Episode 58 (rerun): Steve Smith
 
Stacey Johnson:  [00:00] This is "We Teach Languages," our podcast about language teaching from the diverse perspectives of teachers.
[00:06] [music]
Stacey:  [00:06] I'm Stacey Johnson. This week, we're replaying one of our favorite episodes from last year, Episode 58 with Steve Smith. If you're a new podcast listener, hearing this interview for the first time, or if you're listening again, hoping to catch new insights, we know you'll benefit from Steve's recommendations rooted in research, and his own extensive classroom experience.
[00:39] Steve was a French teacher for 33 years in England, and continues to write books, blog, and create resources on his website, frenchteacher.net. He is also a frequent speaker and teacher‑trainer. You can also catch Steve's coauthor, Gianfranco Conti, in two episodes from our first year, Episode 16 and 17.
[01:06] If you're interested in any of the many resources Steve mentions in this interview, check out the show notes after you've listened. You'll be able to click on a lot of these links, including Steve's own web resources about the books he's written, and some more information about how to effectively use texts in the classroom.
[01:28] Now, here's our rerun of Episode 58, "Principles of Outstanding Language Teaching" with Steve Smith.
[01:37] [music]
Stacey:  [01:40] Steve thank you so much for talking with me today.
Steve Smith:  [01:43] It's great to be here.
Stacey:  [01:45] Would you mind telling us a little bit about your context?
Steve:  [01:49] Sure. Well, a bit of my background. A long time ago, I studied French and linguistics at Reading University in the south of England, went straight into teaching. I taught French for total of about 33 years, with a little bit of German along the way as well.
[02:05] Back in the 1980s, I started to go into methodology in a bit more depth by doing an MA, in particular, looking at conscious and unconscious acquisition, and looking at crashing.
[02:17] I retired from teaching in 2012, but I still keep my hand in by writing and by teaching students. For example, three days a year, I work with students at the University of Buckingham which is in the south of England. These are young teachers who are trying to get their qualification. I work on methods with them three days a year.
[02:38] I do various talks and visits to teachers around the country. I work for an exam board called AQA and I present for them on the advanced level courses they do.
[02:49] I write a lot. I'm a ferocious blogger. I probably do about 10 blogs a month. Ideas keep coming into my head. Basically, since I've retired, I can't stop thinking about teaching.
Stacey:  [02:59] Oh, that's great for us because you have a really useful blog with practical stuff in it. I'm glad that your retirement's so fruitful. [laughs]
Steve:  [03:07] Yeah. I also had an ambition, before I retired, that I would write something. Originally, I thought of doing something fairly academic like a history of language teaching in the UK, but then I decided in the end, perhaps I'll be better writing about something that teachers can actually use.
[03:20] In 2016, Gianfranco Conti and I published the book "The Language Teacher Toolkit." I was asked to write another book by Routledge. That's called "Becoming an Outstanding Languages Teacher." That allows me to spread the word on practical ideas for the classroom.
Stacey:  [03:38] I should also mention for the listeners that even though you are from the UK and that's where all of your teaching took place, you are actually doing this interview from the French coast.
Steve:  [03:51] That's correct.
Stacey:  [03:53] I just want to mention that so everyone can be as jealous as I am right now.
Steve:  [03:56] I'm sitting here in our house, which is about half an hour from the city of La Rochelle, which is down on the Bay of Biscay in France. I get down here a few weeks every year.
[04:08] Apart from that, I do a fair bit of traveling including over to the States. Before Christmas, we were over in New England, and the [inaudible] in the fall and went up to Canada. I get over to Florida as well sometimes in the winter. I enjoy my time over in the States.
Stacey:  [04:23] I think that is like a language teacher's dream retirement, getting to spend a lot of time in the country that they've taught the language and culture of for so long, and getting to travel and see a lot of new places as well. Good for you.
Steve:  [04:36] Thank you.
