Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

When working with a new written text, do you let students read quietly, or do you read aloud the text as the class reads? Below is a summary of a recent paper I came across, shared by the Oasis people at the University of York, together with some comments of my own. The paper is: Malone, J., Hui, B., Pandža, N. & Tytko, T. (2025). Eye movements, item modality, and multimodal second language vocabulary learning: Processing and outcomes. Language Learning . When students learn new words in a second language, recognising them on the page is only part of the story. To really “know” a word, students also need to remember how it sounds, what it means and the company the word tends to keep. These are all aspects of depth of vocabulary knowledge — recall that breadth of vocabulary knowledge is not enough. The question here is whether students learn vocabulary better by reading alone, or by reading while listening. The study above used eye-tracking technology to find out how learners p...

Suppose you have been teaching and practising using the perfect tense with 'avoir' verbs in French — or the equivalent in your language. There are umpteen ways to generate practice, but one obvious route is via old-school questioning. Beneath you'll find a set of questions I uploaded to frenchteacher.net, along with some suggestions on how to design a lesson based on them. You could apply the same principles described below to other languages or areas of grammar and lexis. I'll list the set of questions first, together withe English translations — which you might want to use with average to weaker classes. 1.     Qu’est-ce que tu as mangé hier soir ?               What did you eat last night? 2.     Qu’est-ce que tu as regardé à la télé ce week-end ?               What did you watch on TV last weekend? 3.     Qu’est-ce que tu as acheté récemment ?    ...

Gognitive Load Theory was famously described by Dylan Wiliam as "the single most important thing for teachers to know". This post is all about cognitive load and Cognitive Load Theory, but with language teachers in mind. It is loosely adapted from our book Memory: What Every language Teacher Should Know ( Smith and Conti, 2021). So... you’re in a staff training session, facing a wall of text on a PowerPoint slide, while the presenter talks at a steady pace. You try to read, listen, and (if you are very assiduous) take notes all at once. Before long, you feel overwhelmed, you’ve missed a key point, and you’re thinking more about your to-do list than the training. (My own biggest bugbear is slides filled with too much text, with too little time to process it.) Now think of your language class. They’re facing a bigger challenge: a teacher speaking in a new language, slides to look at, text to read, other students to listen to, instructions to process, and an enthusiastic teacher...