This is of course not a post to advocate for using mini-whiteboards (MWBs) in your classrooms. In this post, I’m assuming you already have some experience of using them. This post is about the journey in my thinking around the specifics of using them. But I will indulge you with a little bit of a context - and an origins story - about my use of MWBs.

From rags to riches

In a previous school, I was desperate to begin using MWBs with my classes. I started asking around whether we had some and was told that we had some gathering dust in the heavily-guarded storeroom. I managed to convince one of the maintenance staff to let me have a look in the storeroom but there were none there. He reckoned that some of the primary teachers had them. But sadly the trail went cold. So I went out and bought my own, and some markers and kept them in my classroom. Despite not using them half as frequently as I do now, I spent a small fortune on replacing both the boards and the markers every so often. Other staff would also borrow them and sometimes forget to bring them back.

Fast forward to today…I’ve worked in my current school now for almost three years. All students are required to bring their own MWB and MWB marker(s) to every lesson. They also require their diary which has a backup MWB at the back of it. Our school has a mantra: take the small issues off the table. The small issue for me in the past was having to distribute and collect my private stock of MWBs and markers and collect them in again and make sure the lids were on, etc. Taking the small issue off the table allows me to concentrate on the specifics of probably the most powerful and important checks for understanding you can do in your classroom. And that is exactly what this post is about.

They think it’s all (h)over, it is now

As you might remember from a previous post, I used to get the students to hover their boards. I would give them four clear stages: thinking time, writing time, hovering time and then a countdown to show their boards. My thinking behind this was efficiency: I could check all the boards at the same time. It also made the check more reliable since I could minimise the extent to which the students had been influenced by the answer of a classmate. It preserved the purity of the CFU. It was my way of ensuring the reliability of the check.

However, when you check boards in this way, you don’t have a great deal of time to take in all the information you need and your scan needs to be quick. Thankfully, there will always be one or two students who are a bit slower who will give you what I am going to refer to as a “thinking window” - five to ten extra seconds where you can scan a little more closely, identify some points of feedback and think about how you are going to respond to the CFU. Doing the check in this way also - for me - limited my ability to praise and feedback to students on a more individual basis. I was scanning the boards and praising the whole class either explicitly or by validating their work but I wasn’t giving much individual praise or feedback when doing it this way. And one of the things I’ve learnt most about since moving to my current school is the power of that individual praise.

In short, I liked checking MWBs this way but I was convinced through a conversation with a Senior Leader at my school that there was another way worth investigating. In the next part of this post, I’ll explain what I do and why I think this is more effective.

What I do now

In my MWB CFUs, I give a countdown of roughly somewhere between 7 and 15 seconds, depending on what I am asking the students to write. It is never more than a sentence because I don’t believe you can give effective feedback on more than a sentence from a quick scan of 25 MWBs.

Without the need to hover their boards, some students get up their boards early, when they do this I am able to praise them individually for getting it right and demonstrating this so quickly. Sometimes I do this non-verbally with a smile and a thumbs up and others I make a big thing of it, saying something like “Johnny has nailed it!”. My colleague, Caroline, does something similar with the word “Perfect” or “Top banana”. This is effective because it creates a buzz and an urge to get that same praise, often students will ask “Is mine right?” “Can you check mine?”. I’ve found that even my older students are prone to doing this, we all like praise.

Why it’s not perfect

What we gain in the opportunities for giving praise, we lose in the reliability of the check. By identifying an answer as “Top banana”, this draws early attention to that answer. Therefore students who are less sure may then be inclined to have a sneaky peak at it which detracts from how reliable the information is. It also reduces the extent to which those particular students are thinking about what you want them to think about. This is thus an aspect of this method that needs policing and I try to be vigilant as to glancing eyes during CFUs.

One potential extra step which may provide a solution is for students to hover their board until the end of the countdown once I have checked it. Doing this would allow for reliability to be preserved whilst also maintaining the extra opportunities for praise.

As Shaun Brien says, the procedures and routines of mini whiteboard checks are what make them work, this is just one way of doing it and - crucially - clear thinking is underpinning it.

If you have any thoughts on the way I’m now doing it or want to share how you do it, I’d love to hear from you.

In this post, I will talk about the two things I am probably working on the most. The first such thing is the start of lessons.

I’m working on a strong start to lessons

We are really fortunate in my school that we have a whole-school expectation that lessons begin with a Starter. As you probably don’t need me to explain, Starter (or Do Now) tasks have a number of benefits. One such benefit is the effect of settling the class into working immediately. There is an economy of scale-type benefit to this being whole school practice: students expect it and become accustomed to it.

There is no doubt that the Starter helps create an orderly start to lessons. It contributes to constructing a professional environment since it conveys the idea that we are here to work and that work starts from the moment you enter the room.

But it doesn’t work miracles and particularly for my Year 7s (and some Year 8s) it’s not enough. And this is because there are a number of other factors at play which can detract from our ability - despite all the best intentions - to ensure an orderly start to a lesson.

The problem

We have two bells at my school. The first one goes around 5 minutes before the second one. As teachers, we are asked to be in the classroom before the first bell. The purpose of this is to give the teacher the opportunity to set up in advance of the class’ arrival. Where possible, this is always my aim. But the issue I face is that it is not always possible and almost all of these reasons are due to timetabling. For example, I might have a yard duty or be teaching a lesson on the other side of the school in the preceding period. I might also need to visit the loo between periods. In these situations, I get the register set up, connect to our wireless projector system and project the Starter as quickly as I can. If I’m teaching in the period before, the latest I have ever done this is three minutes before the second bell. That still means students are able to get working on the Starter before the second bell sounds, which is my intention. But this makes for a more chaotic start than I would like. Like most people, I don’t enjoy feeling rushed. If you tell me 1:00 pm, I’ll aim to be there for 12:50 pm at the latest. I also have neurotic tendencies (more on these later) which give me further motive to want to find a solution. Below are some of the things I am experimenting with at the moment.

1. Rewarding the behaviour I want to see

Students have been taught a clear routine for how I want them to start the lesson. I expect them to come in quietly, find their seat, get out their equipment and begin the Starter which will be on the board. Of course, much like my reflections above, there are factors outside of their control at play. Students may also need to visit the toilet and may also be coming from a different part of the school. Nevertheless, depending on the class, I was probably getting somewhere between 60 and 95% success rate with this and it was something I identified as a focus for improvement.

In particular, I decided that I wasn’t praising the students enough who were doing the right thing. There were probably two reasons for this. Firstly, I would just simply forget. Amongst everything else running through my mind I would forget to make sure I praised the students as often as possible. Secondly, I didn’t appreciate the effort involved on the part of students to meet my expectations. To me, it seemed easy. Why wouldn’t they follow the expectations? I mean, I explained them perfectly.

So I decided to go the other way. I decided to make a big thing of the students doing the right thing. So now, at the start of lessons, I patrol the classroom with my sheets of especially-made stickers (see below) and announce loudly to the students that I am looking for students to whom I can give a sticker for their strong start to the lesson.

And you know what? For the majority of students, it is working. Of course, it is not perfect because we are dealing with young people and it never is. However, it helps me gain a little more control over the starts of lessons

2. A strategy for when the timetable is not my friend

As I mentioned earlier, my intention will always be to be at the classroom before the first bell. I find this particularly tricky between periods 2 and 3 where we have eight minutes for transition. If I am on the other side of the school, which is often the case, I find it a bit of a mad rush to get to the classroom on time. The scene on my arrival to the classroom can sometimes look disorderly and given that I worry about what people think of me (again, more below) and I resolved to do something about it but it is less cut-and-dried than giving out beautifully-designed, custom stickers.

In my previous school, we had these wide, open corridors. There was a rumour that the building was intended to be a hospital before some investors backed out and another group made it into a school. This meant that, even with classrooms on both sides, there was plenty of room for teachers to line up their classes outside their rooms in an orderly way.

That is not always possible in my current school. That’s not a criticism, it’s just the way it is. But where it is, I have been trialling - with one class - asking the students to wait sensibly outside the room to allow me to set up and maintain the control over the start of the lesson. I’ll be honest, it’s had mixed success so far and I am also acutely aware of the potential disruption to other classes in the vicinity which can be caused by having 20+ students congregated outside of a room. It’s fair to say I’m still working on this strategy which is why it is conveniently appearing in a post about things I’m working on. If you have any tips in this space, please let me know.

I’m working on me

As I have gotten older, I have found myself becoming more comfortable with sharing how I’m feeling and sharing (previously well-hidden) aspects of my personality with my friends, colleagues and family. The very fact that I am writing this is probably a pretty good case in point where that is concerned.

I used to bottle a lot up. I think I was probably embarrassed that I worried deeply about what others think of me or that I could spend hours catastrophising. I also used to get anxious in social situations, so much so that I would freeze sometimes and not know what to say or do. I also used to have real trouble under pressure, everything I knew or knew how to do would seem to leave me in moments when I felt pressured.

A lot of this still rings true today but I am able to manage those elements of my personality better and I have developed strategies to help me. One of those strategies is just me telling my wife or someone I trust about how I am feeling. Another strategy is my trying to apply the teachings of stoicism as often as I can and almost reverting back to them on occasion to help me reset. Before going to sleep, especially if the day has been challenging or I find that I am catastrophising quite a lot about something, I’ll listen to the audiobook The Daily Stoic. I’ve also recently returned to an audiobook I enjoyed the first time around by Sam Delaney. These books help me regain perspective and be a better, calmer version of myself. The final strategy I have been using is to try to take time to identify the reason why I am feeling the way that I am feeling. This Tweet below (and the accompanying research) is something I refer back to often to help me do this..

Teaching is a difficult profession and life is difficult enough. Making sure I have the strategies to help manage my mental wellbeing is just as important to me as refining my instructional practice.

See you soon for the next instalment of this series. I promise the subject matter won’t be as heavy.

As you might know, before moving to Australia in 2023, I lived in Muscat in the Sultanate of Oman. For our last couple of years there, my wife and I lived in a villa in small compound with a shared swimming pool and communal gardens.

We’d spend a lot of time outside in the gardens and we got to know the kids who played there. My wife was like Snow White. She’d go out there and all the kids would flock to her, want to speak to her. She’s always been so good with kids. One particular day she was talking to one of little girls who had been quarrelling with another little girl over a toy. My wife - keen to try and pass on some wisdom - said to her: “Sharing is…” expecting her to say “caring”. But instead she said “fun”. My wife and I found this both adorably cute and funny and it is something we say in the house often, including to our toddler.

My school gets a lot of visitors. We have a team that takes care of showing visitors around and organising the day. Sometimes the visitors are prospective parents, sometimes they are teachers or leaders from other schools.

In the last couple of months, we have had some visitors specifically to the French department. They have observed me teaching my Year 7s and then we’ve had lunch together and we have discussed our approach. We have also usually done a quick tour of the school too, time permitting. Most of the time, these visitors are in the early stages of implementing EPI (Extensive Processing Instruction) and are keen to understand a little more about how it looks in practice. We are always happy to share what we do and think to help other schools do the same, if they wish to.

Having conducted a couple of these tours in the last few weeks and had other discussions with teachers at other schools, something which has attracted the most attention is our low-variance curriculum model. These reactions have mostly been positive but some have seemed politely sceptical.

This is the first school I have worked in where this is whole-school policy. Primary departments in schools where I have been before have generally been quite good at sharing lessons and resources but in Secondary I would say that until recently (and even perhaps not) it is less common.

