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No to utility

This post isn’t about listening. It isn’t even about teaching French, specifically. It’s about teaching languages to students whose first language is English - particularly but not exclusively in the UK / English setting; but I think the same arguments would apply to most monolingual English-speaking nations. In fact the same arguments might well apply to teaching non-English in non-English speaking nations too (ie teaching German in Spain or France; teaching French in Germany, etc.) It goes like this: Framing language learning as ‘useful for our future’ As we worry about the slow decline of language learning in the UK, the favoured refrain about WHY kids should learn other languages seems to be one of utility: it’ll get you a better job. It’ll get you into a better university. People ‘with another language’ (whatever that means) earn x% more per year. Even the Guardian article discussing this year’s Language Trends report inferred that key reasons to learn a language were related to...
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Getting dictatorial about dictation

My year 10 Germanists have their listening mock exam tomorrow, so they wanted to ‘do listening’ today. Poor sods not knowing this is my absolute favourite subject! We worked through some exam strategies for a couple of questions from the AQA Sample 2 (they’re doing Sample 1 for the exam and I hope that they will have forgotten them by the time they do Sample 2 in the winter!). Then I thought: dictation! That’s actually the issue, isn’t it? From the exam perspective there’s a lot less room for making an educated guess, but also my gut feeling is that it would tell me a lot more about their experience of processing audio input in German.  Here are the sentences they heard: 1 Man muss sich / im Urlaub / entspannen. (one must relax oneself on holiday) 2 Nächstes Jahr / werde ich / Abitur machen. (next year I will do A levels) 3 Wir haben / gestern / Trauben gegessen. (we have eaten grapes yesterday) Because we were doing exam practice I started by keeping it as close as possible to the...
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A classroom experience March 2025

This post will be a reflection on an experience I had in the classroom this week with my year 7 French group. In it I will attempt to ‘think aloud’ what happened and what I could learn from it in future teaching of listening. It is a mixed ability group of 30 students who began French in September - about six months ago. They have five lessons a fortnight. The back story We have just begun a run of lessons on comparatives: in practical terms, this means using the phrases ‘plus xxx que’ (more [adj] than), ‘moins xxx que’ and ‘aussi xxx que’. I had introduced the ideas and we had worked quite a lot on the vocabulary in the previous lesson, and all of them had completed a vocabulary-learning homework including these key words within the structure (eg plus grand que / moins intéressant que / aussi beau que).  I wanted to move on to doing a series of listening exercises so that the class could have a lot more comprehensible input before they began to output their own sentences comparing...
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The tyranny of topic-teaching

  This post is inspired by a brief exchange I had on BlueSky with Carmen. The exchange looked like this: I was a fairly late arrival into languages teaching, and have been teaching ‘only’ 14 years, having spent the first 18 or so of my career doing all sorts of things to stoically ignore my calling to the classroom. (But that’s a story for another day.) The point of even telling you this is to remark on the fact that in my own secondary education, topics were simply not a thing until A level; and even then I only remember doing ‘topics’ in French, where I did a non-literature course. My German A level based on literature was still not structured through topics.  Yet something changed between when I stepped out of the classroom in 1989 and when I stepped back in in 2011, and that thing was the dominance of topics-based pedagogy. And it now seems so utterly entrenched that even with the new GCSE and some discussion against moving away from the ‘silos’ that a topic-based approach...
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