Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

Sentence builders, often previously known as substitution tables, have become a go-to tool for many language teachers. They have a some advantages, when designed in the Conti-style with translations: They lay our clearly the language to be used. "This is the language you need to be able to understand and use." They are full comprehensible — no student can say they do not understand. They are great for modelling pronunciation, spelling and phonics (sound-spelling relationships). They can be exploited in multiple ways, using all four modes — listening, speaking, reading and writing. They can form an early part of a lesson sequence involving other forms of input and practice, e.g. texts, dialogues and grammar and vocab exercises. For speakers with weak English (e.g. newly arrived immigrant pupils) they provide models of the L1 as well as the L2. They can act as revision and vocab learning tools. If you create them, just make sure that they feature chunked language much more than...

 It’s that time of year when I have a look back through the year’s blog posts and check some numbers. I’ve been pretty busy blogging this year, and a few posts made it into my Thinking About Language Teaching books (the second of which is now due in January). So, from 1 to 5, these were the posts people looked at - and maybe read. 1.   Why GCSE MFL is not fit for purpose Maybe a very slightly click-baity title, but I felt it was worth spelling out my thoughts on GCSE - which is clearly here to stay for a while. I hope, following the DfE response to the Curriculum and Assessment Review (CAR), that the a new Languages Ladder will be established as a further way to assess student progress in languages and encourage uptake. But traditions are strong and GCSE won’t be changing much. Eventually, I’d like to see it evolve into something more communicative, less punitive in grading terms and more accessible to a wider range of students. The conservative turn in curriculum (think decla...

As I've been working on some resources using the excellent Portrait d'enfant videos from Arte, I've been reminded of an issue affecting teachers of GCSE MFL in England. The latest version of the exam, to be taken from 2026, is based on a syllabus in which words are prescribed at Foundation and Higher Tier — meaning that the listening and reading exams can only use the words from the lists (apart from a few glossed words if needed). The word lists are short — 1200 for Foundation Tier and 1700 for Higher. To give you an idea of how short these lists are, researchers such as Paul Nation have calculated that (for English) 2,000–3,000 word‑families  are needed for  simple, everyday conversations , simple questions/answers, basic needs, greetings and simple descriptions. A researcher in this field James Milton has lamented the limited scope of the GCSE lists, arguing that even before the new lists, students' vocabulary was, on average far too low for communicative needs. (Wor...