People more intelligent than I have written more insightfully about this topic but I wanted to write this to make the case for why it needs to be happening in LOTE (modern languages). Because I get the sense that it is not as widespread as it perhaps should be.

In this shorter post, I’m going to try and articulate why it is important.

Sharing is caring (for the students)

If you’d asked me about a low-variance curriculum earlier in my career, I probably would have viewed it with some suspicion. I would have probably said that it limits creativity, reduces autonomy and makes all classrooms feel “the same”.

There is probably some truth in all of those assertions. But I think those concerns also miss the point. The strongest argument for a low-variance curriculum is not about teachers. In the nicest possible way, if by “autonomy”, you mean “freedom to do whatever you want in the classroom”, then yes there’s going to be huge loss and you are going to have to deal with that.

I’m also going to say that this is about consistency whilst being conscious that the word consistency can have pejorative connotations. People have no doubt heard it used as a justification for overbearing performance management policies or practice.

So let me be clear, this is about the students. And it is about equity. Two students in different classes studying the same language deserve the same access to the same content, the same explanations and more or less the same experience. I believe that to do otherwise is unfair and you would be hard pressed to convince me otherwise now. In 2022, the Grattan Institute (an independent research organisation which makes public policy recommendations in Australia) called this scenario the “lesson lottery” and called for an end to this.

Sharing is fun (for teachers)

Brace yourself for an analogy. You might find it extreme but I think it underscores the message well.

Imagine two Year 9 French classes. Let’s call them 9A and 9B. Imagine it’s Thursday P1 and we are doing Reflexive verbs in the perfect tense (I wanted to use this because it’s one of the hardest things for students to master, I’d argue). 9A’s teacher uses a lesson which has been refined over several years and takes into account assessment data and common misconceptions. 9B’s teacher - pressed for time - downloads something from TES the night before or stays up until midnight making something from scratch. It should go without saying that, from a workload perspective, we don’t want any of those scenarios. It is also probably fair to say that 9B’s lesson probably wouldn’t be the best lesson for the students (it might, but probably not). On the other hand, a lesson that has been refined over time and is the result of the collective expertise of subject experts is likely to be the better option. At the risk of comparing 9B’s teacher to Doctor Nick from The Simpsons, we don’t want someone winging it. The stress of that is not fair for them and it is certainly not fair for our students.

Curriculum design and lesson planning are difficult. Really difficult. I only worked briefly with the former principal at my school but he has been credited - amongst others - for revolutionising the school’s approach to instruction. One of the mantras he espoused was “Incremental in time, radical over time”. Curriculum design requires us to think not only about what students need to know today, but also what they will need to know next month and next year. It requires careful sequencing, retrieval opportunities, assessment design and an understanding of how knowledge builds over time. It requires multiple iterations based on experiential and assessment data and - crucially - the critical expertise of multiple teachers. The contrasting idea that every teacher should independently do this work just seems strange when we stop and think about it. That is even before we consider the workload implications of this and the colossal duplication of task. In my experience, planning an effective 60-minute lesson can sometimes take 60 minutes. Imagine if you have six teachers all teaching the same year group and all spending 60 minutes to plan every 60-minute lesson.

Identical lessons is not the goal

A low-variance curriculum is not an attempt to make teachers identical. It is an attempt to ensure that students receive a consistently high-quality education regardless of whose classroom they happen to be put in. It is important to remember here that students don’t pick their teacher. We need to guard against students being unlucky to get one teacher but lucky to get another (e.g. “the lesson lottery”). In fact, I would argue that the less teachers have to worry about designing curriculum from scratch, the more attention they can devote to the things that matter most: explanation, questioning, feedback, relationships and responding to the students in front of them.

To borrow a phrase from Dylan Wiliam, teachers improve through a lifetime of disciplined inquiry. But inquiry is easier when we’re all working from the same map. If one teacher discovers a better explanation, a more effective retrieval task or a stronger example, that improvement can benefit every student rather than remaining confined to a single classroom. Indeed, the next stage of this - in the low variance model used at our school - is exactly this: we look at the data from an assessment taken by all classes and focus on questions where one class scored significantly higher than the others. We then ask that teacher to explain how they did it and then we add it to the lessons for next year. The only reason this is possible is because of the low-variance curriculum. If all your teachers are teaching different things, this is not possible. Without a low-variance curriculum, a common assessment would not be a valid tool because we cannot guarantee what was actually taught. The other way of looking at this is that it is about capturing individual expertise or the natural instructional moves that one of your teachers might make which have made the difference in how well their class retained the material. If what teachers are doing with their class when the door closes is that good, then we should all be doing it. An even simpler way to look at this is that it creates a space in which we discuss and reflect constantly on how to maximise instruction. For example, if you open a shared lesson that you plan to teach and realise that the explanation could do with some work or that there is a key step missing, you will share that thinking. You will most probably edit the slides to include what was missing. In some cases, this can create a dialogue about the best way to do this. All of that would be done in secret without a shared curriculum.

Sharing is powerful (for everyone)

Your reaction to this next bit is going to depend on what you perceive teaching to be. People inside and outside of education perceive the role of a teacher differently. To me, teaching is about optimising learning because the purpose of teaching is learning. Therefore, as teachers, our duty is to maximise the effectiveness and quality of our instruction in order to optimise learning.

As such, for me, the goal of a low-variance curriculum is to maximise the quality of instruction students are receiving so that they learn more. In the ways I’ve described above, a low-variance curriculum does this by:

• Ensuring that the best practice is captured. If it’s effective, everyone should be doing it.

• Ensuring that the materials put in front of the students are the best they can be. A low-variance curriculum does this through being the product of the collective expertise of several teachers. And - in the manner described above - being subject to incremental adjustments over time which are based on assessment data.

A low-variance curriculum isn't about making teachers less professional; it's about making professional knowledge more portable. Every improvement becomes everyone's improvement. Every refinement benefits every class. That seems to me to be a far better use of time, resources and collective expertise than six teachers independently solving the same problems.

Sharing actually is fun. But more importantly, it's one of the most powerful ways we can improve outcomes for our students

Whether John knew it or not with his iconic rap, he was talking about the teaching of grammar and making a point about the potential for cognitive overload. In fact, one could be forgiven for thinking that it is mere coincidence that World In Motion came out just two years after John Sweller’s seminal research on cognitive load theory.

There we were, now here we are

Grammar teaching is something I’ve changed my mind on and there are loads of reasons for this. I think one of the main ones is expert bias. I think that as an early-career teacher, especially, I was not as conscious as I should have been about how difficult mastering French grammar actually is. Without wanting to be too unfair to my younger self, I was probably quite dismissive of how complex it was. My approach was probably little more than teach them the rules and then they will be able to do it. I used to try and simplify verb conjugations by comparing them to maths “just subtract this and add this”. At the time I thought that made it simpler but for some students maybe it didn’t.

Why I think students struggle with grammar

When learning our first language (more on this later) we are not really taught the grammatical rules, we assimilate them by immersion. Indeed, Noam Chomsky believes this is due to an innate Universal Grammar device we have. In short, we are biologically predisposed to do this in our first language. This does not, however, apply to second language acquisition.

Therefore, students who have not learnt a second language often struggle to learn grammar. I think there are many reasons for this. I’d suggest that one of these is because school is often the first time students are exposed to learning a second language. Ausubel (1968) tells us that a student’s prior learning is the single most important factor influencing their learning. As such, if students have never learnt a language before, they don’t have the prior knowledge to which to attach these rules. It seems axiomatic that - especially if grammar is taught in isolation (more on this later) - that students find it hard to grasp grammar rules. They don’t have a page on which to sketch out the roadmap. On the contrary, once they have some experience of learning a second language, there is a commonly-accepted observation that picking up a third language (a second second foreign language) is easier. Personally, I’ve learnt French as my first second language as well as some Spanish. I’ve also done a tiny bit of Italian. Also, since meeting my wife, who is from the Philippines, about seven years ago, I have tried to learn some Tagalog and also some Cebuano. I got a tutor online for Tagalog during Covid and I remember being in one of the lessons early on where the teacher was explaining some grammatical concepts. It felt like he was explaining it in more detail than I needed. I think I actually told him that it’s OK to move quicker through the grammar points because I felt like I understood it. I’m not sure if there is a research base for it (although a quick Google search suggests there is) but experientially-speaking it feels founded that the knowledge of one language supports the learning of another. It feels almost as if my mind was (and still is) more primed to understanding how languages work.

The two mistakes we typically make when teaching grammar

For me, there are two mistakes made in a lot of curricula (including ones I’ve designed in another life).

Mistake #1: Separating vocabulary and grammar

The first mistake is to isolate vocabulary from grammar or vice-versa. I’ve definitely done this. But now I think it’s just so staggeringly clear that it’s at best sub-optimal and at worst harmful. To illustrate my point, think about your last conversation in your first language. Or indeed any language. In order to communicate meaningfully, we need both lexis and grammar. When was the last time you have a conversation without both? When we learn to speak, we begin by mimicking comprehensible chunks of language, containing both lexis and its friend grammar. If you’ll indulge me with a reference to my favourite show - The Office (US) - I’ve got an analogy through which I’ll attempt to exemplify why deconstructing the component parts is ineffective.

There’s a scene where Kevin - a lovable guy who’s the butt of jokes about his intelligence - presents his idea to buy a BigMac every day and take one ingredient from it each day. His idea is to then reconstruct a BigMac once he has all the ingredients.

Now, putting aside the impracticalities and the nonsense of this for a second, I think there’s a point to be made about (cognitive) effort. With just buying the BigMac and eating that each day, the need to think is removed. It’s ready-to-go. The work has been done for you. But to deconstruct this into its component parts to only then try and piece it back together is much harder work.

Disclaimer: This part contains an attempt to relate grammar to the element interactivity concept of Cognitive Load Theory and I’m conscious I might have butchered my explanation…

Let’s relate this to the planning of a unit on likes and dislikes. Even if we accept that the students have been taught the grammar really well and the vocabulary really well, there are still numerous composite parts involved in getting them to produce an accurate sentence like: J’adore manger au restaurant avec mon ami Kevin (I love eating at the restaurant with my friend Kevin). To break this down into its component parts or elements, would be complex (I’ll demonstrate this later). This relates to a concept called element interactivity. Greg Ashman talks about this often and here uses the example of 5x=45. explains this better than I ever could but I’ll give it a go here because I think it relates to my point about the complexity of grammar. Greg would define this equation as something which is high in element interactivity. That means that there are multiple relationships e.g. 5x = 45 but 45 / 5 = x. It would be incredibly complex to break this down into the many component elements, which all have a relationship with one another. The French sentence above is exactly the same. If you are a French speaker, read the sentence again and think about how many elements there are:

J’adore manger au restaurant avec mon ami Kevin

….

I reckon there are seven. I’ve listed them below and in brackets put the associated grammar point which would need to be applied (and taught and learnt) as prerequisite.

1. Adorer (present tense, 1st person singular, regular ER verb, to conjugate remember that the infinitive is Adorer, remove the ER and put an “e”)

2. Manger (infinitive - if students know “je mange”, they’ll often want to put “mange” here. In addition, the concept of an infinitive is often a tricky one for students to initially grasp when learning the first second language).

3. & 4. à + le = au. I’ve grouped these because they are inextricably linked. There is a lot going on in this one. Students have to know the gender of the noun “restaurant”. And then remember that à + le = au. They might mistakenly write à le. This example is a relatively simple one too because the translation of à + le (or au) lends itself well to English e.g. to the. This grammatical point becomes even more complex in situations where French uses a preposition such as à in sentences where English wouldn’t. For example, jouer au foot.

