Why doing more GCSE listening papers isn’t necessarily going to make your students better listeners, and why understanding what goes wrong when they listen may be the key to improving their exam performance.

1. We keep testing listening. But are we actually teaching it?

Picture this: it’s a Year 10 French lesson and your students have just completed a GCSE-style listening comprehension task which, judging by the expressions on their faces and the rather disappointing scores you’ve just collected, hasn’t exactly gone according to plan. A few students have scored eight or nine out of ten, a sizeable group have managed four or five, and a handful have barely got anything right. We have all been there!

So what happens next?You play the tricky bits again, explain what the speaker said, perhaps put the transcript on the board, underline the relevant words and point out the clues they should have picked up. You might even tell them to listen more carefully next time, as though careful listening were something they could simply switch on at will…

Then, in the following lesson, another listening comprehension exercise, and guess what? The same students struggle again!

I’ve seen this scenario countless times in my teaching career and I suspect most MFL teachers will recognise it, but here’s the question I would like you to consider: when a student scores 4/10 on a listening comprehension task, what exactly have we learnt about their ability to listen?

That they didn’t understand six answers? Certainly, but why didn’t they understand them, and more importantly, what are we going to do about it?

Was it because they didn’t know the words, because they knew the words but couldn’t recognise them when spoken, because they couldn’t work out where one word ended and the next began, because they missed a negative or a tense marker, or because they understood the individual bits but couldn’t hold everything together long enough to answer the question?

Different problems, different causes and potentially very different interventions, yet we often respond to all of them in exactly the same way: replay, explain, correct, move on… and then we wonder why listening scores don’t improve as much as we’d like!

The problem, in my view, isn’t necessarily that we’re not doing enough listening, because in many classrooms students complete plenty of listening comprehension exercises, but that we often use those exercises to assess comprehension without doing enough to investigate the cognitive and linguistic processes responsible for comprehension breakdowns.

Are we teaching students how to listen, or are we simply finding out, over and over again, how much they fail to understand? This is where diagnostic listening comes in.

2. What exactly is diagnostic listening?

Put simply, diagnostic listening is what we do after a listening comprehension task to find out why students got particular answers wrong, rather than merely giving them another listening test, displaying the transcript and showing them where the answers were, or replaying the same recording until everyone eventually gets it right.

It involves a systematic investigation of comprehension breakdowns, undertaken with the specific purpose of deciding what needs to happen next instructionally, and rests on three questions which, although closely related, need to be distinguished:

• Assessment: What did my students understand?
• Diagnosis: Why did they fail to understand certain parts?
• Intervention: What can I do to address those difficulties?

Consider a student who hears Je suis allé au cinéma avec mes amis samedi dernier and gets the question about when the speaker went to the cinema wrong, even though, at first glance, the sentence appears relatively straightforward.

Perhaps they don’t know what samedi dernier means, in which case we’re dealing with a vocabulary knowledge problem; perhaps they know the expression perfectly well when they see it written down but fail to recognise it in the recording, suggesting a possible spoken-word recognition problem; or perhaps they recognise samedi but fail to pick up dernier, which might involve segmentation, lexical recognition or insufficient familiarity with the expression.

Alternatively, they may understand the entire sentence when you play it in isolation but lose the information when it’s embedded in a longer passage, because the effort required to process the incoming language leaves insufficient attentional capacity for retaining and integrating what they’ve heard.

The same wrong answer, four different possible explanations, and potentially four different instructional responses, which raises a rather obvious question: would you prescribe the same treatment to four patients presenting the same symptom but suffering from four different conditions?

Of course not, yet mutatis mutandis, that is precisely what we sometimes do when we give students more generic listening practice without investigating what is actually going wrong!

And before anyone accuses me of suggesting that teachers should become amateur cognitive psychologists, let me clarify that diagnostic listening doesn’t require sophisticated laboratory equipment or lengthy individual assessments, merely a sound understanding of listening processes and a repertoire of carefully chosen activities that allow us to investigate plausible causes of failure.

The sequence, in essence, is straightforward: comprehension task, identification of errors, diagnostic investigation, targeted intervention and independent reassessment, although putting it into practice consistently is rather less straightforward than describing it…

Because, as we say in Italian, tra il dire e il fare c’è di mezzo il mare. Between saying and doing lies the sea.

3. What actually goes wrong when students listen?

Before we can diagnose listening difficulties, we need at least a basic understanding of what the brain has to do when processing speech, because without some understanding of the processes involved, how can we possibly know what to investigate?

As I have often written on this blog and in my books, listening isn’t simply recognising words and translating them into English, but a highly demanding, time-pressured activity in which several cognitive and linguistic processes must operate simultaneously in a very limited timed window, often under conditions that are far less forgiving than those encountered during reading.

First, learners need to discriminate the sounds of the language and identify relevant syllabic and prosodic patterns, since stress, rhythm and intonation provide cues that help listeners organise the incoming speech stream and, in some languages, distinguish meanings that would otherwise be difficult to identify.

They then need to segment the continuous speech stream into recognisable words and chunks, a process which, especially in French, can prove extremely challenging because liaison, enchaînement and other connected-speech phenomena may make familiar expressions sound rather different from the forms students have encountered in isolation.

Next comes lexical recognition, whereby the learner identifies familiar spoken words and retrieves their meanings quickly enough to keep pace with the recording, followed by grammatical processing, which involves attending to the little words, endings and structural cues that tell us who did what, when, to whom and under what circumstances.

Finally, learners must integrate the information they have decoded, connect ideas across sentences, track references, interpret discourse markers and make inferences where necessary, all while the recording continues playing…

Now, if a student is using up most of their attentional resources simply trying to recognise individual words, how much capacity will they have left to construct and retain the overall meaning? Not much, I would suggest, which is one reason why vocabulary knowledge alone doesn’t guarantee successful listening, and why a student who can translate every word in a sentence when presented in writing may nevertheless fail to understand that same sentence when spoken at a natural pace.

Of course, these processes don’t operate in a neat, linear sequence, but interact continuously, with prosody supporting segmentation, lexical knowledge helping listeners identify word boundaries, and contextual information facilitating recognition, although the latter can sometimes encourage inaccurate guessing.

Distinguishing these processes is nevertheless pedagogically useful because it provides us with a framework for investigating why comprehension has failed.

4. Eight listening problems worth investigating

I am certainly not suggesting that teachers should diagnose eight different processing skills after every listening comprehension exercise, which would be neither practical nor necessary, but rather that when a pattern of errors emerges, we should ask which processing difficulty might plausibly explain it before selecting one or two targeted activities to investigate.

1. They couldn’t discriminate the sounds

Sometimes the problem starts at the phonological level, as English-speaking learners of French may struggle with the distinction between /y/ and /u/, as in tu and tout, while German learners may have difficulty with vowel length contrasts and Spanish learners may fail to perceive certain consonantal distinctions or stress patterns that contribute to meaning.

If a comprehension error appears to involve a particular sound contrast, I might use Faulty Echo, an activity I frequently use in my listening workshops, in which I say a familiar word or short chunk, then produce a second version which is either identical or slightly different, and students decide whether the echo is correct or faulty.

For example, I might produce Tu viens ? followed by Tout vient ?, asking students to identify whether the second utterance faithfully reproduces the first.

The important thing is to choose the contrasts carefully, because what we want to establish is whether students can actually perceive the relevant phonological distinction, rather than whether they can infer the answer from the surrounding context.

If they consistently fail to discriminate the sounds, what is the point of immediately giving them another long listening passage containing the same contrast, when what they need first is focused perceptual practice?

2. They struggled with syllables, stress or prosody

This is an area I think we have neglected far too much in MFL teaching, because prosody isn’t some decorative extra that we teach when we have time, but a set of features, including stress, rhythm, intonation and syllabic organisation, that contribute to how listeners process the speech stream and whose role in segmentation and lexical recognition deserves considerably more attention than it typically receives.

Take Spanish hablo and habló, where failure to perceive the stress distinction may result in a missed grammatical contrast, or German words such as AUFstehen and verSTEHen, where stress contributes to the identity of the spoken word.

One activity I use is Syllable Building Blocks, in which students are presented with a selection of eight to ten familiar syllables before listening to words or short chunks containing one of them, their task being to identify which syllable they heard, an apparently simple exercise which can nevertheless reveal whether learners are able to detect familiar syllabic units when embedded in larger stretches of speech. Another is Stress Detective, where students identify the stressed syllable or compare two spoken versions.

Simple activities? Certainly, but potentially revealing ones, particularly when the teacher has reason to suspect that the original comprehension breakdown involved failure to perceive relevant syllabic or prosodic information, and why should focused phonological work be boring anyway?

3. They couldn’t segment the speech stream

This is a big one, because students may know every word in a sentence and still fail to recognise those words when they occur in connected speech.

Consider Il est allé au cinéma, a sentence which, on paper, is hardly challenging for a Year 10 student, but which, when spoken naturally, requires the learner to identify plausible boundaries before accessing the relevant lexical items.

One way of investigating this is through Break the Flow, where students listen to a short extract and identify the words or familiar chunks they can hear, or through Chunk Tracking, in which students listen for specific chunks embedded in longer utterances.

For example, students might hear Le weekend | je joue au tennis | avec mes amis | parce que c’est amusant, with the teacher investigating whether they can identify the familiar chunks within the continuous speech stream.

If students recognise the chunks individually but fail to locate them in the recording, segmentation is a plausible source of difficulty, although lexical recognition and familiarity with the chunks may also contribute, and the intervention should therefore involve repeated exposure to familiar chunks in connected speech, with support gradually faded, rather than another generic comprehension worksheet.

4. They knew the words but couldn’t recognise them

This is probably one of the most common problems I encounter, because you can ask students what souvent means and they’ll tell you immediately, or write je voudrais on the board and they’ll recognise it, but play a recording containing those same expressions and suddenly they seem to disappear into the speech stream.

Why? Because knowing a word’s written form and meaning is not the same as having a sufficiently robust spoken representation of it, or being able to retrieve that representation rapidly enough for real-time comprehension.

To investigate this, I might use Word Grab, where students listen to a short extract and identify familiar words or chunks from a selection of plausible alternatives, or Sentence Bingo, where they listen for familiar expressions embedded in different sentences.

If the problem is slow or unreliable recognition, activities such as Audio Boxing and the Language Gym Listening Trainer can provide repeated opportunities to process familiar language under increasingly demanding conditions, with the aim not simply of making students faster but of making recognition accurate, reliable and eventually more automatic.

