Cultural Capital: Strategies for Language Classrooms

Oct 14, 2025Oct 30, 2025 / dlh202 / Leave a comment

Other cultures have always fascinated me ever since learning about Norway in Year 5 or tasting a Stollen in German class in Year 7. My experience of teaching secondary languages suggests that this fascination is true for our students as well.

*Was Norway where this fascination with other cultures started? Possibly! It’s still on the list to visit…*

We teach culture to build enthusiasm interest and develop the cultural capital of our students. for those students who do not enjoy the language learning process so much, this can be a great way to hook them in.

There are four approaches to the teaching of culture that I have used in my career.

Unit based approach

The obvious benefit of a unit-based approach is that students can gain a deeper understanding of the target language culture full stop. I’ve seen units structured around the films “Innocent Voices” or Valentín. I have seen lessons centered around schools in Latin America or French speaking Africa. I have taught lessons about Cuba (thanks Listos 2), Dali, Goodbye Lenin and the Carnival de Oruro over time. There are schools who use artists such as Miro, Matisse and Picasso as the foundation for some of their early Spanish modules. Some textbooks base entire chapters around a target language festival, country or city. Indeed, one of my former colleagues convinced a class that Mira 2’s “Barcelona Te Quiero” song was once a successful Eurovision entry! The language gym has exercises on La Tomatina. There are plenty of ways to integrate culture into our lessons.

Just as there are benefits to this approach, there can be drawbacks. Culture can be relegated to an end of year project or sometimes a module around culture ends up with grammar or vocabulary “shoe-horned in” as they are good revision opportunities when actually other opportunities might have existed. The way to counter this is to ask the question: “Is this the best learning my students can do with the material that I am presenting them with?”

This might be a slightly extreme example but let’s take bullfighting:

It could be used as an opportunity to describe the colours of clothing worn by matadors, body parts or…

Do you use it as an opportunity to build opinions and justifications?

I think that	bullfighting	is can be	dangerous	as	animals are killed	however although yet
I believe that			barbaric		people risk their lives
In my opinion			unpleasant		the animals have no choice
In my view			cruel

The Pop-up approach

Do we simply just teach about the culture when it just pops up? Festivals in particular lend themselves to this approach. Events such as Las Fallas, Barilletes Gigantes, Dia de los Muertos, Christmas, Karneval and Bastille day are all opportunities to engage students with the target language country and its culture. Sometimes a textbook will have a single or double page spread on something. It does not take long to find a short appropriate video to show towards the end of a lesson.

The benefits of this approach are that it does not take up too much classroom time at the expense of learning the language. The drawbacks are that much can be missed if it is the only way culture is taught.

Displays

There are some wonderful displays out there. I have never quite had the artistic abilities to produce an amazing cultural display of the types one often sees on Facebook groups, X and BlueSky although I have done my best. I managed one on Germany with a lot of authentic materials after a trip to Berlin but our school then made the decision (against my protestations) to phase out German…

If you’re wanting inspiration, you can find some materials here with MFL Magic, Jose Garcia is has some of the most artistic cultural displays I have seen or you can go full mural as seen at this school on X. There are companies who can produce bespoke murals when given a set of criteria. If you are really stuck for inspiration regarding layout and how it could look then the picture below was created by giving an AI image generator a prompt “classroom dia de los muertos display.” Bear in mind these are highly predictive generating tools and will not be perfect but it might spark some ideas.

Like other approaches this does not detract from classroom time and it makes for a pleasant learning environment. The drawback is again that the display may need refreshing every so often and then you have to balance time invested against the return.

Culture slide approach

This is probably my most recent evolution in culture teaching and the one that I actually feel has done it best. Dedicating 2 minutes of a lesson to culture after answers to a starter/do now task and before the lesson fully starts. I prepare a single slide on a topic that includes some pictures and some fun facts. I talk through it for a minute or two and then we crack on with the lesson. The benefits of this approach are that there is largely something for everyone. The students who enjoy history enjoyed learning the history of Spain. The musicians enjoyed learning about singers/songwriters, bands and music. The students who go on holidays learn a bit more about the places they have been. The students – for whom a holiday abroad is unlikely – broaden their horizons. The students who don’t appear to enjoy language lessons often appear to enjoy this part.

Just to unpack what I mean a little bit more by “some pictures and fun facts”…

The Spanish island of El Hierro had a whistling language that was used to communicate between villagers. William Shakespeare was given a barrel of wine from Tenerife as part of his salary. Ibiza and Formentera were used as a base by pirates. Francesco Tarregas’s Gran Vals in A contains a tune known by millions around the world without realising its Spanish origins (seriously, look it up). The Menorcan city of Mahon is home to Salsa Mahonesa, or – thanks to the French – as we now know it: Mayonaise (an utterly disgusting substance with which people inexplicably ruin sandwiches).

I cannot reproduce the slides as they produced in the context of my work for an academy trust and therefore property of the trust, however, here is a rough guide to what you could do:

Year 7

Term 1	Term 2	Term 3	Term 4	Term 5	Term 6
Spanish Islands Mallorca Tenerife Ibiza	Major players in Spain. King, President, famous people	Spanish cities Madrid, Valencia, Barcelona, Sevilla	Spanish speaking countries in South America	History of Spain Cavemen to present day in 10 lessons. *	Customs / Festivals Mealtimes Siestas Padel Tomatina San Juan

*Simon Barton’s History of Spain was quite useful for this for the division of eras into 10 lessons.

Year 8

Term 1	Term 2	Term 3	Term 4	Term 5	Term 6
Spanish artists.	Spanish musicians	Central American countries	Foods including Paella Mole Negro Pique Macho	Idioms from Spain	Quirky places to visit in Spain + South America Smurf village Water fights in Bolivia Colombian festival of Yipao

Culture can make great cover work

Feedback from the cover supervisors in my first school was that they hated covering Spanish/French/German as they didn’t know the answers, students would struggle with not knowing words and most people sending in cover are often too ill to provide much more than “do these grammar exercises.” Whilst a set of sentence builder activities goes a long way towards solving this, a cultural based lesson could work. A set of cultural based activities means students are still learning, they do not pick up or reinforce misconceptions with unchecked exercises and the cover teacher has a significantly easier job.

I have done this two ways in the past:

Spain Live – This was a great textbook teaching pupils about Spain. It works very like a geography textbook with articles and questions to answer. There are also France and Germany versions.

IT room/library – Write out a list of Spanish speaking countries, periods in Spanish history or famous Spanish people. Give each student a different one so that they have to do their own piece of work. Students have to create a poster / powerpoint / document of some description that explains everything they can find using the computers or the library (if your school has one). To avoid copying and pasting, make them write it in a horrible histories style where it has to be accessible for a child aged 8-10.

Conclusion

However you choose to teach it, there is no escaping the fact that culture can broaden horizons, enrich the mind and enthuse our students. The above are some ways I have done it over the past 15 years. You may have others in which case feel free to suggest them in the comments or underneath the social media posts.

Transforming Language Teaching: Insights from Other Subjects

Oct 10, 2025Oct 10, 2025 / dlh202 / Leave a comment

I’ve been a teacher for nearly 15 years. Over the past seven or eight, due to timetable pressures and a variety of other factors, I’ve found myself teaching several different subjects. Often, as a languages teacher, I’ve sat in CPD sessions thinking, I’m not entirely sure how I can apply this to MFL.

In the last seven years, I’ve taught across five different subject areas: History, English, Religious Studies, Drama, and more recently, Computer Science. For those of a footballing persuasion, I guess i’ve ended up as a versatile super-sub*. A mix of Wayne Rooney and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer.

History

A few years ago, I was given a Year 9 top set history class, shared with another teacher. I like to think this was a mutually beneficial arrangement. They helped me deliver the lesson by explaining content and the activities; I fixed their German pronunciation. Two things particularly stood out from this time.

The first was that the starter tasks—or “do now” tasks —increased in difficulty from question one to question four. The idea was that every single student should be able to answer at least questions one and two. This meant every student in the room came in with an instant chance to be successful and get their lesson off to a good start. They followed the following pattern:

True / False
Multiple Choice
Short answer
Sentence / Multiple Sentence answer

There was a culture of “no excuses” for not answering or attempting question 1 and 2. I was encouraged to circulate and particularly demand extension to answers on question 4 and support those struggling with 3 or 4. I think a similar principle could work with MFL starters.

The second thing that really stood out was how each lesson was framed as a question to be answered. Now, in History, this is significantly easier than in MFL. Take, for example, the questions: What happened at Pearl Harbour? or What did the failure of the League of Nations mean for the future of Europe? Both of those questions immediately build interest, curiosity, and engagement.

In languages, this is obviously significantly trickier. The question: How do we form AR verbs? does not bring with it the same level of curiosity or interest (apart from for a select few of us who love our grammar). Could we possibly rephrase that question to: How can I master 88% of Spanish verbs?

There are, however, some areas of language teaching that naturally lend themselves to this “lesson as a question” approach. The teaching of ordering food in restaurants would lend itself well, for example: How can I order food and drink in Spain? Similarly: How can I describe people? or how can I say what is wrong with my hotel room? By phrasing the lesson as a question, students can walk out knowing they have learnt the start of the answer. How can I master 88% of Spanish verbs? I need to know the six endings; I need to remember to remove the AR and replace with the correct ending. For those wondering, the 88% is from a 2019 analysis of the Royal Spanish Academy Dictionary.

Religious Studies

In 2019, I taught Religious Studies due to timetabling issues. My main learning from this year of teaching would be the idea of spending entire half terms on one thing. For example, one half term was Christianity, one half term was Buddhism, and one half-term was Sikhism. These were Year 7 modules that were about six lessons each.

One popular Spanish textbook I used to use had the following five pages: ages, members of the family, pets, descriptions of hair and eyes, and descriptions of personality. The topics were well presented, the grammar chosen was sensible when linked with the topics, and the activities were, to an extent, useful. However, was this too much for two lessons a week in Year 7? The answer is probably yes.

At the end of each term in Religious Studies, we would assess what had been covered in the previous five lessons—and only that. I wonder if sometimes in languages we don’t teach sufficiently narrowly, and then we don’t assess that narrowly either. Gianfranco Conti recently wrote in a blog about the desire to correct everything that persists in many schools and trusts across the country. Perhaps we need to ensure that they can do fewer things well?

Drama

One year shortly before half term, I had a visit from a member of SLT suggesting that they needed someone to teach Drama for four weeks until the new Head of Drama arrived. To make matters worse, they said it was Key Stage 3 Drama.

I had the fortune to take on a good class comprised of pupils I had taught before. My biggest learning from the Drama department—and indeed from watching the new Head of Drama at work—was that projection was emphasised. Phrases such as “say it again but say it better”, “tell me, don’t ask me”, “say it like you’re really confident”, “say it like you believe it” were all used to develop their students’ ability to project, to sound confident, and to deliver lines with character, or as one of my English colleagues would say “with gusto!”

In MFL, sometimes I wonder if we neglect this in paired speaking activities. Recently, with my classes, when we’ve done short conversations, or short question-and-answer work in pairs, I’ve asked them to stop and then repeat it sounding like they are more confident. This might mean I ask them to sit up straighter, or I ask them to stand up.

If you think about it, most conversations in real life do not happen at a table where the person next to you is directly to your left or right. In a café, they are often opposite or slightly to the side. In passing, they are often stood up. It may be confirmation bias, but I tend to find that the second time students perform the activity, they sound better.

My version of the activity quiz quiz trade helps with this. Here’s how I run it. If you have read this blog for a while, then you will know my fondness for mini-whiteboards. They will help us here:

Students have a question on a mini-whiteboard and the start of the answer on the back. Whatever language you teach, you can apply the examples below:

Side facing student = question	Side facing away from student = help with answer
What do you do in your free time?	In my free time …
Do you play football	Yes/No ….. sometimes / never
Do you swim	Yes / no …… regularly / rarely

Students must 1) ask a question, 2) answer a question 3) swap their whiteboard. They can sit down after 5 ask/answer/swap cycles.

In our school, we have a policy that is known as SHAPE. Lots of schools have this, although I wonder sometimes if we focus on the S at the expense of the P. Languages, like Drama, are an opportunity for us to develop our pupils’ oracy—that is to say, their ability to speak confidently and fluently.

Computer Science

More recently, I have taught Computer Science. It may surprise you that both subjects can learn a lot from each other. As a languages teacher teaching Computer Science, I have found that my appreciation of mini whiteboard checks for understanding can continue. However, this post is about what we can learn from other subjects.

One of the things I’ve noticed in Computer Science is that flowcharts are extremely useful as a means for understanding. By this, I do not mean a bullet point list or a “1-2-3 steps for conjugating.” I mean a clearly laid-out visual flowchart. For example, this could be used for explaining when to use the subjunctive in Spanish:

Am I expressing a wish or desire?
→ If yes, use the subjunctive.
Am I expressing an impersonal reaction?
→ If yes, and if the sentence includes “it is + adjective,” then yes, I should use the subjunctive.

This could be a helpful way for students to visualise and decide whether the subjunctive is required using my favourite language teaching acronym: WEIRDO (Wishes, Emotions, Impersonal statements, Reactions, Doubts, and Ojalá).

I have also used these to help students build their opinions when talking about school. Word’s SmartArt can be quite helpful in this regard. An example in English is below:

Similarly, a flowchart might be useful in forming the passé composé in French. Students would then be able to decide easily between avoir and être and then progress onto Mrs Vandertramp (does anyone remember—or still use—the YouTube “Umbrella” version?) or however you choose to characterise the remaining verbs.

The second thing I’ve learnt from teaching Computer Science—and this is more aimed at GCSEs—is what we call the Moneyball approach. Moneyball is a film about baseball where a lower-league baseball club finds value in players that people didn’t rate very highly and their data-driven approach makes the club very successful. In the film, one of the main characters tells his club director that he needs to “buy runs,” not “buy players.”

To turn this into a modern-day football analogy: you are essentially buying goals, not buying a striker. Harry Kane scores you 30 goals a season. Other strikers, although highly thought of, may not reach those numbers but you could buy two players who will score 15 goals a season each such as Matheus Cunha and Bryan Mbeumo.

We can apply this Moneyball approach to exams. If the average needed at foundation level for most languages and exam boards (according to ChatGPT) is 60% for a grade 4, and the average for a grade 4 at higher tier is somewhere between 37% and 43%, then we need to consider: How are we going to put our students in the best place to get those marks? What are the things that we can control, that we can drill, and that we can best prepare them for, in order that they may achieve that?

I will leave you to think about those last couple of questions.

Conclusion

I hope this post has shown that, while not every strategy from other subjects will seamlessly translate to MFL, there is a wealth of insight to be gained from stepping outside our own discipline. Whether it’s the deliberate staging of questioning in History, the focus on oracy and projection in Drama, or logical and data-driven thinking in Computer Science, each subject offers something valuable.

By borrowing and adapting these approaches thoughtfully, we can enrich our language teaching and better support our students in becoming confident, capable communicators.

*James Milner was a consideration for comparison at this point but then I remembered his previous club history

Time-Saving Tips for Teachers: Work Smarter, Not Harder

Jun 3, 2025Jun 3, 2025 / dlh202 / Leave a comment

The aim in this post is simple: to save you some time somewhere.

Teacher workload is high and has been for a long period. The DofE set up task forces dedicated to looking at workload around planning, marking and data. The aim was to save teachers 5 hours a week. According to the Teacher Workload Survey in 2019, the average full time teacher was working a 52 hour week. Staff in “outstanding” or “requires improvement”/”inadequate” schools worked an average of 1 hour more than staff in “good” schools.

Over 15 years, I have seen various things contribute massively to my workload. I can recall some 60 hour weeks around 2013-2016 to keep up with the volume that was being demanded of me. I can also name examples of where my workload has been significantly reduced. One subject leader massively simplified our marking policy enabling a set of assessments to be marked within 30mintues. It was then replaced a year later with “deep marking” by a different subject leader.

Sometimes as teachers, we can be our own worst enemies in wanting to do our best for the kids. It’s not wrong but when it leads to a place where you can’t envisage an alternative then something needs to be done. Hopefully, the following paragraphs (long post incoming) will give you some food for thought.

There is a “too long don’t read” version at the end for the time-pressed and stressed teacher.

