Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

Knowing vocabulary is key in listening, speaking, reading and writing. It's more important than grammar — you already knew that, didn't you? One of the challenges in second language teaching is how to help students retain new vocabulary - not just in terms of the number of new words (breadth of knowledge), but in terms of depth of vocabulary knowledge, e.g. the different morphological forms words appear in, synonyms, antonyms, and the company the words keep. While explicit teaching and repeated exposure are obviously important, researchers have also asked whether the type of task learners do with new words matters just as much as the number of times they encounter them. This is where the concept of Involvement Load comes in. The idea of Involvement Load was first proposed by Laufer and Hulstijn (2001) as a way of predicting how effectively a vocabulary task might promote retention. Rather than treating all practice activities as equal, they argued that some tasks push learne...

Here is a detailed breakdown of the different sections of my book Thinking About Language Teaching (Volume 1). It was not always straightforward deciding what category to place each post in. For example, many listening activities also involve speaking and vice versa. Similarly, I had to choose whether to put posts in the category Lesson Planning or Classroom Pedagogy. In any case, readers can just dip into any material they want. Whether you are more interested in theory and research, or just getting more lesson ideas, there is plenty to choose from.   Second language learning theory 1.       Second language learning and acquisition (2015) (In six parts) 2.       What is skill acquisition theory? (2020)   Methods 1.       The myth of method (2018) 2.       The death of method (2018) 3.       The eclectic approach (2022) 4.   ...

I'm pleased to let you know that my latest book on language teaching is out and available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle format. It's called Thinking About Language Teaching (Volume 1). Let me tell you what it is, how it came about and who it's for. I've been blogging since 2010 and, acccording to my blog stats, I've posted over 1600 times, nearly always about language teaching. It struck me that it would be both a fun project and useful to teachers, both new and more experienced, if I put together an anthology of posts by theme. So I trawled through my blog and sifted out enough posts to produce an anthology running to around 300 pages, based on the following themes: Second language learning theory Methods Lesson planning Listening Speaking Reading Writing Vocabulary Grammar and lexicogrammar Cognitive science Advanced level teaching Motivation Culture Classroom pedagogy Curriculum Taken together, the posts end up being an introduction to research and practice ...

While my wife/editor Prof Elspeth Jones is doing the final formatting and proofing of my new book called Thinking About Language Teaching (Volume 1),  I've been adding some new parallel reading tasks to my frenchteacher site. Let me explain the rationale for these. It's always a challenge to produce interesting texts at the right level for MFL/WL classes. For beginners especially, texts can be mundane or else be so difficult they are off-putting, even with some glossing. With parallel texts you are offering a translation so that everything is not only interesting or important, but is also entirely comprehensible. The challenge is then to ensure that students process the target language text , rather than just reading the translation.  I guess there are many ways to do this, but my own method has been to add a15-20 true/false or 'tick the right sentences' task to make sure that students have to carefully read and mentally translate (while looking across t the parallel tr...