And why does this matter? Because when word recognition becomes less effortful, more attentional resources become available for constructing meaning!

5. They missed the grammar

Here’s another familiar scenario in which the student hears Fußball, spielen and gestern, but fails to process the grammatical structure that establishes exactly what happened, or recognises the main verb in a French sentence but misses the negative, or hears hablo when the speaker actually said habló.

In these cases, the student may have understood the topic without understanding the message accurately, which is why I might use Grammar Detective, playing two sentences containing largely the same vocabulary but different grammatical meanings, such as Er spielt Fußball and Er hat Fußball gespielt, before asking students to identify the time reference.

Another possibility is Faulty Transcript, where students hear Nous avons mangé au restaurant but see Nous allons manger au restaurant written down and have to identify the discrepancy.

But here’s the crucial question: did they fail to hear the grammatical distinction, or did they hear it without understanding its significance? Two very different problems, and therefore two different starting points for intervention.

6. They couldn’t process the language quickly enough

Sometimes students understand an utterance perfectly well when it’s played in isolation, but fail when the same language occurs in a longer recording, because they are still processing one chunk when the next one arrives, with information being lost and comprehension compromised as a result.

To investigate this, I might compare recognition of familiar expressions in short and longer utterances, or use timed recognition tasks, although we need to be careful because a student who struggles with fast speech doesn’t necessarily have a general processing-speed problem, as their lexical representations may simply not be sufficiently established.

Similarly, slowing down the recording doesn’t always solve the problem, since artificially slowed speech can distort natural rhythm and prosody, which is why the instructional response should focus on repeated, varied processing of familiar language, gradually increasing demands as accuracy improves.

7. They couldn’t retain or integrate the information

A student may understand the first part of a sentence but lose it by the time the speaker reaches the end, as might happen with Je suis allé au cinéma avec mes amis samedi dernier, mais nous sommes rentrés tôt parce que le film était ennuyeux, where the learner recognises the important expressions but struggles to retain and integrate the information.

We often call this a working-memory problem, but I’d be cautious, because what looks like poor memory may actually be inefficient decoding or lexical recognition, with the effort required to identify each word leaving fewer resources available for maintaining the message.

A useful diagnostic approach is to compare performance on shorter and longer utterances containing similarly familiar language, while recognising that increasing length also increases linguistic and integration demands, so that if students manage the shorter versions but struggle as length increases, we have a reason to investigate further rather than immediately attributing the problem to memory.

8. They understood the sentences but not the whole text

Finally, some students understand individual sentences but struggle to connect them, as in Paul voulait aller à la piscine. Cependant, il faisait trop froid. Il a donc décidé de rester chez lui. Son frère, lui, est sorti avec ses amis, where learners may recognise the vocabulary but lose track of who stayed home, who went out and why Paul changed his plans.

Activities such as Pronoun Chain, Connector Snap and Track the Structure can help us investigate these difficulties, for example by replaying the relevant section and asking students to identify what il refers to, or whether cependant introduces a contrast.

If they understand the individual sentences but fail to integrate them, we need to work on discourse processing rather than simply revising vocabulary.

Eight possible sources of comprehension breakdown, one incorrect answer, and still convinced that simply replaying the recording and explaining the answer is enough?

5. The transcript: A diagnostic goldmine

I have nothing against using transcripts after listening comprehension, quite the opposite, but what I object to is using them simply to show students where the answers were, because when we display the transcript, underline the relevant expression and hear students say, “Oh, yes, I know that!”, we should be asking why, if they knew it, they failed to recognise it.

Here’s a routine I would recommend, starting with students completing the comprehension task independently, followed by a replay of the problematic extract during which they identify what they think they heard, before the transcript is displayed and they highlight words and chunks they already knew but failed to recognise in the recording, using a different colour for genuinely unfamiliar vocabulary.

This simple distinction is enormously useful, because a student who didn’t know cependant needs something different from a student who knew it perfectly well but failed to recognise it in connected speech.

This is also the stage at which metacognition can be explicitly scaffolded, because simply asking students to reflect on why they got an answer wrong is unlikely to produce particularly useful insights, especially when they lack the vocabulary or understanding of listening processes needed to explain their difficulties. Rather than expecting students to diagnose their own problems independently, we can provide simple, structured prompts that guide them through a sequence of questions: What did I fail to understand? What does the transcript reveal? Did I not know the language, or did I know it but fail to recognise it when spoken? Was the problem identifying individual sounds, separating words, noticing grammatical clues or keeping track of meaning? By asking students to select one or two plausible explanations, identify the specific word or chunk that caused difficulty and decide what they need to practise next, we gradually develop their ability to monitor and evaluate their own listening, while giving the teacher valuable information to investigate further. The important thing is that these scaffolds support metacognitive reflection without turning it into an exercise in guesswork or excessive form-filling! The two pupil-friendly diagnostic forms below, one for Years 7–8 and the other for Years 10–11, are designed precisely for this purpose and can be used during the post-transcript and audio-processing phase, ideally followed by a brief teacher-led diagnostic probe and targeted intervention.

HERE ARE TWO READY-TO-USE PUPIL LISTENING DIAGNOSTIC FORMS: ONE FOR YEARS 7–8 AND ONE FOR YEARS 10–11. USE THESE AFTER STUDENTS HAVE LISTENED AGAIN AND COMPARED THE AUDIO WITH THE TRANSCRIPT, TO HELP THEM IDENTIFY WHAT WENT WRONG AND WHAT TO PRACTISE NEXT.

(1) Form 1 — Years 7–8

LISTENING DETECTIVE (Years 7 to 8)

My Listening Check-Up

Name: ____________________ Class: __________ Date: __________

I’ve listened again and looked at the transcript. Now I want to find out what made listening difficult.

1. What went wrong?

Tick up to TWO boxes.

☐ I didn’t know what some words meant.

☐ I knew the words when I read them, but didn’t recognise them when I heard them.

☐ The words sounded joined together.

☐ I mixed up two sounds or words.

☐ I missed a little word or ending that changed the meaning.

☐ I understood some bits, but forgot them or got lost.

2. Find the tricky bit!

Copy ONE word or short phrase from the transcript that was difficult to hear or understand.

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3. What should I practise next?

Tick ONE box.

☐ Learning the meaning of words

☐ Recognising words I already know

☐ Hearing sounds and syllables

☐ Finding words in a sentence

☐ Noticing little words and endings

☐ Following longer sentences

4. Did the practice help?

Listen to a NEW example without looking at the words.

☐ Yes! I understood it on my own.

☐ A little, but I still need practice.

☐ Not yet. I still need help.

Remember: A wrong answer is a clue! Finding out WHY you got it wrong helps you become a better listener.

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(2) Form 2 — Years 9-11

WHY DID I MISS THAT?

GCSE Listening Diagnosis

Name: ____________________ Class: __________ Date: __________

Question(s) I got wrong: __________________________

You’ve completed the listening task, checked the transcript and listened again. Now identify WHY you lost marks and what you need to improve.

1. What was the likely problem?

Tick ONE or TWO boxes.

☐ Vocabulary knowledge: I didn’t know the meaning of a key word or expression.

☐ Spoken-word recognition: I knew the word or expression in writing but didn’t recognise it when spoken.

☐ Sound or syllable recognition: I confused similar sounds, syllables or stress patterns.

☐ Segmentation: I couldn’t separate the stream of speech into familiar words or chunks.

☐ Grammar processing: I missed a negative, tense marker, pronoun or another grammatical clue.

☐ Processing and retention: I recognised parts of the message but couldn’t keep up or remember enough information.

☐ Connecting ideas: I missed a contrast, reason, sequence of events or who was being referred to.

2. What is your evidence?

a. Copy the exact word, chunk or sentence from the transcript that caused difficulty.

---

---

b. Why do you think you missed it?

I knew / recognised ____________________________

but when listening, I ___________________________

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3. What should I practise next?

With your teacher, choose ONE priority.

☐ Sound or syllable discrimination

☐ Recognising familiar words and chunks in connected speech

☐ Identifying word boundaries in continuous speech

☐ Noticing and interpreting grammatical clues

☐ Following and remembering longer utterances

☐ Tracking meaning and connections across sentences

☐ Learning unfamiliar vocabulary

4. Did the intervention work?

After practice, listen to a NEW extract containing a similar challenge, without the transcript.

☐ I understood it independently.

☐ I improved, but still missed some details.

☐ I still needed support.

My next listening target:

---

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Remember: Knowing WHAT you got wrong is useful. Understanding WHY you got it wrong is what helps you improve!

Don’t put the transcript away just yet!

There is another important point I would make about the post-comprehension phase, because once students have compared the audio with the transcript and reflected on their errors, why should we simply put the transcript away and move on to another text? In my view, this is a missed opportunity, since the original recording and its transcript can provide the basis for a further round of purposeful listening activities, either targeting the processing difficulties identified through diagnosis or simply giving students additional opportunities to process familiar language more accurately and efficiently. If students struggled to recognise familiar chunks, for example, I might use Word Grab or Chunk Tracking; if they missed grammatical cues, Faulty Transcript or carefully designed contrastive listening activities; and if segmentation proved problematic, tasks requiring them to identify familiar words and chunks within the continuous speech stream. Even when comprehension was successful, revisiting the same recording through different processing activities can be valuable, because understanding a text once doesn’t mean that students can necessarily recognise its language rapidly and reliably under less supportive conditions.

But there is also a powerful motivational dimension to this practice which, in my view, we should never underestimate, especially for those students who initially performed poorly and may have come away from the comprehension task feeling frustrated, inadequate or simply convinced that listening isn’t their thing. Think about it: a student who has just scored 3/10 or 4/10 is given another opportunity to engage with the very same recording, this time through carefully scaffolded activities that make previously inaccessible language increasingly recognisable, until eventually they can follow stretches of speech that only minutes earlier seemed like an incomprehensible blur. What a difference that can make to their sense of competence! Instead of walking away with yet another disappointing score, they experience progress, and crucially, progress they can actually hear for themselves, which may help strengthen their self-efficacy and willingness to persevere with future listening tasks. Of course, success with a familiar recording isn’t proof that they can now understand unfamiliar speech, but as a confidence-building experience, particularly when the support is gradually withdrawn and students realise they can manage independently, it can be immensely valuable. And isn’t that precisely the sort of experience we want our weaker listeners to have, rather than repeatedly exposing them to failure and then moving on?

