Agree with more sensible goals.

The thing is, to communicate, you need to remember what to say. To enable language to stick in your memory so you remember, you need frequent short lessons in the early stages, something the UK school system can't usually accommodate.

You're right about needing to think through what we do and why. But communicative language teaching has had a pretty long trial and been found wanting. I know you'll say communicative teaching hasn't been tried properly, but can it ever work on 1 or 2 periods a week? My beginners in Bulgaria had 7!

Chester if you haven't done it. Or pop over to Wales and visit Conwy - magnificent castle and you can walk the town walls

The reason is they aren't used to writing at speed. At sec we want them to get the info down before moving to their next lesson, so we're less concerned with neatness.Y7 don't always realise there's no time to finish the sentence or they'll be late for their next lesson and my next class is waiting!

Don't think anyone expects 8 sides of A4 in 2.5 hours! But the pace IS faster at secondary. I think any secondary teacher understands it takes time to adapt. But I don't think it's unreasonable to expect most of year 7 to write faster than 3/4 words a minute.

But this is the issue - we need them to write at reasonable speed.

Yes - I do it that way in vocab tests where they write the word or phrase I say in the TL and then translate it. But when it comes to dictation, for me it's always whole sentences.

Which words are different? As Kedi says, the vowels are often where they have most difficulty, so un/une or le/la/les might be good? Or similar words with different vowels? Otherwise, don't they find it far too easy? Duolingo gives word choices and I don't think I've ever got one wrong.

Really thoughtful blog.

Thanks for this!

They always use Prosit Neujahr at the New Year's Day concert in Vienna. (Not raising glasses). Is Prosit Neujahr used instead of Frohes Neues Jahr as a greeting in Austria?

In recent years the role of personality has sometimes been neglected. Overly scripted lesson plans which a teacher has to follow rigidlycan be stifling.

Agree. Particularly the thing about guessing genders. Eg. Default gender of a cat is masculine in French but feminine in German. No particular logic to it.

'Most high-quality research in instructed language contexts has been about the teaching of English to self-selecting learners in higher education. We call for rigorous empirical research in primary and secondary schools in majority Anglophone settings."
www.lspjournal.com/post/balanci...

Lecker!!!!