Sticky Grammar! #3: Walking Backwards

The example I set out in this series of posts comes from a Year 10 unit in January lasting four weeks on three lessons per week, in which pupils will, at the end of it, write a letter to a shop to complain about some faulty goods they were given as Christmas presents and the [...]

Sticky Grammar!

It’s been a great day at The Schools Network (formerly Specialist Schools & Academies Trust) MFL Conference today at University of Warwick, “What’s Next For Languages?”.  Thank you very much to everyone who came along to my session “Sticky Grammar: Making Grammar Teaching Really Work For All Pupils”. I love the challenge of teaching through [...]

comSIMPLEplexity: Objectively speaking

I’m going to home in on two of the activities I mentioned in the last post on comSIMPLEplexity, the flashcard activity in pairs and pelmanism, and look at the language used.  And then we’ll have that long-promised think about learning objectives.  If you haven’t seen the last post – cue bugle –  (comSIMPLEplexity: Getting pupils [...]

comSIMPLEplexity: Getting pupils to use complex structures

In my first post on the subject of comSIMPLEplexity, we looked at how something as simple and basic as today’s date can be used to set up a routine which brings in more complex language for interaction between the teacher and the class.  In the second article, we looked at an example of how the [...]

comSIMPLEplexity: Presenting New Language

So, picking up where we left off in our introduction to comSIMPLEplexity, the class is warmed up, the cobwebs of their native language have been blown away in the first activity, which may or may not have anything to do with the rest of the lesson, and the context is set for the next activity.  [...]