Stacey:  [04:37] The catch, the tagline for this podcast is that we ask the question, what does excellent language teaching look like. You happen to have written a book called "Becoming an Outstanding Languages Teacher," so it seems like you're the right person to ask this question to. What does outstanding language teaching look like?
Steve:  [04:56] Firstly, the word outstanding is interesting here. In the UK context, it has a particular meaning because the body that inspect schools and teachers, which is called Ofsted, which is a government‑run body, they have the word outstanding to describe schools and individual lessons. It's a bit of a buzz word, is the word outstanding.
[05:18] Most people outside the UK would just see it as being excellent. That's what it's meant to be. What might excellent language teaching look like?
[05:27] I suppose the first thing I would say is that I always hate to say that teachers should do this, should do that. I think outstanding teaching can look very, very different in very different contexts and there is no one recipe for what works.
[05:42] There's a guy called Dylan William, who's very well‑known in the field of assessment for learning ‑‑ formative assessment ‑‑ who says the secret in research is to find out not what works always but what works in certain contexts, in certain situations. I think anything you say about language teaching has to bear that in mind.
[06:04] I also have a view that generic teacher qualities probably are more important than any particular language teaching methodology that you adopt. If you have really good people skills, if you know how to run a classroom to keep good order, to have a sense of humor, do all those sort of things, the methodology you put alongside that is probably a little less important.
[06:30] In other words, you could have a great methodology but not be naturally a particularly good presence in the classroom. I don't think language teaching can be divorced from teaching in general.
[06:41] One person I always my recommend my trainees to read is Doug Lemov. Doug Lemov, an American guru, I suppose, on running classrooms and behavior. He works for the Uncommon Schools charter. His book, "Teach Like a Champion 2." is fabulous as a way of looking at how you run a good classroom.
[07:03] He doesn't talk about languages in particular, but I think you go to a book like that to hone your teacher skills before you add on your methodology, as it were.
Stacey:  [07:13] I am definitely going to pick that book up. I actually am not familiar with that author, but I love a new teacher resource. I'll put a link to where people can pick that book up in the show notes too.
Steve:  [07:22] He'll, for example, talk about how to do what he calls "cold‑calling," which in the UK we would call "no‑hands‑up."
[07:28] Rather than traditionally allowing kids to put their hand up to answer, where you end up favoring the same three, four, five kids at the expense of some of the others, he talks how do you do what he calls cold‑calling and the advantages of random choosing of students, versus no‑hands‑up, but where you still choose the student using your skill, versus hands‑up.
[07:49] He gets in all to the nitty‑gritty of what makes a classroom work well, the interactions that produce effective classrooms.
Stacey:  [07:57] In fact, I work at a center for teaching at a university, and one of the things that I was actually a little bit surprised at when I came to the Center for Teaching is how easily I was able to do consults with people from other disciplines.
[08:11] A lot of the things that teachers have questions about aren't related, actually, to the content we're teaching, but are more related to how do you maintain a certain energy, how do you make sure your class is equitable and inclusive, how do you protect authority while also being approachable. There's a certain number of things that teachers have to work out regardless of what their content is.
Steve:  [08:33] I think that's absolutely right, and now that we're in this era that some people call the post‑methods era ‑‑ we've been through audio‑lingualism, we've been through the natural approach, community of language teaching, and so on and so on ‑‑ I think we are now in a sort of [inaudible] hybrid teacher can you be that will make sure there's lots of good input, practice suitable for the class in front of you preparing for the exam that they're preparing for?
[08:59] That's the hybrid methodology you need to come up with for yourself. I would never say that there's a one‑size‑fits‑all approach that would work for every teacher in every situation.
Stacey:  [09:11] I love that. Thank you for mentioning that. That's actually one of the wonderful joys of doing this podcast is every week I get to speak to a new teacher. Some of them are in China. Some are in Australia. Many are in the United States.
