Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

 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...

As well as the many reading, grammar, sentence builders, dialogues, lesson plans, vocab and listening resources on the Y10-11 page of frenchteacher.net, I have a large number of materials specifically written for GCSE exam prep, along with resources written for the legacy exam, which could also be useful. The full list is below. The most recently added are marked by dates. Foundation 10 reading aloud passages  AQA-style Reading paper AQA-style Reading paper (2) NEW 15.2.26 Reading aloud/phonics help sheets NEW 23.2.26 8 AQA-style role-plays to read and adapt AQA photo-card conversation booklet Knowledge Organiser based on AQA topics 8 Edexcel-style role-plays to read and adapt 8 more Edexcel-style role-plays to read and adapt NEW 5.2.26 10 Edexcel-style photo card/conversation tasks 10 AQA-style photo card/conversation tasks 6 photo cards for display, modelling and practice (Foundation). AQA Writing model – 90 words Edexcel Writing model – 80-90 words Reading paper (any board) How ...