If you’re wondering why your students perform well on reading tasks but not on listening and you’re sure you’ve covered much of the language in the passage, a big factor is their ability to recognise known vocab through listening.To achieve this, all vocab MUST be practised aurally, not just through reading and writing tasks. The …
Continue reading “3 activities that introduce new vocab through listening”
In my previous post, we explored how the demands of the stimulus card can be addressed through effective long-term planning and selection of teaching materials. Before we continue, here is a reminder of some of the common areas where students can struggle in this task: Ineffective summarising of the text Basic, superficial opinions & difficulty …
The stimulus card is arguably one of the most demanding tasks in AQA A-level languages. You may be familiar with some of the issues that students commonly encounter when dealing with the card: Ineffective summarising of the text Basic, superficial opinions & difficulty providing justification Lack of ideas / repetition / drawing blanks Banal, basic, …
I saw a post the other day in one of the MFL Facebook groups about how to liven up ‘choral repetition’ or other activities to help students process language orally, so I’ve compiled some of the ones that have worked best for me so far. We know from Second Language Acquisition research that doing reading/writing …
Continue reading “The best oral processing activities to try”
The title of this post should perhaps have been ’25 ideas for retrieval starters that can also be used as plenaries or simply basic lesson activities’ but it was less catchy… The only reason I have specified ‘starters’ is because I personally love to start a lesson with retrieval of previous material. The purpose of …
This post aims to give an introduction to what is meant by ‘retrieval practice’, the theory behind its development and popularity in teaching, and suggestions for further reading. In a nutshell ‘When we think about learning, we typically focus on getting information into students’ heads. What if, instead, we focus on getting information out of students’ heads?’ (Agarwal 2017) This …
Continue reading “A quick beginner’s guide to retrieval practice”
This post is designed for MFL teachers who, like me, are always on the lookout for tips to make lesson planning more efficient, maximise effectiveness of resources and be able to confidently plan lessons that are sharply focused, engaging and varied. I recently read some fantastic posts on Steve Smith’s blog which inspired me to …
Continue reading “Make your own lesson builder & streamline your planning”
I wanted to make a list for myself that grouped together all the different activities and resources that many of us already use in our lesson planning that can be utilised for ‘remote learning’ – I thought this might be useful for others, not just for remote learning but for reminding ourselves of the different …
Not only are the following sites great for student engagement, but each of them is, in my humble opinion, well thought-out for language learning. Each one incorporates a multi-skill approach that can be a very effective way to complement your classroom teaching. They can greatly reduce prep time, and in some cases, there is no …
Continue reading “4 subscription sites for MFL teaching that are worth every penny”
As a teacher of French and Spanish, I can recommend the following sites that I have found useful – they offer a mixture of intermediate and advanced level listening practice. Some provide comprehension activities or transcripts. Some are also subscription sites but they offer a certain number of free activities. They can be used: 1. …
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