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How to plan a great lesson - fast!

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...
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MFL GCSE: Say what you know how to say!

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I'm sure everyone who has taught a language GCSE has experienced the frustration of students trying to say something they aren't sure about and making mistakes. Even worse, we know they know lots of vocab, and could have said something else very well! Under the pressure of the exam situation, students seem to forget all the lovely structures and vocab they know, and struggle to know what to say to answer the questions - that has been my experience anyway! I've been trying to tackle this in lessons, and help students feel more confident that they do actually have lots of options they can say. I don't want to give them too much help (and we do a lot of structured/scaffolded production already), so I have tested using just images, for example this slide: I start with listening as modelling ; students write what I said and in which order. I always do this with mini whiteboards so I can easily assess how students are doing, and adjust my examples accordingly.  I can also dra...
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Low prep, high impact: building speaking skills

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I do lots of work with my students to practice and build confidence with speaking, and I have tried lots of activities to support them without creating extra workload. In this post I'd like to share a tried-and-tested lesson plan for revising and consolidating vocabulary, and building speaking skills. This develops the sub-skills required to do speaking well, before putting everything back together - it could take 1 or 2 lessons depending on your classes. Best of all, it uses one resource that will take less than 2 mins to create! The example I'm using is from a year 9 Spanish group:  Step 1: Listening as modelling  I started the lesson by modelling to students what they will be able to produce. I would read the sentences, choosing one of the options, and ask students to write the numbers selected on their mini whiteboards. Eg. If they heard ‘Por la tarde, veo las noticias con mi madre y cada día escucho la música pop porque es guay. Suelo ir de compras con mis amigos pero ...
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Reflections on reading aloud

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Reading aloud in MFL has always been important, but with the changes to the new GCSE it has become even more so. I have been thinking about and experimenting with this a lot recently and wanted to share some reflections.  I think about reading aloud as having 2 distinct stages or sub-skills: echoing and independence. To me echoing is about holding a sound in the auditory working memory and accurately repeating it back. This is an important first step to achieve before being able to be independent, meaning to be able to see a word and accurately say it.  There are many activities that are about repeating TL words, chunks, and sentences, and I feel that much of what we do as language teachers is find many different engaging ways to repeat the same things, so students can adequately practice skills and vocab. This means that repetition tends to be quite gamified, for example choral repetition, and delayed repetition.  This is ideally placed at the modelling stage. When I fir...
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Teaching phonics through key words: Lexical Sets

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I studied linguistics at university, including lots of modules about phonetics and phonology, as well as sociophonetics, or language variation and change. This included working on how the use and perception of accents can show identity. I’m now passionate about using this knowledge to teach phonics and speaking effectively. This post focuses on a method for French, which has the largest number of tricky phonics for our students to grasp.  What are Lexical Sets?  A fantastic method I used extensively throughout my degree was Wells’ Lexical Sets  ( J.C.Wells, 1982, Accents of English ). Wells came up with a clever way of referring to vowels, and created a set of words containing each vowel. Each vowel in English has a key word containing that vowel, which means we can refer to a sound clearly and accurately,  even when different accents produce it slightly differently . It also allows us to talk about multiple words all containing the same sound. The diagram below, fro...
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Three key principles for phonics teaching

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As an MFL teacher with a dual degree in linguistics and French, I am passionate about teaching phonics well, and I have the subject knowledge to back it up. Here are some practical principles and activities to incorporate phonics effectively in your lessons.  Principle 1: Have a clear and specific phonics focus  In UK secondary schools, we do not have enough teaching time to deal with phonics implicitly: we need to be deliberate about the key sounds we want students to know, and we need to talk about them and practice them explicitly .  Much like other elements of our teaching, we also need to be careful not to give students cognitive overload. There is no point trying to teach too many sounds at the same time, because students will likely forget the sounds at best, and get confused and demotivated at worst. My school teaches with EPI and sentence builders, and for each sub-topic we carefully consider the most important sounds and focus on these. For the next topic, we in...
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What teachers need to know about phonetics (part 2)

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I love linguistics, particularly phonetics and phonology. As an MFL teacher, this has been an asset for me and really helped me and my department to teach phonics well. In part 1 of this series about how linguistics knowledge can help teachers, I talked about some key phonics terminology and how linguists think about consonants.  I think vowels can be much more difficult than consonants to describe, and for our students to get right, particularly in French. However, they are still very important, and very interesting...  Unlike consonants, vowels are all made without an obstruction of airflow , so it is harder to form distinct categories. When talking about vowels, linguists consider the mouth as a trapezium, calling this the ‘ vowel space ’.    The IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a system of phonetic notation in which every possible distinct sound (phoneme) has one consistent symbol to represent it. The IPA depiction of the vowel space is below:  The ...
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