Step 1: Look at your marking and feedback policy

“Ofsted recognises that marking and feedback to pupils, both written and oral, are important aspects of assessment. However, Ofsted does not expect to see any specific frequency, type or volume of marking and feedback; these are for the school to decide through its assessment policy. Marking and feedback should be consistent with that policy, which may cater for different subjects and different age groups of pupils in different ways, in order to be effective and efficient in promoting learning.” (2018)

By far the biggest driver of my marking load in my career has been schools interpreting “what ofsted are expecting to see.” I think that online pressure from teachers, leaders and unions finally culminated in the clarification guidance that quote was taken from. Over the past 15 years, I have been through the following:

Every book every 3 weeks (13 classes of average 28-30 kids = 390 books or 130 books a week).
2 stars and a wish.
Written comments instead of test scores.
Two targets for pieces of work, pupils then respond by redrafting the work which then is re-marked (sometimes referred to as “deep marking”).
Redrafting the redraft until it was perfect.
DIRT lessons after marking has taken place (directed improvement and reflection time) where students respond to feedback given by reproducing work. Students redraft work with purple pen.
Every class produces a piece of writing every half-term (see maths above) which is deep marked.
Every skill assessed every half-term.
Assessments via Formative with mixture of self-marking and teacher marking.

Don’t get me wrong, pupils need feedback and it needs to be timely and actionable. According to Dylan William it needs to be “more work for the recipient than the donor.” I think sometimes in teaching it is almost inevitable it will be the other way around particularly after marking 30 GCSE 150 word practice questions. The “why” of assessing and giving feedback is clear. We do it because we want our pupils to progress and improve their skills. The big question to answer is: “what are we marking and how often?”

Simple solutions:

Sometimes we can get tunnel-visioned and assume that what we are doing is “normal” and “every school does this.” The table below suggests some ways that you can cut down on the marking without compromising on quality.

Every skill every half-term –>	1 or 2 skills every half-term – maybe complete listening and reading in the same lesson.
All year groups complete assessments at end of half-term	Year groups have staggered assessment windows. Year 7 – Autumn 1 – writing Year 7 – Autumn 2 – reading/listening Year 8 Autumn 1 – reading listening Year 8 Autumn 2 – writing Year 9 Autumn 1 – speaking Year 9 Autumn 2 – reading/listening
Assessments in all half-terms	Take a break from assessments between Easter and May half-term. You have Y11 Speaking Exams, don’t over-cook your teachers.
Writing once a half-term –>	Writing once a term
End of year assessments –>	Split between end of year and Easter
Every skill every half-term –>	2 skills per half-term – assess speaking while students complete a reading assessment.
Every book every … weeks –>	Live marking as you circulate around class. Divide your class into 3 sections and aim to get them done over a two week period.
Individual written comments for students	Series of 6-10 targets for students to work on
Series of 6-10 targets for students to work on	Whole class feedback and practice exercises of a particular grammar point
Speaking assessments in KS3 requiring discussion of a photo and a roleplay type scenario	Live marking as you circulate while students practice questions they have learnt over the term. Quick note in books of any pronunciation errors and how to fix e.g. “nacionalidad” = “na thee on alee dad” Beware the backwash/washback effect
Taking home listening and readings to mark	Do it in class. If pupils are unsure if an answer counts then they highlight it and give you the ones they are unsure about.
Verbal feedback stamps	Ditch them if still using. Permission from OSTED here on P17

With the assessments, it is also worth looking at where that data is going and what is being done with it.

Step 2: Look at your curriculum and resourcing

What we are teaching is important. I think “intent”, “implementation” and “impact” were very well-intentioned and the right things to focus on. Sadly, i think they morphed into some grandiose intent documents and a high need for consistency between classrooms where teachers need to be all teaching the same lesson. I’m not sure that – apart from Year 11 results analysis – impact is getting as much of a look in.

I have taught in schools with shared schemes of work and a shared resources folder that quickly became a unwieldy behemoth containing everything from resources found on TES to worksheets from a scanned OHP acetate (newer teachers you can google that last one). I have taught in a school with a trust produced shared curriculum. I have yet to teach in a school with booklets and visualisers but see it working for our English department.

Some simple solutions to save time:

Shared resources and curriculum can save time.
- To all the teachers out there saying “I can’t teach from other peoples’ resources”, I would have agreed with you, once. Now, I have no choice. I make adaptations for my groups and it’s still quicker than planning from scratch.
- To any teachers out there saying “I sell my resources so I can’t share” then maybe you don’t need to give everything away but there could be an ECT in your department who just needs a bit of help? Or maybe results in your department might benefit from you sharing? It is also worth taking into account that if the resources are produced on a school owned device or as part of your teaching duties (even if on a home device) then the school owns the copyright.
- If you are developing a shared curriculum then resources will likely be only as good as the person producing them. Put your best people on this and try and free them up elsewhere.
- If you are developing a shared curriculum then pick one year group to start with, set out the guidelines and a template and make it really good from the start. Within 5 years, you will have a fully resourced curriculum.
- If your trust produced curriculum resources end up increasing lesson planning time then the balance is wrong and you probably need to raise this with superiors.
Don’t go creating reading texts and questions from scratch.
- A textbook may have already done the work for you.
- I’ve got a post coming on AI but this is one of the areas where it can really help. Where most teachers go wrong with AI is that they do not give it clear enough prompts:
  - I would like a reading text in Spanish
  - Aimed at a UK teenager studying Spanish
  - On the theme of …
  - It needs to include these 8 verbs
  - Write using the ___ tense.
  - Try to avoid any stereotypes
  - Can you add 5 True/False questions
  - Can you add 10 comprehension questions in English?
- It is also worth bearing in mind an AI model like ChatGPT can consume approximately 500 millilitres of water for every 5 to 50 user prompts so if you’re environmentally conscious then be really clear with your prompts).
- Weigh up the time investment. Can I (or an AI) produce it quicker than searching the web?
Have a bank of cover work
- If you’re ill, you’re ill. Focus on getting better and don’t spend ages on cover work. Here’s two simple ways:
  - A previous school had a set of textbooks of cultural information about Spain and France. The non-specialists covering often thanked us for this as they didn’t need answers.
  - The Language Gym textbooks (whilst excellent for teaching) would also be useful for this but make sure the cover teacher also has access to the answer book!
Have self-marking online homework
- Whoever works out how to successfully integrate MFL homework websites with programs like SIMs or Bromcom will be the ultimate time-saver and very rich.
- Self-marking online homework is a game-changer. Keep it really simple. Have a set completion amount or requisite tasks and reward or sanction accordingly. I have tried saying “spent a minimum of … mins” but that only works if the site tracks activity as engagement rather than the page simply being open. Quick wins here include https://www.samlearning.com/ , https://www.language-gym.com/ and https://www.thisisschool.com/products/languages . There are others but these are ones I have used.
If you are learning vocabulary, keep it simple
- Can you use an online platform to track engagement?
- Make sure that if using an online platform that students have a week to complete and an option exists for students to do it in school. This then prevents the argument of “the wifi was down” and “I couldn’t do it last night.”
- We went through the whole process of printing lists for every student but it’s time-consuming so have them somewhere they can pick them up and reinforce the message that it is their responsibility to do so. Our maths department has a cupboard for past papers and students are used to fetching them. A similar principle could be applied here.
- If you are testing it in class then train your class to do it quickly at the start of a lesson.

Step 3: Look at the extras

Our core business is our timetabled teaching and learning. I couldn’t think of a good word to summarize this next section apart from “extras”. I know most MFL departments will look at the list below and think that’s our bread and butter. I’m also aware there are some very small departments out there of 2 teachers who would love to do this stuff but for various reasons cannot. The aim of the post is to save time so let’s look at ways we can save time with these:

Trips – Do you have a teacher you can train up to help you run the trip? Can you give them various responsibilities? There are plenty of trip planning checklists from the major companies. Can you divide some of the list between you? Would a company save time over planning a trip from scratch? Some schools use homestays, would that beat a hotel?

Y11 Interventions – John Tomsett is an experienced leader and wrote this blog about Year 11 interventions. Now, I don’t deny they can yield rewards but how much time is being invested and how much return are you getting on that investment.

After-school clubs – How much value are your after-school clubs adding? Do they need to run all year or just for a couple of terms?

European Day / Week of Languages – Lots of ideas here to save you some time.

Displays – can you get some displays that work for a longer time period?

Step 4: Look at your routine

During the 2013-2015 every book every three weeks phase, I was getting in at work at 7 and leaving at 5 as well as working in the evenings to get the marking and planning done. I know I pulled a number of 58-60 hour weeks. It wasn’t healthy and it wasn’t sustainable so I made a change. I came into work for the time I was meant to start at which was 8:30. I felt better but had to work harder in the time that I had. I was still able to get the work done and no less effective than before.

Simple Solutions:

Do you need to be in the building as long as you are?

The extra hour I was spending before school in 2012-2015 didn’t make me any more productive. I didn’t need to be in for that extra hour.

Could you afford a drop in hours?

A friend of mine has dropped to 0.9 on a two week timetable. One day off a fortnight has been a game-changer for him. It gives him time with family and children that he wouldn’t have otherwise had and fortunately for him the only day the school could make it happen was a friday!

Do you need to protect / ringfence your time?

Since starting teaching, I have always reserved one day at a weekend where I will not touch any work. As a Christian, this was important to me and this has almost always been a Sunday. Occasionally circumstances will force an exception to this but my rule remains at least one day of the weekend is work free.

Do you need to program in some “me time”?

I also made time to play football and badminton once a week in an evening preventing me from doing work stuff on those evenings. There will always be more to do. There will always be more ways to improve that particular lesson. Don’t let perfection become an enemy of good and a drain on your mental and physical wellbeing.

Do you need some accountability?

In schools we hear the word accountability and it normally conjures up negative connotations. Here I’m using the dictionary definition of “subject to the obligation to report, explain, or justify something; responsible; answerable.” In the same way, people tend to keep their gym attendance higher when they have a friend going, do you need a colleague or a friend to challenge you when you’re staying too long? Equally, do you need to be that person right now for someone in your department? On my first day of teaching, I started eating my lunch in my classroom and started looking over my plans for the afternoon. My Head of Department came and took me to the staffroom saying “make it a habit to take your breaks.” Since then I’ve rarely ever worked through a lunch break. Even now with a family and other responsibilities, that habit has carried on. It can be done.

Look at the wider load

As a teacher, you have responsibilities as a form tutor and may have taken on other things as your career has progressed. These were probably right especially if you are looking at gaining the kind of experiences required for promotions. It is worth reviewing things like this every now and again. It occurs to me that I have seen two very experienced teachers retire in my career and each of their jobs were replaced by 2-3 separate TLRs. Just because you are the person doing it, it doesn’t have to always be you. Prior to Peter Capaldi’s Doctor’s regeneration he says this:

“Oh there it is silly old universe, the more i save it; the more it needs saving. The treadmill. Yes I know, they’ll get it all wrong without me!”

I think most teachers can identify with this. The more you do; the more it seems need doing. If you need to leave something because you are stressed, overworked or struggling then it is not weakness. It is a sign that something needs to change. One year, I started work as a Head of Year, which was a job i had been aiming at for a long time. The previous year I oversaw the work with trainee teachers and liaising with the university. I knew by Christmas that one had to go and I couldn’t do both. I approached a senior leader who agreed that two jobs done well was best for the school and we decided upon my replacement together. That replacement was then able to use the experience as part of their interview for a Head of Department role a year or two later. Laying stuff aside for a time might be what you need.

Step 5: Look at your school – can they change things?

“We’ve always done it that way” is a phrase you often hear in schools. There are ways to reduce workload and give some flexibility back to staff. Sometimes you need to see the alternative or the next steps to be able to describe it to someone. Here are some things schools are doing that you may benefit from:

Period 5 PPA from home – If you have a P5 PPA you leave early. It is assumed you will do the work anyway and that any doctor / dentist / MOT / service appointments could be booked in that time.
P1 PPA from home – If you have a P1 PPA and no tutor times or similar then basically it’s the reverse of the above but at the start of the day.
Personal day. Give up 5 lessons worth of cover for a once a year personal day (booked in advance). This is done in another school locally and is on an opt in basis.
Reports – Can you shorten the reports writing process?
Parents evenings – Can you do hybrid parents evenings? Can there be a mix of online appointments and in person ones? Do they need to be the same day?

Step 6: The final question: Impact vs Effort

One thing I wish I had learnt about earlier was looking at the impact I was having rather than the effort I was expending and this probably was worth a section in itself but instead probably leaves you on the biggest question: are my efforts having the impact that I want them to have? If not, what needs to change?

TLDR Version

Focus on making marking / feedback policy manageable and not time consuming.
Cut down on assessments, plan them so they don’t all come at once.
How can you save time on planning and resourcing of lessons. AI and textbooks can play a role here.
Keep systems for homework, vocabulary learning and follow up really simple.
What are you doing outside of school? Can you protect time for yourself? Can you help others?

Key Ingredients for Outstanding MFL Lessons

May 19, 2025 / dlh202 / Leave a comment

This is a re-write of my most viewed post. Despite being written in 2016 and lessons no longer being graded, it has consistently topped my most-read posts every year. It was probably time for an update.

‘Hypothetical’ conversation overheard in staffroom:

Experienced teacher 1: “I delivered a number of outstanding lessons today”

Experienced teacher 2 “Ha! Your definition of an outstanding lesson is you putting your feet up while the kids are standing outside!”

Experienced teacher 1: “you saw them then!”

What makes an “outstanding lesson” is highly subjective and is based largely on the observations of the person watching. It is a positive thing that we have moved away from one word judgement of lessons or lesson snippets and there seems to be a similar move away from one word judgements of schools.

This is not a post on “how to play the OFSTED game” as the only OFSTED game to be played is simply high quality teaching and learning. It is a post about the key ingredients for an outstanding lesson and how we might apply those in MFL teaching everyday.

The big three: intent, implementation and impact.

OFSTED’s re-focusing on curriculum with the three I words is now well known. Intent, implementation and impact. The big question is the question every teacher should be asking of their classes “have they learnt it? And how I know they have learnt it?” Is my implementation achieving the intent? They (ofsted) will discuss this with a Head of Department or Lead Practitioner and then visit classes to see it in action. The idea is that what the Head of Department is saying should be visible in classrooms and students should be benefitting from it. Their evidence for forming their opinion will come from that discussion, watching lessons, talks with students, talks with staff and looking at any work in books.

My experience of being visited by OFSTED and our department going through a deep dive last September was that it followed the following pattern:

Part 1: A discussion about the intent, implementation and impact of the curriculum. My Head of Department did this bit so I cannot tell you exactly what was asked but if you want some typical practice questions then you can click here and this one from ilanguages gives some ideas of example answers too.

Part 2: Visits to lessons, talking to students in those lessons and looking at books. The inspector thought my teaching was “enthusiastic” and the lesson “well-delivered.” They expressed some disappointment that there was not any paragraph level writing in the Year 7 books. It was the first week back in September and their second lesson of Spanish. I’m not convinced their expectations there were reasonable but it also explains the levels of energy on display! They are essentially trying to answer a question around implementation. Is what the inspector has been told evident in classrooms?

Part 3: A discussion later with staff that began with some curriculum matters and then opened up to wider issues such as workload, how teachers are supported in school, safeguarding and recent training. To be honest, I thought this discussion would be much tougher but it was conducted in a fair and supportive manner.

Dealing with the drop in

Inevitably at some point a lesson is going to be watched. Personally, I feel a mixture of being short-changed and relived if not seen by an inspection team. Out of the four OFSTED visits, I have experienced, I have been visited on three. All of the below “ingredients” came from the previous post with some updates for 2025. They are not a recipe but definitely things to think about ahead of any lesson drop in.

