Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

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...