Easy Christmas Shape Poem for Your Language Lessons
Christmas Shape Poetry for French, German and Spanish Lessons Poetry is part of a country’s culture, but poems are not often embedded well or easily into language lessons. I’ll be honest, I don’t enjoy teaching poetry to my language students. I find that it’s tricky for them to understand. I believe they feel disconnected from the poetry they have encountered so far and therefore find reading poems inherently difficult. Particularly since, by their very nature poetry makes meaning by hiding meaning. Okay, so, reading and analysing the language and meanings in poems isn’t for me. However, I don’t see why I can’t use a form of poetry in my French…
50 Great Websites and Teaching Apps for Language Lessons
Easy To Use Teaching Websites and Apps for Language Teachers to Use In Their Lessons Since mid-March, we’ve had to adapt our teaching methods. Teachers have had to embrace technology to a degree, or feel like they are drowning in the myriad of emails from students they have received. At least that’s how I felt! I know for some the change has been quite welcome. For others, not so much. If you’re still in the phase of sticking to Zoom or Teams, or don’t feel confident with technology, branch out a little. My list of 50 Great Websites and Teaching Apps for Language Teachers includes the websites I have been…
21 Must-Use Reading Activities For Your Language Lessons
Fun Pre-Reading and Post-Reading Activities for All Language Classrooms I love language lessons which involve an element of reading. This is because there are so many opportunities for learning and improving language acquisition with topic-related texts. Reading activities are the perfect starting point to learn rich topic-related vocabulary (adjectives, nouns, verbs etc), pick up new grammar structures,ย steal ‘star phrases’ย and ultimately improve comprehension and improve language acquisition skills. According to Moeller & Meyer (1995), reading, even at a slow pace exposes students to more sentences, grammar, and new vocabulary per minute than the average short class, TV show, or song. So, if you are in a rut with how you present…
Low-Prep & Fun Open Evening Ideas for MFL
10 Fun, Low-Prep MFL Open Evening Ideas Wow future linguists with the FUN ideas and activities below which are extremely low-prep and most of which are very low-cost for MFL Open Evenings I rarely enjoyed taking part in Y4/5/6 open evenings at secondary schools, as I always thought they were a waste of time. This was until one student who came to our school in year 7 said they loved the activities that we had for them when he came to visit the MFL department with his family on a school open day. He also mentioned that he had never tasted the French, German and Spanish foods that we put…
Fun Speaking Activity for First Lesson in Language Classrooms
Want to get some weird looks and questions from your family when packing for a new term of college? Get some toilet roll out…! Ready for a fun speaking activity during first lessons in any language classroom. The ‘Loo’ Roll Speaking Activity For First Lessons Today, I started back at college, teaching a speaking and listening course. This ‘loo’ roll activity for speaking was the first fun speaking activity that I learnt during my teacher training course in 2009. I often use it to get students to talk about themselves from the outset of a new course or class. It works for post beginners, intermediate and advanced speakers and allows them…
Teaching Tips of The Week For The Language Classroom
Teaching Tips and Ideas To Use In The Classroom Each Week I come across brilliant teaching ideas and teaching tips that would be fantastic to use in the modern language classroom or English Language classroom daily. Unfortunately, I don’t do anything with the majority of them; mainly, because there are so many and they are hard to keep track of! Whilst there are many teaching ideas which are gimmicky, there are many that could be used to break away from monotonous lessons with the same activities week in, week out. For this reason, I am challenging myself to collect lots of these teaching tips in one place; here, for myself…
Behaviour Management Strategies For New Teachers
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 keep control of the classroom?’ This made me anxious every time I went into a lesson with a trickier class. Behaviour Management – Is There Really A Magic Answer? Even after reading all the literature I could find on behaviour management strategies by Bill Rogers, for example, and doing external behaviour management courses lead by training providers as part of my CPD, I couldn’t really find a magic answer to…
Retrieval Practice Grids in MFL
The Practice of Retrieval ‘When we think about learning, we typically focus on getting informationย intoย studentsโ heads. What if, instead, we focus on getting informationย outย of studentsโ heads?’ (Agarwal, 2017)ย Whilst I feel the quotation is useful in introducing retrieval practice, which the Oxford Dictionary defines as: ‘the process of getting something back from somewhere’, it’s a process teachers do automatically on a daily basis. This could be in the form of recaps at the beginning of lessons, through questioning or activities during the lessonas well as in a mini-plenary or a final plenary. It is also the idea of summative assessments at the end of a unit or in KS4, for GCSE…