The important thing is that each replay should have a clear processing purpose, rather than becoming another passive listening exercise, and that we gradually move from audio supported by the transcript to audio alone, before checking whether students can process similar language in a new recording. After all, why waste a perfectly good listening text when we’ve only just begun to exploit its learning potential?

We can then go further, asking students to identify where the speech stream became difficult to segment, where they missed grammatical cues or where they lost the thread of the message, although we should remember that students’ explanations aren’t always reliable, since they may think they missed a word because it was spoken too quickly when the real issue was weak lexical knowledge.

That’s why we need to follow up with short diagnostic probes and, after the intervention, check whether students can process similar language in a new recording without transcript support, otherwise we may simply have taught them to understand the original recording…

A rather important distinction, wouldn’t you agree?

6. But what about a class of 30?

Whenever I discuss diagnostic listening with teachers, this question inevitably comes up, and it’s a perfectly reasonable one, because we don’t have the time to interview every student individually after every comprehension exercise, although fortunately we don’t need to!

Let’s say 18 students in your Year 10 class have misunderstood a question involving past time reference, in which case, instead of immediately explaining the answer, you could spend three or four minutes investigating the problem by playing two contrasting verb forms and asking whether students can hear the difference, before presenting the forms in short, familiar sentences to establish whether they can recognise them in context.

Next, ask students to identify the time reference to see whether they can interpret the grammatical meaning, and finally embed the forms in slightly longer utterances to check whether they can still process them accurately, collecting responses through mini-whiteboards, response cards or another whole-class response system.

Within minutes, you have a much clearer picture of what might be going wrong, because perhaps most students can hear the distinction but don’t interpret it correctly, perhaps they manage the forms in isolation but fail when they occur in connected speech, or perhaps only a small group continues to struggle, suggesting the need for more targeted support.

The secret is not to diagnose everything. It’s to investigate one suspected bottleneck at a time!

Over several lessons, patterns emerge, and you begin to see which students consistently struggle with phonological discrimination, which ones have weak spoken lexical recognition, and which ones have difficulty integrating information across longer utterances, with that information influencing what happens next in your teaching.

No elaborate spreadsheets required, no individual diagnostic interviews, just a clear hypothesis, a well-chosen activity and careful observation.

7. From diagnosis to intervention: Don’t just give them another listening test

This is where diagnostic listening becomes genuinely useful, because once we’ve identified a likely cause of comprehension breakdown, we need to do something about it, and the intervention should match the difficulty.

If students struggle with phonemic discrimination, use focused contrastive listening activities; if they can’t segment familiar language, provide repeated opportunities to identify words and chunks in connected speech; if lexical recognition is slow, use repeated, varied recognition activities, including Audio Boxing and other rapid-processing tasks; if they miss grammatical cues, use structured input-processing activities that require them to attend to those cues to interpret meaning; and if they struggle with discourse, use short connected texts requiring them to track references, contrasts and causal relationships.

The key is to avoid the all-too-common response of simply giving students another listening comprehension passage and hoping for the best, because the purpose of diagnosis is precisely to identify what needs strengthening.

And, as we say in Italian, “Non si può curare un male senza conoscerne la causa” (you cannot cure an ailment without knowing its cause), which, when you think about it, captures precisely what diagnostic listening is about: how can we possibly expect to remedy a comprehension difficulty if we haven’t first made a serious attempt to understand what caused it?

There are three principles I would insist on.

First, target the suspected cause rather than the symptom, because a wrong answer involving past time reference doesn’t automatically mean students need another lesson on the past tense.

Second, gradually remove support, since transcripts, repeated exposure and shorter extracts can be useful during intervention, but students ultimately need to understand unfamiliar recordings independently.

Third, check for transfer, because if students can recognise an expression after hearing it six times, that’s encouraging, but does it necessarily mean the underlying difficulty has been resolved, and can they recognise similar language in a new recording, with a different speaker, or a week later?

That’s the evidence we’re looking for, and a fortiori, if a student cannot recognise a familiar expression in a short, carefully controlled utterance, why would we expect them to process it successfully in a longer, faster and less predictable GCSE recording?

8. Where does diagnostic listening fit within MARS EARS?

For teachers familiar with my Extensive Processing Instruction framework, diagnostic listening fits naturally within MARS EARS, because the entire approach is built around the principle that students need extensive, carefully sequenced processing of language before we can reasonably expect accurate and increasingly spontaneous performance.

During Modelling and Awareness-raising, we anticipate potentially challenging phonological, prosodic and grammatical features and make them salient, while during Receptive Processing, we provide extensive, carefully sequenced opportunities to process familiar language through listening and reading, using brief diagnostic probes when difficulties emerge.

During Structured Production and Expansion, we continue reinforcing relevant sound–meaning and form–meaning relationships while gradually developing students’ productive control, whereas at the Autonomy checkpoint, we establish what students can understand independently, without sentence builders, transcripts or substantial scaffolding.

These low-stakes assessments are particularly useful starting points for diagnostic investigation, because they tell us what students can actually process without the support that may have helped them succeed during earlier stages.

During Routinization, we aim to make recognition increasingly accurate, rapid and automatic, while as learners move towards Spontaneity, they must process language under progressively less predictable conditions.

Within the EPI schemes of learning I’ve been developing, the Autonomy checkpoints at the end of successive MARSEA sub-units assess listening, reading, writing and speaking respectively, with the listening checkpoint providing an opportunity to identify comprehension difficulties and use the findings to inform subsequent instruction.

But diagnostic listening isn’t confined to that checkpoint, since it can follow any listening comprehension task that reveals a meaningful pattern of errors.

One important principle of EPI is that we don’t simply move on because we’ve taught something; we need evidence that students can process it independently and increasingly efficiently, otherwise what exactly are we moving on from?

9. A ten-minute diagnostic listening routine you can try tomorrow

Let’s make this concrete by imagining that your Year 10 French class has just completed a listening comprehension task containing the extract Samedi dernier, je suis allé au cinéma avec mes amis, mais nous sommes rentrés tôt parce que le film était ennuyeux, and that several students have misunderstood when the event occurred or why the group returned home early.

Here’s what I would do.

Minutes 1–2: Go back to the error. Replay the relevant extract and ask students to identify which part of the message they failed to understand, without giving them the answer yet.

Minutes 3–4: Check recognition. Establish whether students can recognise samedi dernier, sommes rentrés, mais and parce que when heard in short, familiar utterances, using mini-whiteboards to collect responses.

Minutes 5–6: Investigate the suspected difficulty. If students recognise the words but fail to interpret the relationships between events, use short contrastive sentences such as Nous sommes rentrés tôt parce que le film était ennuyeux and Nous sommes rentrés tôt, mais le film était intéressant, asking students to identify whether the second clause gives a reason or introduces a contrast.

If the problem is lexical recognition instead, use short Word Grab or Chunk Tracking activities targeting the expressions students missed.

Minutes 7–8: Use the transcript intelligently. Display the relevant section, ask students to identify precisely what they failed to hear or interpret, and provide a brief, focused intervention.

Minutes 9–10: Check again. Play a new sentence containing similar features, such as Dimanche dernier, nous sommes allés au parc, mais nous sommes partis tôt parce qu’il pleuvait, and establish whether students can now identify when the event occurred and why the group left.

This isn’t a definitive test of learning, of course, because immediate improvement doesn’t necessarily translate into durable acquisition, but it gives us an indication of whether our intervention is moving things in the right direction, and surely that is preferable to simply replaying the original recording, displaying the transcript and moving on?

10. Ten mistakes to avoid when diagnosing listening

Before wrapping up, here are ten pitfalls worth keeping in mind, particularly because even well-intentioned diagnostic work can become misleading if we draw conclusions too quickly or fail to control the demands of the tasks we use.

1. Assuming every wrong answer is a vocabulary problem, when students may know the words but cannot recognise them in speech.

2. Confusing a comprehension score with a diagnosis, since a score tells us how well students performed, not why.

3. Jumping to conclusions after one error, rather than looking for patterns and converging evidence.

4. Assuming that understanding the transcript means the listening problem has been solved, when reading and listening are not interchangeable.

5. Always slowing down the recording, even though slower speech may alter natural prosodic cues and conceal rather than resolve the underlying problem.

6. Blaming working memory for everything, when what looks like a memory problem may actually be inefficient lexical recognition.

7. Using diagnostic tasks that are too complicated, so that reading, memory, grammar and lexical demands become difficult to disentangle.

8. Failing to distinguish unfamiliar language from familiar language that students cannot decode, despite the fact that these require different responses.

9. Diagnosing without intervening, which rather defeats the purpose of finding out what went wrong.

10. Checking improvement only on the original recording, instead of establishing whether students can process similar language independently in new contexts.

11. So, how do we get from 4/10 to 8/10?

Let’s return to the student who scored 4/10 and suppose that, after investigating their errors, we discover that their main difficulties involve recognising familiar chunks in connected speech, processing spoken tense markers and interpreting relationships between clauses.Instead of giving them another ten GCSE listening papers, we spend the next few weeks systematically targeting those difficulties, using short, engaging micro-listening activities, recycling familiar language in varied contexts, gradually increasing processing demands and checking whether recognition is becoming more accurate and automatic.

We continue to use comprehension tasks, of course, but not just to measure performance, because we also want to establish whether our interventions are making a difference, whether students can process similar language independently and whether any improvement survives beyond the immediate lesson.

Perhaps the student eventually scores 6/10, perhaps 8/10, although there are no guarantees and I certainly wouldn’t claim that diagnostic listening automatically produces a particular increase in exam marks, because that would require evidence from controlled studies which, as far as I am aware, we do not yet have for this particular instructional approach.

But here’s what I would argue: if a student repeatedly fails at listening comprehension, giving them more listening comprehension exercises without investigating the causes of failure is unlikely to be the most efficient way of helping them improve.

After thirty years of teaching languages, one thing I’m increasingly convinced of is that we need to spend less time simply checking whether students understand and more time developing the processes that enable them to understand, because without that shift in emphasis we risk perpetuating a cycle in which students repeatedly experience failure without ever receiving the targeted support they actually need.

As we say in Italian, non basta sapere dove si cade, bisogna capire perché, meaning that it’s not enough to know where you fall; you need to understand why, which is precisely what diagnostic listening is about.

Not abandoning comprehension tasks, not turning every lesson into a laboratory experiment and certainly not drowning students in metacognitive questionnaires or lengthy self-assessment forms, but simply making better use of the information their errors provide.