[09:24] There's people allover the world that are teaching similar things, but in contexts that are extremely different to students who have different expectations. They have different socializations into teaching that make them more comfortable with one thing or another. Getting to see how all of us are figuring out how to be effective in our own way, in our own place, has been amazing.
Steve:  [09:46] That's right. If you talk about a post‑methods situation and there isn't one doctrinaire position for language teaching, the danger is that it ends up being a free‑for‑all and that teachers don't have any anchor. They don't have any real either deeper understanding of why they're doing what they're doing and what research can tell us, because research can tell us some useful things.
[10:11] When Gianfranco Conti and I wrote the book "The Language Teacher Toolkit," we did come up nevertheless with our own 12 principles that might guide whatever method you use.
Stacey:  [10:23] That's great. We'll also post to that blog post on the show notes as well so people can click through and find it directly.
Steve:  [10:31] Whether you lean more towards a natural approach, a very interactive approach, or a grammar‑based approach, there's no doubt about it that comprehensible input is the key. You've got to have lots of target‑language use. Certainly, in the UK it's still an area of weakness for many teachers.
[10:52] When inspectors go around schools, they often report, "We want to see more target language being used." That's certainly an area of concern for teachers in the UK as I guess it is in the States. Comprehensible input is important to allow unconscious implicit learning to take place. I think, [laughs] also, that there's plenty of room for very structured practice as well.
[11:16] This very controlled, slightly audio‑lingual, meaningful‑drill‑type practice, which in some quarters is rather spurned at the moment, I still think there's a place for that.
[11:27] I think certainly what's coming back a bit now in fashion in the research is the idea that language learning, whilst it is [inaudible] to do with universal grammar and natural learning, it is like other forms of learning, too, and that you can, by practice and repetition, build up a skill. I think the skill‑acquisition side can't be ignored. In some quarters, it tends to be downplayed.
[11:52] I'd also say, amongst the principles that I would support would be balancing the four skills of listening, speaking, reading, writing. My own feeling on this is that the number‑one skill should be really listening above all else. If I were pushed, I'd say probably the least important skill might be writing and that traditionally in schools we value writing quite highly.
[12:13] It's somehow considered more serious. It's the thing we do when we sit down and do examinations and tests and that perhaps we've overvalued writing generally. The idea of promoting independent learning outside the classroom I think is important. That can be partly through homework.
[12:31] I'd certainly, where the context is right, value homework quite highly and where possible allow students some choice in the homework they do. One very contentious thing at the moment is this idea of to what extent use select and sequence the vocabulary and the grammar that you teach.
[12:50] Certainly, coming out of research, there's not a lot of support for the so‑called focus‑on‑forms approach, sequencing grammar from easy to more complex and somehow teaching it in a sequence hoping that students will pick it up in a sequence.
[13:07] My only feeling about that is that, whatever the research says, when I was teaching in that way using essentially a grammar‑based syllabus, I saw students progress. I saw them producing language that I taught them that wasn't just related to any potential natural order that they'd be acquiring language in. This still bugs me in the research.
[13:30] I would still favor a sequencing of topic vocabulary and grammar tending to go from simple to more complex, despite what some of the research suggests. Where perhaps I would go along with the research more is on the amount of explanation that you have to do with grammar.
[13:47] Certainly, I do think as a teacher the more time you can actually be using language rather than talking about language, that's the way to go. There's a danger that you can just end up explaining stuff, explaining rules, getting students to write down notes so they have a good meta‑linguistic understanding of grammar but then don't actually use the language.
[14:11] Now I think probably that was a fault with our older methods. Even if you do explain grammar, keep it brief, keep it simple, and get going on the practice as soon as you can, I would say, because ultimately it is about a constant proficiency. It's about producing fluid linguists in the time you've got, which always will be a frustrating thing because we don't have enough time.
[14:35] Students' motivation varies. Many of them give up languages quite young. There's a limit to what you can achieve. I don't think we should be too obsessed with failure. It could be that actually we're achieving quite a lot in the limited time that we have with students. Just still on that list. I'm working through this list. It's how things are.
