Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

The title of this post feels a bit odd to me, since I never really ‘taught adjectives’ to a huge extent during my career. Sure, we did some practice with agreements, I told classes a bit about word order and how adjectives could change meaning and we did work on comparatives and superlatives (see below). Overall, however, adjectives just come up a lot in input language and get picked up over time, implicitly, as the research calls it. That said, when it comes to getting students to understand and use adjectives successfully, it seems to me that we could consider the following aspects, in rough order of importance: 1. Which adjectives to teach. 2. The meaning of the adjectives 3. What they sound and look like 4. The order they appear in relation to nouns 5. Agreement Let’s consider each of the above in turn. 1. Which adjectives to teach Your school’s syllabus may dictate adjectives you need students to know. Keeping in mind the need to prioritise high-frequency vocabulary (words and chu...

I’ve previously blogged advice about teaching questions and the perfect tense in French. This time I thought I would look at negatives: the use of ‘ne’ with ‘pas’, ‘jamais’, ‘rien’, ‘plus’, ‘personne’, etc.  A first point to make is that negatives may be tricky for English language L1 speakers because we do them quite differently with our ‘don’t’, ‘doesn’t’, ‘didn’t’, anything versus nothing, and variable syntactic use of no one, never, nowhere etc. Negatives are much harder in English than in French. This is worth mentioning to classes. Negatives in French are easy, notwithstanding awkward issues such as the fact that 'personne' may be understood as 'person' and 'plus' may be perceived as either 'more' or 'no more/no longer.' A second thing to say here is that I suspect we often see negatives as a grammatical (syntactic/word order) topic, and to some extent it is, but I would see negatives as mainly a lexical issue . The key thing for student...

Inexperienced teachers (and sometimes experienced ones) occasionally encounter that situation where a piece of written work has been set for classwork or homework  — free writing/composition-style — and students turn in very inaccurate work, heavily influenced by the first language. Or they don't get the work done at all. Or they copy it. Or they use AI.  If the work is really inaccurate, you then have to decide how much you are going to correct. If you correct everything it takes ages and students are discouraged by the number of corrections. A sensible solution is to do selective correction of key errors which affect meaning. Or you can just hand the work back and admit that you made a mistake setting a task that was too hard. Maybe show them a model version. My approach to this sort of issue would be to ensure that the written homework was set up in order to guarantee success. Much depends on the class here. With high-achievers you could let them loose with relatively littl...

The topic of healthy living is a popular one in syllabuses, for example the GCSE and IB Diploma. And why not? It's important, we like talking about health and food, and it's a vital issue to cover wth young people's well-being in mind. It's also an easy topic to find and generate resources on, including communicative ones. On frenchteacher.net I have a wide range of materials at various levels. Here's the list. Year 9 Health - a mosaic translation Narrow listening Narrow reading Full lesson plan A text with exercises about healthy eating Y10-11 (GCSE) An easy sentence builder Texts with exercises Lucas and Clara describe their lifestyle 10 priorities for a healthy lifestyle France's 2026 policy on eating meat  Sleep   How well do you sleep? - Narrow reading Protection from UV rays The risks of vaping Tattoos Stress in teenagers Alcohol and health in France French people eating less meat Healthy eating - sugar Locavores - people who like local food  Eating meat a...

For over 25 years I have sung in choirs, mostly barbershop choruses and quartets. This has made me spend many, many hours memorising melodies and lyrics. I'm in that mode at the moment as our community choir in East Dulwich, Note-Orious, prepares for our 'disco extravaganza'. Yay!  So what does this process of song learning have to tell us about memory and, perhaps by extension, language learning? 1. Repetition +   Little and Often is best . This is in line with spacing theory from cognitive science. Hermann Ebbinghaus famously demonstrated how quickly we forget items from our short-term memory. The antidote to forgetting is to make yourself retrieve from memory, at spaced intervals, the information you first tried to remember. No one knows quite what the spacing should be, but one hypothesis is that after the first encounter with information, the intervals between retrieval should be shorter, then gradually increase over time. They call this 'expanding spacing'. I ...

