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Saturday, 20 September 2025

Is chatgpt the answer to the GCSE vocabulary homework problem?

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 In a previous post , I declared that I wasn't going to let the new GCSE Vocabulary List worry me. We didn't use to worry about the ...
Tuesday, 19 August 2025

Look on my works, ye mighty...

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 Pillars. The ubiquitous metaphor of the last few years in Language Learning. Supplanting the four "skills" of Listening, Speaking...
Tuesday, 5 August 2025

Linguistics in Year 7

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 I have been meaning for a while to write a post on the idea of Linguistics in schools and its relation to language teaching. Or more precis...
Friday, 1 August 2025

Unfair grading and its impact in Languages

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 Imagine you are selling petrol for £1.40 a litre, and the other garages down the street all sell it for £1.30. Should you be surprised or c...
Thursday, 31 July 2025

Hope is in the air

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 Languages is in the news again. With an exciting plethora of projects and proposals that could take us forward. Here's one that has jus...
Sunday, 29 June 2025

A new GCSE intended to improve the way we teach. And the new Photo Card task.

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 In the 1990s , teaching languages sometimes seemed to be about teaching pupils a collection of things they could say . And the exam reflect...
Thursday, 26 June 2025

Oracy across the curriculum

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  Here are some thoughts on Oracy.  It's not about MFL. I may write something in the future on Oracy in MFL. But that would be something...
Saturday, 14 June 2025

Keeping Marking Simple in the Face of Complexity

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 Year 7 have been writing about food they like and don't like. This is another classic example of where the teacher's focus and the ...
Saturday, 7 June 2025

Really cool translation challenge.

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 I've been working on a really cool translation challenge for the last 3 days. And I've nearly cracked the first 5 words. You'll...
Friday, 16 May 2025

Reading Strategies - Part 2.

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 In Part 1 on Reading Strategies , we looked at some of the language reasons why we might want pupils to read texts in the Target Language. ...
Thursday, 15 May 2025

Reading Strategies. Part One - A Rationale.

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 In the era of "knowledge", it seems that reading "strategies" have fallen out of favour. We no longer tend to have regu...
Saturday, 10 May 2025

Can we sort out Languages in English schools?

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 Can we sort out languages in English schools? That's a sentence you can read 7 times putting the stress on different words in turn. How...