Key Ingredient:	What it means for MFL teachers:
Consistency	This is a tricky one. In some schools and trusts, it appears to mean every teacher delivering the same slide decks (hopefully tailored to their groups). In others, it means a set of principles of delivery but teachers might be working on different lessons due to one group being ahead behind because a teacher deemed the group to be in need of re-teaching etc. There probably has to be some level of consistency across your team in delivery but again this needs to tie in with what you say in that deep-dive session.
Starting Points	Some knowledge of the students’ starting points is helpful. If most of your students arrive at Year 7 having had strong language teaching, how are you building on it? Are you able to build on it? Are your Year 8 and Year 9s building on prior knowledge? Would an inspector see more challenging vocabulary, grammar and writing in books if they compared between year groups?
Challenge	Is your work demanding enough? I don’t mean simply sticking an extension task on a starter or a reading activity. Are you sufficiently challenging that student who finishes the task seconds after you have explained it? Should they have finished that quickly? Are all students challenged and engaged? How could you reward risk-taking with the language?
Pupils views	ARGH?! What would they say about your lessons? If memory serves, my students were asked: – What they are learning? – Do they remember what they learnt last lesson? – How does it fit in with what they have been learning? – Do they enjoy learning languages?
Enthusiasm	You got into this job for one of two reasons (or possibly both). You love your subject or you love working with young people. Ignore the fact that someone is watching and teach like you do everyday.
Scrutiny of work	From this I understand the following: 1) Books will be looked at. 2) Can you demonstrate that students are improving? 3) Is there evidence of challenge or support and scaffolding? 4) OFSTED do not expect to see particular types of marking/feedback however they do expect to see departmental policies enacted so whatever you say you do, needs to be what you actually do.
Subject Knowledge	This will naturally come through as you teach. Remember you are the expert. Keep your explanations clear, don’t be nervous about the observer, just focus on doing what you normally do. If you are teaching your weaker language then there is some advice here: Keeping your languages up!
Effective Planning	No time wasted and all resources readily available and accessible. They will not want to see a lesson plan but it’s very easy to spot a well-planned lesson. This is probably the best thing I have read on planning an MFL lesson and still one of the best posts on the topic 8 years later.
Behaviour Management	Clear rules and consistently enforced. Again, keep to your school or department policies. I would argue that there is nothing wrong with removing a student whose behaviour is detrimental to the progress of the rest of the class, even in an observation. If there is a policy to be followed, follow it.
Adequate structured practice time	Pupils must be allowed enough time to practice and embed what they are learning. There must then be a definite increase in demand and evident progression in difficulty of the material covered in the lesson. Practice in MFL will obviously take place through different skills but it is worth considering: how do they link to your overall objectives in that lesson? Is the planned practice going to lead to some production?
Checks for understanding	Understanding must be checked and any misconceptions identified. You can probably tell who will struggle so maybe set the class a short activity that they can use to demonstrate their learning, while you go and help those who need it.
Challenging h/wk	Homework should consolidate, extend or prepare the students for future work or a mixture of the three. More on homework here
Literacy and Numeracy	Whilst numeracy is harder to shoehorn into MFL, literacy is very much the bedrock of what we do. Start using grammatical terms and do not shy away from them. You’re a language teacher and probably a fan of the odd reflexive verb, subordinating conjunction or relative clause. Own it.
Pupils know why they are learning what they are learning and how to improve	Pupils will likely be asked about what they are learning. They may be asked about work in their books, what lessons are like and how they feel about their progress in the subject. Do they know what they need to do to improve?
Challenging stereotypes	As MFL teachers we are in an ideal place to do this.

OFSTED’s descriptions miss out one major feature of teaching that I believe is key to delivering outstanding lessons and that is relationships. Admittedly you can produce an outstanding lesson that meets all of the above boxes but relationships go a long way to making all of the above much easier! Your relationships with your students will answer that. John Tomsett says: ‘Fundamentally students need to feel loved and I really don’t care what anyone might think of that, to be honest, because if I know anything about teaching, I know that is true.’

What could I do now? 5 things to try this term.

If you’re English then make a cup of tea before contemplating the following:

Build those relationships. Grab your seating plans or mark-book and find 3 students per class who you are going to develop your relationship with. How are you going to do that? Will you be teaching those kids next year? Who knows? Do it anyway.
Key Ingredients. Pick one of the key ingredients that you need to work on. In your planning for next week incorporate it into every lesson. Yep, that’s every single one. It’s all very well reading a blog post but you have to act on it. My old headteacher liked the phrase purposeful practice.
Revisit. Revisit your intent, implementation and impact. Are you doing what you say you are doing?
Gained time. Can you devote some of it to CPD? Who in your department is good at challenge, differentiation, target language use? Who could you learn from?
Power of praise. I used to do termly phone-calls or emails home to a parent to give some positive feedback on a student. I’ve slipped on this and may well do a few in the coming half-term. Shaun Allison writes about them here.
Consider September. Yep, right now! September is where we set the tone, set the patterns and culture in our departments, what would you like an observer to see if they entered your classroom? What needs to be part of your practice?
Iron sharpening iron. “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another” (biblical proverb). I love this proverb as it applies to most areas of life. Another person can always be guaranteed to sharpen you and smooth out the rough edges. Most NQTs have a mentor and most PGCE trainees do too. Once we exit that process, we are on our own. Who could you work with to improve your own teaching? Can you get them to pop in and watch? No notes, no agenda, no judgments and no threat, but just someone there simply to develop your practice.

Further Reading

Great Lessons – a series of blogs by Tom Sherrington (Headteacher) on what makes for great lessons and still good years on.

An Outstanding Teacher – short blog post by Shaun Allison – still good

5 Things to Try Tomorrow

Dec 1, 2024 / dlh202 / Leave a comment

The whole idea behind these posts is five simple things you can do in your classroom with minimal preparation tomorrow.

Adam Boxer’s Tick Trick (adapted to MFL)

This arose from a post on X by Adam Boxer (you can find his website here). I started using this with my classes for translation tasks. It’s devastatingly simple to add into a lesson: “If you have that bit on your answer, give it a tick on your board.“ You can even convert it into TL with more simplistic language “If you have A, correct. If you have B, correct.” I used it to break sentence translations down into chunks of languages so that students were being rewarded for the bits that they were getting right. The current AQA GCSE does a similar thing where 2/3 chunks correct might equal a mark.

Photo by Photo By: Kaboompics.com on Pexels.com

The power of underlining.

Recently, our department has begun experimenting with sentence builders. I currently share some groups and wanted to check how much of the sentence builder my class actually knew and could reproduce because when you see them every other lesson, it is inevitably harder to track their progress. Being a fully-signed up fan of mini-whiteboards, I chose 5 sentences from the sentence builder for my class to reproduce in Spanish. In this case, the sentence builders described a house. Each sentence was different, used adjectives with the highest surrender value (that is to say applicable across multiple contexts) and students could attempt an extra sentence from the previous sentence builder if they finished quickly. I asked students to turn their sentence builders over and try to produce the sentences from memory. If they peeked, looked up a word or phrase then I asked them to underline that phrase on the sentence builder. It gave me quick intel as to how much each student could remember.

Seed-planting for GCSE

One of my Year 9 class this week asked a question about GCSE. It was one of those “let’s slow the lesson down by getting the teacher to talk about something” moments. I quickly weighed up the pros and cons and thought let’s take the opportunity to sell GCSE MFL to this mixed ability group. We have not begun our options process yet but they had some thoughts that needed unpacking.

Do I have to take it?

What is foundation / higher?

My sister says it’s ****** hard?

Do i really have to talk for 12 minutes?

What if i don’t want to teach / translate? Is it worth it?

It’s always worth reminding students that they have been preparing for their language GCSE since Y7. The words that they learn then are equally likely to make an appearance and the topics in Key Stage 3 often map to the GCSE ones. When the foundation reading text says “does Ximena enjoy her history lessons?”, they learnt that in Year 7. I sometimes think we are not so different from maths in that our GCSE is the culmination of everything learnt so far.

Photo by Yan Krukau on Pexels.com Grumpy Smurf picture was copyrighted

Grumpy Time

Not my idea at all and full credit goes to Gianfranco Conti for this one. Having seen that my class had used the sentence builder mentioned above to write about where they live (more ideas for this topic here), I asked them to produce me an answer that was entirely grumpy. Having not done this for a few years, none of my students had written a grumpy answer before so we had a brief moment about adding in adverbs of degree (sometimes MFL teachers and resources refer to these as quantifiers). We noted down a few to add in to sound significantly more grumpy. Students then produced some extremely grumpy sentences and seemed to enjoy it rather than the generic “write about where you live.”

Spot the difference with AI

You might notice we have been teaching a fair bit of “in my house” stuff recently from the post above. This idea continues that theme I asked ChatGPT to produce me an image containing two houses and specified what rooms i wanted in each (after a disastrous first go where we had staircases to nowhere). In the end, I ended up using both images! One for a simple writing activity where students wrote “In house A there is but in house B there is not…” The disaster house came in useful as an extension where with a few adjectives given students could write “there is a useless staircase”, “there is a garage upstairs which is stupid.”

A cautionary note on this one. ChatGPT only allows you a certain amount of images per day also since then I have also learnt that AI image generation has a significant water footprint.

Lastly, if you are starting to look for Christmas MFL ideas then…

Here’s 9 ideas

Here’s 9 more ideas

Also a relatively new blog from Beth M is well worth a look. I remember Steve Smith being kind enough to mention mine in the early days which raised my viewing numbers. I hope this will do the same.

The New New GCSE

Aug 19, 2024Aug 29, 2024 / dlh202 / 5 Comments

15 years of MFL teaching and I’m now on my third GCSE. I watched the sun rise and set on controlled assessment. I welcomed the spontaneous conversation in the “new gcse” only to seemingly now bid it “adieu”. The current GCSE, in my mind, actually only required minor tweaks. If I had my way the bullet points would be in English, the roleplays would have been purely confined to typical holiday occurrences and speaking would have been worth 30%.

I’m not a Head of Department but have worked previously as a Second in MFL. Currently, I’m just an everyday language teacher but here are my thoughts on the “new new GCSE.”

Thought 1: The New GCSE needs to be seen as evolution not revolution.

The new GCSE contains plenty of stuff we have already done and are already doing. Photocards, roleplays, 90 word writing tasks, 150 word writing tasks, translations, listening and reading tasks are all things we have been doing for the past few years and all still in there.

One line that caught my eye was “It should be noted that learners are expected to know all
items on the vocabulary list, not just the ‘required’ ones.”

It may be worth at some point just looking through the list by topic and making sure any words without clear obvious meaning (e.g: tamaño) are taught or brought up somewhere in teaching. I imagine that the list before long will appear on Quizlet or similar apps. Given that the list is accessible to students there is nothing to stop them using it as part of their revision. For example, a student could do a mind map using the celebrity culture topic with Taylor Swift at the middle and a fair amount of vocabulary from that list could easily build up around it. Again, I would encourage students to focus on the non-cognates. Most students will work out “conflicto” (especially if they study history) or famoso, however words like “impuesto” might need teaching and/or revising.

Thought 2: Beware the washback effect

I’m not entirely sure who coined the phrase “washback effect”, it may have been on a Steve Smith blog. I think there can be a tendency within MFL to make sure things such as our assessments and resources align with the GCSE the pupils will ultimately take. It sounds like a reasonable premise and it is well-intentioned. Inevitably, resources on TES and books from various publishers will appear aligning with the new GCSE and contain the types of task that the new GCSE is demanding.

Over time, I have come to believe that there must be a happy middle ground that it can be found. A place where Key Stage 3 gives students the tools, language and confidence to succeed later on but doesn’t batter them with GCSE style assessments in Years 7, 8 and 9, which reduce their confidence. Describing a photo is not a life skill. It can wait until Year 10 and 11 and still be done well. Similarly, does a Year 7 need to be able to describe their house in a roleplay-esque fashion to their Venezuelan friend? If we define learning as “knowing and remembering more” (current ofsted vernacular) then we need to be assessing what they know in a reasonable way that allows the student to show what they know. Why complicate it in Years 7 and 8 by adding in the description of a photo or a roleplay? Do we just simply assess their pronunciation when they talk rather than adding in some sentences to read aloud?

With respect to writing, it is great if a Year 7 can manage 50 words but does it need to be in the format of a blog with three bullet points? The answer is: probably not. In the AQA new GCSE there are grammar questions worth 5 marks. Do these need to feature in your Key Stage 3 assessments? Again, they may be part of your grammar teaching but do not need to form part of their assessment.

Jess Lund once said in a conference “Year 7 is where the magic happens” and I’ve never forgotten her saying that. Let’s not make Year 7 – and I would argue Key Stage 3 – too much like Year 11. We can train them in exam technique when they get to Key Stage 4. The only caveat to the above is that sometimes Year 9s at a particular point benefit from feeling that they “can do” GCSE style activities, which then helps with those options conversations and Year 9 parents evening.

https://www.deviantart.com/redpandaa11/art/Meet-the-Phonic-Letter-Sounds-Placemat-891479101

Thought 3: Phonics/Sentence builders

Our trust will be using AQA so I am not sure quite how relevant this next point will be to Pearson/Edexcel users.

One of the new elements is the reading aloud task. Allow me to explain why i don’t think it should faze us as teachers nor faze our students.

The “reading aloud task” is worth 15 marks however it includes 4 questions on the topic the text is about. The actual reading aloud bit is only worth 5 marks. The main thing for this task is making sure that students are capable of pronouncing common words with the sounds that non-native speakers find trickier. Looking at the AQA sample materials in Spanish, you will encounter at least one of the following: “j” “ll” “ce” “ci” “ge” “gi” “gui” “ñ” and the word “que”. Pronouncing the latter as “cue” will cost marks. Train them out of it, now! There is also a definite lean towards words that are linked to the topics students are already studying. Those Js will almost inevitably come with any part of the jugar word family. Similarly, any mention of festivals is likely to include frequency adverbs “cada año” or “a veces”. However you teach your students phonics, be it via explicit phonics teaching or implicitly via sentence builders, there are a few key sounds such as the ones above that you need to prioritise and trust that your students will be ok with the rest. Phrases such as “mucho dinero”, “amigo cubano”, “en el campo” should provide little challenge. Again, be mindful of the backwash effect further down the school. Could you just “live mark” their speaking in class? If you’re unsure what i mean then this post here explains just how you could do that.

Thought 4: Don’t lose the good stuff

If you have good resources, keep using them. If you have good activities that help the pupils learn then please keep doing it. Sometimes a new course can lead to throwing the baby out with the bath water. Don’t do it. Resist the temptation. Your department will have good practices so continue to lean into those. If you get good results on the roleplays then keep doing what you are doing. If what you do gets great listening results then keep doing it! And, perhaps consider getting in touch and submitting a guest blog? A lot of schools seem to use a PALMW approach for photocards (position, actions, locations, mood, weather). If it works, keep it. It is worth drawing pupils attention to the commonalities we have seen in the photos over the past few years:

Where there is a nature scene, the weather is invariably good.
Where they are people, they are almost always family or colleagues and seem happy, interested, excited or smiling (learn those four words: happy, interested, excited, smiling).
Where there is a table, there is almost always food (learn phrase “a variety of food/drink” in case individual food items not known).
Where there is a school, it is almost always a canteen or classroom.
Phones, recycling, houses, shops, sports pitches and “a group of” are good words to know.

Thought 5: Tactics

Maybe this is the armchair football fan speaking but there are some tactics our students can use to approach aspects of this new exam:

Roleplay -In the words of the pundit and superb former player Roy Keane (yes Everydaymfl is a Manchester United fan) ” just do your job”. This task is 100% no fuss no frills, just remember a verb.

Reading aloud – Write it in bad English if you need to “hwaygo” in your prep time and then go for it. You can still score 3/5 with “major and minor errors”.

Post reading Questions– Aim for 3/4 qs answered and 2 longer answers. Use your prep time wisely on this.

Writing – pick the right question – Pick the question you can do best. Divide the word count by the bullet points, 90/3 = 30 words per bullet point. Whilst the exam board say equal coverage is not necessary, 3 x 30 word short sections will inevitably feel more manageable for students. 3 tenses is a must to achieve the top marks (AQA) along with complex language and having a game plan will be crucial. Whilst that game plan from Vincent Everett’s blog is for speaking, It works really well for the new writing too. The mix of verb + infinitive structures could also be key.

Writing – know your table – A Head of Department I used to work with introduced me to this for French and I’ve converted it into Spanish. This table works for regular verbs in the past and present and the majority of verbs in the future. The little minus signs next to past and present are to remind students that they are “taking away tenses” (think that was a Rachel Hawkes idea) where the verb ending is removed. The plus is to show that you add to the verb by putting something either before or after it but leaving the verb itself alone.

In my university days, I memorised the adjective endings and der/die/das/die tables for German and copied them out at the start of exams. I can imagine most students would be able to manage with the table below. 2mins of writing out ensures that the majority of verbs are used correctly.

	Past –		Present –		Future +
	AR	ER/IR	AR	ER/IR
I	É	Í	O	O	VOY A	+ VERB	going to
HE/SHE/ IT	Ó	IÓ	A	E	ME GUSTARIA	+VERB	would like
THEY	ARON	IERON	AN	EN	VERB +	É	will

Thought 6 – Don’t be limited to one language’s sample materials (if you are in a school that teaches 1-2 languages)

Your exam board will have produced resources for French, Spanish, German etc. If you are in a school that teaches one language then your sample assessment materials have actually just trebled.

Photocards in the other languages will give you an idea of potential photocards that could be given.