5. avec. Fairly simple preposition meaning “with”.

6. mon. Possessive adjective meaning “my”. This would require pre-teaching (and learning) of the idea that in French possessive adjectives agree with the noun which is the object of the possession.

7. ami. Students would have to remember the correct word (and agreement) for friend, depending on whether the friend is male or female.

The point I’m trying to make is that we want grammar rules to be applied automatically and quickly, without the need to think. And I’m suggesting that by keeping grammar connected to lexis and then repeatedly exposing students to accurate sentences containing these structures (e.g. the input flooding phase of EPI) before gradually releasing them (e.g. structured production - guided writing - spontaneity) are helping students automatise correct grammar usage. In short, I think the students should mainly be supported to understand grammar not through drills and verb tables but through an explanation followed by repeated exposure in context. In our form of EPI, given that we are an explicit direct instruction school, we explicitly teach the relevant grammar to the students. We do this in two stages. We present it and teach them about it at the beginning of a unit. And then we do it again towards the end after they have seen and heard countless examples of it being used correctly in context. In short, the rationale here is for novices we want to mitigate against cognitive overload. By teaching students the grammar and vocabulary separately, we risk overloading the students’ working memory when it comes to output. In French, students have to think about verb endings, prepositions, articles, noun gender, adjectival agreement, spelling in a different code (accents) in addition to the relevant vocabulary.

There’s an argument here that students may be able to demonstrate grammatical accuracy but cannot always recall the rules. In other words, their procedural knowledge may be superior to their declarative knowledge. This is something we have observed with some of our students, in fact. But I would probably have two counterarguments to this. Firstly, I would guesstimate that there are millions of native speakers of any language you want to name who can use grammar correctly without always being able to explain why. Secondly, I would rather have it this way than the reverse. Indeed, I think that it is much easier to go back and teach the rules and the name of the verb (e.g. Avoir) than fix the issue of accuracy in context. Based on my experience of teaching this way (separating vocabulary and grammar), I would probably hasten to add that having students correctly conjugate verbs in isolation (e.g. fill in verb tables, add endings) successfully does not always transfer to long-term accuracy in the usage of these verbs. My theory for this is that a verb table or verb ending rules have low communicative value and these are therefore not at the front of students’ minds when writing and speaking. When writing and speaking, students are prioritising communication. They want to get their message across. Of course, I am not saying that they shouldn’t be taught verb conjugations, for example, I’m saying that the presentation of verb conjugations and other grammatical structures which exists within the confines of usable chunks of language is - in my experience - more useful to the students’ long-term learning and retention of these than grammar drills out of context.

Mistake #2: Too much, too soon

As John Barnes tells us, you’ve got to hold and give but do it at the right time. I’ll be clear again: I’m not saying don’t teach verb conjugations or any of the other grammatical structures mentioned in the sentence about Kevin we broke down earlier. Or indeed any grammar. What I am saying is think carefully about it.

One way in which you might want to do this is to think about your teaching of verb conjugations. Let’s say you’re about to teach Year 7 a unit on likes and dislikes. A unit in which you want the students to be able to say what they like and dislike (in the present tense, using regular ER verbs) by the end of it, maybe understand a question about what they like and be able to talk about the likes and dislikes of others. The most frequently used subject pronouns in French are:

Je (I)

Tu (You; informal and singular)

Il (He)

On (We (informal); one)

Also, as French teachers will know, when using these pronouns (with the exception of “Tu”) the verb will conveniently end in “e” every time. So not only are these the most frequently used in French, they are also the most simple to conjugate. In our application of EPI, at the start of the unit, we might briefly explain the grammar rule to the students and give them these conjugations. We would then return to this topic towards the end of the unit, once students have had lots of practise using them and understanding them in context. At this point, we would probably show them the additional subject pronouns (nous, vous, ils / elles) and explain the rule again. Over the course of future units, this grammar point will be returned to both through explicit teaching of it and also through its use in context. This approach just makes sense to me. I have found that what typically happens however is that the whole verb is explained and taught out of context right at the start. Students spend time conjugating verbs in tables and drills. And in my experience it doesn’t stick because it has nothing to stick to. By contrast, in the approach I have just explained, where the grammar rules are explained in the greatest detail later in the unit, students are coming to the grammar explanation with prior knowledge of the grammar in context.

Another example might be the preposition phrase “au” from the example sentence. We will teach them the contraction à + le but we also might teach them that when it’s a place “au” means “to the” when the noun is masculine and that it can also mean “in the” when referring to countries. You might argue that this only gets students so far but my argument would be that we are playing the long game and so the depth of the explanations will increase over time. To me, it could be equated to using the analogy of slices of pizza to explain division in early numeracy. The explanation is appropriate for the age and stage. There is an additional point to be made here about saliency. Meaning is more salient to learners of a second language than form (Van Patten 1996, 2004; Ellis, 2006). Therefore, since prepositions have low salience (Cintrón-Valentín and Ellis, 2016), by attaching meaning to such structures we are increasing its noticeability.

Ultimately, I think the biggest shift in my thinking has been recognising that grammatical accuracy is not the starting point of language learning but the product of it. Too often, we act as though students must first master the rules before they can use the language. Increasingly, I have come to believe the reverse is true. Students need to encounter language repeatedly in meaningful contexts, begin to use it, and only then are they truly ready to understand the rules that underpin it. Grammar still matters enormously, but perhaps its role is less that of a blueprint and more that of an explanation for patterns students have already begun to notice.

Which brings me back to John Barnes. You’ve got to hold and give, but do it at the right time. The question isn’t whether grammar should be taught. It absolutely should. The question is how much, when, and to what extent. My concern is that we often ask novice learners to think about too many things at once. We explain every rule, every exception and every conjugation before students have enough language knowledge to which to attach it. If grammar teaching is to support acquisition rather than compete with it, then perhaps our role is not to teach less grammar, but to teach it at the point where students are most likely to notice it, understand it and use it.

I was inspired to write this post after reading ’s brilliant piece on The Myth of the Portable Teacher in which he explains that effective teachers cannot be simply plucked from one school and placed in another and replicate the same results. It got me thinking about my own journey as a teacher and my decision to change schools, in search of a better one.

In 2017, with two years’ experience as a teacher, I joined a British international school in the Sultanate of Oman. The lure was it was a new school (opened in 2016), a tax-free salary, all-year-round sunshine and the opportunity to establish a French department, since the school didn’t have one at that stage. My sister also lived in Abu Dhabi at the time, not far away. As an aside, Oman is a beautiful and welcoming country and I would highly recommend a visit.

I grew a lot as a teacher and a professional there. The school gave me my first leadership role (probably too early on in my career if I am honest) and I learnt a lot about the leadership of others and leading change management. I will always be grateful for that. Teaching can feel like a bit of a baptism of fire as you adapt to the demands and the reality of being of a full-time teacher. I have heard horror stories of how early career teachers (or teachers in general) are treated in schools around the world but I am grateful that the school provided a safe environment for me in which to grow and develop and there’s no doubt that I improved as a teacher.

As a new teacher, my focus felt squarely on my classroom, whereas I found that experienced colleagues would worry less about what was going on in the classroom (because they were more “used to it”) and more about the systems and the environment around them. According to Kraft and Papay (2014) , teachers tend to develop most (and most markedly) in the first few years before sometimes plateauing. One interpretation of this is that this often rapid growth is a product of the demanding nature of the job. It can feel like sink or swim in those early days and those that swim make huge improvements. In their research, Kraft and Papay looked at teacher improvement over time and concluded - as one might expect - that the school environment where teachers work is key to sustained improvement.

Kraft and Papay’s research resonated with me when I first read it in 2020 and probably put me on a path to leaving my previous school. Just as the research suggested, I had reached a point in my career where I felt like I was stagnating (or not improving as rapidly, because things were becoming second-nature) and I was desperate to fight against that. I wanted to keep improving but I had to work hard at it and realised that I would have to do it off my own back. It was around this time that I started engaging in EduTwitter and learning about evidence-informed teaching and learning. I started following Kate Jones, Dylan Wiliam and , amongst many others. I started trying things out in my classroom. In 2021, I began a part-time Masters in Education, focusing on Teaching and Learning. The result of all this was that - just like my more experienced colleagues - I started to pay more attention to the environment around me.

As I got further down the rabbit hole of research-informed practice and notably after completing a Masters module on effective teacher development, I found myself becoming frustrated. At the same time, I felt huge loyalty to my school. In addition, my role there had become more senior and I was enjoying the challenge of this. I was also settled in Oman and had just gotten married. Therefore, rather than leave, I resolved to try and change the environment I was in. I was convinced that the school could benefit from some of the changes I wanted to make: a Teaching and Learning framework around Rosenshine’s Principles, a set of consistent classroom management expectations and evidence-informed, sustained CPD. When I heard speak at ResearchED earlier this year about bringing about schoolwide pedagogical change, I was triggered because I had tried and failed to do this. One of the mistakes I made was to be (loudly and often) one of those “Well, the research says…” people. If you were lucky enough to hear Caiti’s presentation, I’ll save you some time by saying I probably did all the things she says not to do and hardly any of the things she recommended to do. On reflection now, I reckon I probably came across as quite judgemental. I was probably viewed as some who did a great deal of pontificating. I came up against a lot of friction when trying to change things. Some of which I have to take responsibility for. At the time, I couldn’t understand why some of my colleagues did not share my eagerness to improve things at the school and improve all teachers’ practice. To be honest, I still don’t. I do, however, think that I would be more understanding of their resistance now. Teachers are people and they are entitled to choose comfort.

On reflection, and since joining the school I am at now, I am of the opinion that what it comes down to is the right school for you at the right time. And - crucially - being surrounded by like-minded people. When I think about that last point I’m reminded of this graphic I was first introduced to at my current school. I’m not sure of the original source (the picture mentions Max Landsberg and Eric Partaker) but I’ve seen something similar from also:

Looking back now, I was probably in an environment with a combination of people from each of these groups. And - when trying to lead them toward improvement and interact with them in a way which would result in buy-in - I was treating them all the same. It had a particularly negative impact on the disengaged experts. A lot of the teachers who were resistant also probably overvalued their autonomy. Although, autonomy - as and have talked about many times - is a funny word in education and, if we unpick it, it sometimes amounts to just wanting the freedom to act on one’s own volition.

My failed attempt to change the environment I was in opened my eyes to the fact that I needed to move on in order to grow. I realised that the environment I was in was not going to help me continue to grow. These realisations crystalised in my mind my thoughts about the kind of environment I wanted to work in next.

Deciding I needed to leave was difficult because there was a lot of loss involved. I took an initial pay cut, I had to convince my wife to leave a country she had been in for thirteen years and a job she loved, I had to leave all-round sunshine and a certain lifestyle. I was also moving back to the role of classroom teacher after being a Middle Leader. It was also expensive to move to my new school. We paid for our own flights and visa and shouldered all the other relocation expenses ourselves.

When I got to my new school initially, I found things difficult. Adjusting to new norms, new ways of doing things, new students, new expectations. I joined in Term 4 and it was really hard to hit the ground running. The discomfort probably outweighed the comfort initially. I was taking over the classes of colleagues who liked their teacher. I was the “bad guy” who had disturbed the status quo. To add to this, we had made the decision that my wife and son (who was about 10 months at the time) would stay in Oman until the December break so that I could set everything up for their arrival in early January. There were times in those early days where I wondered if I had made the right decision for me and my family. Most of those were whilst on yard duty out in the rain having moved over from sunny Oman.