The next time your students complete a GCSE listening exercise, don’t just look at the scores, but examine the wrong answers, ask yourself what might have caused them, replay the relevant extracts, investigate the suspected difficulties and select activities that address them, before checking whether students can process similar language independently…

Ultimately, the point of diagnostic listening isn’t to become better at explaining why students got questions wrong, but to use that knowledge to help them get more questions right next time and, more importantly, to become better listeners!

Research and further reading

• Field, J. (2008). Listening in the Language Classroom. Cambridge University Press.
• Vandergrift, L., & Goh, C. C. M. (2012). Teaching and Learning Second Language Listening: Metacognition in Action. Routledge.
• Cutler, A. (2012). Native Listening: Language Experience and the Recognition of Spoken Words. MIT Press.
• Rost, M. (2011). Teaching and Researching Listening (2nd ed.). Pearson.
• Conti, G., & Smith, S. (2019) Breaking the Sound Barrier: Teaching Learners How to Listen. Piefke Tradimg

Introduction

What research tells us about developing accurate, fluent and independent readers.

Reading aloud is a staple of the modern foreign languages classroom Yet it is often poorly sequenced, insufficiently scaffolded and used without a clear understanding of the cognitive processes involved. Effective reading aloud requires learners to coordinate orthographic recognition, phonological decoding, lexical retrieval, articulation and prosody. For novice learners, these processes can place considerable demands on working memory.Here are ten common mistakes, organised around the progression from initial phonological preparation to independent reading fluency.

1. Moving to reading aloud without sufficient receptive processing and explicit phonics instruction

Many teachers I have observed over the years including my former self, model the pronunciation of words and sentences before asking students to read them aloud. However, hearing a model once or twice is not the same as having processed the language sufficiently to reproduce it accurately and fluently. Learners may recognise words when they hear them but still lack sufficiently stable phonological representations, secure sound–spelling connections and rapid access to the relevant lexical sequences.

In my recent post on how to scaffold dictation fluency, I emphasised the importance of carefully sequencing activities along a continuum from receptive to productive processing, gradually withdrawing support as learners become more proficient. The same principle applies to reading aloud: productive performance should emerge from extensive, carefully structured receptive processing, not merely follow a brief demonstration.

An important component of this progression is explicit phonics instruction. However, before expecting learners to apply grapheme–phoneme correspondences independently, we should ensure that they have had sufficient opportunities to perceive, discriminate between and become familiar with the target sounds.

This is where carefully designed auditory discrimination and phonological awareness activities become particularly valuable. For example, Faulty Echo, in which learners detect deliberate discrepancies between a model and its repetition, can encourage close attention to phonological detail. Similarly, aural sorting, sound contrasts and syllable-identification tasks can help learners notice distinctions they might otherwise overlook.

These activities can prepare learners for explicit attention to sound–spelling relationships. In French, for instance, learners might first discriminate between the vowels represented by u and ou, before learning to recognise and apply the corresponding graphemes in familiar and unfamiliar words.

The progression can be conceptualised as follows:

Auditory modelling (teacher models target sounds, words and phrases through repeated listening)

↓

Phonological discrimination (e.g. Faulty Echo, identifying whether two words sound the same or different, aural sorting)

↓

Phonological awareness (e.g. identifying syllables, recognising individual sounds, locating sounds within words)

↓

Explicit sound–spelling mapping (e.g. matching sounds to graphemes, identifying recurring spelling patterns, contrasting French u and ou)

↓

Supported decoding (e.g. echo reading, choral reading, reading familiar words and phrases with teacher support)

↓

Independent reading aloud (reading familiar language without an immediate model, applying learned sound–spelling correspondences to new word combinations)

Importantly, this is a pedagogical progression, not a rigid sequence of isolated stages. Sound–spelling correspondences can be modelled from the outset, and auditory processing, phonological awareness and explicit phonics instruction can overlap and reinforce one another. The essential principle is that learners should not be expected to apply correspondences independently before they have had sufficient opportunities to perceive, recognise and practise them.

In conclusion: before expecting independent reading aloud, provide repeated opportunities to listen to, discriminate between, recognise and process the target language. Use activities such as Faulty Echo, aural sorting, syllable identification, matching audio to written text and identifying recurring sound–spelling patterns. Explicitly teach high-frequency grapheme–phoneme correspondences and provide supported decoding practice before gradually withdrawing auditory and visual scaffolding.

Research basis: Baddeley (2003); Ehri (2014); Share (1995).

2. Failing to teach learners how to segment written language into meaningful chunks

One of the defining characteristics of fluent reading aloud is the ability to process and articulate language in meaningful units rather than as a succession of isolated words. Skilled readers draw on familiar lexical sequences, syntactic structures and prosodic patterns to organise their reading. This reduces the need for laborious word-by-word processing and facilitates more natural rhythm, stress and intonation.

Chunking is therefore both a cognitive and a prosodic phenomenon. Familiar multiword sequences can be retrieved and processed relatively efficiently, while prosodic chunking helps readers organise speech into meaningful phrases. These two processes are related but not identical: a prosodic phrase may contain several lexical chunks.

Consider the following examples, where slashes indicate natural or pedagogically useful phrase boundaries:

• French: Le week-end dernier / je suis allé au cinéma / avec mes amis.
• Spanish: Cuando tengo tiempo / me gusta salir / con mis amigos.
• German: Am Wochenende / gehe ich oft / mit meinen Freunden / ins Kino.
• Italian: Quando ho tempo / mi piace andare al cinema / con i miei amici.

A novice reader may decode these sentences word by word, producing frequent pauses and unnatural stress patterns. A proficient reader is more likely to recognise familiar sequences and syntactic groupings, allowing articulation to proceed more smoothly. The exact prosodic boundaries will, of course, vary according to emphasis, speaking rate and context.

Why does this matter for fluency? When word recognition and access to familiar sequences become more automatic, fewer attentional resources are needed for local processing. This makes it easier to plan articulation, anticipate upcoming material and produce appropriate prosody. Skilled reading aloud thus involves both efficient recognition and the organisation of speech into meaningful units.

Instead: Teach learners to identify and rehearse meaningful phrases. Use visual chunking, teacher modelling, echo reading and repeated phrase-level practice. Gradually remove the visual boundaries and check whether learners can reproduce appropriate phrasing independently.

Research basis: LaBerge & Samuels (1974); Ellis (2002); Kuhn & Stahl (2003); Rasinski (2004).

3. Asking learners to decode too much unfamiliar language at once

Reading aloud is cognitively demanding because it requires the coordination of several processes, often under considerable time pressure. Novice learners must recognise written symbols, access or construct their phonological forms, retrieve relevant lexical information, organise articulation and produce speech with appropriate rhythm and intonation. When too much language is unfamiliar, these processes compete for limited attentional and working-memory resources.

A cognitive model of reading aloud

The following is a simplified, research-informed model of the processes involved:

1. Visual and orthographic processing

The learner identifies letters, letter combinations and familiar written word forms.

Example: Recognising the French sequence eau in beaucoup.

↓

2. Orthographic–phonological conversion and lexical access

The learner retrieves a familiar word’s pronunciation or constructs a plausible pronunciation using learned sound–spelling correspondences. Recognition of meaning may occur alongside these processes.

Example: Recognising that beaucoup is pronounced /bo.ku/, rather than pronouncing each letter separately.

↓

3. Phonological encoding and temporary maintenance

The learner activates and organises the sound sequence for production, temporarily maintaining information as necessary while preparing the utterance.

Example: Holding the phonological sequence of beaucoup de travail while preparing to articulate it.

↓

4. Prosodic planning and chunking

The learner organises the utterance into appropriate rhythmic and intonational units, drawing on syntactic knowledge, familiar sequences and the intended meaning.

Example: Grouping J’ai beaucoup de travail / aujourd’hui into meaningful phrases.

↓

5. Articulatory planning and execution

The learner prepares and coordinates the speech movements needed to produce the utterance.

Example: Producing the sentence with appropriate sound contrasts, liaison where required, rhythm and intonation.

↓

6. Auditory and somatosensory monitoring

The learner monitors their speech and may detect mismatches between the intended and actual pronunciation, making adjustments where possible.

Example: Noticing an incorrectly pronounced vowel and attempting to correct it.

Important: This model is a pedagogical simplification, not a strictly serial account. In skilled reading aloud, several processes overlap and operate interactively. Familiar words may be recognised and pronounced through relatively direct lexical pathways, while unfamiliar words require more effortful decoding.

Why unfamiliar language creates problems

When orthographic recognition and phonological decoding are not sufficiently automatic, they consume attentional resources that could otherwise support prosodic planning, articulation and monitoring.

The result may be hesitant reading, inaccurate pronunciation, inappropriate pauses and reduced fluency.

Instead: Reduce unnecessary processing demands by using familiar vocabulary, previously modelled sound–spelling patterns and short, highly patterned sentences. Introduce new decoding challenges selectively and progressively. As recognition and decoding become more automatic, gradually increase sentence length, syntactic complexity and the proportion of unfamiliar language.

The objective is not to eliminate challenge but to manage cognitive demands so that learners can practise the processes targeted by the activity without being overwhelmed by competing demands.

Research basis: Coltheart et al. (2001); Levelt, Roelofs & Meyer (1999); Baddeley (2003); Sweller (1988); LaBerge & Samuels (1974).

4.Using round-robin reading as the main form of practice

Having students take turns reading sentences or paragraphs aloud provides limited active reading time for each learner. It can also create unnecessary performance pressure, particularly among less confident readers.

Instead: Maximise simultaneous participation through choral reading, paired reading and repeated short rehearsals. Reserve individual performances for carefully selected opportunities, ideally after learners have had sufficient preparation.

Research basis: National Reading Panel (2000); Kuhn & Stahl (2003).

5. Correcting every pronunciation error immediately

Constant correction can interrupt the flow of reading, increase self-consciousness and divert attention from the overall task. Moreover, not all pronunciation errors have the same implications for intelligibility or learning.

Instead: Prioritise errors that affect intelligibility or reveal important gaps in sound–spelling knowledge. Use selective feedback, brief modelling and opportunities for immediate self-correction or another attempt. Where appropriate, delay feedback until the learner has completed a meaningful phrase.

Research basis: Lyster & Ranta (1997); Saito & Lyster (2012).

6. Mistaking successful supported reading for independent mastery

A student who reads a sentence accurately immediately after hearing it may simply be reproducing a recently activated phonological sequence. Successful performance under these conditions does not necessarily demonstrate durable decoding ability.