Open Google Translate on your phone (yep, i said it, eeek…despite this post). Use the camera mode and hold it over the questions and it will translate them for you. I will advise that this mode occasionally has its limitations (it translated “bacon” in Croatian as “violated ham” once) but it should give you a good idea.

The same can apply to the writing tasks and suddenly you have a load more practice materials for your Year 11s.

Everyday Mini-whiteboards

Aug 13, 2024Nov 4, 2024 / dlh202 / Leave a comment

Quite why Mini-whiteboards tend to divide opinion is a bit of a mystery to me. A colleague once observed my lesson with a well-regarded speaker who often leads CPD around the country. My colleague informed me later that this speaker had said that the best way to improve my lesson would be to “bin” the mini-whiteboards. Had I not used them at that point then I wouldn’t have an accurate idea of what they learnt that lesson and indeed if they had mastered the verb conjugations I was trying to teach. Conversely, another senior leader (and now successful Headteacher) would not teach science without having them to hand.

Adam Boxer writes an excellent blog about Ratio (a concept from Lemov’s Teach like a Champion). I believe mini-whiteboards to be one of the best ways of increasing ratio in the classroom. I have a few principles when it comes to using them.

Principles:

– Everyone writes

– Everyone tries

– Everyone hides their answer until it is asked for

Logistics

I don’t have a classroom and teach in wide range of different rooms. I carry around a box with everything I need to teach. Here is how I manage:

Stock up on a box of 10 new pens at the start of – and halfway through – each half-term. No-one throws away a pen without my say so. “If I can read it from the front, it works.”

Hand out the whiteboards while students are doing the starter task. Do not hand out pens until you plan to use them.

Give out and/or get students to give out pens and rubbers. Rubbers are 1 between 2. It saves time and also means they are less likely to lose them as the other person needs it too! Some students prefer the blazer sleeve cleaning method.
Always insist on trying a pen that a student claims “is not working”. Often this is a misconception and what they are really trying to say is that it’s not a perfect jet black.

Always give a clear instruction of what you want to see on the board. Challenge any non-compliance such as doodling etc.

Always count down giving long enough for those students that need it. Sometimes it can help to have a particular student in mind as a guide and start the countdown when they are closer to finished.

No-one shows an answer until countdown is over and everyone shows their answer.

Whiteboard Activities

Obviously, you can use a whiteboard to translate both ways and practise verb conjugations. You can use them to draft sentences for work. I often like to have them on the desks so when students ask for words I can simply write them down. With the new new GCSE, you can use them to practise for the dictation activities. I would imagine these are regular occurrences for the pro mini-whiteboard MFL teacher.

Environmentally friendly time-saving battleships.

To save paper, printing and copying out time. Draw a 5×5 grid on the mini-whiteboard. Shade in the top row and first column. Have students add boats in a non-shaded area. Put your battleships game on PowerPoint slide. Explain that the top row and first column match the shaded ones. A quick model on the board where some students attempt to destroy the ships you have obviously put in there and they will be well away.

Noughts and Crosses translation practice.

Both students in a pair divide both their boards into a 3×3 grid. Have a corresponding grid on the screen with some translations. Students play noughts and crosses. They have to translate correctly to get the X or O. If there is any dispute then they look it up in vocab lists/knowledge organisers etc. The second board is for the inevitable rematch.

Starts and Ends

I tend to use this activity when teaching opinions with reasons. Students get the start or end of a sentence. They have to finish it however they can. It’s quite good for seeing what they can spontaneously produce, what has stuck and what they can do under pressure.

Me gusta ir al cine … (I like going to the cinema)
Me encantan las matemáticas (i love maths)

porque es mi asignatura favorita (because it’s my favourite subject)
aunque me da miedo (although it scares me)

Occasionally, with this activity, I tell students I will give them a score of 1,2,3 depending on how impressed I am with the sentence. This generally has the effect of them suddenly showing they know even more. If they get a score over 10 (keeping track on their boards) they may get a positive point.

Sharks + Icebergs

This is good for practising lots of small chunks. I’ll be honest, I came up with this activity at some point in the past 6-7 years. Soon after trying it with a class, I realised it owes a lot to Language Gym’s rather superb Rock Climbing. Where it differs is that you are not making one long sentence, merely practising short chunks and you don’t have the blood-curdling “aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargggghhh” when the man falls off the wall. You do however find some kids rather gleefully removing limbs from the stick man (should I be worried about them?)

Setup:

Students: The board needs to be portrait. Divide the board into a 7 x 3 grid. 7 rows, 3 columns. Students shade a map from one end to the other (see diagram). One shaded box per line. On the back of the board they draw a stick man.

Teacher: On your board/projector screen you will need a set of 21 short sentences using language the students have been learning.

Front of board (facing student):

	/////////////////////////////////////////
/////////////////////////////////////////
	/////////////////////////////////////////
		/////////////////////////////////////////
		/////////////////////////////////////////
		/////////////////////////////////////////
	/////////////////////////////////////////

Back of board (facing away from student):

Students try to guess their partner’s path across the icebergs (shaded bit) avoiding the sharks (unshaded). Each time they guess wrong, their partner removes a limb from stick man. The winner comes when either someone has made it across the icebergs, or their partner has neither body or head. You can still win if you make it to the other side like the Black Knight in Monty Python. As long as something is left, you are in the game.

_{Wikimedia Commons. It is surely a crime that Dara never got to properly participate in “Scenes we’d like to see”}

Future Tense Scenes We’d like to see.

Copied from the popular game show mock the week, this works best with the future tense. Pick carefully the class you use it with. Students tend to overcomplicate here, restrict them to the language they have been learning.

Things that Mr /Mrs … will never do..

Things that His Majesty will never do

Things I am not going to do at the weekend

Unexpected things that … is going to do this evening

Environmentally friendly strip bingo

Early in my MFL career I was introduced to strip bingo. I admit I tend not to use it too much however it is very simple to hold a whiteboard portrait, write down 5 phrases and rather than tearing off the strips, students simply cross off the phrase that is at the top or bottom of the list. Lots of paper and time saved. Mini-whiteboards can also work well for any form of bingo game to break up a lesson.

5 things to try tomorrow

Apr 23, 2024 / dlh202 / Leave a comment

You may have been wondering about the lack of posts over the past year and a half. Teaching another subject (I can add Python to my Spanish, German and KS3 French), some health issues and raising a toddler (who is awesome) has meant that the blog has had to take a backseat. Fortunately, there are plenty of good blogs out there. If you haven’t come across MFL Craft, Frenchteacher, the nice man who teaches languages or many of the MFL Facebook groups, Threads communities etc then definitely open up some of those in a new tab.

5 things to try tomorrow.

In the early days of my MFL there were forums on the TES website (anyone remember those??). One contained “minimal preparation, highly effective” activities. It probably had a role in inspiring some of this blog and the number of posts titled “5 things to do tomorrow.” I think edu-language over time has changed a bit so I will characterise these five as “low effort, high impact” and the first one counts as two 😉

Clipboard / mini-whiteboard

*best free whiteboard pic out there, obviously yours will be smaller*

Recently on Twitter/X, a simple clipboard shook the education world (or the small subset thereof that exists on Twitter/X). The writer of the post suggested walking around with a clipboard and making notes during class. This ground-breaking practice is something I had been doing for the past 2-3 years and maybe longer; I can’t quite remember when it started. I humbly suggest you do it with a mini-whiteboard/mini-board (the chipboard type as they are easier to write on). By doing so you have just probably saved a tree and also you nearly always have a whiteboard pen on you. So what could you possibly be noting down?

1) Mispronunciations
2) Misconceptions
3) Random name generation
4) Rewards
5) Sanctions

Ultimately, it is up to you. If you don’t currently do it then give it a go. Today, walking around I picked up that my year 7s couldn’t manage “hermoso” (they all pronounced the “h”) or “increíble” (they almost all added a non-existent “d”). Was my modelling poor? I don’t think so but it gave me useful intel to correct them. In addition to picking up things like this, I can note pupils to reward and/or sanction. To save time I sometimes use little codes; you will develop your own. What it might look like is crudely drawn below:

=====================

=====================

===========

| 1 4 6 7 2 3 8 5 |
| 2 4 6 8 1 3 5 7 |
| 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 |

===========

I occasionally use something like the above for random name generation. I teach 6-7 different rooms so it doesn’t take much to adapt the layout. On the board at the front of the room, I will write “front, middle 1, middle 2 , back” (in target language). I will then quickly write out the numbers 1-6 or 1-8 depending on how many students there are in a row on my board in a random order. After cold-calling one student, they will then select (in TL) “front number 3” or “back number 2” to pick the next person. As much as I love a wheel of names (Vincent Everett has a completely different use of wheel of names which is well worth a look – not sure if it is him doing the voiceover but his idea), it does save some time. Maybe you already do this and I’m aware a good percentage of Twitter keep it in their heads. I prefer to have something to refer to.

Live-marking – underline, question, double tick and bad English.

Live-marking seems to be one of those newer buzzwords. We have finally moved away from triple marking, deep marking etc or hopefully are in the process of moving away from some of the more heavy duty marking practices that have dominated the 2010s. While students are writing answers to questions, I will circulate and do one of the following:

• underline/highlight something that needs sorting that I think they can sort
• circle something and ask the student question out loud that forces them to think
• double tick any particularly nice Spanish that no-one else is using

It isn’t rocket science and you’re probably already doing it. If not, give it a whirl. It is quick, simple, effective feedback.

Live marking however does not just need to be for writing. I will circulate while students are speaking and if needed borrow their exercise book. I will write the word they are struggling to say with a “bad English” version next to it or immediately underneath. For example: “increíble” = “in cray ee blay” or “divertido” =” dee v-air tee doh.” It allows the pupil to be successful and serves as a very simple aide-memoire. I find very few students relapse with pronunciation after this little intervention.

Positive Post-Parents evening email

Occasionally on parents evening you do not see the students you want to see. Often those students are the trickier ones. However, sometimes you do not see a student who is performing well and deserves recognition. It might be that they were involved in something extra-curricular. It does not take long to write a quick email like the one below and from experience the vast majority of parents welcome it. It can be quickly done in a PPA the next day or day after.

Dear Parent
I’m sorry I didn’t get the opportunity to see you at parents evening. I just wanted to drop you a quick email to say how impressed/pleased/encouraged I have been by …’s effort/progress/attainment in Spanish this year. Their participation / effort / speaking / written work is of a really high standard / excellent / showing some promise. Please pass on how pleased I am with them and they are a credit to you.
Kind regards
Teacher

If you’re not a fast typist, then most modern versions of Word have a dictate mode that is decent. Like all dictation software it will inevitably struggle with some pronunciation so do check before sending.

If you’re considering this approach for the trickier students then I would suggest a phone-call is an infinitely better approach. If you’re relatively new in your career and need to do this then seek out a supportive Head of Department or Head of Year for advice on how they might approach this kind of phone-call.

3x TL Phrase to use

We almost all play a game in our language lessons at some point. Whether it is the classic battleships, sentence stealer a la Conti, Steve Smith’s Alibi or some from EverydayMFL.

I propose pre-teaching three target language phrases before the game. These could fall into different categories. The table below gives you a few ideas. You can convert them into TL.

Game phrases	Horror Phrases	Gloating phrases	Moving along phrases	Delaying
Your turn	I can’t believe you just did that	I win	Come on	Wait a sec
You first	You’ve got to be kidding me	I win again	Hurry up	Wait a moment
My go	What are you doing?	I’m the best/champion	It is my turn yet	So…. Errrm…

Some games might lend themselves to specific vocabulary. For example, in battleships your three might be “hit”, “miss”, “sunk”.

You might have a hard to motivate set so if you feel your class are less likely to engage with this then get their partner to tick every time they hear one used. If their partner doesn’t hear any of them, then they don’t win.

The Obligatory World Cup Post.

Nov 1, 2022Aug 13, 2022 / dlh202 / Leave a comment

If you’re looking forward to enjoying the World Cup (2 weeks to go) then you’re probably a football fan or have Brazil, Spain, England (yep, I said it) or France in the staff sweep-stake. If you’re not enjoying the World Cup then chances are you’re not a fan of football, or the staff sweep-stake left you with Morocco or Qatar.

The World Cup does lend itself to a variety of activities to revise material you have likely covered this year…

Recapping clothes and colours

This is one of my favourite ways to teach adjective endings. Football kits lend themselves to this task as the link explains. This could also be achieved with the flags of the countries.

Developing opinions and reasons

CCO Public Domain

Why not get each member of your class to write a prediction? You could even involve yourself in this, particularly if you’re still bitter about the sweep-stake.

I think that <insert country here> is going to win

I believe that <team that is not England> is going to win

In my opinion <probably Spain> is going to win

You could change this depending on the ability of the students. Students could add a reason for their opinion “because they have better players”. You could use the “will” future in French and Spanish instead of going to. They could add superlatives “because Ronaldo is the best”. More advanced students could use a subjunctive: “I hope that”. There is an opportunity to revise descriptions and opinions “I like … because he/she is talented.” You could also teach some colloquial language.

Never ending debate

The opinions above can be turned into a never-ending debate (at least that’s the name I’m giving it for now). This is based on something I hazily recall from a video I saw by Greg Horton a number of years ago where students did something similar with school subjects (apologies to Greg if I have in anyway misrepresented what was going on in the video- happy to amend if needed). It requires some structuring from the teacher. Your slide/lesson resources will require the following:

A sentence builder with opinions similar to the ones above about who is going to win.
Some questions such as “do you think … have a chance?”
Some positive, negative, neutral opinions in your sentence builder.
Some colloquial phrases “no way”, “not in a million years”

Put students into 3s or 4s.

Student A (to student B): Who do you think will win?

Student B: “I think … is going to win because…” “What do you think student C?”

Student C: “No way! I think … is going to win because”

Student A: “not in a million years, … is going to win because”

There are 36 teams in the world cup, you should be fine to keep going for a while!

Ways I have found to make this more effective is to do the following:

Firstly, this one only works first time! Secondly, choose well. Get one student from each group and tell them that if the group is still talking French/German/Spanish after 2mins to silently raise their hand. You reward any groups with hands raised.
Tell students you are walking around and will reward anyone speaking really good French/Spanish/German. Write the names silently on a whiteboard and tell them afterwards. It’s a handy reminder to the rest that had they been doing it too, they would have had the reward.
Tell one student in the group to be deliberately controversial. “Yes Morocco are going to win the world cup because…”
Gradually remove/disappear parts of the sentence builder.
Put a timer on the screen. If students are still talking in TL when timer hits zero then there is a reward.

How are you going to watch the final – future tense revision.

Students produce their plans for the day of the final. There is an opportunity here for a short piece of writing involving time phrases, opinions, reasons and the future tense. If they are not planning to watch it at all then it is still good future tense practice. This is a great opportunity to teach some more complex structures such as “after having done…” or “before watching…”

Consequences Activity

Students write their name at the bottom of a piece of paper. They write a sentence at the top, fold it towards themselves and pass it on. They keep going until all the sentences have been written. It can produce something amusing. Watch the kids closely (you know the ones I mean).

In the morning I’m going to…

For lunch, I’m going to…

In the afternoon, I’m going to

For dinner, I’m going to..

After having eaten, I’m going to…

… and … are going to be in the final.

Phonics Practice

This is one I have used a number of times. I always wonder why students can pronounce any footballer but then get every other word with the same sound patterns wrong!

For Spanish teams, pick one of the South American sides. Far harder. Most of the Spanish team will be well known to your kids whereas Costa Rica or Honduras’ first elevens will not be well known.

Recap target sounds with students. For Spanish this may be G, J, CE, CI, LL among others. For French this might be silent endings or other sounds. For Germany this could be sounds with umlauts, “ch” endings or double vowels.

Option 1: students announce the team to their partner as if they were on TV reading out the lineup.

Option 2: students race through the team trying to beat their partner to the end.

Option 3: teacher goes through lineup and students have to spot the mistakes made and correct them. You could do this as a Conti style “faulty echo”. With faulty echo I tend to have students write “la primera” and “la segunda” on each side of a whiteboard. They show me after hearing both versions of the word and keep a points count going on their board.

Song Activities

I think England could have stopped at that John Barnes rap or Footballs Coming Home

Sergio Ramos was involved in this beauty…

How to exploit it…?

Well, I had some ideas but then found this superb guide on Frenchteacher.net Anything I write would simply be repeating the list.

Or use their Euro 2016 effort…

If you are a bit sick of the football, or your class is, then do the same with the song “Así Soy” It worked wonders with my Year 10 class.

