Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

Introduction 'Correct the transcript' tasks (aka 'faulty transcript') are a favourite of mine and I have a collection of them on my site, for both intermediate (GCSE) and advanced level. I first came across the idea many years ago when one of the English exam boards (Oxford and Cambridge, as they were then) used the task in their listening papers. If you need a reminder, students are given a transcript of a text to be read aloud by the teacher or played on a recording. But the version they hear has a number of linguistic differences which the students must identify and correct in their version. I like to put the emphasis on linguistic differences, but you could use factual differences. (The latter would put the emphasis on building intercultural knowledge rather than linguistic).  A good by-product for A-level learners is that the task helps them learn the skill of paraphrasing which is needed, for example, in the AQA A-level exam. What is going in the student's he...

Since writing this post, the Scribetube site has now disappeared (checked 26.6.25).Other free transcription sites are available. ……………………………… Larry Ferlazzo on BlueSky often shares AI tools he has come across. ScribeTube is one such tool. The idea is very simple. You go to the ScribeTube site, enter the URL of the YouTube video, select the language from a comprehensive list and it instantly creates a transcript of the video. I tried it out with four videos in French to test its effectiveness. The first video is this one - a female speaker describing her weekend at level A2 in pretty clear and slowly delivered French. Here is an extract of the transcript: Bonjour à tous ! Aujourd'hui je vais vous parler de mon week-end à deux vitesses différentes. Je vais commencer par parler lentement pour que vous compreniez bien tous les mots comme d'habitude, mais dans la deuxième partie de la vidéo, je vais accélérer et parler de façon un peu plus naturelle, comme je le ferais av...

I do like a good infor gap task! This post is to share a lesson plan I made with the help of Chat GPT. The details are given below. Chat GPT saved me a lot of time by producing the travel itineraries and questions for students to ask. Feel free to copy or adapt it. The original is on frenchteacher.net where I have many ready-made lesson plans. This was the precise prompt I used: Please create for me in French, level A2, three travel itineraries for a trip to France. Inlcude timings and days, means of transport, three main destinations, accommodation and things to do. maximum 400 words per itinerary. This is for an informaion gap lesson in groups of three. After the itineraries were produced in a few seconds, I then gave the following prompt: Thanks. Now give me a set of questions in the present tense, 'tu' form, which could elicit answers based on the itineraries. I would expect one question per bullet point, plus questions about length of stay, transport and accommodation.  I ...

 Every so often I receive a digest from the Oasis collection of research summaries. If you are unaware of Oasis, they are based at the University of York and they invite researchers to summarise academic papers ina format accesible to teachers and those unable to access academic journals. It's a great idea. If you subscribe to their service (free), you can also choose which type of research areas interest you. This week a couple of recent papers caught my eye, the first about skill acquisition (which I may return to) and the second a study what factors influence pupils in their decision to take, or not take, a GCSE in MFL. The study was based on 971 pupils from 20 secondary schools in Northern Ireland - a reasonably sized sample, I would have thought.. If you just want to read the Oasis summary it is here . The original paper is   Caruthers, J. & Henderson, L.’Language  learning trajectories: pupils’ perspectives, structural factors and demographics at GCSE.’   J...

Introduction Back in the day, I was trained to teach French using the British Oral Approach, which was a well established, strongly orally-based way to teach a modern language. It was associated at the time with former teachers, teacher trainers and writers such as Alan Hornsey (who would later be my MA tutor), David Harris and Jack Stephenson. Central to the approach was the use of questioning to provide input, generate communication and develop long-term acquisition of vocabulary and grammar. We'll return to the Oral Approach below. In this post, I want look at some historical background to questioning, support for using questions from cognitive science, types of question, how questioning can be incorporated in lesson planning and how questioning (aka circling ) is used in the TPRS approach. My principal aims are (1) to help teachers understand more about questioning and (2) make a tentative plea for questioning to be given a greater priority in language teacher education. 1. Bac...