Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

Ever since I set up frenchteacher.net in 2002, one of the staple resources of the site has been advanced level texts with exercises. I've always written texts, usually heavily reworked from authentic sources, then added a range of exercises to exploit them: typically vocab to find, lexical work (focused on morphology), questions, true/false, gap-fill, translation, summary, oral discussion and compositional writing.  The subject matter is usually chosen to align with exam specifications in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, but not always. And in any case, I try to write texts which are inherently interesting for students at that level. I write texts at what I consider to be the right level of comprehensibility - broadly at least 90% known words, though this is impossible to gauge accurately. In addition, the vocab-finding exercises add a degree of scaffolding which aids understanding. Below is an example of a text I uploaded quite recently. It comes with model answers for the ben...

This is just a little update on what I've been adding to frenchteacher.net lately. For any reader outside England, Wales and NI, Y7 means beginners (usually age 11), A-level students have usually opted to do French for two more years after 5 years of earlier study. So Y7 is CEFR A1 and A-level B1, bordering on B2 (CEFR). The chunkiest new additions are two 35 page booklets , each with 17 sentence builders (plus gapped versions thereof) which could be printed off for students as an alternative source for revising vocabulary in context and for rehearsing answers for speaking and writing tests. There is one for Higher Tier GCSE and one for Foundation.  These are lightly adapted versions of existing resources on the site. Each booklet has a cover page with suggestions for how students should use the booklets. What I like about these is the fact that students aren't just reading and trying to memorise vocabulary (a pretty boring task), but they can read aloud sentences, record them...

Here's a simple idea for a listening task with near-beginners or just above (CEFR A1). Simply read aloud a set of statements and ask students to note (or show on a mini-whiteboard) if the statement is likely ('probable') or unlikely ('peu probable'). The example below is in French. You could make these up on the spot to fit with whatever vocabulary you have been using in previous lessons. With a shorter list you could add writing to the mix by doing this as a dictation (gapped if you like) and still ask whether the statement is unlikely or not. This makes sure the class is engaging with meaning, as well as form. The same statements could be reused in a game such as Sentence Stealers or Sentence Chaos. Gianfranco has named this sort of task 'Spot the nonsense'. Or you could ask students to instantly write an English translation of each sentence before they make their judgement. Students may like to make up their own examples - this would appeal to their sense...

I was interested to come across this 2020 report for the EEF (Education Endowment Foundation) written by the University of Oxford Education Department. For some reason, it passed me last year. I don't recall it being widely publicised, which is a shame since it has interesting things to say - and not just about what the title refers to. Of most interest to me were its findings about MFL pedagogy. First. here's the link: Foreign_language_learning_and_its_impact_on_wider_academic_outcomes_-_A_rapid_evidence_assessment.pdf (d2tic4wvo1iusb.cloudfront.net) The authors were: Victoria Murphy, Henriette Arndt, Jessica Briggs Baffoe-Djan, Hamish Chalmers, Ernesto Macaro, Heath Rose, Robert Vanderplank and Robert Woore. The report attempted to answer three research questions, the first of which interested me most. This is it: i) the research identifying what approaches to teaching FLs are being used and what variables impact on the effectiveness of these approaches (p. 2) All I'm g...

It's a time of year when many schools and tutors are signing up to frenchteacher.net. Some are brand new subscribers, most longer term addicts. Reading comprehension tasks are a staple of the site and can be found on every page. Every one involves some close reading and language manipulation, in line with what research suggests about how we best acquire vocabulary and language patterns (grammar). Writer and grammar expert Michael Swan has called this 'intensive input-output work'. Below is an example of a reading task from the Y10-11 page of the site (around A2 level CEFR, or intermediate-low in the USA). Help yourself. There are many more similar resources on the site. I often label them 'texts with exercises'. Apologies for any slightly dodgy formatting, which happens when you copy a Word doc into Blogger. Futuroscope – commentaires de Tripadvisor   A          Très bonne expérience. Le parc est très bien conçu et donne la possibilité mê...