Comparatives/Superlatives Revision

The world cup is an opportunity to revise comparatives and superlatives. Who is better, worse, faster, slower, uglier, less talented, more talented? Who is the best, worst, most irritating? There is a TES worksheet from a previous tournament that just needs a little bit of updating, based on who didn’t make it this year.

Player Biography / Description

Mira 3 has a section on biographies of famous people. Viva 2 does a similar page on musicians. Why not do the same with footballers. There is an opportunity here to practise the past tense with “he played for”, “he signed for”, “he was born in”. There is an opportunity for the present tense “she plays for”, “she is a defender”. I’m sure you can come up with even more ideas.

Whilst this post is predominantly about the World Cup, England quarter final hero and goalscorer Georgia Stanway has just joined Bayern Munich. A quick proofreading of this post shows that there has been a lot of French/Spanish emphasis so far so this is for the German teachers.

You could put together a reading text covering past career, present situation and future hopes.
You could use this text from FCBFrauen with an emphasis on cognates.
You could use it as a listening text. There is a “Text Vorlesen” option. It is a little stilted. Whilst I would normally advocate slowing listening texts with beginners, I’m not sure you would want to in this case.

Read some tweets

The vast majority of international teams are on Twitter, as are their players. You could screenshot a few and use them as a translation task. Example below:

"Hay siete jugadores que no han tenido minutos. Y esos siete, más los que hemos tenido minutos, han puesto todo al servicio del equipo. Somos gente que está haciendo todo lo posible por ser gente que merezca ganar": @CH14_ #NadaNosDetiene

— Selección Nacional (@miseleccionmx) June 26, 2018

Listening Bingo

Give students a selection of football related terms. You could record yourself commentating over a video clip, you could mute the clip and improvise on the spot, or use the original commentary (with advanced level)

Option 1: students select 5 terms and you play bingo. First person to hear all 5 wins.

Option 2: students have a list and tick off as many as they hear. People who get the correct number win.

Developing Target Language Teaching II

Sep 19, 2022Aug 15, 2022 / dlh202 / Leave a comment

There are many superb teachers of languages out there and if you are teaching your lessons perfectly in the target language then this post really is not for you. I wrote about this first in Developing Target Language Teaching however it has been an ongoing journey of improvement since. In 10 years, I’ve had to teach 3 different languages and am at varying levels with each. In a previous school, this meant all three in the same day on most days and hourly switching. If you are less confident with a language then this post is for you. If you are following NCELP schemes of work or similar then this is for you. If your department is more EPI influenced then a substantial amount of your target language input is probably coming from the LAM (listening as modelling) activities in the modelling, awareness-raising and receptive practice phases, however there may be something for you to take from it.

Routines

In my previous post, I wrote about how scripting was helpful. Lockdowns really helped with this. I began each lesson with the exact same language and it has stuck since. In my department, we moved from using command forms to “we’re going to”. This was partly due to the higher surrender value of “we’re going to” and it has worked a treat as students know a higher proportion of infinitives and are familiar with read/write/translate/speak etc. It also saves working out command forms in a variety of languages where they don’t come as naturally.

How do you start/finish a lesson?

It is well worth considering what are the first and last things that your classes hear from you? Is it target language? Is it comprehensible target language? Do you vary what you say depending on the level of the group?

Working it out Step by Step. This is how I set up a …

If you are teaching a language in which you are not particularly strong then it is a worthwhile use of a PPA to sit down and script out how you would set up a speaking / listening / reading / writing / translation task in that language and then check it by a more confident colleague. For example, let’s take a listening task. I’ll put the script in English below with “stage directions” in brackets.

We are going to listen (check understanding of listen, use gestures)
In your books, the information that you write is numbers / letters / positive / negative (check understanding, use gestures)
We are going to listen two times (gesture, make sure fingers correct way round, check understanding)
If it is dificult, possibly third time (gesture, check understanding).
Number 1 (let it play as per recording)
We are going to check
Number 1 = A
Who has number 1 correct? Hand up (gestures).
We are going to continue with 2,3,4,5 etc.
Afterwards we are going to correct it.

Get pupils to translate as you go.

My one caveat with setting up activities is that certain things are best done in English. I would argue these are (but not limited to):

Some games with high value (no snakes no ladders) are sometimes best explained in English the first time as ultimately the game is forcing the students to produce the language and you might arive at that quicker.
Grammar explanations. I find these are best done in English however practice activities after can normally be explained in TL.
Negative discipline with consequences. Best done in English so complete clarity exists.

Icons

Doug Lemov’s Teach like a Champion refers to “Means of Participation.” Essentially, Lemov’s premise is that students should know exactly how to join in with each phase of a lesson. Ben Newmark (whose blogs are well worth a read) writes: “Clarity and predictability around Means of Participation results in better lessons; better behaviour, clearer teaching and children who learn more. It results in pupils who accept the rules around lesson contributions as non-personal organisational routines that create a fair and purposeful environment.“ There are two ways to ensure that the means of participation in our lessons are clear. Firstly, we can frontload instructions as we mentioned above (in bold). Secondly, we can add simple icons to our PowerPoints. It could be argued that this is taking away the need to listen. On the contrary, I’ve found the icons tend to help weaker learners and the stronger ones will focus on my instructions anyway. I would also add that the icon is often accompanied by the infinitive underneath.

Praise Praise Praise

As language teachers we’re pretty good at praise. We know every word for good, amazing, brilliant, fantastic, splendid and we encourage the students to use them in their writing. I have friends who still know tres bien from their French lessons back in the late 90s but I’m not sure the feedback was that helpful. I’ve tried altering some of the praise I give to pupils in the target language. This was partly with an aim to making it more specific (yet still comprehensible) and also helping them to hear a greater diet of words. In bold below are some phrases I will often use in target language.

Your pronunciation was perfect (this one really builds confidence “I said it right”)

98% correct. One small problem. (highlight problem) Can you repeat? (pupil repeats) Perfect

Incredible. Applause for … Very long, lots of details (with actions and occasional writing of cognates on board, detalles = details).

Great answer, one more time, more confidence please.

I don’t agree (pause) but your Spanish was perfect (often used when student has expressed a view that I disagree with such as mushrooms are tasty, Manchester United aren’t as good as …)

“Again, more passion” or “Again, stronger” Our school is currently using SHAPE to help pupils formulate better responses. This relates to the P for projection.

Displays

I have been through many displays in my time but my target language phrases one is probably the most used in class. I cannot remember where I got the phrases from but having them at the front of the room is quite useful for pointing. The blog link above will give you a flavour of the ones on the wall.

Coaching & hits/misses

It takes time in a language you are less familiar with to develop target language teaching. I suggest you have a friendly colleague who can pop in as a coach. They can praise you when you are getting it right and persevering, which helps to reinforce the routines. They can also log your hits/misses. Were there moments when you used English but simple French/German/Spanish was possible? There is not always time to reflect in a school day and this can be really helpful as long as the process is developmental and not judgmental.

What to do when it slips

Let’s be honest, it slips when we’re tired, stressed, sleep-deprived, not had tea/coffee or when we’re lacking confidence because it’s language number 3 and not your best one or you’re ~~battling~~ teaching 8×6 on a friday period 5. At this point, it is simply a case of get back on track as soon as you can. Don’t beat yourself up. Things that I have done in the past are:

Stick TL phrases in weakest language to my desk.
Stick TL phrases inside front cover of planner.
Write a TL phrase at the top of my planner everyday for a week and try to get it into any lesson.
Leave your door open and use TL whenever someone walks past.
Tell yourself that someone is listening next door to see how much you’re using. Or actually have someone next door.
Spanish minute. No-one is allowed to talk unless what they are saying is in Spanish (including the teacher), set a student to monitor it.
Sometimes you just need to hit reset with a class. “I know we haven’t used as much … as I would like lately. I’ve done that too. We’re going to step it up a bit from Monday, be ready. I will be listening to hear you using …, there will be rewards if I hear lots of it from you. Likewise if you hear me using a bit too much English then you have to call me out on it.” This works better with more co-operative classes. The phrasing will need changing with less co-operative classes.

Language teaching can be exhausting. I have taught 5 new subjects to fill timetable gaps and languages seems to demand more energy than many of the others. It can be easy to slip into english, hopefully this post will help you Deutsch zu erhalten, maintenir votre français or mantener su espanol.

Evolution of Starters

Sep 1, 2022Aug 15, 2022 / dlh202 / Leave a comment

Over the time I have taught, the role and types of starter activity have varied massively. When I first started teaching, a starter was a quick activity to get the lesson off to a speedy start, ensure that every pupil was “doing something” and allow the teacher to deal with any admin (forgotten books, registers etc). The best starters were differentiated or had challenge tasks (with added chillis. If you don’t know what I mean by chillis, you’re probably better for it). This post is charting the journey of where I started to where I am now. As I researched for this post, I stumbled across MFLClassroomMagic who has a list of principles we should consider when planning starter tasks. I wish I had this list in the early days.

The Early Years

Match ups, gap fills, anagrams, spot the errors and two way translations were the name of the game in these days.

The Pros:

Quick to produce.
Environmentally friendly (no paper needed).
Accessible for most learners.
Easy to differentiate

The Cons

Were these cognitively demanding enough.
Would these have been better after introduction of vocabulary.
Students had to recall single words not chunks.

The Paper Based Ones

I went through a phase of paper based starters. I got to a point where I was quite quick at condensing them on to a page of 4 to a page (without needing a class set of magnifying glasses. These involved simple puzzles, gap fills or occasional Tarsia puzzles. For those unfamiliar with Tarsia, a tarsia puzzle is a shape divided into smaller shapes with clues along the inside lines that match. If you match them perfectly, you will create the shape.

*Example from Mrbartonmaths.com. Whilst not language-specific, you will see the principle.*

The Pros:

Quick to produce is using websites such as Discovery Education Puzzlemaker.
Every student has something in front of them with little excuse for not doing it.
Students do enjoy puzzles or working things out.
Fallen phrase, double puzzles and letter tiles were my go-to puzzles. Never wordsearches.

The Cons

Were these cognitively demanding enough?
Have enough glue-sticks to glue in the tarsia puzzles. Avoid tarsia puzzles during pollen season.
Sometimes took too long for some students and you would find them completing it in the lesson when they were meant to be on other things.
Again single words more likely so lost opportunity for longer chunks of transferable language.

The Vocabulary Test

I went through a phase in one school of vocabulary test starters based on learning homeworks. All students had vocabulary booklets and were allocated a section each week. 5 were Tl to English and 5 were English to TL.

The Pros:

Students had the resources, they just had to learn the phrases.
Rewards the diligent.
Workload light in terms of administering the test. Tests could be marked by partner.
Easy to differentiate to ability groups

The Cons

Working out what to do with those who don’t revise or process things slowly.
Regular repeated failure for students can be quite demoralising.
Harder to make work in mixed groups.
Some kids with dyslexic tendencies admitted they did not enjoy this part of the lesson.

I moved schools in 2018 and learning resources cannot be shared outside of the Trust so examples of the following cannot be given, even on request, sorry. As the Steve Smith style starters and “return of the vocabulary test” are no longer departmental or trust current practice (at least as starters, some of the activities may inevitably feature at other points in a lesson), then I will share them. The final one titled “The Hybrid” (sounds like a sci-fi film) is still in development and refinement. It may make an appearance on this blog one day.

The Steve Smith Style starters

I would characterise the next phase of my evolution as the “Steve Smith style starter.” This is not because they are solely Steve Smith creations (although they may indeed be) but mainly because they (and variations thereof) all appear in this nifty list on his website! One starter task that I cannot locate the author of (wondered if it might have been Kayleigh Merrick via Twitter. If you are reading this and it is you, and you’re not Kayleigh, then please let me know and I will happily link to your blog/Twitter feed), was “Find 4”. This could have been 4 ways to start a sentence, 4 items of vocabulary on a particular theme, 4 connecting words. One would assume that with such an activity marks would be awarded for creativity and originality.

The Pros:

Start/End the sentences. I always referred to it as “starts and ends.” Students enjoyed the freedom with this activity to finish the sentence. Your most creative students will enjoy finishing some of these, particularly anything that involves their classmates. Sentences such as “at the weekend … is going to” or this weekend (insert past tense activity here) said The Prime Minister (or any celeb, other teacher etc)
Activities like “change one thing” work really well. You can also colour some words so that half of the room change one thing and half of the room change another thing.
Convert the sentence from present to future was always challenging but I found worked better if an infinitive was given in brackets

The Cons

Keeping the creativity going with these is ever so slightly trickier.
Odd one out was a good activity and students would enjoy it but it helps to have some phrases so students can explain their decision in TL otherwise you risk going into English for too long. Phrases such as the ones below, allow for a bit more TL use.
- I think the odd one out is … because of the spelling / length /meaning / type of word
- I’ll be honest, it was a guess

Return of the Vocabulary Test

Our school moved to silent starts of lessons for the first 10minutes for all subjects and all lessons. This meant we had to be creative in what we did with our first 10mins that did not involve talking. In that time, students would have 10 phrases to change from English to TL. They were tested on the same phrases for 3-4 lessons in a row so that they got better at them.

The Pros:

Allowed testing of chunks and single words chosen by the teacher.
A positive marking scheme of “2 points for perfect 1 for close” rewarded effort.
Questions could get progressively tougher.
Students repeatedly tested on the same chunks.
Worked well in remote learning.

The Cons

Bit repetitive.
Hard to stop students checking previous page in book for answers.
Always had to go through answers, some students would copy down during this and maybe not think enough during the test.

The Hybrid

Where we are now, is a place I’m quite happy about. It takes some of the better elements of all the above. It ticks most of the boxes on MFL Classroom Magic’s list. It is not perfect (few things in education are perfect) but the direction of travel seems right There are two tasks to complete in our first ten minutes, with the suggestion they apportion their time appropriately. Elaborating on this will have to wait for another day.

Final Words

Hopefully this post stirs you to thought. Maybe that thought is “I’m really glad my school does … and not what I have just read.” Sometimes it’s quite nice to be reminded we are doing the right thing. Maybe that thought is “I can’t believe Everydaymfl is not doing this awesome thing which we do, he absolutely should know about this awesome thing!” If that is your thought then please drop it straight in the comments.

However, that thought might be “I should really look at our department starters ahead of the new term.” If the ideas above have not hit the spot then I would whole-heartedly recommend this list from MFLClassroom Magic for 25+ more ideas (with added templates). If you’re stuck after that then ask your team, they might just have a brilliant idea.

First MFL lesson of the year

Aug 24, 2022Aug 3, 2022 / dlh202 / 2 Comments

Updated from original in 2014. This is a summary of things that I have tried and their various strengths. For any ECT/NQTs looking for a more detailed walkthrough, I would recommend Silvia Bastow’s website, particularly this

The one thing my PGCE never prepared me for was what to do in the first lesson of the year. I’ve now had 8-9 attempts. As a result of different heads of department, changing schools a few years ago and different policies, I have tried many different ways of doing the first lesson of the year. I’ll come to these later.

The biggest help you can give yourself is a strong start. As readers of this blog will know, I’m a big fan of football and a particular club which might explain the lack of Liverpool/Man City in the following examples. A strong start normally makes for a good season:

1960 Tottenham – won first 11 games, won the league.
1993 Man Utd – won 13 out of 15 opening games, won the league. This made EverydayMFL very happy.
2003 Arsenal – won 10 out of 13 opening games, won the league.

I would argue the same applies in teaching, however if you don’t manage a strong start with a class, then let me assure you that it can improve over time. If you find after a few weeks that you are struggling then I would suggest:

Talking to someone in your school.
Observing others with similar classes and seeing how they manage them.
Any material by Tom Bennett, Tom Sherrington and Shaun Allison Their writings were invaluable in my early career.
This shameless self-promotion blog.
And this blog from the same shameless self-promoting author.
Bill Rogers “Cracking the hard class” is also worth a read.

How do you give yourself a strong start?

Have a Seating Plan. Students enter the room and I tell them where I want them to sit. Seating plans are an invaluable tool in pre-empting behaviour, learning names and establishing that it is your space they are entering. Students with various needs will have arrangements made for their seating. This can be done entirely in the TL (again setting standards high). Students line up outside the room and are greeted before being asked in TL to sit in a particular seat. As for where to sit students, I generally go with boy/girl pairings never in alphabetical order. Some with particularly tricky behaviour records will be strategically placed, according to any intel that we have on them. SEN/PP are also carefully considered. Knowing who your SEN/PP students are is important. I had one colleague who had texts of 2 tables put together, students would essentially be sat in a square and they would put them on the top right and top lefts (as they looked at it from the front). That way they always knew. If students disagree with the seating then I will offer them the opportunity to discuss it at the end. If they refuse to take that opportunity then follow your school’s policy regarding defiance.

