Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

Irrespective of the recent oracy push in the English education system, I have long thought that not enough emphasis is placed on listening and speaking in GCSE modern language exams. Think about it - the current weightings are 25% for each of the four skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing. Apart from being suspiciously tidy, the system appears to show that reading and writing in the target language are just as important as speaking and listening. Because of the well-known backwash (washback) effect (the test affecting the teaching), the current weightings encourage teachers to spend a lot of time on written texts and written accuracy. Lessons at KS4 are often devoted to short essay writing, accuracy-focused grammatical exercises, past paper practice and reading comprehension. This is entirely understandable as teachers do their best to help pupils get the best grade. A spin-off is that reading and writing-focused tasks also play a major role at KS3, as the ripples of th...

Lucy Powell’s recent announcement on oracy in England has generated a lot of reaction on social media, largely positive, as far as I can tell. In general terms, the idea is that speaking (and listening)) should be given greater prominence across the curriculum, alongside reading and writing. Pupils should learn not just to express themselves clearly, but to listen attentively, respond thoughtfully, explain ideas and participate effectively in discussions.  For modern language teachers, the initial reaction might understandably be:  Haven’t we always done this? After all, speaking has been central to language teaching for decades. Think of all those question-and-answer exchanges, spoken drills, presentations, dialogues, role plays, information-gap tasks, surveys, interviews and discussions. Language teachers have a long tradition of modelling spoken language, providing scaffolding, encouraging hesitant pupils and gradually developing fluency through practice.  But we ought...

 Simone Conboy and Juliet Park, members of the Association for Language Learning kindly wrote reviews of two of my books for the Languages Today magazine. I have been given permission to share, with nods to Languages Today and the ALL which does so much to support language teachers in England. I'll just copy in the screenshots below.

I have spent more than an average amount of time perousing material from different sources across the world and engaging on social media with teachers from different countries. I have also been lucky enough to do occasional events in Scotland, Ireland and Australia, as well as in my home country England. So I have seen that teachers come at pedagogy from different angles. I have always thought, however, that we can be rather parochial in our thinking about language teaching. By parochial, I mean that we tend to view language teaching through the lens of our own national curriculum, exam system, official guidance and professional debates. Each country, and sometimes each region within a country, develops its own language for talking about pedagogy, its own priorities and its own assumptions about what constitutes good teaching. I guess there's nothing particularly surprising about this. Teachers have to work within the systems in which they're employed. But I wonder whether this...

 Just to make you aware, whether your are already a subscriber, or a potential one (!), that I have been adding loads of new resources to my site, inlcuding, most recently, new 10-page GCSE (Higher) grammar booklets. These are made by ChatGPT, but edited and fine-tunedby me, because despite all my best prompts, I can't get quite what I want in terms of layout and level of challenge in the exercises. My aim was to create a set of grammar booklets in line with AQA topic areas. So each set of exercises is themed aropund topics like education and work, free time, healthy living and so on. I also requested certain types of exercise, for example transformation drills, gap-fills, translation both ways, and question-answer. This is all pretty old school stuff and won't suit every teacher, but I'm certain many will find these resources useful as handouts for revision, extra work or exam prep. They suit Higher GCSE students aiming for between grades 5 to 8, I would say. They would be...

 This is the third of three posts based on the findings of Rober Sakhrani's PhD thesis about why uptake in MFL has declined in schools in England. Major sections of his thesis centred on interviews carried out with pupils and teachers in four schools in Norfolk, a rural part of eastern England. Have a look at the previous two posts for concise summaries of his findings. Aftre putting those posts together with help from ChatGPT my next thought was: so what can schools and departments do about uptake where it is poor? Of course, in many schools, particularly independent schools, MFL is compusory up to GCSE — then the question is more about A-level uptake, which is also very problematic. Where MFL is optional, and uptake is perceived as too low, what can be done?  Below is a list of possible strategies: Firstly, the pupil and teacher interviews suggest that increasing take-up is not mainly about telling pupils that languages are useful . I agree with this, even if it may help at ...