Instead: Revisit the language after a delay, remove the model and present familiar words in unfamiliar combinations. Check whether learners can decode accurately without immediate auditory support. This provides a more meaningful indication of whether sound–spelling correspondences have been consolidated and can be applied independently.

Research basis: Share (1995); Ehri (2014).

7. Neglecting stress, rhythm and intonation

Accurately pronouncing individual words does not automatically result in fluent, natural reading. Learners also need to develop prosodic control: appropriate stress, rhythm, phrasing and intonation.

Instead: Explicitly model sentence stress, rhythm, intonation and meaningful pauses. Use echo reading and repeated phrase-level practice to develop expressive, intelligible delivery. Encourage learners to imitate the prosodic features of whole utterances, not merely the pronunciation of individual words.

Research basis: Rasinski (2004); Kuhn & Stahl (2003).

8. Prioritising reading speed before accuracy and expression

Reading quickly is not necessarily reading fluently. When learners are encouraged to accelerate before they have developed sufficiently – as when we ask them to read aloud tongue twisters meant for native speakers – accurate and stable decoding skills, they may resort to guessing, omit words, distort pronunciation or sacrifice natural phrasing. Fluency involves the efficient coordination of accuracy, automaticity and prosody, not speed in isolation.

Instead: Establish accurate decoding and appropriate phrasing before introducing speed as an explicit performance target. Initially, learners should concentrate on recognising words reliably, articulating them correctly and grouping them into meaningful prosodic units. Once these processes are reasonably secure, increasing reading rate becomes a legitimate and valuable instructional objective.

Research basis: National Reading Panel (2000); Kuhn & Stahl (2003).

9. Failing to systematically develop reading automaticity through fluency-building activities

However, the fact that speed should not be prioritised prematurely does not mean that it should be neglected. Quite the opposite. Once learners have developed reasonably accurate decoding skills, teachers should deliberately create opportunities for them to read familiar language increasingly quickly and effortlessly.

Reading-aloud fluency does not develop simply through exposure to written texts or occasional opportunities to read aloud. Learners need a carefully staged sequence of activities that progressively develops accuracy, automaticity and prosodic control.

Importantly, automaticity is not simply the by-product of accurate reading: it is an instructional objective in its own right. Repeated, appropriately challenging practice can help learners reduce the time and attentional effort required to recognise, retrieve and articulate familiar language.

This is where purposeful EPI fluency-building activities such as timed repeated reading, paced reading and personal-best challenges become particularly valuable. They introduce an element of challenge, make progress visible and encourage learners to process familiar language more efficiently, without sacrificing accuracy or expression.

Instead: Organise reading-aloud instruction around a progression that initially prioritises accurate, supported decoding and subsequently incorporates deliberate fluency-building practice. Once learners can read the target material accurately, introduce repeated readings with gradually reduced completion times, paced reading and other carefully calibrated speed challenges.

The objective is not to make learners rush. It is to accelerate automaticity so that fluent reading becomes progressively less effortful.

A possible progression towards fluent reading aloud

Stage 1 – Phonological familiarisation

Learners listen to short phrases and sentences, focusing on pronunciation, stress and intonation before attempting to read them aloud.

Stage 2 – Sound–spelling mapping

Learners identify recurring grapheme–phoneme correspondences in familiar words and practise recognising these patterns in other lexical items.

Stage 3 – Supported decoding

Learners read short, familiar phrases with visual support, teacher modelling and echo reading.

Stage 4 – Chunked reading

Learners practise reading sentences divided into meaningful phrases, gradually developing more natural phrasing and prosody.

Stage 5 – Repeated reading and timed fluency practice

Learners rehearse short passages several times, aiming for progressively greater accuracy, automaticity and expressive delivery.

Once accuracy is established, introduce activities such as:

• Timed repeated reading: Students read the same short, familiar passage aloud several times, recording how long each attempt takes and trying to improve their previous performance without sacrificing pronunciation or prosody.
• Beat your personal best: Students repeat a familiar passage, attempting to reduce their completion time while maintaining an agreed accuracy criterion.
• Timed chunk reading: Students repeatedly read short, meaningful phrases, gradually increasing the rate at which they can recognise and articulate them accurately.

These activities make progress visible and introduce a motivational element of self-competition. The objective is not simply to speak faster but to reduce the attentional effort required to recognise, retrieve and articulate familiar language.

Stage 6 – Independent reading and paced reading

Learners read familiar texts without immediate modelling or visual chunking cues, demonstrating increasing control over decoding and prosody.

At this stage, paced reading can provide an additional challenge. Students read accessible passages within predetermined time limits, with targets gradually adjusted as their processing becomes more efficient.

For example, learners might read a short passage aloud at a comfortable rate, establish a baseline and then practise towards a modestly faster rate over subsequent attempts. Accuracy and natural phrasing remain essential.

The principle is similar to the timed reading approaches discussed by Chung and Nation (2006), although their research primarily concerns silent L2 reading speed rather than oral reading fluency.

Stage 7 – Delayed transfer

Learners read new combinations of familiar language after a delay, demonstrating that they can apply established decoding and prosodic skills beyond the original practice material.

Where appropriate, teachers can also compare reading accuracy, rate and prosody across different occasions to determine whether improvements are retained and transferable rather than restricted to a repeatedly rehearsed passage.

Why timed practice can help

The theoretical rationale is straightforward. As recognition and decoding processes become more automatic, they require fewer attentional resources, potentially freeing capacity for articulation, prosodic planning and comprehension.

Repeated, appropriately challenging practice can contribute to this automatisation. Timed activities add a measurable performance goal and may increase motivation, particularly when learners compete against their own previous performance rather than against classmates.

Nevertheless, faster reading is not automatically better reading. Excessive time pressure can encourage guessing, omissions and unnatural delivery. Timed practice should therefore be introduced only when learners can already read the material with reasonable accuracy, and improvements should be judged against accuracy and prosodic quality, not speed alone.

The key is to increase processing demands systematically while progressively reducing scaffolding, rather than simply asking learners to read longer or more difficult passages.

This progression is a pedagogical synthesis informed by research on automaticity, orthographic learning and guided oral reading, rather than a single experimentally validated instructional programme.

Research basis: LaBerge & Samuels (1974); National Reading Panel (2000); Kuhn & Stahl (2003); Ehri (2014); Chung & Nation (2006).

10. Failing to develop learners’ ability to self-monitor and self-correct their reading aloud

Reading aloud is not simply a matter of decoding written language and articulating it. It also involves monitoring one’s own speech, detecting discrepancies between intended and actual pronunciation, and making adjustments where necessary. Skilled readers can use auditory and articulatory feedback to regulate their performance, whereas novice learners may struggle to recognise their own errors, particularly when much of their attention is devoted to decoding.

This creates an important instructional challenge: learners cannot reliably correct pronunciation errors they are unable to perceive. Moreover, even when they notice that something sounds wrong, they may lack the phonological knowledge or articulatory control needed to correct it.

Self-monitoring therefore needs to be developed explicitly and progressively, rather than simply expecting learners to recognise and correct their mistakes independently.

Instead: Incorporate activities that gradually develop learners’ ability to evaluate and regulate their own reading aloud. For example:

• Listen, compare and correct: Learners record themselves reading a short, familiar passage, listen to an accurate model, identify discrepancies and attempt a second recording.
• Focused self-monitoring: Learners listen back to their reading with one specific target in mind, such as French nasal vowels, silent final consonants or appropriate phrasing, rather than attempting to monitor everything simultaneously.
• Best Recording (a variation of Paul Nation’s activity of the same name): Learners work in pairs, taking turns to read aloud a short, familiar passage while their partner records them. After each attempt, they listen to the recording together, identify aspects that could be improved (e.g. pronunciation, phrasing, stress or intonation), and rehearse before recording again. The process is repeated until the learner is satisfied that they have produced their best possible version. The partner provides focused feedback and helps the reader notice discrepancies they might otherwise overlook. The emphasis is on successive improvement through repeated performance, self-evaluation and peer support, rather than simply producing a flawless recording on the first attempt.

Initially, the teacher should provide substantial support through modelling, focused listening tasks and explicit feedback. As learners become more proficient, this support can be progressively withdrawn, encouraging greater independence in error detection and correction.

Importantly, self-monitoring should not become so intrusive that it disrupts reading fluency. The aim is to develop increasingly accurate internal monitoring, not to encourage learners to interrupt themselves after every word. During early practice, listening back to recordings may be more productive than attempting continuous self-correction while reading.

Ultimately, the goal is to help learners move from dependence on external correction towards greater autonomy in evaluating and improving their own oral reading performance.

Research basis: Levelt (1983); Levelt, Roelofs & Meyer (1999); Saito & Lyster (2012).

Concluding remarks

Effective reading-aloud instruction is not about getting students to pronounce a passage successfully on a particular occasion. It is about developing the cognitive processes that eventually make accurate, fluent and independent reading possible.

This requires a carefully sequenced progression:

Phonological familiarisation → Sound–spelling mapping → Chunking → Supported decoding → Guided oral practice → Selective feedback → Prosodic development → Automaticity → Independent transfer.

Purposeful fluency-building activities, including timed repeated reading and paced reading, can be embedded within this progression to make practice more engaging and encourage increasingly efficient processing.

From an Extensive Processing Instruction (EPI) perspective, reading aloud should therefore be embedded within a broader input-to-output sequence, rather than used as an isolated pronunciation activity.

One important qualification: much of the strongest evidence on oral reading fluency and orthographic learning comes from first-language literacy research. The implications for MFL instruction are plausible and pedagogically useful, but should not all be presented as findings directly demonstrated in secondary foreign-language classrooms. Likewise, findings on timed silent reading should not automatically be generalised to reading aloud.

The central principle remains:

Model before expecting performance. Scaffold before demanding independence. Consolidate before accelerating. And test transfer before assuming mastery.

