Dictionary Skills – Doing it by the book

It’s easy to take for granted that pupils know how to use a dictionary, that it’s something very obvious (because we, as successful language learners, have been doing it for years and have forgotten how we learned it!) and that it doesn’t need to be planned in to our teaching.  And then we discover that [...]

Progression in routines – Going for length and complexity

Let’s kick off this article by picking up on the question with which we ended the last one in this category: How does the language we already have in our routines fit into our own personal scheme for developing language learners? In other words, in your view, what do you see as the route for [...]

Setting up routines with mixed-ability classes: Going for linguistic range

What questions about language tend to arise from pupils in later stages of their study?  (e.g., Year 10, Year 11).  Which linguistic areas provoke most confusion or uncertainty? Interestingly, they are not always particularly complex sentence structures, but the “small” words, words having a particular grammatical function, the most familiar, almost incidental words, which can [...]

How smart are you? Or, how are you smart?

Let’s get the ball rolling in thinking about learning styles… In my view and experience, the distinction between preferred learning styles is 100 times more useful than the distinction between “ability”, by which we usually mean prior attainment.  It is much more useful because it is about how pupils access information and concepts.  Take away [...]