 In my last post, I wrote that I would give you a summary of what Robert Sakhrani found out from his interviews with teachers in the four schools studied. I asked ChatGPT to do a bullet point summary for me of the relevant extract from the PhD. As a reminder the PhD thesis can be found here if you want to follow it up further. Recall that the title of the PhD thesis is: Exploring the decline in uptake of modern foreign languages at GCSE in England through Positoning Theory: reflecting on the perspectives of pupils and teachers in secondary schools.  See whether the findings accord your own thinking. I imagine perceptions will vary enormously depending on your school and background experience. In a third post I'll explore what practical steps departments and schools might take to encourage positive attitudes and uptake. Here is what teachers aid (via ChatGPT): Teachers frequently felt that MFL had been progressively deprioritised within the school curriculum , particularly ...

 An anonymous poster on Facebook recently shared a PhD thesis carried out by Robert Sakhrani. The title is "Exploring the decline in uptake of modern foreign languages at GCSE in England through Positoning Theory: reflecting on the perspectives of pupils and teachers in secondary schools." The thesis is publicly available here . I found this thesis very worthwhile and interesting, even if the findings were unsurprising. Policy-makers would do well to read it. For this post, I asked ChatGPT to summarise in about 500 words the findings of the chapter covering the results of the pupils voice interviews. For background, the thesis interviewed students and teachers from four schools in Norfolk (eastern England), there of which are state schools, one independent. Below you will find the AI bullet-point summary of pages 179 to 188 of the thesis. You'll see that, in discussing motivation, there is only brief mention, at the start, of methodology as an implied possible source o...

  This is an activity I included in my new book L et's Get Them Talking! 50 Communicative French Lessons . I've called it Fact Finders! You might call it Chasseurs d'infos in French. It works like running dictation. I'll simply copy in here the resource I uploaded to frenchteacher.net (available as a free sample). It contains 5 example texts. In the actual resource there are 10 texts which can be used or adapted. I used ChatGPT to generate the texts based on a prompt requiring GCSE-style topics, 170 words and A2-level language with high frequency vocabulary. Needless to say, this is a super activity for generating listening comprehension skill and written accuracy. The collaborative and comptetitive nature adds motivation. FACT FINDERS! Running dictation / information retrieval  Teacher instructions • Print or photocopy the texts. Cut one or more of them out and pin them around the classroom walls. • Put students into pairs. Student A is the Fact Finder; Student B is t...

 Geoff Jordan is well known to some as an acerbic commentator on English Language Teaching (ELT) methodology. His blogs are well-informed and sometimes highly critical of individual scholars and teacher educators. This book is more measured in tone and provides a useful, clearly written introduction to 30 key concepts in second language acquisition research. (He explains in the text that he prefers the term ‘additional’ to ‘second’, but the title remains, probably because it is so widely used and understood.) Jordan’s main starting point for the book is that most language teaching fails and does so because teachers do not know enough about what research says about SLA. So the book aims to rectify this. Concepts covered include biggies such as explicit and implicit learning, comprehensible input, interlanguage, noticing, Universal Grammar versus Emergentism, aptitude, motivation, synthetic and analytic syllabuses. Other areas less familiar to many teachers include the social turn in...

 In recent months I've been using ChatGPT a good deal to speed up my resource writing. Up to now, I haven't used it much at all for producing slides, but I decided I could make some useful slide decks for A-Level teachers. Funnily enough, I was never a great user of slides at A-level, preferring aural and written  textual material. Why? Well, the obvious danger with PowerPoint is that it becomes too teacher-led and leads to a lecturing style with insufficient interaction with the class. Now, there may be a place for some lecturing, particularly in view of the AO4 requirement for A-level (AO4 means Assessment Objective 4, which is about cultural knowledge). So this is why I've made some sets of slides covering typcal A-level topics.  So far I've done four, each with between 12 to 15 slides, covering the following topics: immigration, occupation, resistance and volunteering. More will follow. UPDATE 23.9.26 I’ve added: French cinema, immigration and integration in Quebec,...

  It seems a bit odd to me that in 2026 the case still has to be made for Communicative Language Teaching, but here I am making that case! I first became aware of the Communicative Approach in about 1980. I was trained in the British Oral Approach which was a good deal more communicative than Grammar-Translation, but which was still essentially about getting students to internalise vocabulary and grammar through question-answer and controlled teacher-led activities. You might call it a sort of orally-focused PPP. At that time Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) was gaining ground in the EFL world, as it was known then. Academic influencers of the time were Dell Hymes (who coined the term "communicative competence"), Henry Widdowson, Christopher Brumfitt and Sandra Savignon. Meanwhile, around that time, Stephen Krashen was making waves in the USA with his various hypotheses focused on comprehensible input — another reaction against the traditional grammatical syllabus. Behin...