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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With the summer term well underway, you might be making plans to welcome September’s new Year 7 cohort to school on induction day. With this in mind, we asked former Leader of English (and parent) Jill Carter what advice she’d give to parents whose children are about to start secondary school for the first time. […]
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With the summer term well underway, you might be making plans to welcome September’s new Year 7 cohort to school on induction day. With this in mind, we asked former Leader of English (and parent) Jill Carter what advice she’d give to parents whose children are about to start secondary school for the first time. […]
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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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In a previous blog post I outlined a very basic memory technique which works by creating a story out of to-be-remembered information. This makes the information more memorable than recalling a list of unrelated words and the technique itself requires no real groundwork, after all, you are just making up a story. Whilst impressive results […]
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