Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

 It’s that time of year when I have a look back through the year’s blog posts and check some numbers. I’ve been pretty busy blogging this year, and a few posts made it into my Thinking About Language Teaching books (the second of which is now due in January). So, from 1 to 5, these were the posts people looked at - and maybe read. 1.   Why GCSE MFL is not fit for purpose Maybe a very slightly click-baity title, but I felt it was worth spelling out my thoughts on GCSE - which is clearly here to stay for a while. I hope, following the DfE response to the Curriculum and Assessment Review (CAR), that the a new Languages Ladder will be established as a further way to assess student progress in languages and encourage uptake. But traditions are strong and GCSE won’t be changing much. Eventually, I’d like to see it evolve into something more communicative, less punitive in grading terms and more accessible to a wider range of students. The conservative turn in curriculum (think decla...

As I've been working on some resources using the excellent Portrait d'enfant videos from Arte, I've been reminded of an issue affecting teachers of GCSE MFL in England. The latest version of the exam, to be taken from 2026, is based on a syllabus in which words are prescribed at Foundation and Higher Tier — meaning that the listening and reading exams can only use the words from the lists (apart from a few glossed words if needed). The word lists are short — 1200 for Foundation Tier and 1700 for Higher. To give you an idea of how short these lists are, researchers such as Paul Nation have calculated that (for English) 2,000–3,000 word‑families  are needed for  simple, everyday conversations , simple questions/answers, basic needs, greetings and simple descriptions. A researcher in this field James Milton has lamented the limited scope of the GCSE lists, arguing that even before the new lists, students' vocabulary was, on average far too low for communicative needs. (Wor...

When working with a new written text, do you let students read quietly, or do you read aloud the text as the class reads? Below is a summary of a recent paper I came across, shared by the Oasis people at the University of York, together with some comments of my own. The paper is: Malone, J., Hui, B., Pandža, N. & Tytko, T. (2025). Eye movements, item modality, and multimodal second language vocabulary learning: Processing and outcomes. Language Learning . When students learn new words in a second language, recognising them on the page is only part of the story. To really “know” a word, students also need to remember how it sounds, what it means and the company the word tends to keep. These are all aspects of depth of vocabulary knowledge — recall that breadth of vocabulary knowledge is not enough. The question here is whether students learn vocabulary better by reading alone, or by reading while listening. The study above used eye-tracking technology to find out how learners p...

Suppose you have been teaching and practising using the perfect tense with 'avoir' verbs in French — or the equivalent in your language. There are umpteen ways to generate practice, but one obvious route is via old-school questioning. Beneath you'll find a set of questions I uploaded to frenchteacher.net, along with some suggestions on how to design a lesson based on them. You could apply the same principles described below to other languages or areas of grammar and lexis. I'll list the set of questions first, together withe English translations — which you might want to use with average to weaker classes. 1.     Qu’est-ce que tu as mangé hier soir ?               What did you eat last night? 2.     Qu’est-ce que tu as regardé à la télé ce week-end ?               What did you watch on TV last weekend? 3.     Qu’est-ce que tu as acheté récemment ?    ...

Gognitive Load Theory was famously described by Dylan Wiliam as "the single most important thing for teachers to know". This post is all about cognitive load and Cognitive Load Theory, but with language teachers in mind. It is loosely adapted from our book Memory: What Every language Teacher Should Know ( Smith and Conti, 2021). So... you’re in a staff training session, facing a wall of text on a PowerPoint slide, while the presenter talks at a steady pace. You try to read, listen, and (if you are very assiduous) take notes all at once. Before long, you feel overwhelmed, you’ve missed a key point, and you’re thinking more about your to-do list than the training. (My own biggest bugbear is slides filled with too much text, with too little time to process it.) Now think of your language class. They’re facing a bigger challenge: a teacher speaking in a new language, slides to look at, text to read, other students to listen to, instructions to process, and an enthusiastic teacher...

In my previous blog post about curriculum reform in England, I referenced the idea of decolonising the curriculum. Like me, you've probably seen many references to decolonisation. But also like me, you may not have been entirely clear what this means in practice. What is it beyond working on a text about slavery? In this post I'll try to explain what it might mean. I'll also address the question of whether this is about fundamental long-term reform or just a temporary bandwagon, the type of which we've seen many times in the past. The decolonising the curriculum movement starts from the idea that what we teach and how we teach it are never neutral — they reflect certain values and worldviews. It recognises that education today is still shaped by long-standing influences such as racism, colonial history, and unequal power structures. Because of this, teachers and schools are being encouraged to think carefully about the ideas, values, and assumptions that guide the way c...