During this difficult start, three things reassured me that this was the place I wanted to be and that this discomfort was worth it. The first was the support I received and felt. People were patient and understanding with me. Another aspect was the quality of in-house professional learning that was available to me. In fact, this is still the biggest appeal about my school, for me. The third was the fact that I was surrounded - as I saw it - by so many like-minded people and so many experts in their respective fields.

To come full circle, David Didau says - in the article mentioned at the top of this post - that success in one setting doesn’t guarantee success in another. This was so true for me. I had to feel like a worse teacher in order to eventually be a better teacher. I had to embed new habits into my practice. I had to adapt to teaching someone else’s lesson (we use a low-variance shared curriculum at my school). Those things are hard to do but they have made me a better teacher. Dylan Wiliam says that effective leadership is about stopping teachers doing good things, so that they have time to spend on doing even better things. I think improving as a teacher is like this too. You have to sacrifice to improve. That is an incredibly difficult thing to do - as I’ve hopefully articulated in this post - it hinges on being able to persevere through discomfort and accept that there is going to be loss. Improvement always demands a price, the challenge is ensuring the game is worth the candle.

That’s not to say I’ve neglected speaking and writing. In fact, far from it. It’s just that I haven’t been thinking about them in the same obsessive way lately.

In April, we invited Pierrick Hubert to visit our school for some professional learning around VCE French. Some readers might already know Pierrick through his popular YouTube channel for VCE French students, or through his conference presentations and his work as an assessor for VCE French. We reached out to him because, ultimately, we want to improve our students’ outcomes in the written sections of the VCE French exam. As someone new to teaching Year 12 this year, I am committed to learning all I can to support my students. But beyond that, as a department, we wanted to sharpen our own understanding of how writing develops and how it can be taught more effectively.

Writing in languages classrooms - in my experience and from what I have observed over the years - often goes like this:

Teach some vocabulary.

Practise the vocabulary.

Recap some associated grammar.

Ask students to write 100–150 words on the topic.

I like to call this a “race to production”. We sprint towards the final product — the paragraph, the response, the assessment task — often without spending enough time helping students internalise the language and structures that would actually make successful writing possible.

And when students struggle, which many inevitably do, it can be tempting to conclude that they simply “can’t write”, or that they haven’t revised enough vocabulary, or that they need to “be more creative”. We might also try to explain it away by saying something like “they don’t know the grammar”. But I’ve come to understand that the problem is more fundamental than that. By following the process above, we are simply asking them to do too much too soon.

Chris Such talks about reading partly through the lens of its capacity to teach the craft of writing. I really like this and it makes sense to me. The more students read, the more they encounter sentence structures, stylistic choices, cohesive devices, and ways of organising ideas. Reading exposes students to what good writing actually looks and sounds like.

That idea has made me reflect on how writing is sometimes positioned in language classrooms. We often treat writing as the output: the thing students do after the learning has happened. But perhaps writing development depends much more heavily on input than we sometimes acknowledge.

We have moved toward a more structured approach to writing in Middle School French (Years 7 to 9) but I feel that we perhaps need to have a more granular approach to developing students’ writing skills in Senior French classes (Years 10-12).

Students need to repeatedly encounter high-quality examples of the kinds of writing we want them to produce. They need models. They need guided imitation. They need opportunities to notice patterns, borrow them and automatise them. In many ways, this feels less like teaching students to “express themselves” and more like apprenticing them into increasingly sophisticated ways of communicating.

Of the many things that struck me during Pierrick’s session with us - and his session on the use of authentic resources in languages classroom at the LTV Conference last year - was how he advocated for using real texts to help expose students to natural, real-world examples of writing for a purpose.

From my learnings from Such, LeMov and Pierrick Hubert and from Elodie Lyoen and Isabelle Mangeot-Hewison at a recent AFTV Professional Learning event, I have established what I think is a useful model for students to analyse texts in a way which will pay forward for structuring their own writing. This is what I think this looks like:

With my Year 12 class, we now do this with every text we look at. I want the students to be well-rehearsed in unpacking a text because I believe in the potential of that to improve their own writing. When we are then ready to write (more on this next), we use a similar approach to plan our own writing. This approach - again - is a hybrid of what I picked up from Pierrick Hubert and the AFTV session by Elodie Lyoen and Isabelle Mangeot-Hewison. This approach is about helping students structure their writing effectively. But VCE French writing is not simply about producing grammatically correct language. Indeed, since the writing tasks are prompt-based and tied to specific purposes and text types, students also need to learn how to situate themselves within the prompt. In other words, they need to learn how to play a role as an author.

A student might be asked to write as a concerned citizen, a blogger, a journalist, a friend, a traveller, or a participant in some imagined scenario. Success depends partly on their ability to inhabit that role convincingly. Students need to understand not just what to say, but how someone in that situation might actually communicate. As such, we look to break down the prompt like this:

Again, this feels like another way in which reading authentic texts can support writing development. If students are regularly exposed to authentic blogs, articles, emails, forum posts, interviews, or opinion pieces, they gradually build a mental model of how these text types work. They can notice tone, structure, rhetorical choices, and the subtle conventions that distinguish one form of writing from another. They can begin to develop a feel for the “voice” of different kinds of authors. But they won’t do this on their own. They need guidance and a model for doing this. And this is another thing I’ve been working on. This is what this looks like at the moment. This version of it is adapted from a departmental meeting recently where we discussed how we might do this:

This is my attempt at codifying the process of making visible the invisible thinking of the expert (the teacher). Rather than asking students to simply “read the article” and then later produce a similar text independently, the teacher gradually guides the students into noticing how purposeful writing works.

In the I Do phase, the teacher explicitly models the reading process. The article is not treated simply as a comprehension exercise, but as a model text. The teacher thinks aloud while reading, drawing attention to the features that make the text effective. For an informative article, this might include identifying how the introduction positions the reader, how arguments are sequenced, how facts and statistics are integrated or how impersonal expressions are used to create an objective tone. At the same time, the teacher reinforces SSC (sound-symbol correspondence) rules to help with spelling, annotates the text (with translations; with the infinitives of verbs and their translation) and verbalises the kinds of decisions an effective writer makes. The key idea here is that students are not expected to infer these processes independently; the cognitive work is modelled explicitly.

In the We Do phase, we move towards guided participation. Through what I call “baguette reading”, the class collectively engages with the text. Students take it in turns to read and errors are addressed in real time. Features are also identified together and sentences are recast or manipulated to strengthen understanding. Attention remains fixed not only on meaning, but on the craft of writing: Why has the author chosen this phrase? What effect does this structure create? How does this paragraph fulfil the purpose of the text? Students begin rehearsing the thinking processes that skilled readers and writers engage in automatically.

Finally, in the You Do phase, responsibility gradually shifts to students. Through paired reading, students alternate reading sections aloud and provide “verbal annotations” to one another. When they do this, they are essentially articulating their thinking about the text in real time. This stage is important because it forces students to externalise their noticing. Rather than passively recognising features, they begin naming and discussing them independently.

The purpose of this process is to reframe reading as preparation for writing and to continue to increase students’ awareness of the craft of writing. Students are not just reading to extract information; they are reading to study how texts work. Over time, repeated exposure to authentic models helps students build mental representations of different text types, tones, structures, and rhetorical moves. The aim is that when students eventually come to write independently, they are no longer starting from nothing. They have knowledge of language, structures, and authorial choices available to draw upon because they have spent time noticing them first.

This is also another limitation of the “race to production” model. The more I think about it, the more writing seems inseparable from reading. Reading provides the raw material from which writing is built. Students need language to borrow, imitate, adapt, and rehearse before they can realistically be expected to generate it independently. And not just independently, but independently and accurately.

But before that they need practice. But not just any practice. They need targeted practice, scaffolded practice and they need feedback on that practice. I recently had the pleasure of seeing speak about gapless instruction. David is a great speaker and he said many brilliant things. One of the brilliant things he said was that “practice makes permanent”. David used this phrase to underscore the importance of students being ready to practise. He says that before students practise, accuracy must be guaranteed. And accuracy is guaranteed because students have rehearsed correct forms through modelling and guided construction.

This means breaking writing tasks down into its component parts and having students complete independent practice in short bursts. It is the antithesis of the race to production, it’s more like a casual Sunday-morning amble to production. I recently had an extra (reserve/cover lesson) with Year 7 English. For context, the lesson was a practice writing piece lesson so the students will have been working towards this piece in the previous lessons but had the misfortune of having me in front of them for this actual practice lesson. I really enjoyed it because I got to see how the English department at my school do exactly this. There are a number of benefits to this approach. The two that spring to mind are time management and the idea of helping to ensure accuracy and slow down practice so that misconceptions and errors are not fossilised. The process this lesson used to help students write a persuasive piece looked something like this:

And then the students’ independent practice in the lesson for each of these sections of their piece was broken down into 6 to 8 minutes on each section, with a couple of minutes editing time at the end of the whole piece. The benefit of this deconstructed approach is that the teacher - despite having released the students to independent practice - can circulate and check-in with the students and give whole-class feedback (positive and negative) on what they are seeing. That is not only powerful but it serves to help stop the fossilisation of bad writing habits in its tracks.

The more I reflect on all of this, the more I suspect that writing is less like a performance and more like an apprenticeship.

Students do not become confident writers because we repeatedly ask them to write independently. They become confident writers because they spend time immersed in texts, noticing patterns, rehearsing structures, imitating models, receiving feedback, and gradually internalising the moves that effective writers make.

Perhaps this is what reading instruction has been teaching me all along.

Before students can write well, they first need something worth writing from.

If I reflect on when I first started teaching, I think I was a bit of a clown.

I was probably too concerned with being liked. I wanted the students to have fun in my lessons. I wanted them to find me funny. I thought the way to engage students was to make things fun. It was fun at all costs. Even at the expense of learning, probably.

Then, I swung the other way.

I became interested in educational research. I started thinking about proxies for learning. I realised that perhaps I hadn’t always been doing right by my students. So I corrected hard and told myself that learning always had to come first.

And so I became stricter. More serious. More focused. Or at least, that’s what I thought I was doing. In reality, when aiming for warm-strict, I was probably more strict than warm. It was less Teach like a Champion and more Teach like a Chump-ion.

There was one class in particular that needed a lot of redirection.
And over time, I became… permanently grumpy.

Because the “strict” version of me didn’t really smile.
Didn’t really joke.
Didn’t really show much personality at all.

And so, understandably, that’s how they saw me:

Grumpy teacher.
Probably a bit of a grumpy person too.

Through various means, indirectly, I got that feedback indirectly and it stayed with me.

At the same time, something didn’t quite add up.

My senior classes were different.

With them, I was myself.

I made jokes. I played with the tone of my voice. I told jokes. I used memes. I tried to make things engaging and, yes, even fun.

And I enjoyed those lessons more. And their feedback (and various other metrics) suggested I was still being an effective teacher.

Which raised an uncomfortable question:

Why was I giving my older students something that my younger ones weren’t getting?

So this year, I made a decision.

To be that teacher.

The one who makes the (admittedly average) Dad jokes.
The one who varies their tone and gets a bit animated.
The one who tries to make the content land with a bit of joy.