Stacey:  [14:53] That's great.
Steve:  [14:55] Listening and reading activities. This is something that Gianfranco writes about a fair bit, and I totally agree on this. When we do listening‑reading, we should be using it to model language use rather than to quiz and test. Frequently, listening work in the classroom ends up being a comprehension test. You play the recording. You do the comprehension questions.
[15:18] You mark them right or wrong. Many students feel frustrated by this, and they find listening hard. I think listening should be inherent to a lot of lessons, probably all lessons, and should involve a greater focus on the process of listening rather than just being about comprehension.
Stacey:  [15:37] That's great. I think that so much of the listening work that I have seen in textbooks I've used and classrooms I've observed is just listening in order to figure out the answer to these comprehension [laughs] questions, whereas that's not a real‑world use of listening. When we listen to each other, there's a lot going on as far as making sense of what the other person is saying.
[16:04] I really want students to focus on that communication act.
Steve:  [16:09] I think that's right. Most listening skill actually comes from the interpersonal listening. It's all those things going on between the teacher and the pupil. The teacher is the best model, assuming their linguistic skills are up to it. The teacher is the best model because they can go at the speed that's required for their class. They can build in repetition. They can pause.
[16:25] They know very precisely what the class can do. They can just pitch the language at the level that's required, whereas the audiotape or the video won't be doing that so precisely. So, you got to have a balance I think of teacher‑led stuff and audio stuff.
[16:40] I quite like a phrase that's used by a writer called Michael Swan from the world of EFL. He talks about intensive input‑output work. When you're doing listening or reading for that matter, I would tend to favor a shorter text worked on intensively rather than longer texts done superficially.
[17:03] I think if you work over a short text in lots of different ways, getting a twist to your lesson, finding different ways of working on the same language, that's how you build in all the recycling and repetition that's going to lead to long‑term memory and to proficiency in the longer run.
Stacey:  [17:20] I like that a lot, too. I think that's something that most of us did not learn in our methods classes either. In the textbooks that I've seen, generally we start at page one. We move sequentially through the pages, and you never see a text more than once. We visit a text one time, and then you move on. You never see it again. I can't understand how teachers can only use a text one time.
[17:44] [laughter]
Steve:  [17:45] That's right. There's a couple of ways of getting this recycling in. There's this narrow‑reading concept that you do see in textbooks to be fair, where you get a series of short paragraphs. For example, it might be five young French people talking about their holidays.
[18:00] They're artificially concocted texts that look kind of authentic, but aren't. They've got the same language repeated in the different text. That's one way of getting the recycling in.
[18:10] The other way is to take one text and then, as we say, do lots of different things around it. The number of interactions are huge that a teacher can use. I wonder how many teachers have that wide repertoire of interactions. You've got the very traditional question‑answer. You've got the very traditional true‑false.
[18:27] You've got the one that students often like is the providing a false statement for them to correct. Another one would be, for example, to take a listening text and show the transcript, or even show a faulty transcript for them to put right. It's just another twist on the same original text.
[18:47] One that I was always keen on with my own classes was something I call for myself oral gap fill. Let's suppose you've worked on a text for a while, you've done a sequence of different things, maybe including some transcription, some dictation, which is coming back into fashion, by the way, dictation.
[19:02] It's no longer a dirty word. In a communicative era, you felt guilty if you did dictation, but there's very good reasons for doing transcription work.
[19:10] This oral gap fill I was going to mention is just once you've done a text, students then hide the text, and then you do an instant whole‑class activity where you produce the first, say, three or four words, and they have to put their hand up to give you the next word that they heard. Students like those short‑term memory tests because they can do them.
[19:30] You can also tailor them to the class in front of you. If you've got a very brilliant class, you give them less, they produce more. They might give you the whole next sentence because they can remember it. If you've got a weaker class, you might have to produce more, and just leave them one word to fill in.
