About this site

I am Director of International Education and Research for The Cam 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.

My PhD

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!).

NCELP

More recently, from 2018 – 2023 I worked with an inspiring team of teachers and researchers as part of NCELP (National Centre for Excellence in Language Pedagogy), England’s first MFL Centre for Excellence. Our work, a strong partnership between The University of York and The Cam Academy Trust, set out to bring academic research and teaching practice closer together to improve the richness and impact of both.

Updated resources

Aligned with the MFL Pedagogy Review (2016), the new subject content for GCSE French, German and Spanish and the Ofsted languages research review, we developed a comprehensive programme of CPD to explore new possibilities for curriculum design, in particular those afforded by a language-led, knowledge-rich, practice-based curriculum, in which the three language knowledge strands – phonics, vocabulary, grammar – underpin the development of confident communication, cultural understanding and the creative use of language. To support the CPD, we created examples of schemes of work and resources. Those LDP resources are now being revised and uploaded. You can download the new LDP resources here.