Bethlingual - building confident and successful MFL learners

I enjoy the game ‘dobble’ and I’m sure many of your students do too! Here’s how to turn it into a useful way to practice vocab recall in the classroom.  I play this as a way for students to practice remembering and saying vocab quickly, since it is a very fast game. They also have the benefit of multiple repetitions of key vocab. How to play The aim is for players to find the single matching symbol between two cards. Start by dealing all the cards equally amongst players face down. There should be one card left face up in the middle of all the players. All the players flip over their top card simultaneously, and they need to find the symbol that matches between their card and the centre card. The first person to say the symbol puts the card onto the center card, and the player who gets rid of all of their cards first is the winner.  There are many other variations of play, and I recommend this for groups of between three and five students. Students will get through a game quic...

One of the frustrating things about starting a new spec is the lack of grade boundaries to help make a judgement about what grade students are on track to receive. Unfortunately, until there has been a cohort who take this exam and receive a grade, no one will be able to give accurate grade boundaries - we can only estimate. While the boundaries change year on year, they have remained roughly similar for the last 8 years (on the previous spec). It is of course possible for them to change further for a new specification, but this is still our best source of data to create a best estimate for the new one. I have created a spreadsheet which gives a few alternative ways of calculating a 'best estimate' grade - these are best used alongside teacher professional judgements. This may potentially include you knowing your students' target grades, or comparing with previous cohorts. It may also help you to report a more nuanced grade, which is required by my school and I'm sure m...

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...