How To Learn Vocabulary with Free Language Learning Apps – A Review/Comparison ‘Quizzes should be learning experiences for our students and we can make them into powerful ones’ (Fink, 2003) With the advent of the internet, it has never been…
The art of asking can be quite a daunting task for many in their own language, let alone a foreign language. This post aims to discuss why we need to know how to ask questions, provide a comprehensive explanation of…
Behaviour Management – Issues When I was doing my QTS training, one of the worries I often had was about classroom behaviour management strategies. I had loads of questions: ‘what if the students don’t listen?’ and ‘what if I can’t…
The Practice of Retrieval ‘When we think about learning, we typically focus on getting information into students’ heads. What if, instead, we focus on getting information out of students’ heads?’ (Agarwal, 2017) Whilst I feel the quotation is useful in introducing retrieval practice, which the…
French Writing GCSE and KS3 Marksheet I started teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) in an adult education college in 2009 and although I did set writing homework, it was voluntary. So, I wasn’t obliged to do lots…
How To Help Students with The French Speaking General Conversation GCSE Exams In order to support the French Speaking of my students, I collated a number of foundation level and higher tier questions and put them into a handout which…
How To Learn Vocabulary Effectively For modern languages, you need vocabulary to communicate well. However, students often find it difficult to remember words and sentences they are taught in the classroom between lessons. Some learners equally struggle to know how to…
Speaking languages spontaneously can be quite of daunting, especially at in a GCSE French, German or Spanish classroom. However, one of my professional targets this year is to develop my application of teaching spontaneous speaking in languages at GCSE (in…
Why do GCSE students need German listening practice? My GCSE German students are fantastic at writing, they get on very well with reading and do well on speaking when they have plenty of vocabulary on a topic. The GCSE skill…
Why Improve French Listening Skills for GCSE? For the revised 9-1 AQA GCSE French examinations from 2016, each skill: speaking, listening, reading and writing now accounts for 25% of the overall GCSE French grade. In addition, ‘students must enter at…