Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

I sometimes think that dialogues are under-exploted in textbooks in England and by MFL teachers in general. If I'm right, this is a little surprising since dialogue is the basis of most spoken and aural language we engage with in everyday life. The lesson plan below, another from my book 50 Lesson Plans for French Teachers, is aimed at post-beginner/ low-intermediate (level A2) — roughly Year 9 in England — and is based on a dialogue between two friends. Rationale So the starting point for the lesson is a dialogue on the topic of plans for next weekend. The dialogue contains examples of the near future and is the basis for some listening, reading and speaking practice. Work hard on the choral reading aloud before you let students loose on the pair work. If they have been well trained in phonics and reading aloud this should be fine. In a way, this lesson is a variation on the sentence builder approach, where students slot in alternative words and chunks to vary meaning. S...

This post is based on a lesson plan from my book 50 Lesson Plans for French Teachers: Step by Step (available from Amazon). One of the challenges with near beginners is finding content which is both interesting for its content and accessible from a linguistic point of view. For students to be able to process the language they hear or see, the language needs to be highly comprehensible, but at this level authentic material is usually too hard to process. The thinking behind this parallel reading lesson plan, therefore, is to provide enough scaffolding to make a harder text teachable and useful. This lesson will introduce new language, use a range of skills and teach some general knowledge about an animal most of us like. First, take a look at the main resource below about dolphins. Parallel reading: dolphins Les dauphins Les dauphins sont des mammifères marins qui sont liés aux baleines et aux marsouins. Un mammifère marin vit dans l'eau. Les dauphins se trouvent partout dans les ...

My final post for 2025. A Happy New Year to you all! I daresay this is not an original task, but it's one that I hadn't designed before! It's a variation on the traditional 'text with exercises' resource. In this case, there is a source text — the example below is for level B1/2 and is about so-called intangible cultural heritage in France ( patrimoine immatériel ). French readers will understand the task from the instructions, but I'll explain the principle here so that you can design your own, similar task, maybe with the help of AI. In my example, I used Deepseek to help with the the production of the text and exercises. In total, the resource took around 35 minutes to produce. Instead of students seeing the text from the start, they must reconstruct the main elements of it by asking the teacher questions provided to them. (They could actually start from scratch without questions, but it would be quite a challenge — one for a very able Y13 group perhaps.) So ...