Selected references

• Baddeley, A. (2003). Working memory: Looking back and looking forward. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 4, 829–839.
• Chung, M., & Nation, I. S. P. (2006). The effect of a speed reading course. English Teaching, 61(4), 181–204.
• Coltheart, M., Rastle, K., Perry, C., Langdon, R., & Ziegler, J. (2001). DRC: A dual route cascaded model of visual word recognition and reading aloud. Psychological Review, 108(1), 204–256.
• Ehri, L. C. (2014). Orthographic mapping in the acquisition of sight word reading, spelling memory, and vocabulary learning. Scientific Studies of Reading, 18(1), 5–21.
• Ellis, N. C. (2002). Frequency effects in language processing: A review with implications for theories of implicit and explicit language acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 24(2), 143–188.
• Kuhn, M. R., & Stahl, S. A. (2003). Fluency: A review of developmental and remedial practices. Journal of Educational Psychology, 95(1), 3–21.
• LaBerge, D., & Samuels, S. J. (1974). Toward a theory of automatic information processing in reading. Cognitive Psychology, 6(2), 293–323.
• Levelt, W. J. M., Roelofs, A., & Meyer, A. S. (1999). A theory of lexical access in speech production. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22(1), 1–38.
• Lyster, R., & Ranta, L. (1997). Corrective feedback and learner uptake. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 19(1), 37–66.
• National Reading Panel. (2000). Teaching Children to Read. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
• Rasinski, T. V. (2004). Assessing Reading Fluency. Pacific Resources for Education and Learning.
• Saito, K., & Lyster, R. (2012). Effects of form-focused instruction and corrective feedback on L2 pronunciation development. Language Learning, 62(2), 595–633.
• Share, D. L. (1995). Phonological recoding and self-teaching: Sine qua non of reading acquisition. Cognition, 55(2), 151–218.
• Sweller, J. (1988). Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning. Cognitive Science, 12(2), 257–285.

Introduction

Dictation is one of the oldest activities in the language teacher’s repertoire. Yet, despite its apparent simplicity, it is also one of the most cognitively demanding things we can ask a beginner language learner to do.

Consider what happens when we dictate even a relatively simple sentence to a Year 7 student. The learner must perceive a rapidly disappearing acoustic signal, segment it into words, recognise those words, hold what they have heard in working memory, retrieve their written forms and reproduce them accurately — while the next part of the sentence may already be arriving.

Thing is: for an experienced language learner, many of these processes have become relatively automatic. For a beginner, they haven’t, though.

This is why simply doing more dictation is not necessarily the best way to make students better at dictation. If we want learners eventually to transcribe connected speech successfully, we need to teach and scaffold the processes that successful dictation requires.

In this post, I will suggest a progression which moves from highly supported listening to independent transcription, following a simple principle rooted in what we know about how the brain works:

Hear and discriminate → segment → identify → reconstruct → complete → transcribe with support → transcribe independently.

The key thing here is: scaffolded, inclusive progression.

The cognitive bases of dictation fluency: from perception to grapho-motor execution

Before considering how we should scaffold dictation, it is useful to understand what successful dictation actually involves cognitively. The diagram below provides a simplified model of the journey from hearing the speech signal to producing the words on the page.

At its simplest, successful dictation requires learners to turn a continuous stream of sound into an accurate sequence of written words. First, they have to perceive the sounds accurately. They then have to work out where words and chunks begin and end, recognise those words, and use their knowledge of vocabulary, grammar and context to help predict and confirm what they are hearing. Next, they have to retrieve the correct spellings and physically write them down. Meanwhile, working memory has to keep hold of what has just been heard while all of this processing takes place, and learners need to monitor what they are writing to check that it makes sense and corresponds to the original input.

With experienced listeners and writers, many of these processes happen rapidly and relatively automatically. With Year 7 beginners, however, several of them are still slow, fragile and effortful!This is precisely why asking beginners simply to “listen and write what you hear” can impose such a heavy cognitive burden, overwhelming for many of your less confident learners.

The table below breaks the process down further. Of course, these processes do not operate as a perfectly neat sequence in the brain. Brain processes rarely do! Instead, they interact constantly and often operate in parallel. The model above is therefore best understood as a useful pedagogical representation of the major demands involved in dictation, rather than as a literal step-by-step account of cognition.

Cognitive process	What does the learner have to do?	French example	What might go wrong for a beginner?
1. Acoustic input	Receive a continuous and rapidly disappearing speech signal. Spoken language does not arrive with spaces between words.	The learner hears Je vais au cinéma avec mes amis as one continuous stream.	The sentence may simply sound like a blur of unfamiliar sounds.
2. Phonological perception	Identify the relevant speech sounds and other phonological information such as rhythm and intonation.	The learner needs to perceive cinéma accurately enough to recognise it.	An unstable phonological representation may cause the learner to mishear a familiar word or fail to recognise it altogether.
3. Segmentation	Work out where words and meaningful chunks begin and end in continuous speech.	The learner needs to perceive je vais / au cinéma / avec mes amis rather than one undifferentiated stream.	The learner may know every word on the page but fail to locate those words in connected speech.
4. Lexical access	Match what has been heard with words stored in long-term memory and activate their meaning.	Hearing /sinema/ activates the known lexical item cinéma.	Recognition may be too slow, or the learner may know cinéma visually but not recognise it quickly enough from its spoken form.
5. Grammatical and contextual prediction	Use grammar, meaning and familiar chunks to anticipate and confirm what is likely to come next.	After je vais au…, the learner may expect a place such as cinéma. After avec mes…, a noun such as amis becomes highly predictable.	Beginners have fewer automatised chunks and less grammatical knowledge available to constrain the possibilities.
6. Orthographic retrieval	Retrieve the correct written form of the words that have been recognised.	The learner recognises /sinema/ and retrieves cinéma, including the correct accent.	The learner may recognise the word perfectly but write sinema, cinema or another plausible sound-based spelling.
7. Grapho-motor execution	Turn the retrieved orthographic representation into handwriting or typed output.	The learner physically writes cinéma while retaining the next part of the sentence.	If handwriting or spelling is slow and effortful, it consumes resources that could otherwise be devoted to listening and remembering.
8. Working memory	Temporarily maintain and coordinate what has been heard while words are recognised, spellings retrieved and previous material written down.	While writing au cinéma, the learner may already need to retain avec mes amis long enough to transcribe it next.	Earlier words may disappear from memory while the learner concentrates on spelling or writing another word.
9. Monitoring and self-correction	Compare the developing written version with what was heard and with existing knowledge of vocabulary, grammar and spelling.	The learner writes avec mes ami, notices the mismatch and corrects it to avec mes amis.	So much attention may be devoted to getting words onto the page that little capacity remains for checking and correcting.

From controlled processing to fluent dictation

This model also helps explain what we mean by dictation fluency: fluent learner does not necessarily possess a fundamentally different set of skills from a beginner. The crucial difference is that many of these processes have become faster and more automatic, eliciting very little processing load in working memory.

Consider the word cinéma. A beginner might have to consciously analyse the sounds, search memory for the word, retrieve its meaning, remember its spelling and then think about how to write it. An experienced learner may move from hearing /sinema/ to activating cinéma — its pronunciation, meaning and spelling — extremely rapidly.

The same applies at sentence level. A more proficient learner hearing:

Je vais au cinéma avec mes…

is already using grammatical, lexical and contextual knowledge to anticipate what could plausibly follow. Processing is therefore not exclusively bottom-up. What learners already know helps them interpret what they are hearing. This has a major implication for teaching, the most important one is that full dictation requires the successful coordination of phonological perception, segmentation, lexical access, grammatical prediction, orthographic retrieval, working memory and grapho-motor execution.

It follows that repeatedly giving beginners full dictations and hoping that these processes improve is not necessarily the most efficient instructional approach.Instead, we can reduce the complexity of the final task, isolate or foreground some of its component processes, provide support where learners need it and gradually remove that support.

That gives us the rationale for the progression that follows:

Hear and discriminate → segment → identify → reconstruct → complete → transcribe with support → transcribe independently.

And this is where both my experience with weaker French L2-learners and research show that effective dictation instruction should begin.

1. Why full dictation is so difficult for beginners

Suppose a Year 7 French class hears:

Le week-end, je joue souvent au foot avec mes amis.

To write this sentence successfully, learners need to do much more than “know the vocabulary”.

They must identify where one word finishes and another begins. They need sufficiently stable phonological representations of souvent, avec, mes amis, etc. They must map the sounds they perceive onto words stored in long-term memory. They must retain several elements while writing. They must retrieve appropriate spelling conventions. They also need to use their emerging knowledge of French grammar and syntax to predict what is likely to come next.

In other words, dictation simultaneously places demands on speech perception, segmentation, phonological processing, lexical access, working memory, grammatical prediction and orthographic encoding.

That is quite a lot for an eleven-year-old who started learning French six weeks ago.

There is another important issue. The speech signal does not arrive neatly packaged as the sequence of words we see on the page. Native and proficient speakers perceive meaningful units within a continuous stream of sound because their brains have become extremely efficient at segmentation and lexical recognition. Beginners have not yet developed this ability. Consequently, when learners repeatedly fail at conventional dictation, the problem may not simply be that they “haven’t learnt the words”. They may know a word perfectly well when they see it and still fail to recognise it in connected speech.

This is why I would not normally begin dictation training with full dictation. Instead, I would build towards it carefully scaffolding the process. starting with the most important process: phonemic discrimination.

2. Start with discrimination, not transcription

At the beginning of the progression, I want the learner’s attention almost entirely on the sound.

A simple multiple-choice listening task works extremely well here.

For example, students might hear:

Je joue souvent au foot.

and choose between:

A. Je joue souvent au foot.
B. Je joue souvent au tennis.
C. Je joue parfois au foot.
D. Je ne joue jamais au foot.

There is virtually no writing involved. This matters because the learner is not simultaneously worrying about spelling, handwriting and remembering an entire sentence, more attentional capacity can be devoted to the all-important careful auditory discrimination.

The alternatives should not simply be random sentences. Good distractors should require learners to attend to acoustically or semantically important contrasts.This makes multiple choice an excellent entry point into dictation training, provided we see it not as a testing device but as a listening scaffold.

3. Move from general recognition to precise listening

Once learners can identify the overall sentence, we can increase the perceptual demand. One useful next step is Missing Detail.

Students see most of the sentence but one important element is missing. They listen and identify what belongs in the gap.

For example:

Le week-end, je joue ______ avec mes amis.

They hear:

Le week-end, je joue au tennis avec mes amis.

The task now requires more than recognising which sentence was spoken in that the learner must focus attention on a specific point in the speech stream and extract the relevant information. The writing burden remains small and manageable, however.

This is important in the early stages. We are increasing the listening challenge without unnecessarily increasing every other source of cognitive demand at the same time.

4. Teach learners to reconstruct what they hear

The next stage can introduce Sentence Puzzles. Learners hear a sentence and are given its constituent chunks in a scrambled order:

avec mes amis | je | le week-end | au foot | joue

Their task is to reconstruct:

Le week-end, je joue au foot avec mes amis.

