Where to find more of the Nice Man being Nice and Teaching Languages

 Here is where you can chase up some things that I have written or posted.

On my YouTube channel, I have Remote Learning videos, so you can see what "The nice man in the videos" sounds like. And all my other videos, for CPD. My Year 8s did actually say, "You could be a famous YouTube French teacher" so you never know...

OUP guest blog on how language learning is like accumulating a snowball of language. Don't let your French melt! Make it yours, and make sure new French sticks to it so it gets bigger and bigger. A nice story of a chat with a pupil which turned out to be important for both of us. He went on to become a police officer. (Annoyingly the Spanish resource that accompanies the article has 2 of the boxes on the second line swapped round so watch out.) And a MEITS guest blog that ends with the same metaphor, but is about the proposals for a new GCSE in MFL.

Webinars and Conference talks: Language World 2020 on Going Beyond the Sentence. If you have access to the linguascope teachers CPD area, you can find a more up to date version of this talk from March 2021 hosted by Crista Hazell. A linguascope webinar hosted by Stéphane Derône on having a Game Plan to extend speaking and writing, and a linguascope teachlang conference talk on Metaphors and Metacognition - I don't know if this link still works as I don't have a facebook login. And a TILT video hosted by Joe Dale and Helen Myers where I talk about Creative Outcomes in language teaching. On these webinars, Helen likes to call me Early Man, rather than The Nice Man. Not because I am a Neanderthal, but because I like to get there early and have a nice chat.

Helen Myers hosts some of my resources from talks I gave at Language World in 2005 and 2007 on the Association for Language Learning London Branch website. They are useful for basic Keep Talking and Dice Speaking templates that can be adapted to any topic. More of my resources can be found on my TES "shop", many of them for free. Here is the page on Amazon with books I have co-written. Other bookshops are available. The Nice Man recommends the A Level Spanish Grammar and Translation Workbook, but warns you that the 2 different editions are basically the same on the inside so don't buy both.

Here is a Language Learning Journal article from 2005 talking about having a core of powerful language to enable pupils to talk spontaneously and develop ideas across topics. And an article on Cultural Capital on page 13 of the May 2020 Language Today. Some thoughts on the history of developing communication and spontaneous speaking for the Association for Language Learning's page on the GCSE Speaking Endorsement in 2021. Contains a nice story about my dad speaking Latin to a French car mechanic.

You can hear some podcasts I have been invited on to: 2008 at Language World with the very lovely Joe Dale in a very relaxed chat about French Nintendo DS club inspired by Ewan McIntosh and about teaching over the internet from home before broadband. With QKA languages talking about the Google Street View Mysteries and also how different GCSEs encouraged or thwarted teaching spontaneous speaking. And talking on the mfltwitterati podcast with Joe Dale and the equally lovely Noah Geisel about football as a metaphor for the speaking exam. On podcasts it seems obligatory to refer to guests as "the very lovely..." so that makes me "the very lovely nice man."