Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

I recently had the pleasure of reading Kedi Simpson's 2024 PhD thesis  The Developmental Trajectory of Second Language Listening Errors.   Kedi teaches French, German and Spanish in Oxfordshire and has been researching listening for a few years now, via an MA and doctorate. Since she is at 'at the chalkface' she has an intimate knowledge of what students find easy and hard. The thesis is almost a bit of a wake-up call, because what struck me the most is how many misunderstandings typical pupils have when they hear quite simple sentences in French. Over a long period Kedi got pupils to write down the meaning of what they heard when listening to short audio snippets. She also got chosen students to tell her about their experience of listening - what goes on in their heads. It's fascinating!  They often understand far less than we may think.  A central theme of Kedi’s thesis is  Fuzzy Lexical Representation Hypothesis (Gor et al., 2021), which argues that second...

  This new book is published by Routledge and is edited by Laura Molway, Senior Lecturer at the University of Oxford Department of Education, specialising in second language teacher education and  Anna Lise Gordon a PGCE tutor who now has leadership and research roles at St Mary's University, Twickenham. Key topics, as described in the book, include: Roles and responsibilities of mentors The subject knowledge and understanding required by beginning languages teachers The lesson planning process Guidance on teaching core skills of reading, writing, speaking and listening Development opportunities for languages teachers Observations and pre- and post-lesson discussions Contributors include some well-known teachers from MFL community, for example Bernadette Holmes (NCLE), Suzanne Graham, Robert Woore, Caroline Conlon, Juliette Claro, Crista Hazell, Adam Lamb, Gillian Peiser and Judith Rifeser. There are five sections and 18 chapters in all. The book is aimed at university and sch...

This post is for teachers just finding their way with AI - like me! Not written or checked by AI. Over the last year I've got into the habit of using AI, mainly Chat GPT, occasionally DeepSeek, for creating resources for frenchteacher.net. I thought I would share with you my thoughts so far. And these are overwhelmingly positive. Speed and productivity By far the most useful aspect for me is the speed at which I have been able to create worksheets and lesson plans. I am more productive as a result. In all cases, AI has not done anything I couldn't have done myself, but it has done it all so much more quickly. The best example I can think of is the ability to create multi-choice questions, which I have usually avoided since are very time-consuming to write. It's true that the options provided may not be the most subtle or create 'plausible distraction' - a requirement of assessment materials. But for my purposes, the MC questions produced are at the right level and p...

Introduction This post follows up on my previous one, which explored why L2 listening can be so difficult. Anecdotally, throughout my career—largely spent teaching higher-aptitude students—I often felt that listening, to some extent, took care of itself. This was because my students were doing a lot of listening right from day one: through oral question-and-answer work, drills, games, information gap tasks, dialogues, role plays, short audio clips, songs, and the occasional video. It’s worth recalling here that oral work almost inevitably involves listening , even if we think we’re primarily teaching speaking. This common perception—that speaking is more “visible” or measurable—may explain why listening is often under-emphasised in classroom planning. The so-called 'listening lesson' is about so much more than playing a recording while students do some exercises based on it. Let's explore how teachers can 'teach listening'. Do lots of listening A first, obvious prin...

Gianfranco Conti and I are embarking on a second edition of our best-selling handbook called Breaking the Sound Barrier: Teaching Language Learners How to Listen (2019). We wrote the book to help address how we should go beyond just teaching listening through traditional comprehension exercises. In so doing, we were strongly influenced by the work of John Field whose 2008 book Listening in the Language Classroom questioned the so-called comprehension model (a product -based model, sometimes called teaching by testing), and proposed his process model , known by Gianfranco Conti as listening-as-modelling .  Catching up with studies over the last six years is a reminder to me that research on how to teach listening is out there, but it has remained a relatively neglected area. What research there has been has tended to focus on metacognition - strategies for helping learners be better listeners. Field's process model, focused more on decoding skills, has not been followed up to a ...

(I have fixed some typos in the original draft) Introduction In England, Wales and Northern Ireland the current GCSE in modern foreign languages (MFL) is an improvement on the old O-Level in some important ways. In 1987 it moved beyond the elitist, grammar-translation-heavy approach that once dominated language teaching, placing greater emphasis on communication and offering an exam that was, in theory, accessible to a broader range of students. But despite that step change, the GCSE is still failing to meet the needs of many learners. It is no longer fit for purpose — and the model could do with a major rethink. Just don't expect it any time soon. A System That Bakes in Failure Now, first of all, the system works pretty well for higher-achieving students, the ones I often taught over the years. It allows the teacher enough freedom to work in communicative ways, certain in the knowledge that pupils will be well-prepared for the assessment and achieve high grades. In my own contexts...