The new KS3 curriculum

Classroom Toolkit

I have written a toolkit to support three key aspects of the new KS3 curriculum: Classroom Talk, Translation and Use of literary texts. These have come from my twenty-year obsession with language teaching and from my PhD about classroom talk. The toolkit contains video of classroom practice, and commentary, together with classroom resources and planning tools, and should be useful for all secondary languages teachers. The toolkit is available in Spanish, French and German and can be purchased from Pearson (links below).

I explain a little about the three aspects in YouTube videos. Find out more about the classroom talk here, translation work here and the literary texts one here.

Spanish toolkit

A link to the Spanish toolkit page is here.

French toolkit

A link to the French toolkit page is here.

German toolkit

A link to the German toolkit page is here.

About this site

I am Director of International Education and Research for Comberton Academy Trust.

This website contains resources, ideas and strategies for promoting, teaching and learning languages. It is hoped that they will support Heads of Languages and teachers of Spanish, German and French.

The motivation for this site is the belief that the best ideas and resources are developed in collaboration, in an ongoing cycle of invention, development, experiment and reflection. Languages teachers are among the very best at learning from and building on each others’ practice and I am indebted to everyone who has ever talked about language teaching with me.

The fantastic languages team in which I work has been very influential and some of their work appears here.

All my resources will appear here on this site.

Early in 2012 at the University of Cambridge I completed my PhD, entitled "Learning to talk and talking to learn: how spontaneous teacher-learner interaction in the secondary foreign languages classroom provides greater opportunities for L2 learning." You can download the full PhD thesis here (not for the faint-hearted!). In due course I will produce edited chapters that will be eminently more readable.

This website will be updated periodically.