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My new book is out!



I'm delighted to let you know that that my new book Thinking About Language Teaching (Volume 2) is now out and available as a paperback or Kindle version from Amazon.

You might recall that Volume 1 of this collection of themed reflections on language teaching came out last September. I was hoping Volume 2 would be published sooner, but we had to move house before Christmas and have been pretty busy, so the new book took longer than expected. And it is, as often, the editing and formatting which took the longest. My wife Elspeth Jones spent a long time weeding out errors, editing and formatting the text for publication.

To remind you, this roughly 300-page book is a collection of reflections written between 2012 and 2025, with additional commentary and thoughts.  The original posts were lightly edited in many cases. I am very proud of the range of content I have been able to share. Teachers will not only think about their craft on reading the book, but will get masses of ideas for the classroom.

The two volumes, totalling around 600 pages and extremely rich in ideas for the classroom, references to research and other people's wisdom about language teaching.

So if you like reflecting on teaching and developing your repertoire of activities, this is the book for you.

The content is divided into the following themes:

  1. Methods
  2. Insights from research
  3. Lesson planning
  4. Listening
  5. Speaking
  6. Classroom pedagogy
  7. Cognitive science
  8. Assessment
To give you more detail, here is the list of contents:

Introduction                                                                                                                      

Methods

1.       The Blind Men and the Elephant                                                           

2.       The Michaela method                                                                                

3.       Language Teaching and the Bilingual Method  

4.       The power of stories 

5.       Book review: The Art and Science of Language Teaching 

6.       What do TPRS lessons look like? 

7.       Teaching in the target language 

8.       Do you talk to your classes about language learning? 

9.       What if we have our whole approach to MFL teaching wrong?

10.   Foreign language learning and its impact on wider academic

outcomes: a rapid evidence assessment 

Insights from research

1.       Gestures: is watching as good as doing?                                           

2.       What is the Natural Order Hypothesis? 

3.       What is Input Processing? 

4.       Anxiety in the second language classroom 

5.       Personality traits and language aptitude 

6.       The age factor in language learning 

7.       Aptitude for second language learning 

8.       The Ofsted Curriculum Research Review: Languages 

9.       What is a synthetic syllabus? Why should we know about it? 

10.   10 research-informed principles for grammar teaching 

11.   Book review: Teaching and Researching Reading (Grabe and Stoller, 2019) 

12.   What about implicit versus explicit grammar teaching?  

Lesson planning

1.       Milking a text to the max 

2.       The Rosenshine Principles applied to MFL 

3.       10 more nifty starters for language lessons 

4.       10 nifty plenaries for language lessons 

5.       Guessing games: keeping it simple and productive 

6.       Dissecting a lesson: teaching an intermediate written text 

7.       Do you need a textbook?

8.       Using the sentence banks in our new GCSE workbook 

9.       Creating stimulating content 

10.   Does homework matter? 

11.   What makes a good text? 

12.   Different ways to model input 

13.   Input, communication and pushed output — an example lesson

14.   What I’ve learned so far about using AI for resource writing 

15.   Distinctive input 

16.   Surely not another 10 nifty lesson starters?                            

17.   10 nifty standby language lessons 

Listening

1.       Training students to cope with authentic speech 

2.       The role of phonics teaching 

3.       Delayed dictation 

4.       Listen and Draw 

5.       A rationale for ‘correct the transcript’ tasks 

6.       Towards a programme of listening instruction

7.       Three A-level interpersonal listening tasks 

8.       Phonics bingo 

9.       Making input comprehensible

10.   Narrow listening resources on frenchteacher 

11.   A low-prep listening game 

12.   The Unbelievable Truth                                                                                       

Speaking

1.       Developing fluency in our learners 

2.       The one-upmanship game 

3.       Class surveys for beginners 

4.       Treasured Possession

5.       A miming and verb manipulation task 

6.       Vocab to story 

7.       Battleships and beyond 

Cognitive science

1.       Forgetting 

2.       Expanding spacing? 

3.       The power of priming 

4.       Retrieval practice and stress 

5.       What is learned attention? 

6.       Do you suffer from cognitive biases? 

7.       What is metamemory? 

Classroom pedagogy

1.       ‘Disappearing text’ 

2.       Nifty ideas from the Buckingham University PGCE trainees 

3.       Jim Scrivener teaching tips 

4.       Pyramid memory speed test 

5.       A sentence swapping memory game 

6.       Five activities to develop anticipation skills 

7.       Exploiting Tarsia puzzles for beginners 

8.       A question-answer sequence 

9.       A zero-prep game — “I have never…” 

10.   A zero-prep task to practise the perfect tense

11.   An aural gap-fill pair task 

12.   Exploiting a simple train timetable 

Assessment

1.       Marking 

2.       The backwash effect 

3.       Why GCSE MFL is not fit for purpose 

4.       What factors affect whether a student chooses to take a GCSE in a language? 

5.       Responsive Teaching 

6.       What about reading aloud in the new GCSE exam? 

7.       What about dictation in the new GCSE exam?                                     

Conclusion   - a set of wise quotations about language teaching from leading researchers                                                                                                                      

The tone of the book is a little more personal than the other books I have published on language teaching, but as always I try to make the material accessible and practical. I refer to a range of approaches and traditions, since, as you may know, I am a believer in eclecticism in language teaching.

So take a look and do consider supporting my work.

The paperback costs £13.50 and Kindle version £9.99. Both on Amazon.

Volume 1 is here.

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