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 …
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Strategies for success with A-level speaking cards: PART 1 – Effective Curriculum Planning
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, …
The best oral processing activities to try
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 …
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25+ ideas for retrieval starters
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 …
A quick beginner’s guide to retrieval practice
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 …
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