Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

 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...