In short: to be myself. To teach in a way I find enjoyable.

One small thing, I’ve been trialling with one Year 7 class is to talk about:

Being “Dans le bus.”

It’s become shorthand for: come with me on this.
Stay with the explanation. Follow the thinking. Let’s go somewhere together.

And I’ve realised that getting students “dans le bus” isn’t just about clarity of instruction.

It’s about whether they actually want to get on.

When I was constantly playing the role of the strict teacher, I was managing behaviour but the cost was huge. I was stressed. I was tired. I wasn’t happy. There were times I was apprehensive about going to teach that class. And obviously, we can have challenging classes and students can be challenging, but I also don’t think I was setting myself (or them) up for success by making the choices that I made about how (and who) I was going to be with them.

Being that person in the classroom was exhausting. It didn’t feel natural.
And it didn’t bring students with me.

Now, I’m calmer. I enjoy teaching more.

And not because the expectations are lower. They aren’t.
But because I’m not trying to maintain a version of myself that doesn’t fit.

I’m not acting.
I’m just teaching whilst being me. I’m managing situations in a way which fits with my personality.

This has probably taken me longer than it should have to figure out.

Partly because I care—perhaps too much—about how I’m perceived.
Partly because, early in my career, I was influenced by colleagues who commanded respect in a very different way: strong, authoritative, uncompromising.

And that worked for them.

But it isn’t me.

A former colleague used to say:

“On fait ce qu’on peut.”
We do what we can.

Right now, I think mine is closer to:

“On fait ce qu’on est.”
We do what we are.

And it turns out that when I’m being myself—when there’s a bit of humour, a bit of warmth, a bit of life in the room— more students are willing to get dans le bus.

And once they’re on, we can actually go somewhere.

It is essential we hear from practising teachers in education as often as possible and it is something I feel passionate about. Therefore, I found myself frantically nodding along in agreement with ’s tweet this week:

In its own (very) small way, that is my aspiration for this blog too: a blog about French teaching, for French teachers, by a French teacher.

So, as a practising teacher with four classes — including a Year 12 class (equivalent to Year 13 in the UK) — it matters to me that I keep that promise.

And as recently as my last lesson with Year 12, I’ve been exploring something new: the use of narratives to support explanations of French grammar and, crucially, to make them stick.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I shall begin…

It starts with a story

It all began with Daniel T. Willingham.

If you haven’t read Why Students Don’t Like School, I’d highly recommend it. In the book, Willingham argues that stories are “psychologically privileged”. In other words, narratives are easier for the mind to process, organise, and remember than abstract rules.

That idea stayed with me.

Chapter 1: Beaucoup Loves De

One fine day, Raija Chapman posted in the French Teachers Australia Facebook group about a simple idea seen on another group: to help students remember that it is always beaucoup de, a teacher had said, “Beaucoup loves de.”

Raija then had the excellent idea of asking ChatGPT to turn this into a story.

Here’s a snapshot (the full version is linked below).

Isn’t it brilliant?

The first time I used it, I combined it with translation and reading aloud, and re-taught the underlying rule. At the time, this was a persistent error for my Year 11 class. I’d estimate that around a quarter of the group were making it regularly in extended writing.

And despite repeated explanations, it kept coming back.

So my initial thinking was that this can’t hurt.

Then I remembered Willingham’s point about narratives and started to wonder if it might actually help.

Now, nearly a year on, I can say that I’m seeing beaucoup de (or d’) far more consistently than before.

With one important caveat: I only see evidence of this when students both write extended pieces and choose to use beaucoup. So the data is, inevitably, a little patchy.

That said, something seems to have shifted.

Chapter 2: The Many Lives of De

Fast forward to this year.

My (excellent) Year 12 class seem to be constantly grappling with de:

• omitting it after verbs which require it (e.g. refuser (de) partir)

• using du / de la where it should be de, or vice-versa

Once again, I found myself re-teaching and re-explaining.

And once again, the evidence was clear: it wasn’t sticking.

As an aside, I suspect part of the issue is low salience: prepositions are easy to overlook. Gianfranco Conti has written insightfully about this. But even if these are “small” errors, they matter.

For two main reasons:

• Students’ sense of success matters. Repeated errors — even minor ones — chip away at confidence.

• As David Didau reminds us, practice makes permanent. If students repeatedly get something wrong, that’s what sticks.

So this time, I decided to lean fully into the idea of narrative.

I asked ChatGPT to create a story: a day in the life of “De”, where each section represented a different grammatical role.

The result?

A character constantly being called upon to do different jobs:

• linking nouns

• introducing infinitives

• appearing after quantities

• stepping in when plural adjectives come first

Each “chapter” is followed by targeted slides where I check for understanding in different ways.

One unexpected bonus: a student has taken ownership of reading the story aloud each lesson which has given it even more presence in the classroom.

Below is an example of a particular section from the story and an example of one of the slides that followed it. You can find a link to the full story below.

So… is it working?

What’s striking, at least for now, is the student response.

My Year 12 students — who are generally quite attuned to their own learning — have already said that the story really helps them remember the grammar. They were already asking me on Thursday what the next story will be about. I told them I was hesitant to “overdo it” with stories. But they pleaded with me. If I do end up relenting, I’m thinking it might be about “bien/bon and mal/mauvais”.

As an instructional technique for consolidating grammar teaching, part of me thinks that the jury is still out. Or perhaps I need to track their learning and application of it over time a little more closely.

It’s one thing for a story to feel memorable in the moment; it’s another for it to translate into sustained accuracy in writing. The proof, as they say, will be in the pudding.

In the meantime, I’m hopeful for a happy ending…

Link for stories.

This was my second ResearchEd and it was even better than the first. In fact, with over 700 attendees, it was the biggest ever in Australia and one of the biggest ResearchEDs in the world.

The thing I love most about attending conferences like this or just engaging with research in general is the way in which ideas or thoughts or others can quietly rearrange the way you think about something you deal with every day.

I attended keynotes by David Didau and Bron Ryrie-Jones and also some brilliant talks by , Reid Smith, Katie Roberts-Hall and Sasha Laurence and Jessica Colleu Terradas.

I took something away from them all. As someone who tried - but ultimately failed - to change the professional learning culture in one of my previous schools, Caiti Wade’s session was particularly inspiring but also very triggering.

Another session that stuck an immense chord with me was Jessica Colleu Terradas’. Jess presented on her doctoral research at Australian Catholic University which explores spelling development and the role of morphological knowledge in literacy. I chose to attend this session because I was really keen to see how this could be applied to French spelling. I was also excited to learn that Jess is French and so would have a better handle than most on this. I managed to catch her at the end of the session and I look forward to connecting with her more on this topic.

As I listened to Jess talk through her research, my mind was constantly thinking about spelling in French.

It is something I have not really given much consideration to before, despite it being one of those perennial frustrations in the French classroom. Students often experience it as arbitrary. Teachers correct it endlessly. And progress can feel frustratingly slow.

There was one key idea in particular I took from Jess’ presentation. As put it, ResearchED is “smart people saying smart things”.

The smart thing the smart person (Jess) said in this case was that spelling is not a single skill.

Rather, it is the coordination of several linguistic systems.

As Jess explained, when students spell a word, they are drawing simultaneously on phonology (sounds), orthography (letter patterns), morphology (how words are built), and lexis (their stored knowledge of words and meanings).

In other words, spelling is not simply memorisation.

It is a kind of linguistic problem-solving. Kind of like this below.

But when you start looking at French spelling through this lens, something interesting happens. Features that appear confusing at first start to reveal an underlying logic.

Phonology plays an obvious role. And as I have mentioned before students need to map the correct sounds onto graphemes. French complicates this relationship somewhat—many letters are silent and the same sound can be represented in several ways—but the sound system still provides an important starting point.

Orthography matters too. Over time, through repeated exposure to written language, learners begin to internalise the statistical patterns of the writing system. In an early iteration of the French curriculum at Michaela, Barry Smith and colleagues - as part of their CUDDLES process - would get the students to identify the consonants and vowel combinations and silent letters in words. Such techniques are about helping build students’ awareness of French orthographical patterns and develop stable mental representations of the language in memory.

But the aspect that particularly caught my attention in Jessica’s work was morphology: the study of how words are built from meaningful units such as roots, prefixes, and suffixes.

Morphological awareness helps learners recognise relationships between words. Once students see these relationships, spelling can start to feel less arbitrary.

French provides many examples of this.

As I was reflecting on how Jess’ work applies to French, it occurred to me that one of the reasons French spelling can feel strange to learners is that it often preserves morphological relationships between words, even when the pronunciation changes.

Here are some examples of this:

Petit → Petite

One can be forgiven for thinking that the t in petit appears unnecessary. It is not pronounced.

But the moment the word changes form, we preserve and pronounce that consonant:

• petit

• petite

• petitesse

Jess’ discussion got me thinking about the base morphemes of words. And if we look at this group of words, the base morpheme is preserved across the word family. What looked like a silent letter turns out to be a clue about how the words are connected.

Grand → Grandeur

Similarly:

• grand

• grande

• grandeur

The d is silent in grand, but it reappears in related forms. The spelling signals the relationship between the adjective and the noun.

Chant → Chanter → Chanteur

Another neat family:

• chant

• chanter

• chanteur

• chanson

Notwithstanding the slight shift, the spelling maintains the shared root related to singing. Once students recognise the base chant, a whole network of words becomes easier to decode and spell.

Dent → Dentiste → Dentaire

Another example:

• dent

• dentiste

• dentaire

The spelling of the base remains stable even as suffixes are added. Recognising the root helps students spell unfamiliar words such as dentaire even if they have never written them before.

And this insight matters for teaching.

Teaching students these root patterns and helping them notice them does more than help students spell more accurately. It can also strengthen both reading and writing.

When students encounter unfamiliar words in a text, recognising the base can help them infer meaning. A learner who knows dent can often make a good guess at the meaning of dentiste or dentaire, even if they have never encountered those words before.

At the same time, morphological awareness expands students’ capacity to express themselves.

Instead of relying on a single familiar word, they begin to access a family of related expressions. A student who knows grand may later encounter grandeur. A student who knows chanter may recognise chanteur.

By knowing the adjective from the which the noun derives and vice-versa, students are able to potentially express the same idea in different ways.

And that matters.

Because one of the hallmarks of more advanced language use is precisely this flexibility: the ability to vary expression, to choose between related words, and to adapt language to context.

In that sense, helping students notice morphological families is doing more than improving spelling.

It is quietly expanding the range and sophistication of what they can say in writing or in speech.

Perhaps spelling errors, then, are not simply mistakes to correct.

They are signals.

Signals about what students have—or have not yet—noticed about the structure of the language.

And if we want students to become confident readers and writers of French, teaching students those structures may just be one of the most impactful things we can do.

Since some excellent professional learning on the tenets of stoicism from a senior leader at my school, I have been trying to live by some of its main teachings. One of these is to focus on what you can control and do your best to control these controllables. So, in preparation, I spent some time looking through the lesson. I reached out to the Head of Prep–5 Maths and printed off the seating plan. I also got there as early as I could, rushing from assembly.

I also had a clear plan to teach some of the routines I use with my own classes. And all things considered, I think they landed pretty well. In fact, I was buoyed and energised leaving the room and – as corny as it may sound – had the feeling that something magical had occurred. And I’m putting this relative success down to the power of routines and what I’m going to call “seasoning the lesson”. I’m going to attempt to explain what I did.