Have every resource ready and accessible. Slick and professional is a good way to start. If your school has a number of sheets to glue in then make sure you have the sheets. Make sure you know where you can get more from mid-lesson if needed (a friendly colleague or a central supply). Make sure your PowerPoints, mini-whiteboards and whatever you intend to use are ready. This highlights that you are in control, you are organised, you pay attention to detail and you want to maximise the time they have in the classroom. Transitions are smooth and disruption free.

Be prepared, start to embed routines and look calm. Most groups will likely be quite compliant in this lesson. It is a honeymoon period. Do not be fooled, many students will push your boundaries over the next few weeks. This could be through disruption, defiance or non-completion of homework. Be ready to use the systems and don’t be afraid to do so. Don’t be afraid to call home positively or negative in the first few weeks. Don’t be afraid to keep a student back for a few seconds at the end for a quiet word (if time allows). Routines are key. If you are using a 5,4,3,2,1 silence/silencio/Ruhe system then make sure it is clear and there are consequences for anyone who falls foul of it. It will pay off in the long run.

Consider the student. Some students will already have written your subject off. Consider painting the big picture briefly at some point. How is this subject useful? Draw on experiences you or others have had. I could line up 20 teachers in my school who openly have expressed regret at not learning a language. How can you convince them that learning languages is: fun, relevant and useful? Consider how you can create a feeling of “can do” and success in the early weeks. Rosenshine suggests that students need a success rate of 80%. How are 8×6 and 9y5 going to have a success rate of 80% in those early weeks?

Smile while being firm and fair. I remember being given the “don’t smile until Christmas advice” on my PGCE. No! You can smile as long as you are doing your best to be firm, fair and consistent. It’s ok to get things wrong occasionally, we are human beings and it does happen. The key thing is how you learn from it and what you do next.

Do not lower your standards at all. High expectations are crucial. It may sound harsh but will pay dividends long term. I learnt this the hard way in my first few years. Behaviour matters, effort matters, trying matters and homework matters. Reward the good stuff and make sure there are consequences for the negative stuff. Stick to the school systems as pupils will realise that you are not to be trifled with. Occasionally, you may need to adapt your approach depending on how the class have come in. For example, if there was a fight at lunchtime, everyone was soaked by a sudden shower or students have just come from an extremely boisterous lesson elsewhere. This does not mean lowering your standards, expecting less work or being soft. It is simply adapting to the evolving situation in front of you.

If that is how we are to be in our first lessons, then we can now consider: what we do, and more importantly, what the students do. The first decade of my teaching career involved a variety of approaches. Here are a few “first lessons” that I have tried.

Admin first approach

The pros of this approach is that everyone starts from the same point and all the necessary stuff is done. Rules can be established and students are very compliant in this lesson, often regardless of ability. In the past, this has included gluing in various sheets, going through and copying out some classroom expectations. My rules generally were phrased positively. Sometimes I asked students to sign underneath if they understood. This meant I could hold them to it later if they were not playing ball. I cannot remember my exact rules but I imagine they would have been something along the lines of…

In this class:

We try our best every lesson, every week.
We use Spanish wherever possible.
We are kind and we respect others.
We present work neatly.
We start tasks immediately.

My main issue with this is that sometimes there is not enough time for a language based activity or fun. This means that students are left waiting until the next lesson for the real learning to start. A lot of subjects also take this approach and it can get a bit monotonous if students have done it 5 times before they reach your lesson.

Lesson learnt: if showing the kids what to put on the front of their book never write an example name like “Lionel Messi” as some Year 10s don’t know who he is…as a result I taught Lionel Messi for a year, and she did alright in Spanish.

Information Gleaning Approach

Often following shortly on the heels of the “admin first” approach, the teacher may set the students a series of sentences to complete in the back of their books.

My three “go to” sentences were these:

I enjoy Spanish lessons particularly when …
Aspects of language learning I find difficult are …
If my last Spanish/French/German teacher were here they would say…

The latter generally is answered quite honestly. They also give you an idea about which activities the class enjoys least (often listening, remembering lots of vocab, speaking in front of others or writing long paragraphs). This then informs your planning for the first few weeks as you can build up to these and scaffold accordingly. It is also quite helpful with some pupils to follow up on it later in the term. “You said you found writing long paragraphs hard last year, has it got any easier?”

Sometimes I phrased them as questions:

What aspects of language learning have you been good at/struggled with in the past?
Which skills (speaking, listening, reading, writing) do you feel you are good at, and why?
If your previous teacher were here, what would they say about your performance in their lessons?

This can often be quite useful as long as students are silent when doing it. The information needs to come from them unaffected by their peers. If you refer to the information gleaned in subsequent lessons then this shows the students you value them.

Lesson learnt: really effective if kids are silent but also if they are lazy or unmotivated then they will probably not finish this. That in itself is information enough. The question is then what are you going to do about it?

Engage then admin.

In my second year of teaching, I tried this approach of having a normal lesson first with a number of good fun activities to start the year. It really worked with a couple of year 7 groups and year 8 groups as it allowed them to have a sense of achievement and the emphasis was on learning rather than admin. We then completed the admin in the second lesson. A short summary of rules were given and I made sure students kept to them. There was a focus on speaking and listening as students had no paper to write down anything.

Lesson learnt: Short summary of rules is crucial and mini-whiteboards need to be available. Routines around the use of mini-whiteboards need to be established quickly.

The Quiz

I tried this once and I know a great many colleagues who do this. I even saw it on a Sixth Form Induction day lesson. A short quiz about Spain in the first lesson is one way to fill the remaining time after admin and expectations. I can understand the pros. It neatly introduces the subject. It teaches the students some cultural knowledge. It allows you to show what you are passionate about: Spain/France/Germany/Italy. However, I have a few reservations. Firstly, students with low cultural capital are instantly disadvantaged. These are also the students less likely to value MFL for the reasons in the quote below:

“The reasons commonly put forward for the low levels of student interest are usually that English adolescents (a) do not see the relevance of foreign language learning to their future careers ; (b) since most people around the world speak English, they do not feel the urgency to learn it; (c) see foreign languages as some kind of hobby, that you do in your free time or before a trip to get by in the country you are travelling to; (d) do not feel culturally close to the target language civilizations.” Gianfranco Conti 2015

Secondly, Gianfranco Conti highlights the importance of self-efficacy as a factor in motivation. Why start the year with a quiz that most students will fail on a subject to which they are not “culturally close”? Conti describes self-efficacy using Bandura’s definition: “beliefs in one’s capabilities to organize and execute the courses of action required to produce given attainments.” Why would we not take the first few lessons to really build confidence? Surely it is more important that students leave our early lessons with the motivation and the belief: “I can do this.”

Lastly, there is an opportunity being missed to embed routines around target language, speaking activities and having fun using the language.

That’s a lengthy answer to “Why don’t I do quizzes in the first lesson?” Feel free to disagree in the comments below.

The Hybrid

In my current school, we seem to manage a hybrid of both “admin first” and “straight in”. Books and sheets are swiftly given out. Rules and expectations are outlined. We then get straight into learning or revising content from a previous year. If it is Y7 then we will start on meeting and greeting. If it is Y8,9,10,11 then we will get started on the topic for the term. Personally, I have never been a fan of quizzes about the country in the first lesson. I prefer that they leave my room feeling that they can do something in the TL, or have learnt something. That doesn’t mean that the cultural stuff is not important but when it comes to culture, I prefer teaching them the various cultural aspects as they arise, or linking them to a topic. I have yet to write a post on teaching culture so maybe that will come at some point.

Lessons learnt: So far this hybrid model seems to be may preferred method. It makes expectations and rules clear but then gets on with the first priority: learning.

Dear Santa. For my PGCE in MFL, I would like…

Nov 1, 2021Aug 28, 2021 / dlh202 / Leave a comment

Time for a reflective post. After seeing some trainees move on to a new school, I got thinking about what I have learnt since my PGCE and things I wished I had learnt when I trained back in 2011-2012.

When I trained, there was a time of flux in teaching. We had just embarked upon the era of controlled assessment, the Department for Education was headed up by Gove and OFSTED were very keen on progress in lessons, in books and engagement. We were taught about the importance of literacy and numeracy, teaching that suited student’s learning styles and differentiation. We covered behaviour and voice management twice over that year. We learnt about what Ofsted wanted in terms of engagement. All students had to be “engaged”, teacher talk had to be minimal, mini-plenaries were regular and objectives had to be clearly stated and revisited to demonstrate that all learners had made progress in that 50 minute lesson. Most CPD was either going on a course, watching another teacher, or being watched yourself, which carried with it the aforementioned expectations. Webinars, podcasts and even blogs were in their infancy. At the time I remember my main sources of internet based CPD being Frenchteacher.net, Classteaching and Tom Sherrington’s blog. All of these were and are quality blogs and have clearly stood the test of time. If you are starting out in your career, I would recommend the teachers guide you can find on Frenchteacher (although for an expanded version you can buy Steve’s books on Amazon) and Tom’s Pedagogy Postcards.

In MFL specifically, we were taught activities for lessons. We were taught to progress towards production. We were taught how to conduct a textbook listening (play once with no questions, play once with questions, play again with questions and breaks then go through answers), how to help students prepare for their controlled assessments and learn chunks of text. However, I don’t recall my course mentioning Macaro, Field, Krashen, Van Patten and it sadly pre-dated the advent of Rachel Hawkes‘s website and Gianfranco Conti’s writings. I discovered Steve Smith‘s blog reasonably earlier on and found it invaluable. Schools that were using technology tended to use the triumvirate of Linguascope, languagesonline (to be fair I am still using this), or Atantot.

Over time, I have had to unlearn a lot of what I learnt on my PGCE. Learning Styles were dispatched by Daniel T Willingham (whose book “Why don’t students like school?” received the everydaymfl treatment here). Mini-plenaries started to fade out of the MFL vocabulary. Yellow backgrounds, blue writing and comic sans (shudder) were highlighted as the dyslexia friendly PowerPoint combination at the time, whereas the British Dyslex!a Association now have some great recommendations. Teaching has changed a lot. In some ways for the better and in other ways less so. Reflecting that at a subject level, MFL has changed a lot.

If I was designing a PGCE for MFL now, I would hope that it answers the questions below over the year. If it doesn’t then, I am aware that there are a number of excellent books by Steve smith and Gianfranco Conti that will help in doing so. I would hope that your PGCE also teaches you what we might call the generic elements of teaching that apply across all subjects. By generic elements I’m referring to the kind of thing you might find in Rosenshine’s Principles or Lemov’s Teach like a Champion.

Anyway, from the MFL side of things. Here goes…

Dear Santa.

For my PGCE in MFL, I would like…

Speaking

How do we teach pronunciation?
How do we teach phonics?
How do we help reluctant speakers to speak more?
How do we develop the memory of short reusable chunks of language?
What speaking activities are developing learner’s memory and ability to deploy phrases?
How do we make the TL the regular language of classroom interaction?
How do we develop a culture of “everyone talks”?

Listening

How do we develop listening skills?
What different ways are there to conduct a textbook listening?
How do we make listening feel less like a test?
How do we use transcripts effectively without giving students all the answers?
What is comprehensible input?

Reading

How do you use a reading text progressively so that activities become more challenging?
How do we teach readers how to read and avoid guesswork?
How does reading help acquisition of language?
How do you get the balance between a text that is 98% comprehensible and not making it too easy?
How do we support students with a primary school level reading age in reading a foreign language?
How do we integrate authentic texts, literary texts and short stories in such a way that they can be challenging but accessible?

Writing

How do we help students to structure writing?
How do we help students to use the language that they know better?
How do we help lower ability students to write 90 words?
How do we help students of high ability to write in a way that prefers them for A-level?
What should a student be able to write in Y7, Y8, Y9, Y10, Y11?
How do we help students in contexts where they may never have been on holiday to answer the question “¿Adónde fuiste de vacaciones?”

Grammar

What grammar should be taught at what stage?
How do you stop students saying things like “me gusta juego” and “me hago” etc? (asking for a friend…)
How do we teach some of the areas of grammar that do not have simple English equivalents such as the partitive article in French, subjunctive in Spanish and cases in German?

Vocabulary

How do we ensure learners get a good balance of nouns, adjectives and verbs when textbooks seem to be very noun heavy?
How can we make use of web-based applications to help reinforce and extend vocabulary?

Target Language

How do we use target language in lessons so that it is comprehensible?
How do you maintain target language throughout a lesson in a language you are less confident with?
How do you adapt your target language to the ability of the group in front of you?
How do you encourage learners to use more the target language in lessons?
What do you do when learners start to use *&£$%^ words they have looked up in a lesson?

Second language acquisition theories & concepts

What theories have dominated the field of second language acquisition?
What can we take from each and use in practice?
What are the current theories? What are their benefits? How can we use this to enhance teaching?

Memory

What is retrieval practice and how does it apply to MFL?
How can we use homework to effectively combat Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve?
Rather than simply telling students to “learn vocab”, how can we do it in ways that ensure longer term retention and more thorough processing?
How does the brain store and retrieve language?
How do you revisit content so that students “know and remember more” without it being too repetitive that they switch off and lose interest?

Lesson Planning

What are good starter tasks for MFL lessons?
How do you phrase a good lesson objective for an MFL lesson?
How do you sequence activities to reach that objective?
Is it appropriate to have production every lesson?
How do you plan a sequence of lessons over time so that content is revised effectively?
How do you adapt lessons for SEND learners?
What are the common barriers dyslexic students face in MFL and what are the most effective ways to overcome them?
How do you check for understanding quickly and effectively?

Transitions

What are the common barriers that learners face moving into secondary school from primary?
How do we overcome these barriers?
How can we develop closer links with primary schools when time, resources and funding are limited?
How can we ensure learners are ready for A-level so that the jump is not too big?
How can we develop closer links with sixth forms to increase progression?
How do you drive up options numbers in a school where languages are not prioritised highly?
In a Welsh context where many students have to study Welsh, how do you drive up options numbers as any foreign language is additional and cuts down on the amount of option choices a student has?

Status:

How do you raise the profile of MFL?
What profile raising projects are most effective?
How do you raise the profile of MFL in a school with low budgets?
How do you combat the “I did GCSE FRench and I can’t remember any of it” line on parents evening?
How do you combat the “I’m never going to need … anyway” line from students?

On changing schools

Sep 1, 2021Aug 28, 2021 / dlh202 / Leave a comment

A few years ago, I moved schools and forgot to post this. Maybe you have moved school and this one could be useful to you.

I learnt a lot from MFL teachers and colleagues in other departments my first school. I developed a lot as a teacher and a person. I worked with some amazing teachers and fantastic students. However, the time had definitely arrived where a change was needed.

Maybe you’re thinking the same? You could be contemplating the next rung up the ladder, a change of scenery, a change of department or a change of key stage. In this post, I’ll look at things that remain the same, things that change and things that help to hit the ground running. Perhaps the biggest thing I noticed in moving is that everything is the same and yet simultaneously everything is different. Hopefully the rest of the blog unpicks that paradoxical statement.

SAME

Kids are still kids. It might be the most obvious thing to say but even if you are moving to a more challenging school then it is worth bearing in mind: they are still children. Some will try to push boundaries, unsettle the new person and test you. Others will get on board immediately and give you no problems at all. The adoption bell curve model from the business world suggests that when selling change or a vision to a group you will have the following clusters of people. From my limited experience so far, I have found this model remarkably applicable to classrooms. The following was paraphrased from Forbes

Innovators (2.5% of population). These guys will get on board with anything new.
Early Adopters (13.5% of population). People who drive change in an organisation, quite often leaders.
Early majority (34%). People who join once they see the benefits of the change.
Late majority (34%). Skeptics. People who join after the early majority. Often will need some convincing or coaxing.
Laggards (16%). People who are stuck in their ways. These are tricky to convince.

If you get the first 3 groups then you are at 50%. The subsequent 34% will likely start to tip the balance in your classes. Of that 34% there will be some quite late adopters who don’t fall into the “laggards” category. If even half of those get on board then you are at 67%.

It is worth adding at this point that while kids are still kids, you will see variations depending on the schools you move between. You may move from a moderately challenging catchment to a less challenging one, or from the frying pan into the fire. Parents may have different expectations, which then influences in-classroom behaviour. Don’t be afraid to approach your DSL and pastoral team to get a better idea of the challenges and overall character of the catchment.

