Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

I've been reading a new book called Secondary Languages in Action , published by Hachette Learning. The authors are London-based teachers and consultants: Natascia Servini, David Shanks, Luma Hamed, and Julien Violette. I've had the pleasure of collaborating with David Shanks in the past, and more recently with Julien Violette. Published in 2025, the book comprises five chapters and runs to 112 pages. It is good value at £15, or under £9 for the Kindle edition. There is low-cost e-book version. Chapter 1, titled Debates and Perspectives, opens with a well-written and balanced overview of key issues in language teaching: communication versus accuracy, target language use, cognitive science, and the decolonisation of the curriculum—a topic of growing relevance. I particularly liked that the chapter begins with Dylan Wiliam's famous quotation: "Everything works somewhere; nothing works everywhere." It immediately sets the tone for an eclectic, open-minded approach. A...

All language teachers instinctively use gestures. We also probably use them more than average in everyday life - an example of what French calls 'déformation professionnelle'. If you've read around the research a bit, you'll know what there is research support for gesturing, both in terms of making input comprehensible and assisting memory - helping words stick. In one language teaching method, AIM , developed by Wendy Maxwell in Canada, gesture is actually a central part of lessons. A 2023 study looked into whether it is  better to perform gestures yourself, or simply watching someone else, probably the teacher, do them. Through a systematic review and meta-analysis of seven studies, the researchers compared two popular methods: gesture enactment (physically performing gestures) and gesture observation (watching someone else gesture). Here’s what they found:  1. Watching works just as well as doing Perhaps a little surprisingly, the analysis revealed no significant ...

Introduction This post was prompted by a post on a Facebook group. A teacher was seeking a vocabulary list for an A-level French topic. This is not an uncommon request and my initial reaction was "Why"? I have to say from the outset that, while I did not systematically use vocabulary lists with most students in my classes, the textbooks we used did include them up to GCSE and I was in the habit of setting vocab tests for my high-aptitude classes - they seemed to like the challenge, did their learning well, and scored highly in the tests I gave. More on that later. But was I right to set vocab to learn in this way? Are vocab lists a useful tool? We know about vocab lists. The rationale is pretty clear. Vocabulary knowledge is hugely important. In language learning terms, vocab is more important than grammar and research shows a strong correlation between vocab knowledge and proficiency. So vocab lists aim is to provide students with the lexical items they need to understand a...

Introduction Here’s an issue which crops up when a teacher says something like this to me “But students have to know grammar to speak and write properly. If we don’t teach the rules, how will they learn the grammar.” So let me look at this and try to clarify what knowing grammar means and how we might help students ‘know grammar’ in a useful sense. When language teachers talk about knowing grammar, what do they mean? It could mean either the ability to explain rules, or the ability to use rules fluently and accurately in real-time communication. Or both! Declarative versus Procedural Knowledge Declarative knowledge refers to factual knowledge - knowing that something is the case. In the context of grammar, it’s the ability to state rules explicitly: for example, knowing that, in English, we use the third person singular -s in the present simple (e.g., “She runs every day”). It’s the kind of knowledge often gained through formal instruction, textbooks, and grammar explanations. Teachers...

 It's always an interesting challenge trying to find a non-mechanical way to practise grammar, one which will motivate a class more and force them to use a construction in an interesting way. Technically speaking, this is an example of ' pushed output' - putting students in a position where they have to use a structure repeatedly. In so doing they have a greater chance of internalising or 'acquiring' the construction. (We'll not get into the debate here about whether pshed output is a valid way to further acquisition, but, like most teachers, I happen to think it is and there is plenty of research support for the idea, starting with Swain (1985).) The example below, from my website, is a homework task which will force students to use the imperfect tense in French. I have in mind Y9-10 students with about theree yeras of French. In English it could equally be used to get students to use verb phrases with 'used to' - 'he used to go to school in Birmin...

This post is mainly for teachers in training, but may interest others thinking about their everyday practice.  I'm going to return to a topic I have blogged about before and one which I have referenced in videos and books for language teachers. It's about how to develop a teacher-led question-answer sequence in the classroom. This is similar to what TPRS teachers would call circling. This sort of practice no doubt goes back centuries, but became a central part of Direct Method from, roughly, the turn of the 20th century and was widely used in British schools from the late 1960s through into the 70s as a central plank in the Oral Approach (aka Oral-Situational approach). Many teachers would still use QA sequences today, but I suspect the craft of questioning has been neglected. Hence this post! Firstly, a simple rationale informedd by research, then an example with some tips thrown in. 1. During a teacher-led QA session students are receiving comprehensible input , interacting ...