Putting the onions in the beans

I listened to an episode of the podcast Stick to Football the other day. Before the episode begins in earnest, the hosts tend to have an informal chat about a range of topics. On this particular episode the conversation turned to baked beans on toast. The hosts were discussing how delicious and yet how simple a snack (or meal?) it is.

A question came up about whether you add anything in the beans. One of the hosts – Roy Keane – said that he keeps them as they are. Some of the others mentioned that they add cheese or butter to the beans. Ian Wright then said that he fries onions until caramelised and then puts them in the beans and it’s delicious. The others weren’t convinced.

The discussion also reminded me of how my sister and I, as teenagers making our own lunch at home, used to put cheese or whatever condiments we could find into our Super Noodles.

Bear with me, I’ll get to my point…

At Clarendon, we have a shared curriculum. And, for a few different reasons, it works really effectively for us. Most teachers, especially new ones, don’t have to plan lessons. But they are asked to intellectually prepare for them.

At the risk of comparing ready-made lesson plans to plain, old (yet delicious) beans on toast, what I try to do with this time is think about the moments where I can “enhance” the lesson. Make it jump from the page. Bring it to life. What I essentially try to do here is weave in what some people call engagement norms.

Greg Ashman talks about how great primary school teachers are at this and about channelling one’s inner primary teacher.

I sang the answers to their homework

At one point the students told me that their regular maths teacher sometimes sings the answers to their homework. I suspect they may have been testing me.

But I did it anyway. I played along.

They seemed to enjoy it and I didn’t mind. Although my colleagues in the Performing Arts department probably would have.

I also read some answers (they were all just numbers) in French because… reasons.

I taught them some of my usual routines

One of the routines I taught them revolves around the word pamplemousse.

It’s worth noting here that these students don’t know French. We start French in Year 7.

As you’ll know, this word means grapefruit in French.

I told them it’s my favourite French word. That might not strictly be true, but I do like the way it sounds. And the students seem to enjoy it too. My theory is that they’re intrigued by how strange it sounds compared to its English equivalent. Grapefruit is blunt and functional. Pamplemousse sounds like something the BFG and the other giants would eat.

In my classes, pamplemousse is my call for attention.

When I say it, students are expected to be silent. They put everything down immediately, sit up straight, and look at me.

It’s essentially the same idea as SLANT, if you’re familiar with that technique. But there’s something about using an unexpected French word that adds a small moment of novelty.

And novelty, used sparingly, goes a long way. Especially when it’s last period and especially when the teacher is a non-specialist.

I also taught them my routine for answering questions from the board.

Sometimes I feel that we don’t always give students the thinking time a question requires and we move straight to a ten-second countdown. So what I like to do – for questions where the students have some reading, some thinking, and then some writing to do – is give them a bit of time before I start the countdown.

The time is usually 20 or 30 seconds. And I narrate this. I say something like: “OK, you now have 30 seconds to read the question, have a think, and write your answer.”

And then I start my countdown. But with a small twist.

I ask the students to hover their boards.

Boards are written. Boards are ready. But they stay face down, just below chin level, until the final moment. As I count down, I remind them to hover their boards. I also remind them to hold the board with two hands. It slows the whole thing down just enough to keep everyone together.

Ten, hover, nine, hover, eight, hover…etc.

Then “Show me”.

There is something satisfying about thirty boards appearing at exactly the same time. It is also very efficient for checking answers.

Sometimes I counted in French as well.

What struck me afterwards was how little these things cost. A slightly different countdown. A strange French word. Some questionable singing.

None of it changes the core of the lesson. The maths is still the maths.

But small routines create rhythm. And rhythm makes a classroom feel purposeful.

Sometimes the difference between a flat lesson and an energetic one is nothing more complicated than a grapefruit. 🍊

I used to think reading was silent. Twenty-five students, heads down, eyes scanning the page.

Now, if you walk past my classroom during a reading lesson, you’ll hear 25 voices saying the same sentence in French.

Together.

Out loud.

Repeatedly.

It is, objectively, quite loud.

If my former self walked past my current classroom, he might quietly close the door and assume behaviour management had collapsed entirely.

But something much more interesting is happening.

Because reading is not just visual.

It is phonological.

And it is deeply vulnerable to interference from English.

The Brain Cannot Help Itself

When students see a French word, they do not encounter it innocently. Their brain immediately tries to pronounce it using English sound rules. It is automatic.

And also completely unhelpful.

Students see beaucoup and their brain offers something like “boo-coop.”

They see ils parlent and pronounce the s and the ent with great confidence.

They see fils and bravely pronounce the l.

Students will pronounce every silent letter with the confidence of someone who has absolutely never been betrayed by French before.

Their brain is doing exactly what it was trained to do.

Just in the wrong language.

This phenomenon is called L1 interference. It’s a perennial battle for languages teachers. And it is one we have to win.

Researchers such as Linnea Ehri have shown that fluent reading depends on forming secure connections between spelling, sound, and meaning: a process known as orthographic mapping. Similarly, Charles Perfetti argues that fluent readers possess high-quality lexical representations in which written form, pronunciation, and meaning are tightly integrated.

If the pronunciation attached to a word is inaccurate, the representation itself becomes unstable.

Students are not just mispronouncing words.

They are building fragile mental representations of the language.

And fragile representations create fragile readers.

The Problem with How We Often Teach Reading

For years, I did what most of us were trained to do:

• Pre-teach vocabulary

• Students read independently

• Answer comprehension questions

• Review answers

• Move on

It felt productive.

Students could often answer the questions. They could locate information. They could even, with effort, explain the text.

But on the rare occasion they were asked to read a sentence or the more frequent occasions where they were asked to read an answer their pronunciation was hesitant, their reading was slow and their confidence was fragile.

And when faced with unfamiliar texts — especially at senior level — the cognitive strain was obvious.

I had to confront an uncomfortable possibility.

They weren’t reading French.

They were decoding it.

Reading vs Decoding: The IKEA Problem

Decoding is slow. Effortful. Fragile.

It looks like this:

Students move word by word.
They translate constantly.

They subvocalise inaccurately.
They hesitate.

Decoding is the linguistic equivalent of assembling IKEA furniture without the instructions. You might get there eventually, but it is exhausting, and you remain deeply uncertain about the stability of the final product.

Reading is different.

Reading is automatic.

The brain recognises patterns instantly. Words are processed in phrases. Syntax feels familiar. Meaning emerges with far less effort.

Fluency, as Norman Segalowitz explains, depends on automatising bottom-up processes like word recognition so that attention can be directed towards meaning.

We see this in first language acquisition. Children do not begin by analysing grammar. They experience thousands upon thousands of meaningful, repeated encounters with language. Over time, patterns become automatised.

Eventually, reading becomes effortless.

The same principle applies in the second language classroom.

When students encounter familiar structures repeatedly — in listening, in reading aloud, in structured input — the brain begins to recognise rather than decode.

Cognitive load decreases.

Fluency increases.

And fluency is built through repeated, accurate encounters with language.

Reading Through an EPI Lens

Through a combination of some excellent Professional Learning at my school around FASE reading and classroom (more about the former later) and applying the principles of Extensive Processing Instruction (EPI), I began to rethink reading entirely.

Reading is not separate from listening.
It is not separate from speaking.
It is not preparation for acquisition.

It is acquisition.

Reading provides structured, repeated exposure to high-frequency language in visible form. It strengthens the connection between orthography, phonology, and meaning.

But this only happens if reading is done in a way that builds automaticity.

This is where FASE reading becomes central.

FASE Reading: Fluent, Accountable, Social, Expressive

In our school, we are lucky enough to have a whole-school focus on reading. And in particular FASE reading: Fluent, Accountable, Social, Expressive.

I am going to quickly breakdown each of these elements of FASE reading. But I want to make it clear that I don’t believe these are stylistic preferences. I think they are way more important than that.

Fluent

Fluency is not speed.

It is effortlessness.

Through repeated, guided reading, students begin to recognise familiar structures automatically. They stop assembling meaning piece by piece and begin recognising patterns as wholes.

This reduces cognitive load. Working memory is freed. Reading becomes smoother, more stable, more confident.

Fluency is what allows comprehension to occur reliably.

Accountable

Everyone reads.

Everyone tracks the text.

No one disappears.

I use what is traditionally called popcorn reading.

But in my classroom, we call it baguette reading (because…reasons…).

I simply say, “Baguette, Amélie,” and Amélie reads.

The baguette is unpredictable.

The baguette keeps everyone honest.

It is light-hearted, but cognitively powerful. Every student remains engaged because participation is always possible.

Silent reading can look impressive.

But it is impossible to tell whether students are reading French, reading English, or thinking about lunch.

Baguette reading makes reading audible. And you can never have enough opportunities in a languages classroom to hear your students speak.

We also do something I call “paired reading” where students - in pairs - to read a sentence to their partner and translate it. During this activity, I like to get around the class and listen out for common pronunciation mistakes which I will go over with the whole class afterwards.

If you have ever taught EPI, these activities are just the tip of the iceberg. EPI is full of activities such as these where students are reading aloud, either to one another in pairs or to the rest of the class.

Social

Reading is not treated as a private act.

It is communal.

We read in chorus. We share pacing. We shape pronunciation together.

There is something powerful about 25 voices producing accurate French simultaneously.

It normalises effort. It reduces anxiety. It builds collective confidence.

Language is social.

Reading should be too.

Expressive

Reading is not monotone decoding.

It is expressive.

We attend to rhythm.
To phrasing.
To intonation.

Students learn that punctuation shapes meaning. That sentences have contour. That French has music (see here for an amazing podcast in French on just that topic).

This expressive dimension strengthens the connection between written and spoken language.

Students are not simply recognising symbols.

They are producing language.

Why Reading Aloud Changes Everything

Silent reading has its place. But in the acquisition phase, reading aloud plays a critical role.

When students read aloud, they strengthen the mapping between:

• Written forms

• Sound patterns

• Meaning

This coherent mapping allows the brain to store language in a stable, retrievable form.

Without this, students often develop inaccurate internal sound representations. These inaccuracies interfere with listening comprehension, speaking fluency, and reading confidence.

Reading aloud helps align the system.

Over time, familiar structures are recognised instantly.

Decoding gives way to reading.

What This Looks Like in Practice

A typical reading sequence in my classroom might look like this:

I model the text. Students listen.

We read together in chorus.

We break the text into phrases.

“Baguette, Chloé.”

Students inevitably make mistakes and when they do it is important to correct these.

Depending on the error or the student, I might correct pronunciation gently but given what I have already said about the fossilisation of pronunciation mistakes, I think it is important to do it immediately. This is a tough one to get right because you want to build confidence. One way of softening the blow to the student involved is to get the whole class to repeat the mispronounced word correctly after you in choral response.

In any case, the goal is not performance.

The goal is automaticity.

The Payoff

Something shifts when students can read fluently.

They approach new texts with less hesitation.

They process longer sentences without panic.

They recognise familiar patterns instantly.

They trust their ability to understand.

By the time they encounter complex senior-level texts, their cognitive resources should no longer consumed by decoding. They are available for interpretation, inference, and meaning.

Reading becomes what it was always meant to be.

Not a puzzle to be solved.

Not a test to be passed.

But a means through which to acquire new language.

Thank you

Before I get into today’s post, a quick thank you.

Thank you to everyone who’s subscribed, read, shared, or taken the time to speak to me or message me about these posts so far. And a special thank you to who has very generously recommended the blog to others. Judging by the recent wave of new subscribers, many of you are here thanks to her. I really appreciate it.

