Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

This post is for teachers just finding their way with AI - like me! Not written or checked by AI. Over the last year I've got into the habit of using AI, mainly Chat GPT, occasionally DeepSeek, for creating resources for frenchteacher.net. I thought I would share with you my thoughts so far. And these are overwhelmingly positive. Speed and productivity By far the most useful aspect for me is the speed at which I have been able to create worksheets and lesson plans. I am more productive as a result. In all cases, AI has not done anything I couldn't have done myself, but it has done it all so much more quickly. The best example I can think of is the ability to create multi-choice questions, which I have usually avoided since are very time-consuming to write. It's true that the options provided may not be the most subtle or create 'plausible distraction' - a requirement of assessment materials. But for my purposes, the MC questions produced are at the right level and p...

Introduction This post follows up on my previous one, which explored why L2 listening can be so difficult. Anecdotally, throughout my career—largely spent teaching higher-aptitude students—I often felt that listening, to some extent, took care of itself. This was because my students were doing a lot of listening right from day one: through oral question-and-answer work, drills, games, information gap tasks, dialogues, role plays, short audio clips, songs, and the occasional video. It’s worth recalling here that oral work almost inevitably involves listening , even if we think we’re primarily teaching speaking. This common perception—that speaking is more “visible” or measurable—may explain why listening is often under-emphasised in classroom planning. The so-called 'listening lesson' is about so much more than playing a recording while students do some exercises based on it. Let's explore how teachers can 'teach listening'. Do lots of listening A first, obvious prin...

Gianfranco Conti and I are embarking on a second edition of our best-selling handbook called Breaking the Sound Barrier: Teaching Language Learners How to Listen (2019). We wrote the book to help address how we should go beyond just teaching listening through traditional comprehension exercises. In so doing, we were strongly influenced by the work of John Field whose 2008 book Listening in the Language Classroom questioned the so-called comprehension model (a product -based model, sometimes called teaching by testing), and proposed his process model , known by Gianfranco Conti as listening-as-modelling .  Catching up with studies over the last six years is a reminder to me that research on how to teach listening is out there, but it has remained a relatively neglected area. What research there has been has tended to focus on metacognition - strategies for helping learners be better listeners. Field's process model, focused more on decoding skills, has not been followed up to a ...

(I have fixed some typos in the original draft) Introduction In England, Wales and Northern Ireland the current GCSE in modern foreign languages (MFL) is an improvement on the old O-Level in some important ways. In 1987 it moved beyond the elitist, grammar-translation-heavy approach that once dominated language teaching, placing greater emphasis on communication and offering an exam that was, in theory, accessible to a broader range of students. But despite that step change, the GCSE is still failing to meet the needs of many learners. It is no longer fit for purpose — and the model could do with a major rethink. Just don't expect it any time soon. A System That Bakes in Failure Now, first of all, the system works pretty well for higher-achieving students, the ones I often taught over the years. It allows the teacher enough freedom to work in communicative ways, certain in the knowledge that pupils will be well-prepared for the assessment and achieve high grades. In my own contexts...

Introduction 'Correct the transcript' tasks (aka 'faulty transcript') are a favourite of mine and I have a collection of them on my site, for both intermediate (GCSE) and advanced level. I first came across the idea many years ago when one of the English exam boards (Oxford and Cambridge, as they were then) used the task in their listening papers. If you need a reminder, students are given a transcript of a text to be read aloud by the teacher or played on a recording. But the version they hear has a number of linguistic differences which the students must identify and correct in their version. I like to put the emphasis on linguistic differences, but you could use factual differences. (The latter would put the emphasis on building intercultural knowledge rather than linguistic).  A good by-product for A-level learners is that the task helps them learn the skill of paraphrasing which is needed, for example, in the AQA A-level exam. What is going in the student's he...

Larry Ferlazzo on BlueSky often shares AI tools he has come across. ScribeTube is one such tool. The idea is very simple. You go to the ScribeTube site, enter the URL of the YouTube video, select the language from a comprehensive list and it instantly creates a transcript of the video. I tried it out with four videos in French to test its effectiveness. The first video is this one - a female speaker describing her weekend at level A2 in pretty clear and slowly delivered French. Here is an extract of the transcript: Bonjour à tous ! Aujourd'hui je vais vous parler de mon week-end à deux vitesses différentes. Je vais commencer par parler lentement pour que vous compreniez bien tous les mots comme d'habitude, mais dans la deuxième partie de la vidéo, je vais accélérer et parler de façon un peu plus naturelle, comme je le ferais avec un autre français natif.  C'est parti ! Alors, j'ai passé un très bon week-end, le samedi je suis restée tranquille à la m...