You are good at your subject and teaching it. You have qualifications including GCSEs, A-levels, a degree and a PGCE. You may even have more letters after your name. You may be a native speaker of a language or at near-native level in many languages. You are the one that has trained to teach this subject. You know a variety of methods, strategies, stories and ways to make the subject come to life and engage learners. Your enthusiasm and love for your subject will carry people with you. You know all the advice you have been given over time. In a new setting, you have a great opportunity to further improve but also develop new habits. Your new department may also have certain initiatives that may develop your teaching and alter your lessons in a way you had not expected. You will have different people observing you and giving you feedback, which hopefully makes you even better at your job.

DIFFERENT

Starting points vary wildly. This was probably the one that took me by surprise most. Going from a comprehensive school with a number of feeder primaries to another comprehensive school with a number of feeder primaries, I made the assumption that the year 7s would be similar. I was wrong. Get to know your catchment and their starting points. In addition, in languages, we have the added complexity of the patchwork nature of primary school MFL. There are primary schools out there doing sterling work, however the experience of languages held by your students can vary wildly. This may have an impact upon your Year 7.

New/Old is not always better. It is really easy to make comparisons between your previous and current departments. We make sense of things often by comparing to expectation or experience. In changing schools you could go from the frying pan into the fire, or from the fire into the frying pan, or just from one kitchen worktop to another (if that’s not stretching the metaphor too far). The key is accepting that it is different and not necessarily better or worse. Learning when to play the “in my old department” card is key. Don’t do it too often, but if it is a strong strategy that makes a tangible difference to pupils learning then there is no reason not to suggest it.

Context is crucial. One of your first jobs in starting at the new school is to gain an understanding of the context you are in.

What is the area/estate like?
What challenges do the kids face outside of school?
How involved are parents?
How many go on to further study?

Subject status in your school may be different

Maybe you have moved from a school where everybody does languages to one where it is optional. Maybe languages are highly valued by SLT; maybe they are not. These are aspects of life in your new school that you may need to navigate. Remember: you were picked at interview because of what you offered. What can you offer your school to raise the profile of MFL? How can you help to improve uptake or outcomes?

HITTING THE GROUND RUNNING

Know the key people. Having a HoD, HoY or SLT member to call on in difficult situations does help. Obviously try to deal with it yourself first but if you need to refer up the food chain then do it. Don’t be afraid to call a parent positively or negatively.

Know your students. Seating plans are invaluable. Learn their names as quickly as possible. Be interested in what they tell you even if you don’t understand TikTok. Praise effort. Don’t overlook the quiet kids. Jamie Thom writes “If the adjective “quiet” is used, it is often pejorative: “Daniel is a lovely student, but he is very quiet. He really needs to speak up more.” How are you going to ensure the quiet kids in your class are able and confident in a subject which requires a lot of talk.

Know the systems. Behaviour policies and practices are crucial in making a smooth start. One colleague advised me to be “firm, fair and consistent”. That sounds manageable but is not always easy to pull off. Stick to the behaviour policy and when the inevitable “but in Mr Mainwaring’s class…”* is voiced then the answer is “maybe…but I’m asking you to…”

*as with most names on this website Mr Mainwaring is taken from television

Invest in relationships. Put time into getting to know the kids you are teaching. Get involved in something outside your subject. Get to know your tutor group. Be human. Acknowledge mistakes if and when you make them. Remember you are allowed to smile before Christmas but definitely maintain your high expectations throughout the year.

Invest in routines. How do you start the lesson? In my current school, all lessons start with a silent starter task. It’s helpful in terms of setting the tone and expectation. Use the first five lessons with each class to teach your routines (and more if necessary). How do you expect students to start? How do you expect them to participate? How do you use mini-whiteboards? How do you finish lessons?

Stick at it. The first year in a new school can be tough. In many ways, the second year is easier. Students know you. In my experience, students will often check their new timetable by their peers or their siblings. “I’ve got Mr Wilson and Mr Jones this year, what are they like?” Quite often, I have found students decide quite quickly that you are “ok” based on their sibling’s or friend’s opinion. Or sometimes they decide the contrary and need winning round! I was told shortly before the end of term by a Y10 student I taught in Y8 “we all really loved that lesson at the start of the week.” It was a great class and I genuinely looked forward to Monday P1 that year. I will guarantee now that not every class says that about me!! However, these guys carry that impression of lessons 2 years later and will pass it on to their siblings and their peers. Returning to our Forbes model, it does help increase your early adopters and early majority in the subsequent years.

Lean on support when necessary

Sometimes you will need to lean on the experience of others. In the early days at a new school, there will be things you don’t know or didn’t absorb in the INSET day. Sometimes this support will come from teachers and other times from students “Sir, have you taken the register yet?” Don’t be afraid to ask the “how” questions of your pastoral team, heads of year, heads of department, SEND team or tutors. How do I get the best out of Charles Godfrey? How does Joe Walker do in your lessons? Jack Jones seems to struggle with …, what works with him?

If you are changing schools this September, then I offer you my very best wishes. I hope you have a great start, you meet some great classes and just happen to have a free lesson P5 on a Friday.

Everyday Displays

Aug 19, 2021Oct 30, 2025 / dlh202 / 2 Comments

Over the past 9-10 years, I have had a number of classroom displays. I’ll be the first to admit, I’m not very artistic. I look at some of the displays I see on Twitter and think “that looks incredible”, shortly followed by “I could never do that.” If you search MFL displays on Twitter you will soon see what I mean, along with a wonderfully deadpan nativity one! Here is what I can do with my limited artistic abilities and have done. Hopefuly ahead of the new term, it inspires some ideas.

When it comes to displays, I think there two types of display:

Learning
Inspiring

The kind of questions we need to be asking are:

How does this display help my students learning, or help me while teaching?
Is this display doing the thinking for them or making them do some thinking?
Is this helping to inspire a love of languages, an understanding of their value or an appreciation of culture?

I have 4 display boards in my classroom.

Display Board 1 (front) – TL phrases I want students to use in lessons

Display Board 2 (side) – Phonics board – this is an experiment from September

Display Board 3 (back) – Why study langauges

Display Board 4 back) – Map of Spain

My Current Displays

I’m aware that some people out there argue in favour of a “less is more” approach from a perspective of aiming to reduce visual stimulus in a classroom. I can completely see their point of view and definitely lean more towards this now than I did when I first started teaching.

Display Board 1: TL Phrases

I cannot find the original online so it is entirely possible my Head of Department made this. The phrases on this board are largely similar to this one on TES: https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/spanish-classroom-language-mat-12359711 The overriding aim in any display like this is that it has to be stuff that students are actually going to use. We have quite a strict equipment policy in our school so any “I have forgotten a pen/book” phrase is out. The rationale for having this at the front of the room is that I can just tap the board if a pupil asks me something in English that could easily be done in Spanish. Phrases it includes are:

“te toca a ti” (your turn) “espera un momento” (wait a second) “lo he dicho bien?” (did I say it right?)

he puesto (I’ve put…) “creo que es” (i think it’s…) “no es justo” (it’s not fair)

Display Board 2: Phonics

Credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeffdjevdet/20611280311
Owner requests speedpropertybuyers.co.uk/ be credited

This is an experiment for this year. I wanted pupils to be a bit more conscious of how words are formed in Spanish and essentially take a bit more responsibility in working out how they are said. That way if someone says “I don’t know how to say it”, they can break the word down and reconstruct it. This uses some enlarged slides from Rachel Hawkes’ phonics powerpoints here.

Display Board 3: Why study languages

Question Mark Response - Free image on Pixabay

This one is at the back of the room so chances are students are only going to see it when they are a) walking in and b) turning around to look at the clock (how dare they!). It could be more prominently placed if my classroom allowed for it but the material on there is large enough to read even with a cursory glance. Again, I am not the most artistic of people so my first trip was to Instant Displays for some lettering and then to use these resources from NST.

Display Board 4: Map of Spain

File:CCAA of Spain (Blank map).PNG - Wikimedia Commons

If I’m honest this is the one I am most proud of. It took a while to make so here is how:

You will need:

yellow and blue display paper
A marker pen
a projector that projects on to a whiteboard

Here is how to do it:

Find this map of Spain.
Fix yellow display paper to your whiteboard.
Project map on to the yellow paper.
Draw around the outline map adding dots for places.
Remove yellow paper from whiteboard.
Cut it out.
Cover display board in blue paper (sea).
Fix your map of Spain in the middle.
Write on the places.
Don’t forget the Canary Islands and the Balearic Islands.

This tends to be used quite regularly in lessons particularly when a place is mentioned in a text. It can be quite helpful to say: “This place is here. If you have been to … then you were not very far way from it.”

One year we also put some stars on places where students and staff in the school had been to Spain and where.

With apologies to Portugal.

Other things on the walls

The Weather: Students in our lessons write the date, learning aim (post on learning aims and objectives in the works) and weather.

Numbers 1-20: This is quite useful for lower ability classes when getting feedback on tasks. “How many people scored …?” Or for randomly selecting the next person. “Charlie, pick a number between 1-20.” you count along the rows for the next person. This is of course when you are not using Wheel of Names.

Both of these can be found at Instant Displays.

Spanish Speaking countries: This is quite a nice poster set by Twinkl. You can check it out here.

My Past Displays

The Sentence Builder

In the past I have turned a display into a giant sentence builder. The sentence builder was modelled on one in this video from Vincent Everett (the sentence builder appears at the 3min 20), which uses modal verbs and infinitives. It was extremely helpful to students, however I quickly learnt I needed to cover it up during tests!!! He also has an excellent blog, which you should check out. His Toblerone idea will be making it into a lesson in September.

Origami Houses

You can find out how to make these here

I set up a display board as above and then populated it with the origami houses that the students had made. I asked a few students to print off some useful vocabulary that could float in clouds in the sky, which they duly did….only with a few additions such as the house from Up! and the Death Star from Star Wars.

The Three Tenses Board

This was quite a simple idea from my previous Head of Department but effective. It contained 30 phrases all students had to know. His original looked something like the table below. I will let you decide what verbs should make it into the 30.

Past	Present	Future
J’ai mangé	Je mange	Je vais manger
J’ai bu	Je bois	Je vais boire

Teaching Spanish at the time I simply adapted the phrases. Again, this was a “cover up during assessments” board.

Hopefully, this has inspired you with a few ideas. I have probably done others that I cannot remember but these are the ones that I feel answered the three questions best.

You want us to write how much?!

Nov 3, 2020 / dlh202 / Leave a comment

This Blogpost was inspired by a Twitter conversation I have seen over the past week or so and posted a whole year later. Sorry it took so long!

The 150 Word Question appears on the higher GCSE paper. It is the showcase question. This is where 5 years of hard work in Spanish needs to appear on the page.

Irrespective of whether you follow a 2 year or 3 year Key Stage 3, I tend to introduce this in Year 10. Below I will explain how I did it. The suggestions are similar to some suggestions by two teachers on Twitter. I will say now that the similarity is entirely coincidental and it was quite reassuring to read their tweets, as I means I might just be doing the right thing!

Here is how I went about getting my class ready for 150 Word Questions:

Show class a question. Explain to them that this is the showcase question. It has to show them at their best and what we have spent 4-5 years teaching them.
Translate question in pairs, then share answers.
See if class can divide the two bullet points into three, four or five sections.
Divide 150 by number of sections to give approximate and more manageable word counts (3 x 50 word sections sounds more achievable)
Go through how it is marked, including how many opinions, justifications etc are needed. Unpacking phrases such as “narrate events” is also worth a few minutes of your time.
Divide class into groups of 3-4. They write the best section they possibly can on mini-whiteboards or on paper with alternating lines (any means that allows editing). This means tenses, opinions, reasons, conjunctions, adverbs. Remind students that if they have speaking prep that matches the bullet point then they use it.
Remind students of their core language sheets and encourage use of them when writing.
Remind students of their Top 10 Complex Language sheets and encourage use of at least 2-3 phrases from it.
Students compose sections, If they finish then they can try another section.
Hand in mini-whiteboards.
Teacher types up student contributions into a 150 word answer. Mark it and annotates it with why it scores high marks. If you have a visualiser, you could do this live.
Students then attempt a similar question in subsequent lesson. They are allowed their example one, along with core language and complex language sheets. They cannot copy but can adapt it. They do this on their own. You could then mark it or take in a few and give generic feedback. Students do appreciate knowing how they scored on a first attempt.

Explaining a couple of terms above:

Core Language Sheets – idea from Rachel Hawkes.
Complex Language Sheets – basically A* language from use back in the day (wow I sound old) of controlled assessments. Mix of simple memorable subjunctive, past tense, future tense phrases “cuando sea mayor”, “si tuviera la oportunidad, iría a…” etc or “bien que ce soit”

What happens next?

Probably, I will get back to teaching the course, as later in the year they will likely have a mock exam or an assessment point so they can do one without support then. They also have two good versions to revise from! Combining the graduated approach above, along with regular practice of 90 word questions should help in preparing for that.

Other thoughts

Encourage students to avoid duplication of vocabulary. Ban the boring adjectives! “boring”, “nice”, “interesting” and “fun”. Instead things can be pleasant, enjoyable and exciting.
Remind them that the poor examiner has to read loads of these and they are all 150 words long! Encourage them to make it different to the average student. Tell them they play piano in their room rather than football at the park. They do not “go to the park with my friends”. They “go to the cinema with my little brother who is <insert adjective here>”. Again an opportunity for a more interesting adjective here (but not too interesting)
Remember that avoid does not mean you can’t use them when your mind goes blank.
Cutting the question into manageable chunks is always helpful. Can one bullet point be divided into two? To some of our students 40+40+75 does not sound as bad as 75+75.
Lastly: make a plan. What language am I going to use? How can I show off?

5 Things to try tomorrow 2019 Edition!

Jan 26, 2019 / dlh202 / 2 Comments

A very Happy belated New Year to you. If you’re reading for the first time then you are very welcome! Over 10,000 busy teachers visited last year from countries all over the world. Hopefully, you found something useful. Anyway, to kick off this year, here are 5 things you can try tomorrow.

Photo Credit: Ekspresevim Flickr via Compfight cc

Vocab Sheet/Knowledge Organiser Dice Quiz

Some schools have vocabulary sheets, some have knowledge organisers. Get some 12 sided dice and set 12 chunks/items for students to test each other. They need to produce the Spanish for this activity to be most effective. Students test each other on 5 things. My year 8s are working through a foods topic so the phrases they were testing each other on primarily concerned restaurants.

3pts – perfect recall without help.
2pts – needed sheet to prompt
1pts – needed sheet but not correct
0pts – silent response

Quick run-through:

Harvey rolls dice, rolling a 9. He looks at the screen. His partner Lewis has to do task 9. Lewis reads task 9. “Order a dessert”. Lewis consults his vocabulary sheet and says “quiero un helado de chocolate”. Lewis has achieved 2 points. He then rolls the dice for Harvey.

Double chance to win bingo

Students divide a mini-whiteboard into 6. They put three adjectives and three nouns into the spaces. This worked best with school subjects and opinions. Bingo was one of the go-to games for my German teacher in year 7. I find doing it this way forces learners to listen to more of what you say. I guess you could do it with 9 squares and alter the verb too. The Year 7s loved it this week.

me gusta la geografia porque es útil

Bomb Defusal

Using a writing frame, put a sentence from it on a mini-whiteboard. Learners have 10 opportunities to defuse the bomb or a set time limit using this website. Very simple guessing game but actually allows you to check their pronunciation of the target structures. Make it more interesting by having the first person pick the next person, who picks the next person. Or use a random name generator.

Live Marking

This was sold to me a year or so ago as a way to “dramatically reduce your marking load”. This idea from a history teacher was that you went around the class adding comments to kids work such as “how could you develop this point further?”. The kid then had to respond instantly. In humanities subjects I can see it being effective. I came up with a variation recently designed to help a class that are not particularly confident speakers.. Here’s how it works:

Find a text in TL (textbooks are great for this).
Work student by student having them read out the text – no prior preparation.
With each student write a quick note in their book on their speaking. Here are a few examples:
- 15/1 Speaking: “superb today – no issues.”
- 15/1 Speaking: “check words with LL otherwise fine.”
- 15/1 Speaking: “check words with “CE.”
- 15/1 Speaking: “pronunciation fine, now try to sound more confident.”
If you feel that they need to respond in some way, write out a series of words containing the target sound and work through them with the student. Or get them to redo the line.