This post is a slight diversion from my usual “How I teach…” theme. Not because classroom practice has become less important to me — if anything, the opposite — but because I’ve been thinking more and more about the conditions that make any of that practice effective in the first place.

In particular: self-efficacy, motivation, and the order in which they actually develop in language learning.

Self-efficacy is not confidence or motivation

Self-efficacy comes from the work of Albert Bandura and refers to a learner’s belief that they can successfully carry out a specific task. This specificity matters. Self-efficacy is not the same as feeling confident, enjoying a subject, or seeing yourself as a “language person”. In fact, the latter would probably be self-concept, rather than self-efficacy.

A student can like languages and still have low self-efficacy. They can appear motivated — compliant, enthusiastic, engaged — while quietly expecting to fail as soon as tasks become difficult, fast, or public.

Bandura defines self-efficacy as our belief in our ability to succeed through our own actions. But crucially, that belief doesn’t come from any success. It comes from mastery experiences, where success is achieved - and challenges overcome - as a direct result of one’s own actions.

That distinction matters. Bandura calls mastery experiences the most influential factor in self-efficacy. But, for a mastery experience to influence self-efficacy, students need to feel that there were obstacles to overcome and must see the link between their eventual success and their actions, skills and knowledge. Therefore, self-efficacy is our confidence that we can achieve success in a challenging task as a clear result of our actions and our knowledge and skills. And if learners cannot make this link or do not have this confidence, they can lack the inclination to attempt a task.

I reckon the part about mastery experiences contributing to self-efficacy is widely accepted. As I mentioned in my last post, Pink (2009) also talks about achievement preceding motivation, which is arguably similar. But I’d suggest that it is not as widely understood that mastery experiences must include challenge and students must see the link between their actions, skills and knowledge and their success.

In short, where self-efficacy is concerned, belief follows evidence. Students don’t develop self-efficacy because we tell them they can do it; they develop it because they experience themselves doing it.

This distinction is often blurred in discussions about motivation. Motivation is frequently treated as something we must generate first — through engagement, novelty, or fun — in order to get students to try. But without self-efficacy, motivation is fragile. It collapses under cognitive load.

We’re all motivated when we’re sat on the couch

As some of you might know, I’ve done a bit of running in the last 10 years or so. I’ve ran a few 10ks and half-marathons and I ran the Paris marathon in 2019. I ran 5k every day for a year for the Children’s Cancer Research Fund. It’s something I find it really hard. For one, I don’t really have the typical build for long distance running. When I first got into it, I came across David Goggins. For those of you who don’t know him, he’s a former U.S. Navy Seal and ultra-endurance athlete and motivational speaker. He’s written two books about his journey which I’d really recommend. He speaks really frankly and candidly about motivation and how most people don’t achieve their full potential because they allow themselves to be limited by their mind.

I heard him once talk on a podcast about motivation being fleeting and temporary. And he gave the analogy of being sat on a couch, all nice and cosy, and watching someone on the TV complete endurance challenges or perhaps a marathon. He says that in that comfortable state, it’s easy to feel motivated to be able to take on something like that and to convince yourself that you’re able to do it. Your comfortable state in that moment can almost trick you into believing that you are capable of doing that. It might even compel you to sign up for a marathon. But when you actually have to confront doing it or beginning to train for it, your little friend motivation has long gone and you’re on your own.

In unrelated news, I read a while ago that the Sydney Marathon had become the seventh Abbott World Marathon Major. I’ll be honest, I couldn’t name the other six. But that detail, combined with being very comfortable on my couch, somehow felt like sufficient motivation to enter the 2026 ballot.

The appeal was the ballot itself. I could sign up without really committing, collect the quiet satisfaction of “having a go”, and leave the actual decision in the hands of fate. Rejection would have been ideal: proof of intent without consequences.

Dear Reader, fate disagreed. I got a place.

Languages are especially vulnerable

Language learning places unusually high demands on learners.

Research in second language acquisition consistently shows that speaking, for example, is a high-load, real-time skill, requiring the coordination of phonology, vocabulary, syntax, and working memory. When learners are asked to produce language before these systems are sufficiently developed, failure is not a sign of poor attitude or low effort: it is predictable.

Predictable failure is devastating for self-efficacy.

Compounding this is the potential for students to develop - as alluded to earlier - low self-concept as a language learner. Students can begin to categorise themselves as either “good at languages” or “not”.

Not only does this expose the fragility and instability of any perceived motivation, it also helps explain why disengagement in languages is so often misdiagnosed as a motivation problem. In many cases, it would be more helpful to view motivation as a rational response to repeated experiences of low success and excessive challenge.

Motivation follows belief

Work on motivation consistently highlights competence as a key driver of sustained effort. Learners are motivated when they experience progress and feel that success is within their control.

In languages, this means motivation is more reliably produced as an outcome of good instruction than as a prerequisite for it. When tasks are sequenced so that students can understand, process, and succeed — particularly in receptive skills — willingness to persist increases naturally.

This aligns with research on listening, which shows that learners often disengage not because listening is boring, but because it feels opaque and uncontrollable. When success becomes predictable, effort becomes worthwhile.

A personal detour: when engagement wasn’t enough

When I first started teaching, I was determined to make lessons fun.

We danced. We sang. We played games. I worked really hard to prioritise what I believed mattered most: engagement.

Students looked busy. They smiled. Lessons felt energetic. From the outside, things appeared to be going well. Had I been asked, I would have said that my students were motivated.

In 2017, I had a bit of a lightbulb moment.

I’d just started at a new school, and around the same time I began using Twitter more deliberately to explore educational research and improve my practice. That’s when I came across What Makes Great Teaching (Coe et al., 2014). Coe’s discussion of “poor proxies for learning” hit me like a bus.

If I’d been playing Poor Proxy Bingo, I would have had a full house.

Enjoyment. Engagement. Confidence. Busyness. All things I had been using — sincerely — as evidence that learning was happening. What Coe made uncomfortably clear was that these indicators can look impressive while telling us very little about whether students are actually getting better at the thing we’re trying to teach.

That realisation forced me to confront something I’d been avoiding. My lessons were often engaging, but they weren’t always building the kind of success that leads to self-efficacy. Students were entertained, but they weren’t consistently accumulating evidence that they could understand and use the language independently.

And without that evidence, motivation — no matter how lively the lesson — was always going to be shallow.

What this means for language teaching

Although this isn’t a “How I teach…” post in the narrow sense, it underpins every instructional decision I write about.

High success rates are not about lowering expectations. They’re about sequencing difficulty intelligently: receptive before productive, models before independence, and tasks that reduce unnecessary cognitive load so students can focus on meaning.

When students experience repeated, genuine success, self-efficacy grows.

Belief, in language learning, is not the starting point.

It is the result of good teaching.

A race to production

For a long time, I thought I was teaching speaking.

Students did role-plays. They answered questions. They “had a go”. I set up pair work, circulated, encouraged, corrected gently. To the casual observer, it probably looked fine.

But I felt that something was off.

A chasm seemed to be forming. The same chasm that forms when discovery learning (or whatever it calls itself these days) is used in favour of explicit instruction. Using this approach is tantamount to privileging the already privileged, as Carl Hendrick said recently. The students that did OK or even thrived were usually the confident ones, the ones with good memories or strong literacy skills. Many others froze or - in the case of pair work - waited for their partner to do the heavy lifting. And despite all that “practice”, progress in speaking was slow, fragile, and uneven.

What I eventually realised — thanks largely to Extensive Processing Instruction (EPI) — is that I wasn’t really teaching speaking at all. I was mostly just asking for it. And I was asking too soon. Like someone you barely know asking for a lift to the airport.

Speaking is not a skill you practise into existence

One of the most persistent myths in languages teaching is that speaking develops primarily through speaking practice.

It feels intuitive: want students to speak better? Get them speaking more.

The problem is that speaking is a cognitively demanding, real-time skill, requiring learners to retrieve vocabulary, apply grammatical knowledge, and articulate meaning under time pressure (Levelt, 1989; DeKeyser, 2007).

For novice learners especially, this is cognitively brutal.

What is more, such an approach was probably subjecting my students to what Pink (2009) calls excessive challenge: repeated exposure to a task which is too difficult. As you can probably imagine, this leads to learners becoming demotivated and possibly anxious regarding tasks of this nature.

EPI forced me to confront an uncomfortable truth: speaking quality is constrained by the quality of underlying language processing.

The Modelling phase and why it is crucial

At the heart of EPI is the Modelling (or Awareness-Raising) phase. This is where students are exposed to a great deal of high-quality, carefully structured input from the teacher.

This input is composed of rich, salient, meaningful language that is comprehensible, repeated, and purposeful. For this phase, I often go back to Dylan Viñales’ magnificient blog post.

In this phase, students listen, repeat in a controlled way, and practise identifying and experimenting with the phonological features of the language they are hearing. They are not expected to speak spontaneously. Their role is to listen, notice patterns in sound and form, and gradually build stable connections between sounds and meaning.

The more I’ve leaned into this phase, the more it’s reminded me of something obvious but often overlooked in languages teaching: how we learn our first language.

Parallels with first language acquisition

Before children speak, they listen a lot.

They are immersed in enormous amounts of natural, authentic input. Through this exposure, they begin to attune to the sounds of the language, recognise recurring words and phrases, map meaning onto form, and build expectations about how language works.

All of this happens long before they are capable of producing language themselves.

In many second language classrooms, we reverse this sequence. We ask students to speak almost immediately, often after minimal exposure.

EPI resists this reversal.

By flooding students with quality input in the modelling phase, we give them time to develop awareness of sounds, structures, and meaning before we ever ask them to retrieve language under pressure.

One of my current research interests is exploring how and to what extent insights from first language acquisition can inform second language teaching, particularly in the first year of language learning. While first and second language acquisition are not identical processes, the principle that comprehension and exposure precede confident production feels both intuitive and instructionally powerful.

EPI flips the speaking sequence

In an EPI classroom, speaking comes late. This is because it is demanding, rather than unimportant.

The core idea is simple: learners need extensive, meaningful processing of language before they are expected to produce it.

That means:

• sustained, structured listening

• repeated encounters with the same language

• carefully controlled variation

• time for form–meaning connections to stabilise

Speaking isn’t removed. It’s earned.

From output-first to processing-first

Before EPI, my lessons often followed this pattern:

1. Teach some vocabulary and a grammar point

2. Do a couple of examples

3. “Now you try”

Under EPI, the sequence looks very different:

1. Input flood through teacher modelling

2. Guided processing that forces attention to meaning and form

3. Recycling of the same structures across lessons

4. Constrained speaking using already-processed language

5. Freer speaking once retrieval becomes more automatic

When students reach the stage at which they are able to produce accurate output, it provides an opportunity for them to showcase their learning.

Guided speaking is not “dumbing it down”

A common criticism of EPI — particularly of the modelling and early recycling phases — is that it can feel like parroting. Students listen, repeat, and encounter the same high-frequency language and chunks again and again, and critics argue that this work is artificial and ultimately unhelpful for developing spontaneous speech.

This concern, whilst understandable, rests on a misunderstanding of what repetition is doing in an EPI classroom.

The modelling stage is not about students mimicking sounds for their own sake. It is about building phonological, lexical, and syntactic representations that are stable enough to be retrieved later under real-time pressure. Repetition here is controlled, intentional, and meaning-driven. Students are not being asked to generate language; they are being asked to notice how it sounds, how meaning shifts, what stays constant, and what changes.