This is a powerful bridge between recognition and transcription because the learner no longer simply selects an answer. They must hold the sentence in mind sufficiently well to reconstruct its sequence. At the same time, the words themselves are provided.

This means the activity removes much of the orthographic retrieval burden while retaining demands on listening, memory, word order and syntactic prediction. It also encourages learners to process language in chunks, rather than attempting to hold an entire sentence as a sequence of isolated words.

5. Teach them to find the boundaries in speech

One of the greatest obstacles beginner listeners face is segmentation. On the page:

Je vais au cinéma avec mes amis.

looks like seven clearly separated words.

In speech, learners do not hear seven convenient little boxes. Instaed, they encounter a continuous acoustic stream.

An activity such as Break the Flow can therefore explicitly train learners to identify boundaries between words or meaningful chunks. Students hear a sentence and indicate where they believe the divisions occur.

At first, I would use highly familiar language. The purpose is not to test whether learners know obscure vocabulary. It is to help them become better at finding familiar language inside connected speech.

This distinction is fundamental. Listening instruction should not always be about asking:

“Did you understand it?”

Sometimes it should be about teaching learners:

“How do you find the language you already know when somebody actually says it?”

6. Zoom in on individual words

We can then narrow the learner’s attention still further. In Spot the Word, students hear a sentence and identify or type a particular word they have detected.This may sound relatively undemanding, but it trains an important listening behaviour: selective lexical identification. Instead of trying to transcribe everything, learners practise locking onto individual lexical items within a larger stream of speech.

Why is it valuable? Because with beginner learners because full dictation can otherwise become an all-or-nothing experience. Miss the beginning of the sentence and panic sets in; while the learner is trying to reconstruct what has already disappeared, the rest of the sentence passes them by.

Training learners to recover individual words helps develop more resilient listening behaviour.

7. Remove some of the word, but not all of it

We can now begin increasing the orthographic demand. Activities involving Missing Vowels or Missing Consonants provide learners with incomplete written representations of the words they hear. Instead of writing a word entirely from memory, students use the acoustic signal to reconstruct its missing letters.

This provides a useful intermediate stage because learners must increasingly connect sound and spelling, but they are not yet required to retrieve the entire orthographic representation independently.

I would not necessarily regard Missing Vowels and Missing Consonants as two rigidly consecutive levels of difficulty. Their relative difficulty depends on the target language, the particular lexical items and the sound-spelling relationships involved. It is better to regard them as two complementary forms of partial transcription.

The pedagogical principle is more important than their precise ordering: don’t remove all the support at once. Fade it gradually.

8. Move to guided dictation

Only after learners have had substantial experience of recognising, segmenting, reconstructing and partially transcribing language would I move towards something resembling conventional dictation. But even here, there is an important intermediate stage: Guided Dictation.

Students might be given:

Le ______, je joue ______ au foot avec mes ______.

and hear:

Le week-end, je joue souvent au foot avec mes amis.

Or they might receive first letters, word lengths, selected words, chunk boundaries or other carefully chosen prompts.

The learner now has to transcribe substantial portions of the sentence, but the existing information reduces uncertainty and working-memory demands.

Crucially, guided dictation allows us to manipulate difficulty very precisely.

Early on, perhaps 70 per cent of the sentence is provided.Later, 50 per cent.Then 20 per cent.Eventually, nothing.

This is scaffolding in the proper sense of the word: support is provided because learners need it, and progressively withdrawn as they become capable of performing independently.

9. Finally, full dictation

Full dictation should be the destination, not necessarily the starting point.By the time learners reach this stage, they have repeatedly practised many of its component processes:

discriminating sounds → identifying details → recognising words → reconstructing sequences → segmenting connected speech → mapping sounds onto spelling → retaining chunks → transcribing.

Now the scaffolds disappear and learners hear:

Le week-end, je joue souvent au foot avec mes amis.

and write:

Le week-end, je joue souvent au foot avec mes amis.

What appears to be a very simple classroom activity is actually the culmination of a carefully engineered instructional sequence. And because learners have been prepared for it, full dictation is far less likely to become the familiar scenario in which confident students succeed, weaker listeners write three words and everyone waits for the teacher to reveal the answer.

10. A few important principles

Several principles should underpin the progression.

First, use familiar language. Especially at beginner level, dictation training should predominantly consolidate language that has already been extensively modelled and processed. If the vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation and spelling are all new, it becomes very difficult to know what exactly the task is developing.

Second, keep the language short initially. Sentence-level listening is ideal because it allows repeated, intensive processing without overwhelming working memory.

Third, allow repetition strategically. The objective is not to simulate an examination every time students listen. During learning, replaying the input allows learners to test hypotheses, notice previously missed information and gradually construct a more accurate representation.

Fourth, vary what learners have to listen for. Sometimes the target should be a phonological contrast; sometimes a word boundary; sometimes a grammatical morpheme; sometimes lexical meaning; sometimes spelling.

Fifth, make difficulty progressive. Don’t move from “listen and tick” directly to “write everything you hear”.

And finally, don’t confuse dictation practice with dictation testing.

If every dictation is scored, high-stakes or performed under strict test conditions, we risk turning an extremely useful instructional technique into yet another assessment event. During the learning phase, errors should provide information:

What didn’t I hear? What did I mis-segment? Which sound-spelling correspondence fooled me? Which word did I know on paper but fail to recognise aurally?

Having this metacognitive reflection at the end of any such activity is for me the icing on the cake. Having done my PhD in metacognition I can vouch for the importance of the lightbulb moments that this self-questioning often sparks.

11. The Language Gym Dictation Trainer: putting the progression into practice

This thinking lies behind the Dictation Trainer on The Language Gym, the latest addition to the http://www.language-gym.com’s game room. Rather than presenting beginner learners immediately with an empty box and asking them to transcribe complete sentences, the trainer takes them through a series of increasingly demanding listening and reconstruction activities:

Multiple Choice → Missing Detail → Sentence Puzzle → Break the Flow → Spot the Word → Missing Vowels / Missing Consonants → Guided Dictation → Dictation

Each activity removes a little more support.

Multiple Choice develops careful auditory discrimination without requiring transcription.

Missing Detail directs attention towards specific information in the speech stream.

Sentence Puzzle requires learners to reconstruct the sequence they have heard while providing the language itself.

Break the Flow focuses explicitly on one of the most important bottom-up listening skills: segmenting continuous speech into meaningful units.

Spot the Word develops selective lexical recognition within connected speech.

Missing Vowels and Missing Consonants strengthen the mapping between phonological and orthographic representations while still providing substantial visual support.

Guided Dictation removes much of that support and requires increasingly independent transcription.

Finally, Dictation removes the scaffold altogether.

The important point is that these are not simply nine different ways of making dictation more entertaining.

They embody a learning progression.

The learner moves from:

recognition → focused identification → reconstruction → segmentation → partial transcription → supported transcription → independent transcription.

And that progression mirrors the cognitive model discussed earlier. Rather than asking the novice learner to coordinate all the processes involved in dictation successfully from the outset, we manipulate the task so that particular processes can be practised with reduced demands elsewhere.

In other words, the Dictation Trainer operationalises a principle that, according to cognitive load theory, process-based instruction and, most importanty common sense should underpin much of beginner language teaching of any complex skills, including dictation:

Don’t repeatedly test the complex performance you eventually want. Break that performance down, practise its component processes, scaffold their integration, and gradually remove the support.

By the time a Year 7 learner reaches the final Dictation activity, we are no longer simply hoping that they can write what they hear. Rather,we have taught them how to get there.

Introduction

Over the years, through workshops, conferences, social media and conversations with teachers, I have noticed that the very same questions about EPI keep coming back. They are important questions because they concern what ultimately matters most: how we move from supported performance to independence, from knowledge to fluency, and from classroom practice to genuine communication!

In this post, I address six of the questions I am asked most frequently:

1. How do you teach writing in EPI, and how do you move from micro-writing to extended writing?
2. How do we move students from sentence builders and scaffolding to genuinely independent speaking and writing?
3. How do we get students to speak spontaneously rather than simply reproducing memorised sentences?
4. What is the best way to correct errors without damaging fluency, confidence or motivation?
5. How do we recycle language effectively across units so that students actually remember it months later?
6. How do I embed culture in an EPI curriculum?

Although these may appear to be six separate questions, they are actually connected by one fundamental principle: we cannot expect learners to perform complex language tasks successfully unless we systematically develop and practise the processes that underpin them. Whether we are talking about writing, speaking, error correction, retrieval, recycling or culture, the objective is ultimately the same: to help learners develop a repertoire of language that is durable, rapidly retrievable, flexible and usable in real communication!

And, as always, the journey from input to independence matters just as much as the destination!

1. How do you teach writing in EPI, and how do you move from micro-writing to extended writing?

In EPI, writing is taught as a process, rather than simply practised as a product. Too often, students are given a title, a few bullet points and perhaps a vocabulary sheet and are expected to produce 90 or 150 words. Yet extended writing requires the learner to perform numerous demanding processes simultaneously. L2 writing research has long conceptualised writing as the coordination of multiple cognitive and linguistic processes, including planning, formulation, lexical retrieval and monitoring (Kellogg, 1996; Kormos, 2012; Manchón, 2011). If those processes have not been adequately trained, simply asking students to write more extended pieces will not necessarily make them better writers!

The model I use identifies eight processes involved in successful writing: understanding the task, generating ideas, retrieving language, building sentences, applying grammar, organising and linking ideas, checking whilst writing, and improving after writing. Each needs to be explicitly developed.

This is where micro-writing is particularly useful. Instead of practising all eight processes simultaneously, we can design short tasks which foreground one or two:

• Understanding the task: 1. give students three possible responses to an exam bullet point and ask which actually addresses it and why. 2. Give them a title such as The pros and cons of driving a car and a set of sentences some of which are pertinent and some of which aren’t. The task: crossing out the irrelevant ones, or ranking them in descending order of relevance
• Generating ideas: 1. give a prompt such as What did you do last weekend? and allow 45 seconds to generate five possible ideas before writing anything. 2. Give them the same prompt and sentence stems to complete.
• Retrieving language: 1. Give five English chunks or visual prompts and ask students to retrieve the target-language equivalents from memory. 2. Stage a No snakes no ladders with mini whiteboards
• Building sentences: 1. provide three familiar chunks and challenge students to combine them into one well-formed sentence. 2. Give them a sentence and then ask them to extend them with prompts such as when, how, where, who with
• Applying grammar: 1.Give a sentence in the present and ask students to rewrite it accurately in the past; 2. Give them incorrect sentence to rewrite accurately
• Organising and linking ideas: 1. Give three short sentences and ask students to connect them into a coherent mini-paragraph. 2. Stage a jigsaw reading task
• Checking whilst writing: 1. Students write three sentences but pause after each to run through a short checking routine, for example checking the verb, agreement and word order. 2. Students write one sentence at a time, pausing after each to check meaning, accuracy and cohesion, identify and repair any problems, then continue writing.
• Improving after writing: 1. Give students their own four-sentence text back and ask them to upgrade two sentences by adding detail, complexity or greater lexical precision. 2. Ask them to keep a personalised list of their recurrent mistakes and ask them to use it before handing it a written piece.