I recently wrote a post with 5 suggested guidelines for teaching question forms in French. As with that post, here I'm going to suggest 10 guidelines for approaching the passé composé in French. Remember, these cannot be hard and fast rules, just suggestions based on my experience over many years and which may be justifiable with research in mind. My views on this are bound to be coloured by the fact I taught mainly higher aptitude, generally highly motivated pupils, but even in the settings I taught in there were plenty of pupils who struggled with languages.  Firstly, I've chosen the perfect tense since it us undoubtedly one of the hardest areas for students to both understand (declarative knowledge) and use fluently and accurately (procedural knowledge). Remember that it's procedural knowledge we are after. Understanding the rules is one thing, using them is another. In cognitive load theory terms the perfect tense is hard to grasp since it has many of what are called in...

Questions in French are a tricky area to teach for several reasons and it's tempting to just let students pick them up over time through input and repeated use. Some students will be able to do this, though few will figure out how to use the subject/verb inverted forms. They are formal and hard to learn..Most students will be able to use a limited range of high frequency questions hey have heard and used many times over ( Qu'est-ce que tu fais? Comment t'appelles-tu? Quel âge as-tu? Qu'est-ce que tu as visité? — that sort of thing.  In this post I'm going to share my tips for teaching questions to students of varying aptitude First, a quick reminder why questions are are a challenge. I think first of two types of questions: yes/no ( elle est grande? est-ce que'elle est grande? est elle grande? )  and open-ended question word questions ( qu'est-ce qu'elle fait. elle fait quoi, que fait-elle ). I then think of the structure of questions taking four form...

Multi-choice questions (MCQs) have long been a staple in language resources and exams, and with AI making them easier to produce than ever, I've been making growing use of them in my frenchteacher resources. In the past, I avoided them since they took so long to write. But while technology has simplified their creation, the art of designing  effective MCQs — whether for assessment or practice —still requires thought and precision. Here are some issues to consider when writing and using MCQs. Assessment 1. Objectivity One of the greatest strengths of MCQs is their objectivity . Unlike level-based mark schemes (or "rubrics" in the USA), where subjectivity can creep in, MCQs provide reliable scores, an important aspect of assessment. When designed well, they should offer a reliable snapshot of student listening and reading comprehension, or sometimes lexical and grammatical knowledge. 2. The three-option rule  Research and practice show that three options are statistically ...

 I'm not sure who first coined the terms fine-tuning and rough-tuning of input, but they have certainly become associated with the work of Stephen Krashen. In this post, I'll explain what the terms refer to and what they might mean for language teacher practice. We all know that a prequisite for first and additional language acquisition is input students can understand ( comprehensible input , to use Krashen's familar term). Krashen used the formula i + 1 to describe input which is at or just above the learner's current level. This would imply giving students aural and written texts, dialogues, etc, which contain a large majority of vocabulary students already know (Paul Nation and others write about 95-98% knowledge), using grammatical constructions which students are already familiar with. This is where the distinction between fine-tuning and rough-tuning of input comes in. There is no precise definition of this, but essentially if you finely tune the input you go out...

 I used the AI tools Deepseek and Le Chat (Mistral AI) to help me write this - a great example of cognitive offloading, as you'll see. So what is cognitive offloading and what implications are there for our work as language teachers and teacher educators? Cognitive offloading  is the process of using physical actions or external tools to reduce the immediate cognitive demand of a task. It's the act of shifting the burden of mental processing from your brain onto the environment to free up mental resources. A simple everyday example would be to use a calculator to do simple arithmetic. I've also come across the term auxiliary memory, to describe tools like phones and notebooks where we can store information so we don't hae to worry about holding it in memopry. Call it freeing up cognitive space, if you like, or "letting tools do the work for you". Everyday examples include: Writing a list:  Instead of trying to remember 10 grocery items, you write them down. Yo...