Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

Gianfranco and I have been in the language teaching game a long time, but we are both learning all the time as we read more, talk with teachers and refine our thinking about a very complex matter - teaching and learning additional languages in schools. Our thinking is also bound to be heavily influenced by the settings in which we have taught - largely secondary level students in high schools often doing compulsory language courses. Since writing the first edition of The Language Teacher Toolkit we have both therefore adjusted our beliefs about classroom language teaching. The set of principles below, taken from the second edition of The Language Teacher Toolkit, resemble the ones we included in the first edition of our handbook, but have changed in subtle ways. See if these chime with your own beliefs. 1.      Comprehensible input. Comprehension of meaningful language is the foundation of language acquisition. When listening and reading input are understood by students, ...

This is an example of a parallel reading task from the Y9 (CEFR A2) page of frenchteacher.net. I like the concept of parallel reading as a way to give access to harder, often more interesting texts. The main downside is that the language is not deeply processed (since there is not much built-in recycling and intensive work involved). Another possible downside is the emphasis (in some texts) on less frequent vocabulary. This doesn't worry me much since, in French, many more technical words are cognates and often, though not high frequency, the words are important, as in the example below.  Overall, for me, therefore, parallel texts are a useful occasional way to spice up lessons and give experience with harder texts. The example below is on the important issue of sea level rise. Since 1901, the average level of the oceans has risen by between 15 and 25 cm. Most of this rise is, according to climate scientists, down to human-induced climate change. Feel free to copy and use. There ar...

A recurring theme on this blog and in the books I have written or co-written is that to keep workload and stress in check, it's great to have a repertoire of activities that need little or no preparation, but which are productive. By productive, I mean generate plenty of structured input, output and repetition. Some use the term "surrender value" or "opportunity cost" to get the idea of "bang for your buck" when planning a task.  Some tasks can be relatively mechanical (drills), some more genuinely communicative (problem-solving communicative tasks), while some fall a bit in the middle (structured information-gap activities). One scholar in the field, Bill VanPatten, has labelled this last type "activities" (as opposed to "exercises" or "tasks"). Guessing games fall into that middle category. There is a gap in information between two or more students, but the activity doesn't lead to a purposeful problem-solving or rea...

In my last post, I wrote about how a resource can become, in effect, a lesson plan once you have established a well-rehearsed set of procedures and activities for running a lesson. On frenchteacher.net I have been adding more full lesson plan resources, with suggested activities supplied in sequence. This may of of use to teachers learning how to plan their lessons. This was the approach I took in my 50 Lesson Plans book . On my frenchteacher site I have a range of full lesson plans, some based on written texts, some task-based, some storytelling based and some based on sentence builders (substitution tables). It's that last type of plan I have been working on lately. These lesson plans (on the Y9 page) are aimed at students with about three years of French behind them. They consist of two sentence builders, one of which is gapped and which can be used at any point in the sequence, depending on how much help the class needs. As always, the sentence builder ensures the learning goal...

In the penultimate chapter of  the new edition of The Language Teacher Toolkit (Smith and Conti, 2023), we make the point that, once a teacher has gained experience in a repertoire of go-to activities that work, the main resource used in the lesson effectively becomes the lesson plan . Typically, a written comprehensible text can be the basis of a sequence involving, for example, reading aloud, question-answer, vocab finding, drilling, 'aural gap-fill' or sentence completion, true-false and so on. Another example is where, if you are skilled in using a sentence builder (Conti/EPI-style substitution table), then that table is the basis for a ready-made lesson or lesson sequence. If you are working with a text book, for example, you don't need to reinvent the wheel provided the source language input is interesting, suitable for the syllabus and at the right level. The source IS the lesson plan. That said, when you write your own material you may be more invested in the plan a...