Each year I do a round up of the most viewed blog posts (not including older posts prior to 2024, since many of these are also looked at). I don’t blog as prolifically as I used to, but even so I generally put out roughly five posts a month. When I post, the readership I have in mind is both teachers in training and experienced teachers who may be interested in issues around research, book reviews, classroom pedagogy and classroom materials. I also use the blog as a marketing tool, notably when I post adapted extracts of published books.
Incidentally, apart from blogging, I’ve been busy working on three publications this year: the two GCSE workbooks with Gianfranco Conti and the A-level handbook with Steve Glover. I addition I wrote a chapter for the latest edition of the Pachler and Redondo (eds) book for trainees, and did some work reviewing NCLE hub training materials. Needless to say, I’ve spent a good deal of time writing resources for frenchteacher.net. Chat GPT has enabled me to speed up the creation of texts and exercises.
So, back to those five most-viewed blog posts, starting with the most read.
1. Five reasons not to set vocab to learn
In this post I criticised one of the staples of language teaching: vocab learning and testing. I’ve often felt, from early in my career, that vocab learning was one of those tasks teachers set based on tradition rather than on any clear notion of its value for language acquisition. In essence, although clearly not useless, it is, as I see it, uninteresting and far from the best way to spend the limited time available to teachers and students. Learning isolated words does not transfer easily to usage in context and neglects key dimensions of what it means to ‘know a word’. Far better is to ensure students get to see, hear and use words in use, in chunked language. The blog post examines this in more detail.
This was a marketing post for the first of our two workbooks designed to support the new GCSE French specs. Gianfranco wrote the many little exercises to rehearse the language needed for the exam skill tasks which I produced: comprehension tasks, role plays, writing and photo cards. We very tightly controlled the vocabulary to match the AQA and Pearson lists - a bit of a challenge, but feasible. The two books have sold in good numbers since publication.
I’ve been making a lot of use of Chat GPT for text and exercise writing. I get it to write new texts or to summarise published articles. I then edit them further as necessary. Chat GPT is good at producing multi-choice tasks, which is time-consuming. As a general rule Chat GPT is quite good at factual knowledge (but can make serious mistakes and needs to be checked for bias and stereotyping). But is very good at producing accurate language at the level prompted - it recognises CEFR levels such as A1, B1 etc. This post gave two examples of lessons.
4. Teaching A-Level Modern Languages
Before Steve Glover and produced our handbook, I had written a few posts about A-level teaching in 2023. This particular post brought together the previous posts and became the initial basis of the handbook. Regarding the book, as far as I know, there has not been a book of this type since an edited volume by Norbert Pachler in, from memory, 1999. So the book should be very useful indeed for trainees and any teachers taking on A-level for the first time. Steve Glover and worked on this over roughly six months, with help from our editor (my wife Elspeth Jones) and a team of volunteer proof readers. Steve Glover covered the bulk of the work on film and literature, his speciality. The book has 220 A4 pages including many photocopiable resources for French, German and Spanish
5. French words and phrases for the classroom
This was just one of those posts which teachers find useful for classroom use. It was based on a resource from my website.
To conclude, my blog has been running since late 2009 and has over 3.3 million views, so I am happy that so many teachers have found the ideas and resources useful over the years. It is certainly a bit of a treasure trove of training materials to which PGCE tutors can refer trainees. Readers can use the search box to find posts on all sorts of language teaching issues.
Best wishes to readers for the festive season and new year!
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