Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

As I've been working on some resources using the excellent Portrait d'enfant videos from Arte, I've been reminded of an issue affecting teachers of GCSE MFL in England. The latest version of the exam, to be taken from 2026, is based on a syllabus in which words are prescribed at Foundation and Higher Tier — meaning that the listening and reading exams can only use the words from the lists (apart from a few glossed words if needed). The word lists are short — 1200 for Foundation Tier and 1700 for Higher. To give you an idea of how short these lists are, researchers such as Paul Nation have calculated that (for English) 2,000–3,000 word‑families  are needed for  simple, everyday conversations , simple questions/answers, basic needs, greetings and simple descriptions. A researcher in this field James Milton has lamented the limited scope of the GCSE lists, arguing that even before the new lists, students' vocabulary was, on average far too low for communicative needs. (Wor...

When working with a new written text, do you let students read quietly, or do you read aloud the text as the class reads? Below is a summary of a recent paper I came across, shared by the Oasis people at the University of York, together with some comments of my own. The paper is: Malone, J., Hui, B., Pandža, N. & Tytko, T. (2025). Eye movements, item modality, and multimodal second language vocabulary learning: Processing and outcomes. Language Learning . When students learn new words in a second language, recognising them on the page is only part of the story. To really “know” a word, students also need to remember how it sounds, what it means and the company the word tends to keep. These are all aspects of depth of vocabulary knowledge — recall that breadth of vocabulary knowledge is not enough. The question here is whether students learn vocabulary better by reading alone, or by reading while listening. The study above used eye-tracking technology to find out how learners p...

Suppose you have been teaching and practising using the perfect tense with 'avoir' verbs in French — or the equivalent in your language. There are umpteen ways to generate practice, but one obvious route is via old-school questioning. Beneath you'll find a set of questions I uploaded to frenchteacher.net, along with some suggestions on how to design a lesson based on them. You could apply the same principles described below to other languages or areas of grammar and lexis. I'll list the set of questions first, together withe English translations — which you might want to use with average to weaker classes. 1.     Qu’est-ce que tu as mangé hier soir ?               What did you eat last night? 2.     Qu’est-ce que tu as regardé à la télé ce week-end ?               What did you watch on TV last weekend? 3.     Qu’est-ce que tu as acheté récemment ?    ...

Gognitive Load Theory was famously described by Dylan Wiliam as "the single most important thing for teachers to know". This post is all about cognitive load and Cognitive Load Theory, but with language teachers in mind. It is loosely adapted from our book Memory: What Every language Teacher Should Know ( Smith and Conti, 2021). So... you’re in a staff training session, facing a wall of text on a PowerPoint slide, while the presenter talks at a steady pace. You try to read, listen, and (if you are very assiduous) take notes all at once. Before long, you feel overwhelmed, you’ve missed a key point, and you’re thinking more about your to-do list than the training. (My own biggest bugbear is slides filled with too much text, with too little time to process it.) Now think of your language class. They’re facing a bigger challenge: a teacher speaking in a new language, slides to look at, text to read, other students to listen to, instructions to process, and an enthusiastic teacher...

In my previous blog post about curriculum reform in England, I referenced the idea of decolonising the curriculum. Like me, you've probably seen many references to decolonisation. But also like me, you may not have been entirely clear what this means in practice. What is it beyond working on a text about slavery? In this post I'll try to explain what it might mean. I'll also address the question of whether this is about fundamental long-term reform or just a temporary bandwagon, the type of which we've seen many times in the past. The decolonising the curriculum movement starts from the idea that what we teach and how we teach it are never neutral — they reflect certain values and worldviews. It recognises that education today is still shaped by long-standing influences such as racism, colonial history, and unequal power structures. Because of this, teachers and schools are being encouraged to think carefully about the ideas, values, and assumptions that guide the way c...

The DfE in England has been conducting a general review of the curriculum, including assessment, and published an interim report in March 2025. This suggested that evolution, not revolution, would be the order of the day — which probably comes as a relief to most teachers. For example, it has been stated that the exam regime is basically fit for purpose. However, in the world of languages, there is clearly a case for something more revolutionary. Before I summarise various findings from a recently published set of articles in The Language Learning Journal , let me offer my own view of things. There is a lot to be celebrated in terms of achievement, enthusiasm, and curriculum development. In many schools, languages thrive with motivated pupils and teachers. This is often the result of pupil intake factors and SLT support. Grassroots curriculum initiatives such as EPI should be researched, recognised, and celebrated. Primary languages provision is very mixed, with (according to the recen...

Over the last couple of years I've built up a good collection of resources on frenchteacher.net to support teachers and pupils. As well as the many other resources, such as audio and video listening, 'correct the transcript' tasks, texts with exercises, parallel readings, sentence builders, dialogues, lesson plans, 'spot the differences' listening and traditional grammar drills — I have resources specifically written to match exam board tasks (all boards). Teachers will no doubt find other resources on the site useful, inlcuding those on the Y9 page. Here is the list from my Y10-11 page. Foundation Tier 10 reading aloud passages AQA-style Reading paper 8 AQA-style role-plays to read and adapt AQA photo-card conversation booklet  Knowledge Organiser based on AQA topics  8 Edexcel-style role-plays to read and adapt 10 Edexcel-style photo card/conversation tasks 10 AQA-style photo card/conversation tasks 6 photo cards for display, modelling and practice (Foundation). A...

I posted a while ago about Dr Kedi Simpson's PhD thesis on listening in which she followed the progress of students in her high school in England at Key Stage 3 (age 11-14, working at A1 to A2 level). One key takeway for me was the degree to which students mishear simple utterances, for example interpreting what they hear coloured by their English phonological system. An example I recall is a student interpreting "bouteille d'eau" in French (bottle of water) as "potato". A second takeway from the thesis was, for me, that it's worth spending time asking students what they think they are hearing, to find out what's causing confusion. Is it simple lack of vocabulary knowledge? Mistaking words for English words? Being confused between similar-sounding target language words? Missing grammatical details which can alter meaning (see this post by Gianfranco )? Latching on to one or two words they understand and guessing the meaning of a whole utterance? Her...

I'm sharing here a resource I put together with the help of Chat GPT. It's an A-level text with accompanying exercises on the topic "C'est quoi, le populisme?" It's a topic for the times, of course, and one well worth discussing with students. The Chat GPT text is very "BBC" in tone actually, giving equivalence to the far right and far left. I'm no fan of Mélenchon, leader of the left-wing La France insoumise, but I'd be even more critical of the other end of the political spectrum. Anyway, that makes for good debate if you have a class into these things. If your class is not very interested in politics it's a great opportunity to get themn to think politically. I know that plenty of French teachers are not that "political" either, so it may be instructive for them too. Here's the resource, complete with answers. It's on my Free Samples page of frenchteacher.net C’est quoi, le populisme ? Le populisme est un mot que l’...