[19:46] Again, that's all more listening input. It's focusing on individual words such teaching students to identify words and chunks in the sound stream. All these things can have a purpose.
Stacey:  [19:58] You've given us a really good list of things to go look at. Do you have, by any chance, a blog post of your own or one that you can point us to with a list of these kinds of activities?
Steve:  [20:08] Yeah. My main website that I write resources for is called frenchteacher.net. On that site, there's a teacher's guide section that you can pick out from the menu. There's a drop‑down menu with lots of tips like that on how to exploit texts, different types of speaking interventions that you can do.
[20:29] In fact, I've a whole list of 50 different types of speaking activity you can do from the very simple such as choral repetition, question‑answer, to much more subtle ones that you can do that involve you interacting with the class. I've done the same for writing, and the same for different ways of exploiting texts.
[20:48] Many of those things feature to some extent in the "Language Teacher Toolkit" book, and the other book I did, "The Outstanding Languages Teacher" book.
[20:57] I like to do that with teachers now, have this repertoire. Did you know you could do this? Most of us work with unlimited repertoire, and I would have done as well. I'll go to activities that we like to do. That's great for your workload. You don't want to be overloaded with too many different things.
[21:12] At the same time, it's good to be open to something new. "Ah, yeah, I could use that. That works." Often, it's a very low‑cost, low‑workload thing that will just keep the lesson going.
Stacey:  [21:24] I agree. For many of us, the reason why we're not making better use of the texts we select is because we do the two or three things we're really good at, and then we're not sure where to go next. Knowing where to go to say, "You know what" I'm going to do the two things I always do, but I'm going to throw in a third thing this week," that's wonderful. Thanks for providing all that on your blog.
Steve:  [21:48] Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't come off. That's the nature of teaching, isn't it? You never quite know what's going to work. There's something else I was going to say on that as well. Just as you were talking, it made me think of something else there, and I've forgotten. Not to worry.
[22:01] Oh, authenticity, authenticity. This is a big issue, isn't it, authentic text. I definitely fall into the camp of those who believe that a usable text is what you need, not necessarily an authentic text. An authentic text can be exciting. It can be dull. An adapted authentic text can be exciting or dull. The key thing is how usable is that text.
[22:27] One great teacher skill is when you've got that textbook, or you found that text somewhere, you immediately weigh it up and say, "How can I use that?" With experience with that repertoire of different activities that you have in your brain, you can immediately work on that. That's going to produce a lot of good classroom stuff.
[22:49] You can find another text which might have some really interesting content, but actually, it's not usable. You can't get into it. There aren't ways of getting students to talk about it or for you to interact with the students about it.
[23:02] Authenticity was a big thing back in the 1980s. I see it's coming back at the moment. The hashtag #authres appears on Twitter a fair bit. Are teachers dead keen on authenticity for the sake of authenticity? To me, that doesn't hold water. A text what it needs to be plausible. It needs to be at the right level. It needs to be interesting. Above all, it needs to be usable in the classroom.
Stacey:  [23:28] I have to tell you that I am one of the people who is always telling teachers to use more authentic texts, but it is not because I want them to use exclusively authentic texts. As a teacher, I walk through the world making connections all the time, watching TV shows, reading magazines, trying to pull those things into my classroom.
Steve:  [23:48] I think it works if the text is at the right level. I think that's the key thing. You will have read, like me, the research that suggests...Gianfranco's quite strong on this, the idea that when we read a new text, we want to have at least, whatever it is, 90, 95 percent of the language already known.
[24:07] I'm dubious about that. I don't like numbers as precise as that. To start with, in a classroom, if you've got 30 students in front of you, they come with a lot...

Podcast transcripts are provided through a partnership with PEARLL (Professionals in Education Advancing Research and Language Learning), a Title VI Language Resource Center at the National Foreign Language Center at the University of Maryland. Find additional transcripts: www.pearll.nflc.umd.edu/podcast	

Transcription by CastingWords