Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

I posted a while ago about Dr Kedi Simpson's PhD thesis on listening in which she followed the progress of students in her high school in England at Key Stage 3 (age 11-14, working at A1 to A2 level). One key takeway for me was the degree to which students mishear simple utterances, for example interpreting what they hear coloured by their English phonological system. An example I recall is a student interpreting "bouteille d'eau" in French (bottle of water) as "potato". A second takeway from the thesis was, for me, that it's worth spending time asking students what they think they are hearing, to find out what's causing confusion. Is it simple lack of vocabulary knowledge? Mistaking words for English words? Being confused between similar-sounding target language words? Missing grammatical details which can alter meaning (see this post by Gianfranco )? Latching on to one or two words they understand and guessing the meaning of a whole utterance? Her...

I'm sharing here a resource I put together with the help of Chat GPT. It's an A-level text with accompanying exercises on the topic "C'est quoi, le populisme?" It's a topic for the times, of course, and one well worth discussing with students. The Chat GPT text is very "BBC" in tone actually, giving equivalence to the far right and far left. I'm no fan of Mélenchon, leader of the left-wing La France insoumise, but I'd be even more critical of the other end of the political spectrum. Anyway, that makes for good debate if you have a class into these things. If your class is not very interested in politics it's a great opportunity to get themn to think politically. I know that plenty of French teachers are not that "political" either, so it may be instructive for them too. Here's the resource, complete with answers. It's on my Free Samples page of frenchteacher.net C’est quoi, le populisme ? Le populisme est un mot que l’...

One of the staples of my frenchteacher website is the "text plus exercises" resource format. I take a text based on a syllabus-related topic, then add a range of comprehension, lexical, oral and sometimes grammatical activities to encourage careful processing of the language and opportunities for communication through listening and discussion. GenAI (generative AI) has made the production of texts and exercises faster, though at the expense of text authenticity. In any case, the texts I have always used are reworkings of authentic texts, to adjust them for difficulty level, comprehensibility, length and relevance. The example below is one I made with a lot of help from Chat GPT. I choose the parameters for the text (length, topic, CEFR level - in this case B1). I then choose the type of exercises I want to include and ask Chat GPT to produce the exercises and answers. I add some material of my own - vocabulary search and lexical exercises - and edit as necessary. In this case...