Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

Here is a simple listening and vocab retrieval activity from my frenchteacher site. It's easy to adapt to other languages, of course. I like this for its clarity and simplicity. I also like the fact that it helps build students' deep knowledge of vocabulary, by associating words with a meaningful context (words within conected language as opposed to words memorised from lsist or learned via a vocab app). Finally, the activity allows you to fully oprate in the target language. If you think more scaffolding is needed, you could always display partial translations on the board, though i would avoid this if possible. If you are recycling known, comprehensible language, you shouldn't need extra support. A listening exercise and vocab retrieval starter. Do as many examples as you wish. They are given in three sets of 12 sentences. Read aloud the sentences. Pupils must just supply the missing word (shown in brackets). They can do this on paper or on a mini-whiteboard.   Presen

It is often said in the research literature on second language acquisition that two key factors behind success are aptitude and motivation . I have posted before about aptitude here. In this post, I'm lifting and adapting some sections sections about motivation from our handbook The Language Teacher Toolkit (Second Edition). I have not listed the references at the end of this post - they are part of the ample bibliography in the handbook.  Motivation has been considered over the years from various  perspectives, all of which cast light on the topic and can help language teachers provide the best conditions for learning. below are some of those perspectives. 1. Instrumental and integrative motivation Gardner and Lambert coined the terms instrumental motivation (language learning for more immediate or practical goals, such as mastering basic conversation for a professional role) and integrative motivation (language learning for personal growth, cultural enrichment and a desire to

A feature of our new GCSE workbook, is the inclusion at the end of each unit of two 'sentence banks', one Foundation, one Higher. These lists of translated sentences would be familiar to teachers who like to use parallel text knowledge organisers. Below is an example from Part Two of our new workbook, coming in a few weeks. It's Foundation Tier set from the unit about education and future plans. Items in bold are more challenging structures which go beyond simple, one clause present tense sentences. The Higher senetnce banks contain more of these. Je vais à l’école à pied. I go to school on foot. Il y a 800 élèves à mon école. There are 800 pupils in my school. Je porte un uniforme scolaire ; c’est pratique. I wear a school uniform; it’s practical. J’ai cinq cours par jour. I have five lessons per day. Les cours commencent à neuf heures. Lessons start at nine o’clock