The same applies to the recycling of high-frequency language. This is not an artificial constraint but a deliberate attempt to prioritise depth over breadth. Spontaneous speech does not emerge from having seen lots of language once; it emerges from having processed a smaller amount of useful language (usually very high-frequency) repeatedly and successfully. Research on formulaic language and skill acquisition consistently shows that fluent speech relies heavily on automatised chunks rather than novel sentence construction under pressure (e.g. Levelt, 1989; DeKeyser, 2007; Wray, 2002).

What is often labelled “artificial” is, in fact, what makes spontaneity possible later on. By reducing cognitive load early — through familiar structures and predictable language — learners are freed to focus on meaning when speaking becomes less constrained. Without this foundation, so-called spontaneous speaking tasks frequently result in avoidance, silence, or reliance on memorised scripts.

From this perspective, constrained (or guided) speaking is not the opposite of authentic communication; it is the preparation for it. Spontaneity is not something we demand at the outset — it is something that emerges once learners have the linguistic resources to support it.

And contrary to the cognitively-demanding and anxiety-inducing alternative, confidence grows gradually from repeated success and from not being pushed into the deep end.

Fluency emerges. It isn’t forced

One of the most satisfying outcomes of shifting to EPI has been how fluency develops without me explicitly chasing it.

When learners have heard the same structures many times, processed them for meaning, and retrieved them in low-stakes speaking contexts, speech becomes faster and smoother almost as a by-product.

Fluency is built before it is displayed.

The Guinness approach

EPI doesn’t make students speak less. It makes them speak better and with far more confidence.

By practising patience and giving modelling and comprehension the time they deserve, and by resisting the urge to rush into output, speaking can become more accurate, more fluent, and more inclusive.

With speaking, like Guinness, good things come to those who wait.

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Welcome

For a long time, listening was the part of language teaching I avoided most. Not because I didn’t value it, but because I didn’t know how to teach it and neither, I suspect, did many of the people around me. This blog, Field Notes of a French Teacher, is a place for me to document how my thinking and practice have evolved as a practising French teacher in an independent school in Australia, particularly in areas where my confidence was once lowest. What follows is the story of how I went from quietly avoiding listening in my classroom to writing, speaking, and presenting about it. And why I now believe listening deserves far more deliberate attention than it usually gets.

Listening: the Cinderella skill

Listening has been called the Cinderella skill by a number of researchers (Nunan, 2002; Vandergrift, 1997). This comes from its tendency to be overlooked, underappreciated and neglected. I have recently presented on this topic at two separate conferences. But it wasn’t always this way.

I neglected it. Big time.

In fact, I used to avoid it. That feels both uncomfortable but also therapeutic to admit now, given how much I now write and talk about listening. But for a long time, “doing” listening was the part I dreaded most. Essentially, whenever I did listening, my students struggled. And I was powerless to help them. So I just didn’t do it. My logic was that if I didn’t do it then they would not struggle and I would not look like a wally in front of the teacher observing me for not knowing how to help them.

Once upon a time

I remember one observation particularly clearly. I’d put on a listening task. My students struggled. Faces dropped. Panic rose. And, eventually, I asked them:

“Shall I just read it out?”

They all said yes. Instantly. Unanimously.

The feedback I received afterwards was, frankly, fairly damning. My observers said I should not have done that. It’s easier to listen to me than to listen to an audio and therefore I had undermined the task and removed the challenge. I agreed.

But with the benefit of hindsight, I can see something else going on.

The task was simply too hard. And it was a centrally planned lesson so I had very little control over this.

I was also told I could have paused it more or replayed sections. And maybe that would have helped in the moment. It might even have made the observation go smoother.

But it wouldn’t have solved the underlying problem.

All I would have been doing is learning how to compensate for students’ underdeveloped listening skills and teaching them how to survive listening tasks, rather than improve at listening itself.

We don’t know what we don’t know

One of the things I’ve come to understand is that this was more than just a personal failing. The observers’ feedback, whilst valid, served only to accommodate (rather than address) students’ underdeveloped listening skills. My theory is that they didn’t have the expertise to help me. And that’s not a dig at them. The expertise in listening instruction was not out there. And to be truly honest, I’m not sure if it is in 2025. Teachers in my placement schools were always talking about “doing” a listening. Siegel (2014) talks about listening activities used without much consideration for their place within a learning sequence. There was never any discussion of listening as a skill to be developed. In fact, there was some research to suggest it was a passive skill which did not need to be (Rivers, 1996) (not that I was aware of this at the time).

The lack of expertise in this area is something highlighted by the brilliant Suzanne Graham (2017) who found that teachers were not familiar with research regarding the listening process. She also found that teachers’ practice in the area of listening amounted to the Comprehension Approach (Field, 2008) whereby learners listen to audio and complete tasks which test comprehension.

Trial and error. Mostly error.

In my next school, I did slightly more listening. The source of audio was usually me, due to my encountering another (common) issue: availability of quality audio. This is one of the biggest issues in the area of listening instruction and a major obstacle in the development of listening skills.

I then moved onto another school in the Middle East where I taught KS3 French and most notably iGCSE French. The audio for the iGCSE classes came from one textbook mainly. The listening activities were always comprehension-based. And the following scenario, taken from Kedi Simpson’s superb blog, repeated itself over and over:

I was mainly a “show me your mark out of five” kinda-guy. The issue with this approach wasn’t the way I recapped. It was that students weren’t getting better at listening through doing this. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was subjecting my students to what Daniel Pink (2009) calls excessive challenge: repeated failure at the same thing, with no sense of progress. According to Pink, this causes a sense of overwhelm, stress and helplessness and negatively impacts intrinsic motivation.

Something else happened during this time which frustrated not only my students but also me. I discovered - to my horror - the awful way in which the listening exams seek to trick the students and entice them to fall into traps in order to select the wrong answer. Often, the exams did this to the extreme, with sentences that were unnatural and inauthentic and therefore impossible to predict. I found it really unfair and unreasonable. However, I resolved that my duty was to set my students up for success and therefore we spent a lot of time on exam practice, especially in thinking about synonyms and equivalent expressions. On reflection, this could be considered useful for my students’ top-down skills as they developed strong pre-listening routines. But their tendency to still fall for the traps or be misled or not be able to perceive the individual words pointed to another issue: underdeveloped bottom-up skills.

Started from the bottom, now we’re here.

I came to the realisation that there must be another way. Teaching iGCSE forced me to confront how fragile my students’ listening really was. They weren’t necessarily failing because they lacked vocabulary or grammatical knowledge; they were failing because they couldn’t perceive the sounds and words. This realisation led me to Gianfranco Conti’s EPI methodology and specifically LAM (Listening as Modelling). I read Breaking the Sound Barrier for the first time and discovered the work of John Field. What resonated most was that - finally - listening was being presented as a set of skills that could and should be taught. This was enlightening. Finally, listening had been demystified.

I began tentatively, trialling LAM-style activities to develop students’ listening skills, first with my iGCSE classes and then with some of my younger groups. I bought the Language Gym books myself and started using the listening activities, curious to see whether focusing on decoding and processing would make any difference. Almost immediately, it did. Students experienced more success with listening; they seemed to enjoy it more, or at least dread it less. Listening stopped feeling like a trap and began to feel like something they could get better at. Fast forward a few years and I moved to my current school, where listening was still largely approached through comprehension tasks. Students were “doing” listening, but their listening skills were not being developed. Following a curriculum review of Years 7–9 by two members of the Senior Leadership Team — involving lesson observations and close scrutiny of curriculum materials — one of the key recommendations was a greater focus on skill development. In particular, they noted lessons where students struggled significantly with listening. In response, I proposed a curriculum overhaul, adopting Gianfranco Conti’s EPI methodology in Year 7, with a view to extending it into Years 8 and 9. This involved my completing the EPI Teacher course and then Gianfranco coming to our school to deliver EPI training to 50 local teachers including all of ours. We have just completed our first year of the new curriculum in Year 7 and have begun teaching it in Year 8. Year 9 will follow in 2027. The early results have been genuinely encouraging: students are noticeably more confident with listening than previous cohorts, suggesting that when listening is taught deliberately, it becomes far less daunting. Quelle surprise.

Below is an approximate roadmap of how listening is now taught in our school:

1. Explicit phonics and sound–spelling relationships

Listening instruction begins with phonological clarity. Students are explicitly taught:

• Core phonemes of the language

• Common sound–spelling correspondences

• High-frequency grapheme–phoneme patterns

• Key sources of phonological confusion (e.g. liaison, elision, weak forms)

This stage is about helping students hear the language accurately. The goal is not comprehension, but accurate perception: being able to distinguish sounds, syllables, and word boundaries. This directly supports speech stream segmentation and reduces cognitive load later.

2. Controlled decoding of short, meaningful input

Students then work with very short, carefully controlled listening input, often at word, phrase, or simple sentence level. Activities focus on:

• Identifying words or phrases they already know

• Matching sounds to written forms

• Noticing how familiar language sounds in connected speech

• Repeated exposure to the same structures in slightly varied contexts

At this stage, listening success is deliberately engineered. Students are not asked to “understand everything”, but to practise decoding and recognising language they have already encountered in reading and input.

3. Extensive repetition with minimal variation

Since EPI emphasises massive, structured exposure, listening texts recycle:

• The same core vocabulary

• The same grammatical structures

• The same phonological patterns

Across multiple lessons, students hear the same language many times, with slight changes in context or meaning. This repetition supports:

• Automaticity

• Faster word recognition

• Reduced reliance on translation

Listening becomes less effortful because the language is increasingly familiar at a perceptual level.

4. Listening for meaning without comprehension pressure

Once decoding becomes more reliable, tasks gradually shift towards global meaning, but without the high-stakes demands of traditional comprehension questions. Activities may include:

• True/false or forced-choice tasks

• Matching ideas to images or summaries

• Sequencing events

• Identifying gist rather than details

Crucially, students are not punished for partial understanding. The emphasis remains on successful processing rather than performance.

5. Developing top-down strategies alongside bottom-up processing

As students’ decoding improves, EPI integrates predictive and inferential listening:

• Anticipating what comes next based on context

• Using prior knowledge to support understanding

• Tolerating ambiguity and uncertainty

This aligns with John Field’s view of listening as an interactive process, where bottom-up decoding and top-down meaning-making develop together — but only once the decoding foundation is secure.

6. Gradual increase in text length and complexity

Only later do listening texts become:

• Longer

• Faster

• More naturalistic

• Less tightly controlled

By this point, students have:

• Stronger phonological awareness

• Greater lexical familiarity

• More confidence in their ability to cope with spoken language

Listening no longer feels as cognitively demanding, because students have been prepared for it.

I recently completed a Masters in Education (Teaching and Learning) with the University of Buckingham, where my dissertation focused on listening and the impact of explicitly teaching both bottom-up and top-down skills on listening comprehension. I’ve spent a long time reading the research and thinking hard about listening instruction, but I’m very conscious that this is still a work in progress. What has changed is that listening now sits at the centre of my classroom practice rather than at the margins. Through this blog, I want to continue documenting that journey: what it looks like to teach each of the four skills deliberately, what I’m still grappling with, and how theory, training, and day-to-day classroom reality intersect.

Thanks for reading.

My plan for this blog is to share my thoughts and insights from the ‘coal face’ as a practising French teacher in Australia.

Happy reading!

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