With exams looming on the horizon, David Shanks is back to share his top 4 exam preparation tips for teachers… With just six short weeks remaining until the speaking examination window opens, we are firmly in the ‘home straight’ as we head towards the first sittings of the long-anticipated “more challenging” 9-1 MFL GCSE exams […]
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Our January blog post welcomes back Yvonne Kennedy, MFL consultant and Allez author… The phenomenon of the ‘backwash effect’ whereby the format and foci of GCSE assessment has a direct influence (positive or negative depending on your point of view) on teaching practice at Key Stage 3 will be familiar to many language teachers. Some, […]
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This month, we’re welcoming David Shanks back with his 4th blog post… In a recent conversation, a colleague pointed out that her journey in teaching had real parallels with her previous experience of the acting world. The similarities are indeed quite striking: the working in front of an “audience”, the improvisation, the regular re-runs, the tweaking […]
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This week we’re delighted to have Dr Simon Kemp, Associate Professor of French at Somerville College, Oxford to the OUP MFL blog as our guest blogger. Teaching language skills through literature How can you best bring language and literature teaching together? On literature-heavy undergraduate courses like the one that I teach, there’s a danger that students feel […]
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This week, we’re welcoming back Liz Black with her reflections on starting out as a teacher. What advice would you give to new colleagues? I’m sure like me you have found the last few blog posts by Yvonne Kennedy and David Shanks extremely helpful. We can learn so much from other language consultants and teachers, […]
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This month, we’re welcoming David Shanks back with his 3rd blog post… And so, school is no longer “out for summer” and another lengthy wait to hear Alice Cooper’s classic on the radio begins. We are learning new student names, dusting off the teaching cobwebs and are most proud of our shiny new stationery and […]
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It’s with an element of retrospective frustration that I regard my early years of teaching. Keen to learn the trade and to teach as well as possible, I kept my head down, taught 5-6 lessons a day, planned and marked almost exclusively alone and all within the same four walls. I often passed up opportunities […]
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This week we’re delighted to welcome David Shanks, MFL consultant and lead practitioner at the Harris Federation, as our guest blogger – look out for part two next week… “It’s a great networking opportunity.” “I’m off to network over dinner.” “Sorry, I can’t tonight, I need to show face and network at an event.” When […]
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Last summer, I was asked to take part in a project on assessment at Key Stage 3 to consider what the Programme of Study for languages might mean for the design of new assessments in the classroom. Reviewing this document, I was reminded of the emphasis on the interconnectivity of the four skills of speaking, […]
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When I visited a local school recently I was talking to Martin Heeley who has been working on and developing some ideas I gave him during the course. As we have a focus on the blog about what to keep of the ‘old ways’ and what technology we can harness cheaply or even free to […]
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