Bethlingual - Beth M's MFL blog

This blog is a continuation of My Top 10 Speaking Activities: Part 1 I wanted to share some helpful activities that I use often with my classes. The activities I've selected help students to practice and develop different sub-skills of speaking, and are listed here with an explanation and an example. 6. Quelquechose/Algo/Etwas This requires slightly more prep than the other tasks so far since you need a partner A and partner B version of the resource, but worth it since it practices the two new skills of the new GCSE – reading aloud and dictation. There are two similar texts, and students take it in turns to read it to their partner and to write what they heard in the gaps. I also like that the pair who isn’t speaking has a clear and specific role, as I think this is important for engagement in these types of tasks. Students tend to need coaching to not try to mumble or speed through it, so this is done a little later in the learning sequence (when I am happy that students can accu...

I’ve written quite a bit about how to develop our students’ speaking skills, and making sure we scaffold and challenge appropriate to their current understanding and abilities. I’ve also discussed how we can make speaking activities a classroom routine, increasing confidence and motivation by making it so students expect to have to speak, and so they are clear on what they need to do. I thought it would be helpful to write a post explaining my top 10 speaking tasks at the moment as well as how, when, and why I use them. They aren’t listed in any particular order but are roughly in order of when I might use them with my classes if I’m introducing a new topic. (Most of my example slides below come from tasks I’ve done with my lovely year 10 French group throughout last year.) So, without further ado... 1. Repeat if correct (also known as ‘beat the teacher’) This is great at the start of a topic as it’s repetition based, so ideal for drilling new vocab or a particular phoneme. KS3 classes...

Building classroom routines is essential. I think when most of us think of routines , what immediately springs to mind is linked to making the classroom a safe and settled space in terms of behaviour, ie . entry and exit routines, register routines, handing out equipment routines. T hese are hugely important and make lessons go much more smoothly – and I think we can utilise routines for speaking too. Over the past few years, I have developed and used a classroom speaking routine that I refer to as the ‘2-minute speaking questions challenge’. I’ve written about this activity before on this blog post – please have a read and see if you may be able to implement this in your classrooms.  The p urpose of this challenge is to develop confidence and accuracy with understanding and (quickly) responding to questions in the target language. It’s been incredibly successful in my school context across a range of prior ability groups, in that all students know several key verbs, c...

In order for students to be comfortable recognising and eventually using phonemes in the target language, there needs to be lots of listening and exposure to the target sounds.  I think listening is a bit of an underrated skill, and potentially isn’t given as much time as it should be. However, in my school context, we often find that listening is the score with the highest results. In addition, I find that when listening is done really well, speaking becomes much easier for students. We do listening in every lesson, and the task type is different depending on the stage of learning of the students. At the start of a new topic, this might be choral repetition (listening and repeating), or sentence bingo, or sentence chaos (listening and identifying a specific sentence). It could be activities requiring closer listening, such as break the flow (adding spaces between words), faulty transcript tasks (spot the extra word or the pronunciation mistake), reordering words in a sentence, or...

Phonics needs to be taught explicitly. This is particularly true when we have very little teaching time per fortnight, and especially for less phonetically transparent languages like French. Phonics is embedded within every single lesson I teach, in a variety of ways. As well as being explicitly taught, I argue that it needs to be scaffolded, and needs to be deliberately practiced, not only by actually saying the target sounds, but by listening too. I’m aware that there are differing opinions on this, but I think when we introduce new vocab, it should be with the spoken and written forms at the same time. With lots of the phonemes we need to teach, we have to counter the transfer effect, where a student’s knowledge of English ‘competes’ with what it sounds like in the target language. For example in English the grapheme ‘oi’ sounds like oy in boy, but in French the same grapheme sounds like wa in wag; this means that students have to not only have the knowledge of the French phonic rul...

Within a successful lesson, students should have opportunities to learn and/or consolidate vocabulary and structures by practicing some of the core skills – speaking, listening, reading, writing. Teachers should have a clear idea of what they want students to know and be able to do during the lesson and wider unit, and they should assess how well this has been learned, in order to adapt the teaching so it is effective for all. However, teachers also have little time and a huge workload! I recently read a discussion about how long planning lessons can take, and wanted to share some tips to help speed this process up.  Lessons are all about the learners and how they are developing. In my department we use the EPI methodology, which breaks down the key stages of development in a really clear way, but the principles shared here can apply to any classroom. There is no point expecting learners to be able to run before they can walk – this is simply a recipe for frustration, for us and th...