Bethlingual - Beth M's MFL blog

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...