Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

As digital technology and the internet have developed over the last couple of decades, language teachers and their students have benefitted from all sorts of possibilities: online listening, viewing and reading, interactive websites to practise all the skills, online course books and interactive resources for whiteboard, computer, phone and tablet, all kinds of apps for vocabulary and creative use, not to mention those tools which help you be organised and communicate with classes and parents. It's hard to keep up really. Every teacher will have their own feelings about technology and which bits they find useful. Now even though I am reaching dinosaur status, I must say I was always quite positive about tech. I persuaded my school to pay for an early computer-based language lab (Keylink), was a user of Fun with Texts (later to evolve into Textivate) embraced sites such as languagesonline.org.uk, Taskmagic and MYLO (a multi-skill interactive site paid for by the DfE then eventually ...

I've recently come across this interesting French website called Daily Geek Show which also has, by the way, an associated YouTube channel with interesting videos as well as a Twitter feed worth following (@DailyGeekShow). According to their Facebook page: "Daily Geek Show est un site d'actualités dédié aux plus belles découvertes de l'humanité !" There's certainly a lot of potentially useful authentic reading and listening material for intermediate (GCSE) and advanced level. Based in Paris, the site features videos, news, features, quizzes and an "insolite" section (weird news stories). Here is a video you could use on poverty with an A-level class (or even a really good GCSE group). The video goes with an article here . On the day I checked the Features page covered subjects such as  female Nobel prize winners, cannabis, left-handed people, how artistic endeavour is good for your health and animal cruelty. The News page featured hur...

I just wanted to update existing subscribers and anyone else interested about the many listening exercises available on frenchteacher.net which would work well with GCSE classes (intermediate level). These are divided into three sections on the Y10-11 page 1.  30 minute listening These are instant 30 minute listening tasks (including correcting) which can be read aloud or recorded by the teacher. I would recommend reading aloud since this allows you to adjust the speed to the class and also gives you the opportunity to improvise a bit by building in repetition and paraphrase. The tasks are divided into Foundation Tier and Higher Tier, so far 8 Higher passages and 7 Foundation. Topics include volunteering, environment, family, healthy living, horse-riding and holidays. 2.  Audio listening This is a set of worksheets linked to authentic recordings from the Audio Lingua website. I chose these carefully for their relevance to GCSE, length, interest and clarity. You'll fi...

When I was teaching at Ripon Grammar School I did some work on learning styles with a Y10 tutor group. This may have been around the year 2000.  I handed out a questionnaire to my class and the answers were used to help students work out if they were predominantly visual, auditory or kinaesthetic learners. The "VAK" model was popular at the time (along with multiple intelligences). Some schools even went to the ridiculous lengths of labelling children as V, A or K to help teachers adjust their teaching to each child. VAK still persists in some quarters. I did the questionnaire myself and, if I recall correctly, I was more of an auditory learner than anything else. This didn't surprise me at the time since, as a linguist, I had a feeling I liked to listen and had a keen ear. I even do that thing typical of "auditory learners" where you cock your head to one side when you listen. In recent years "learning styles theory" has been debunked by psycholog...

I've been working on some new A-level resources over the last few days. I've added three new conversation booklets based on the A-level (Year 2) sub-themes.This was actually in response to a teacher who asked for an equivalent to the AS (Year 1) booklets I produced last year. So the new booklets for AQA, Edexcel and Eduqas/WJEC consist of the existing vocab lists on the site plus general questions relating to the sub-themes. There are no stimulus cards, but the questions should help students prepare for material likely to come up. I have also produced a new set of exercises for video listening based on a very good documentary on YouTube about the French resistance. This topic is a feature of the Edexcel and Eduqas/WJEC specifications and the video focuses on the rise of the armed communist resistance. This exercises in unusual for the site because the source video is 20 minutes long. (In fact the whole video lasts 50 minutes, but I have only covered the first 20.) I normall...

This is a short extract from my new book Becoming an Outstanding Languages Teacher . The book, primarily aimed at new or newish language teachers, features a number of examples of detailed descriptions of interactions between the teacher and students. These are effectively blow-by-blow accounts of how you might run specific lessons - what the teacher might say, what the pupils might say. Each of these descriptions is accompanied by a running commentary of tips. This particular example is from the chapter on developing speaking lessons . It is aimed at intermediate students and uses a text about Cinderella as the stimulus. First, here is the text (you would translate it into your chosen language): Cinderella There was once a beautiful girl, an orphan, who lived in a big house with her father. Her stepmother had two daughters who were ugly and unkind. The stepmother and the two sisters forced Cinderella to do all the housework every day. She had to do the laundry, wash t...