Bethlingual - Beth M's MFL blog

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...

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 ...

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...