Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

Introduction In England, for a few years since the publication of the TSC Review of MFL Pedagogy (Bauckham, 2016), teachers have been urged to consider language teaching in terms of a 'three pillars' model, namely phonics, vocabulary and grammar. Departments have been encouraged to design their curriculum founded on those three pillars - producing a sequenced syllabus where explicit attention is given to teaching sound-spelling correspondences (SSCs), words and grammatical rules. The idea is that these these provide understandable building blocks for students who may be floundering in a sea of ill-organised input. You know how the argument goes: give students the words and the glue to stick them together (grammar) and acquisition gradually occurs. Of course, the reality is that most departments have been teaching in this traditional way for many years, even if we have moved to somewhat more communicative techniques compared with the the 1950s and 1960s. The particular focus on ...

 My co-writer and the former secondary teacher with the broadest knowledge of second language learning and teaching research, Dr Gianfranco Conti, has been blogging a lot recently as he pursues his latest speaking tour of the UK. I sometimes wonder if he ever sleeps.  When we wrote our first edition of The Language Teacher Toolkit in 2016 a major source of the material were the blog posts Gianfranco wrote in 2015. Recently, he has produced a spate of informative, research-informed posts which every language teacher should find illuminating. The easiest way to find them is just to go to his blog at gianfrancoconti.com and browse. In recent weeks he has covered areas such as grammar, listening, sentence builders/EPI and teaching via topics. Notably, he has returned to the work of John Field, a leading writer in the area of listening instruction. We turned his perspective on listening instruction into our book Breaking the Sound Barrier: Teaching Language Learners How to Listen ...

  On the Primary/Y7 page of my frenchteacher site I have a collection of tasks which help novice pupils with their French comprehension, translation skills and writing. Below is an example. In the original Word document the parallel French and English texts are presented in landscape, side by side. I choose the gaps to suit the level of a typical Y7 class,  but teachers can edit them to make the ask easier or harder. There is a progression in the lesson, since students move from initial scaffolded comprehension towards their own simple writing. Some classes could go further than my suggestion of five easy sentences to write. The French text can be exploited in other ways, for example with questioning, a 'correcting false sentences' exercise or just choral repetition and reading aloud. There are many possibilities to promote recycling of the same language. I would envisage this resource being used later in a teaching sequence on the family topic. I used Chat GPT to produce the ...

I've been particularly busy on my frenchteacher site lately, adding a variety of new resources at different levels, as well as updating my links pages and replacing some out-of-date resources. Below is a list of new stuff I have added over the last two weeks. By the way, I usually mention the CEFR (Common European Framework) level for the benefit of thise teachers do not work in the English system and don't know what Y7,8, 9 etc means. And for those teachers in England who aren't sure about those levels, A1 is roughly Y7-8, A2 is roughly Y9-11, B1 is roughly Y11-12, and B2 is roughly Y13. American teachers use their own levels based on the ACTFL guidelines. There is a detailed chart in this document which lays out the equivalences between these different levels. Y8 (Very low intermediate) A narrow reading worksheet for Y8 (or a weaker Y9). A matching "Who wrote..?" task, sentences to complete and translate. CEFR A1. Y12-13 (Advanced) A current affairs resource. A ...

Choral repetition is one of those traditional teacher practices which we don't often stop to question and, surprisingly, there has been very little research into its usefulness. I posted about the topic in 2022 but am prompted to revisit the subject after reading a research article which you can find here  When it comes to learning new vocabulary learning, their research questions were: Was choral repetition more effective than no choral repetition? Was there no difference in the relative effectiveness of choral repetition versus no choral repetition?  Or, in strongest contrast to common intuitions about choral repetitionbeing effective, was there ever a case in which choral repetition was less effective than no choral repetition? Their findings in this relatively small pair of studies, one with Spanish learners, one with French learners. Their findings and pedagogical implications were summarised thus: The findings of the studies reported here suggest that despite the popular...

This book by highly respected and frequently published writer about language learning and teaching, Paul Nation, was published in 2024. Being familiar with a good deal of Paul Nation's work, I was curious to read this latest volume. Paul Nation is a veteran teacher, researcher and writer about English Language Teaching (ELT). He is best known for his best-selling books about vocabulary learning and for his 'four strands' model of curriculum design. In this very clearly structured book, largely based on previously written works, Nation lays out the basics of his Four Strands model, alongside his so-called Principles of Learning. He then chooses what he considers to be the most effective language teaching techniques (activities) and assesses them in relation to the Principles and the Four Strands. After the introduction, each chapter describes the technique and how best to implement it, considers what research evidence might support it, briefly looks at any digital applicatio...

Here is a list of some of the schools that subscribe to frenchteacher.net (February 2025). Many schools subscribe to the site every year, some take a hiatus and others just join for a year and download the resources they like. I'm very grateful to the many teachers, schools and departments from around the world who subscribe. Most schools are in England, but I have schools from places such as Canada, the USA, Italy, Dubai, Romania, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Spain, Hungary, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand and India. Many schools are hard for me to identify since teachers have signed up on a personal basis, as have many private tutors. So apologies if your school is not mentioned! If you want to join this list of schools, just go to frenchteacher.net and follow thw signing up instructions on the Subscribe page. Abingdon School ACS Schools Aiglon College Alperton Community School Altricham Grammar School Alun School Ark Pioneer Academy Audenshaw School Aylesbury Grammar...

Paul Nation is a highly regarded veteran teacher, researcher and writer about language learning, particularly in his field of teaching English as a second or foreign language. He is most well known for his standard book about vocabulary learning (republished a few times) and for his 'four strands' model of language curriculum design. I've been reading his 2024 book called The 20 Most Effective Language Teaching Techniques and thought I would share with you the Principles of Learning he lays out, and by which, he argues, we should judge the usefulness of classroom language learning tasks. At a later date, when I have finished Nation's book, I intend to write a review for those who may be interested in reading it. The principles I shall summarise come from Chapter 4 of the book. He categorises his principles as follows: Motivation principles (Engagement) 1. Motivation : the degree of engagement with a task affects the likelihood of learning occurring. 2. Self-efficacy : ...

Last Friday I had the pleasure of presenting to over 30 A-level teachers (or potential A-level teachers) at the Harris Academy Peckham in south London. As part of a section about how to exploit written texts, I mentioned a less conventional approach which you might find interesting. Steve Glover and I described this in our handbook. Instead of doing a classic pre-reading task, then handing out a printed text for exploitation and discussion, the idea is to get students to discover the content of the text by asking a set of questions they have been given. Students take turns asking a question, the answer to which the teacher provides from the text they has in front of them. As the teacher replies, students take notes (in English or the target language). After all the questions have been asked, the teacher gets the students to feed back what they have noted. If the notes were taken in English, the students will have to do a quick translation into the target language A more challenging alt...

Here is a simple activity to get students to read, interpret meaning, read aloud and produce language. I call the activity 'Likely or unlikely' and it works as follows. Display some sentences on the board, like the ones in French below. Some of the sentences make sense, some don't because they are not plausible. All the sentences given further down include various first person uses of the present tense with some repetition of common verbs . Try the following sequence: Students read individually and note whether they think each statement is plausible or not. In pairs, students can compare their answers. The teacher reads aloud each sentence and has the class repeat chorally and individually ('cold-called'). Any unknown words can be quickly translated. The teacher elicits the answer (likely or unlikely) from the class with hands up. Where it is agreed an answer is unlikely, the class is asked to write a plausible alternative on a mini-whiteboard or on paper. Indivi...