Students seemed motivated by it and seem more confident as a result. As a teacher, it is quick simple feedback and if a response is needed then you can do one very quickly! It takes very little time to do a whole class.

Sense/Nonsense Listening

This is a really simple warm-up activity prior to a recorded listening on a similar topic. Recently year 8 working through the food topic and have arrived at restaurant situations. This one was a bit of a “off the cuff” thing. Read out a sentence. Students have to listen carefully and decide if it is “sense” or “nonsense” based on vocabulary they have covered recently.

De primer plato quiero una tortilla española con helado de chocolate.
De segundo plato quiero una sopa de manzana.
De segundo plato quiero un filete con patatas fritas.
Por la mañana juego al fútbol con mis amigos
A las dos de la noche juego al baloncesto
me gusta el inglés porque es interesante
No me gusta el teatro porque es divertido

The possibilities are endless.

European Day of Languages

Sep 19, 2018Sep 19, 2018 / dlh202 / 2 Comments

It is that time of year again and it always comes around really fast. European Day of Languages. If your school does not take part then this is your opportunity. It is great free publicity for your subject! Not to place ideas in any of your heads but you could even call it “Languages Week”…

There are many ideas out there, resources on TES and even on the EDL website itself. Here are a few I have seen work over the years…

Update: ALL have also produced some ideas here.

School site quiz quest.

This one requires some prior preparation, you will require: a quiz on paper, answers on paper, blue tac, sweets. Give students a set of quiz questions with answers around the school in creative places. Put the answers up a few days before announcing to generate interest. Any students who complete the quiz in their breaks and lunches get some kind of reward. It is very likely you will have a fair number of keen year 7s for this. Students collect the quiz sheets from you and hand in to an agreed location.

Tutor time quizzes/videos.

Some schools do not have a tutor time programme so create one for the week. Your other staff will often get on board if they are invited to take part. If they are forced then they may resent it. My experience was that 2/3 of staff would willingly go along with it.

We did the following:

Quiz on a different European country each day.
Video on a different European city each day.
The register in a different language each day (modelled and practised in staff briefing of course).
Staff used Digital Dialects to teach themselves and the kids a new language
Some members of staff taught languages they knew such as Gaelic, Spanish Welsh and Hebrew.
Some members of staff from other countries insisted on registers being done in the language in their classes!
Some members of staff kept the language from registration going all day.

Who speaks what? Display board

Do you have pupils and staff from other countries? Prepare a display with a photo and a short bio as to what languages they speak, how they learnt and how much they can still do.

Who speaks what? Video interviews

Get around your multilingual staff and interview them about their experiences of language learning. How easy/difficult did they find it? What are the benefits and advantages of speaking a language? You could show the videos in an assembly or tutor time.

Displays

Various famous people have learnt languages. If you want a list then here are a few… It didn’t take long to create a nice PowerPoint background, add a picture from the internet and a text box with the languages they have learnt. These then went along the corridor.

Bradley Cooper – French.
Carlo Ancelotti – English, French, Spanish.
Mark Zuckerberg – Mandarin.
Zlatan Ibrahimovic – English, Spanish, Italian.
Tom Hiddeston – Spanish, French, Greek.
Tom Daley – Spanish.
José Mourinho – English, Spanish, Italian, French.
Natalie Portman – German, Spanish, Japanese.
Colin Firth – Italian.
Viggo Mortenson – Spanish, French, Norwegian, Italian.
Dory – Whale.*
Christoph Waltz – French, English, Italian.

*may not be a recognised language

Assemblies

I appreciate that some readers may have visibly tensed up at this suggestion. It is a great bit of free advertising for your subject! Two years ago, I did an assembly titled “I never planned to teach languages”. It went down really well. We began with a quiz of film quotes translated into other languages (we used google, more on the evils of google here). They got sweets for guessing the film and the quote. Languages such as Portuguese, Dutch and Romanian are great for this. Then I started telling a little bit of my story about how I got into MFL teaching and where it has taken me. If you’re interested in that story, or in need of a good night’s sleep then you can read a bit here.

Dress up

One of my former colleagues is a little too keen on this idea… I’ll let your imagination take care of this one.

Foreign Food Stall/Tasting – courtesy of a great colleague from previous school.

Bring in plenty of foreign foods for kids to try at a breaktime. Staff and students could contribute to this. This could be run much like a cake sale with profits going to a language related charity or a charity run in a European country. Efforts we had one year included Schwarzwaldkirschetorte, Tortilla Española, Tarte au Citron Apfelstrudel and Croissants. You could even insist on orders being given in the foreign language.

Get the canteen involved.

If your canteen is up for it, then take over the menu for a week. I’ve given each day a theme as they will know what is practical. As nice as it may be to have a Croquembouche, it might be a little too much to ask!

Monday – French.
Tuesday – Spanish.
Wednesday – Welsh (that’s for Secondary MFL matters in Wales – you guys are great).
Thursday – German.
Friday – Portuguese.

Your canteen staff will probably welcome the opportunity to vary the menu a bit, just give them plenty of warning.

Language Learning Videos

Here are a set of videos with a pro-language learning theme.

Funny Foreign Language Videos

Who doesn’t love a funny or odd Youtube video at some point? Here are a few favourites from the past few years:

This one had the kids saying “poom” for a few days.

PE Department will approve of this one!

One semester clearly hasn’t convinced her…

What do you do? Share your ideas on Twitter

5 Things to try tomorrow

May 22, 2018May 22, 2018 / dlh202 / Leave a comment

These may already form part of your everyday teaching repertoire but here are five activities to try tomorrow. Each has a differentiation and challenge added.

Quiz Quiz Trade

Everyone I know seems to understand this one differently. I have seen it used in MFL and English in different ways. It can probably be applied to other subjects too. Here’s how I make it work in my classroom.

Get the mini-whiteboards ready
Project on screen 3 questions students have been learning.
Students pick one of the questions and write it on their board.
Students go around the room. They must ask a question, answer a question and then swap whiteboards.
They must perform 5,6,7,8 swaps before heading back to their seat.

Differentiation: You can differentiate this by getting students to write the start of an answer on the other side of the whiteboard.

Front of whiteboard: ¿Qué llevas normalmente?

Back of whiteboard: Llevo…

Challenge: You could have students put a word on the back of the whiteboard that has to be incorporated into the answer. You could increase the variety of questions used or vary tenses used by questions.

Rewards: whilst the students are doing this, go around, listen and note down the ones who are going for it. Reward them at some point in a manner of your choosing.

MM Paired Speaking

MM are the initials of the excellent teacher who showed me this. It is an information gap activity but I like it as it practises speaking, listening, reading and writing.

Students divide page into 3 columns
Column 1 – write days of week in TL leaving 2-3 lines in between each
Column 2 – pupils draw picture that represents vocab they have been learning such as places in town.
Column 3 – leave blank.
Project on board a question such as ¿Adónde vas el lunes? (where do you go on Monday?). You could also project a model answer “el lunes voy al cine” (Mondays I go to the cinema).
Model the activity with a keen student. This stage is crucial for the activity to work well.
Fiona asks Shrek where he goes on each day of the week. When Shrek answers, Fiona uses her final column to write down exactly what he says.
Shrek and Fiona swap roles.

Differentiation: Weaker students might need this printing out on paper.

Challenge: You could increase the complexity of the sentence demanded by insisting pupils add an opinion. This could be done by adding a column in between 2 and 3.

Car Race Quiz

I resurrected this little gem this week. I cannot find the original car race powerpoint but you will find similar powerpoints here by the same author. Car race, horse race or (at Christmas) race to Bethlehem should work. For those of you big on knowledge organisers, this could be a different way to test them.

Have a list of questions ready to test everything in a unit from key vocabulary to how to form various tenses or structures covered.
Divide class into teams
Teams take it in turns to answer.
If they are right then click the car/horse/wise man (whichever you choose to download) and they will gradually move towards the finish line. If a team is unable to answer, pass it to another team.
Winners are first to the finish line.

Differentiation: This can come through the questions you ask and how you tailor the activity to the students in front of you.

Challenge: you could turn this activity into a translation challenge. First group to produce correct translation of a particular phrase gets to move their car forward.

Song gap fills

I don’t do these too often but a colleague of mine did one with a class recently. Find a song and take out a variety of vocabulary. You could look for words with a particular phoneme that you want students to practice or remove some verbs you have learnt recently. They listen twice or three times trying to put in the missing words and then you show them the lyric video for them to check their answers.

It is best done last lesson of the day or you will be hearing it all day. Whilst my colleague suggested Kevin y Karla (check their Youtube channel out), This one was a hit with my year 9s:

Differentiation: depends on the quantity words you take out.

Challenge: have two versions with words removed. Remove significantly more from one version, or equally put the wrong words in and students correct them.

12 sided dice topic revision

If you have a set of these then great. If not then tell students to roll a six sided die twice and add the numbers.

Set 12 tasks on the screen that link to the topic you have been studying. Give each task a points score according to complexity.

1 Simple vocabulary recall task

2 Explain grammar structure

3 Translate something

4 Make a sentence including …

etc

Differentiation: you could pair up students who are at a similar level. You could turn it into a rally-coach task (the more advanced student does their own task but coaches a weaker individual to help them achieve).

Challenge: depends on the complexity of tasks set

GCSE: Customs & Festivals

Apr 30, 2018Apr 30, 2018 / dlh202 / 3 Comments

800px-Santiago_Sacatepequez_Kite_Festival

Picture of Santiago Sacatepequez by gringologue [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

The Spanish speaking world is full of a variety of festivals. From the perilous San Fermín to the picturesque Fiesta de los Patios en Córdoba or contemplative Semana Santa. If you look further afield you will find El Día de Los Muertos/El Día de La Muerte, and El Yipao in Colombia.

AQA refers to this topic as “customs and festivals in Spanish speaking countries/communities”.

Pearson/Edexcel refer to it as “celebrations and festivals”.

WJEC refer to it as: “festivals and celebrations”.

The ideas discussed in this blog and inevitably the language used will unavoidably favour the exam board I’m currently preparing my students for. Nevertheless the ideas themselves should be applicable to any exam board and adaptable to languages other than Spanish.

It is worth considering how a module like this one might be examined. It could be tested by all four skills

Speaking: any of the three elements could include something related to this topic. Your sample assessment materials should give you an idea.
Writing: write about a festival/celebration you went to or would like to go to
Listening: listen to an account of Carnival and answer questions (AQA SAMS)
Reading: same as above but text on page

Here are some activities I have tried over the course of teaching this module.

The VLOG

This was an idea from a colleague of mine and one of the best MFL teachers I know. The ultimate aim is that students produce a VLOG (video-blog) in which they describe a Spanish festival. A growing number of the students I teach want to be “Youtubers” so they welcomed this idea. Students were told they can appear in the VLOG if they choose or they could do something similar to Tio Spanish. The main rule was that it was them doing the talking. The structures I wanted the students to be using included the following:

it celebrates, it takes place in, it is, there is/are, you can see, you can, it starts, it finishes, it lasts, it is one of the most … , it has, it involves, it includes, I would like to go, because it looks, i would recommend it because it is.

Part 1: 2-3 lessons of controlled listening, reading, speaking and writing practice ensued trying to recycle these structures as much as possible. I had been reading quite a bit over half-term and wanted to try out some new ideas. One source of ideas was The Language Teacher Toolkit The Language Teacher Toolkit. Another was the Language Gym Blog. A number of these formed part of the lesson and I wrote a number of texts that recycled the target structures above.

Part 2: I took the students to the ICT room. They researched key details about a festival from a selection I had produced. No-one did La Tomatina because that was on the scheme of work for subsequent weeks. After that students produced a script using as many of the target structures as possible.

Part 3: They handed in their scripts, which I marked. They then corrected and improved it based on feedback they were given so that their VLOG recording is grammatically sound. As part of this, they also had to underline any words that they felt were tricky to pronounce. Those that finished this redrafting process worked with me on how to pronounce the words. Others were directed to Voki. Whilst not perfect, it will do the job.

Part 4: Students are currently recording their vlogs.

Festivals that match interests.

Sometimes it is worth investigating a little more to find out some more festivals out there. UK textbooks tend to emphasise la tomatina or navidad. I think the former because it captures the imagination and the later because students can relate to it. One student was quite motivated by the fería de caballos in Jerez. Another really enjoyed looking into la mistura peruana (Peru’s food festival). Día de amistad (South America) was perceived to be a great idea by another student and they wondered why we don’t have it here.

Android Game

This was a way of practising the key vocabulary around festivals. Here’s how it works: Frodo draws 9 dots on a whiteboard in a 3×3 pattern. Frodo then joins up 4-5 of the dots consecutively like an Android phone password.

On the screen have 9 squares with phrases in. These correspond to the 9 dots.

Sam’s job is to crack Frodo’s password. Sam says the phrases on the screen trying to guess where Frodo’s password starts. Frodo can only respond “si” when Sam has guessed the first one. Even if he has said other parts of the pattern up to this point, he must get the first one.

The main aim here is repetition of vocabulary and familiarisation with the target structures. You should advise students beforehand not to use their actual phone password. You would think it might not need saying, but it does.

Trapdoor with lives

Trapdoor seems to be a staple of MFL teacher PowerPoints on TES.

Danielle was kind enough to let me use this example of trapdoor. You should visit her site: Morganmfl

The prevailing methodology seems to be that students restart when they get it wrong and go back to the beginning. A slight twist I have tried recently is giving students a number of lives. They then have to reach the end alive. This means that they have a greater chance to use all of the vocabulary on the activity. I tend to base the number of lives on 1-2 guesses per section.

For festivals I used the idea of a past tense account of the festival including the following vocabulary:

I went to, we went to, my friends and I went to, we participated in, we threw, a lot of, we ate, we drank, it was, we are going to go again, because it is, we are never going to go again,

Mastermind with lives

Again using the same principal as the trapdoor activity above. Students have to guess what their partner is thinking. They can only tell their partner how many they get right. Place a table on the board with 3-4 columns. The original game to the left uses four. Personally, I prefer three for MFL lessons. One student writes the target phrases in their book. The other tries to guess the phrases that they have written. This can be made quicker by giving students a number of lives. It also means both students are likely to get a go. Students seem to enjoy this one.

TL Questions and TL answers

By Carlesboveserral [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)%5D, from Wikimedia Commons

This module has been great for training students to respond to target language questions with target language answers. Using the AQA book, we covered la tomatina. I wrote text about la tomatina from the point of view of “Marcos” who attended la tomatina. There were then 8 TL questions with relatively simple answers in the text. Part of the activity was to train pupils to look for language that is similar to the verbs in the question.

If this is the answer, what is the question

In the subsequent lesson, I jumbled up the TL questions and TL answers and asked students to match them. The answers were on the left of the slide and questions on the right. To increase the level of challenge in this activity, you could have students create the questions themselves.

Four Phrases One festival

Have four boxes of text on the screen. Three of the boxes all partly describe a festival. The final box should have some details that do not correlate with the others. Students need to work out the festival as well as which box does not help them. The idea behind this was to give them practice of filtering out the distractors when looking at higher level reading texts. Depending on the level of your class you can make this as subtle as you feel is right.

Dice

I’m not quite sure where I would be without a set of 6 sided and 12 sided dice in lessons. Aside from the rather popular “one pen one die” activity, you can do a variety of things.

Improvisation – students make a sentence based on prompt. You could add a minimum word count to stretch them.

Where was the festival?
What was it about?
What did you see?
How was it?
Who did you go with?
What did you like most?

Roll, say, translate – Hugh rolls the dice and says the sentence. Zac translates into English.

se celebra en abril
tiene lugar en Sevilla
hay muchas casetas
empieza dos semanas después de la Semana Santa
la gente baila sevillanas, bebe manzanilla y come tapas
Quiero visitarla porque parece bonita

etc

Extreme Snakes and Ladders

By Druyts.t [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, from Wikimedia Commons

I’ll be honest with you; it is not extreme but the name seems to have an effect on classes. Find a snakes and ladders board. Set sentence-making challenges for anyone who lands on a number ending in 1,3,5,7,9. You could also add a snake stopper and ladder allower. These should be tricky tasks.

1 Where was the festival?

3 What was it about?

5 What did you see?

7 How was it?

9 Who did you go with?

Snake Stopper: make three sentences about a festival that includes the words … , … and …

Ladder Allower: Describe a festival you wouldn’t go to and why

If you have managed to read this far then well done! Feel free to tweet any ideas to @everydaymfl or leave a comment below.

Everyday MFL

Ideas for the everyday MFL teacher.

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