These individual processes sit within five broader principles which shape how I approach writing instruction in EPI.

1. Write little and often. Replace occasional marathon writing sessions with frequent, low-stakes writing opportunities. Writing fluency is built through regular retrieval, sentence-building, manipulation and quick-response tasks rather than through constantly producing extended pieces. A student who writes four or five carefully focused sentences several times a week may get far more useful writing practice than one who produces a long piece every few weeks! This emphasis on repeated retrieval and increasingly fluent access to language is consistent with research on retrieval practice and skill development (DeKeyser, 2007; Nakata, 2017).

2. Train the processes, not just the product. Successful writing depends on processes such as idea generation, lexical retrieval, grammatical and orthographic encoding, sentence assembly and monitoring. These processes need to be practised explicitly and systematically, rather than assuming that they will somehow develop simply because students write longer texts (Kellogg, 1996; Kormos, 2012).

3. Prime before you write. Activate the language before asking students to write. Listening, reading, retrieval and speaking tasks can reactivate relevant vocabulary, chunks, structures and ideas, making them more readily accessible when students begin writing. Research on pre-task planning and pre-learning similarly suggests that making relevant linguistic resources more accessible can support subsequent L2 production (Ellis, 2005; Webb, 2009). We should not repeatedly send learners to the blank page linguistically “cold”!

4. Build automaticity through rapid response. Activities such as mini-whiteboard work, retrieval tasks, translation sprints, Do Nows and plenaries can develop greater speed and fluency in accessing language. Skill-acquisition accounts of L2 learning emphasise the importance of extensive practice in moving from effortful processing towards increasingly rapid and automatised performance (DeKeyser, 2007; Segalowitz, 2010). Knowing a word or structure is not enough if retrieving it consumes so much cognitive capacity that little remains for constructing and monitoring the sentence!

5. Use extended writing sparingly but purposefully. Extended writing certainly has a place, but primarily to integrate, demonstrate and diagnose writing skills, not as the dominant form of writing practice. If the underlying processes are weak, repeatedly asking students to produce 90 or 150 words simply gives them repeated practice at struggling with those same processes.

So how do we eventually get to extended writing?

The transition involves progressively integrating the processes that have previously been practised in smaller combinations. Students move from individual sentences to sentence expansion and manipulation, from sentences to linked sentence chains, from sentence chains to short paragraphs, and eventually from paragraphs to extended texts. At the same time, scaffolding is gradually faded and retrieval demands increase.

This is important motivationally too! A struggling learner confronted with a blank page and “Write 150 words” can experience failure before writing has even begun. Micro-writing creates frequent, achievable successes, whilst allowing us to diagnose exactly where the problem lies.

The principle is simple: write little and often, train the processes, prime before writing, build automaticity, progressively integrate the processes and only then expect learners to orchestrate them independently in extended writing!

2. How do we move students from sentence builders and scaffolding to genuinely independent speaking and writing?

One criticism occasionally levelled at EPI is that sentence builders create dependency. They can, but only if they are used incorrectly. A sentence builder is a temporary scaffold, not the destination. The purpose of scaffolding is ultimately to make itself redundant!

At the beginning of an instructional sequence, students need substantial support because the language is unfamiliar and retrieval from long-term memory is not yet possible. Sentence builders reduce cognitive load, make useful patterns transparent and allow learners to experience successful comprehension and production very early on. This is compatible with cognitive-load accounts of instruction, which emphasise the importance of reducing unnecessary demands on limited working-memory resources during initial learning (Sweller, Ayres & Kalyuga, 2011).

However, there is a crucial stage between using a sentence builder and dispensing with it: retrieval practice.This is where, in my experience, quite a few teachers who have adopted the MARS EARS cycle move too quickly. They spend considerable time modelling the language and carrying out receptive-processing activities, but not nearly enough time on the repeated retrieval required to make that language readily available without the scaffold. Then, when the sentence builder disappears, students struggle, and the conclusion is sometimes that they have become “dependent” on it. Often, the real problem is simply that retrieval has not been practised sufficiently! Research on retrieval practice shows that effortful retrieval can strengthen subsequent retention more effectively than additional exposure alone (Karpicke & Roediger, 2008), whilst L2 research has demonstrated benefits from repeated retrieval for vocabulary learning (Nakata, 2017).

Fading should therefore be gradual. Students might initially work with the complete sentence builder, then with sections covered, then with increasingly minimal prompts, then perhaps with English cues or images, and eventually with no linguistic support whatsoever. Activities such as delayed copying, sentence reconstruction, translation, retrieval grids, oral retrieval from visual cues and writing from memory can progressively increase retrieval strength.

However, independence requires more than recalling the original sentences. Students must also manipulate and recombine the language. Change the subject. Change the tense. Add a reason. Substitute an adjective. Combine two familiar structures. Respond to an unexpected question. Use a familiar chunk in an unfamiliar context.The criterion for removing scaffolding should therefore not be time, as in “we have used this sentence builder for three lessons”. It should be evidence that learners can retrieve and manipulate the target language successfully.

This is why the retrieval work in MARS EARS matters so much. Repeated retrieval, spaced over time and under increasingly demanding conditions, is what converts supported performance into increasingly autonomous performance (Nakata, 2015, 2017).

The journey is essentially:

scaffolded processing → retrieval → faded retrieval → manipulation → recombination → autonomous use

The goal was never independence from the language in the sentence builder. We want that language firmly embedded in long-term memory! What we want is independence from the sentence builder itself.

3. How do we get students to speak spontaneously rather than simply reproducing memorised sentences?

First, we need to rethink what “spontaneous speaking” actually means. Spontaneity does not mean generating language from nowhere. Fluent speakers draw constantly on familiar lexical chunks, collocations, syntactic patterns and communicative routines stored in long-term memory. Research on formulaic language has repeatedly highlighted the role played by prefabricated sequences in fluent language production (Pawley & Syder, 1983; Wray, 2002; Wood, 2010). You cannot spontaneously retrieve language which you have never acquired!

The real objective is therefore to develop a sufficiently large and automatised repertoire which learners can retrieve, adapt and recombine rapidly in response to an unpredictable communicative need. Research into L2 fluency similarly stresses the importance of automaticity and speed of access to linguistic knowledge (Segalowitz, 2010).

This is why speaking instruction, like writing instruction, needs to be process-based. Simply telling students to “have a conversation” does not train the processes which successful conversation requires.

I typically build towards communicative interaction progressively. Early on, chunking aloud helps establish accurate and fluent articulatory routines. For example, students can repeatedly produce a difficult phrase such as je voudrais aller or ich würde gerne as a single phonological unit rather than assembling it word by word. Research on formulaic sequences provides a strong rationale for building readily accessible multiword units, and intervention research has found benefits of explicit formulaic-sequence instruction for aspects of oral fluency.

We then need substantial oral and written interactional retrieval practice. Students might see a visual cue and retrieve a question, hear a question and rapidly retrieve an appropriate response, or complete a written interaction in which each answer determines the next question. The aim is to make high-frequency interactional language increasingly accessible and rapidly retrievable.

Next come mini role-plays. These are very short exchanges with a limited communicative objective. Students might buy a train ticket, decline an invitation politely, arrange when and where to meet, order something in a café or complain about a hotel room. These provide genuine interaction without overwhelming working memory.

We then progressively increase unpredictability through communicative tasks such as information gaps, spot-the-difference activities, problem-solving, surveys, decision-making tasks or conversations in which students do not know in advance exactly what their partner will say. Task-based research has long emphasised the importance of meaning-focused interaction and increasingly demanding conditions for L2 production (Ellis, 2003; Skehan, 1998).

Throughout this sequence, however, we must train the micro-skills of speaking: asking and answering questions, turn-taking, initiating and closing an interaction, reacting, hesitating naturally, requesting clarification, repairing communication, circumlocuting, agreeing and disagreeing, using fillers and buying oneself processing time.

These behaviours also need routinisation. For example, repeated two-minute conversations with changing partners can require students to use expressions equivalent to “Really?”, “Why?”, “What about you?”, clarification requests and follow-up questions until these interactional routines become increasingly automatic.

This is why I do not accept the opposition between memorisation and spontaneity. Memorisation of useful language is necessary but insufficient. The progression should be:

chunking → retrieval → interactional retrieval → mini role-plays → increasingly unpredictable communication

At the same time, we systematically train and routinise the micro-skills which hold conversation together.

Spontaneity is not where speaking instruction begins. It is what well-sequenced, process-based speaking instruction gradually makes possible!

4. What is the best way to correct errors without damaging fluency, confidence or motivation?

The first question I ask is: what is the purpose of the activity?

Not every error needs correcting, and certainly not every error needs correcting immediately. Error correction should be driven by the learning objective and by where students are in the instructional sequence. Research on corrective feedback strongly supports its potential value for L2 development, whilst also showing that its effects depend on factors including feedback type and instructional context (Li, 2010; Lyster & Saito, 2010; Lyster, Saito & Sato, 2013).

During highly controlled work, particularly when students are consolidating a new pattern, accuracy matters greatly. Errors which become repeatedly rehearsed risk becoming entrenched. At this stage, relatively immediate feedback can therefore be useful, particularly when it directs attention to the precise feature students are trying to acquire. Indeed, Lyster and Saito’s classroom meta-analysis found significant and durable benefits of oral corrective feedback, although the effects varied according to the feedback provided.

However, the situation changes when the primary objective is fluency.If a learner is trying to sustain an interaction and we interrupt every few seconds to correct gender, adjective agreement or a verb ending, we force attention away from meaning and towards form. We increase cognitive load, disrupt the flow of communication and potentially make the learner increasingly reluctant to speak.

So correction needs to be selective, purposeful and timed intelligently!

I tend to prioritise errors which impede communication, relate directly to recently taught high-value language, occur repeatedly, or are likely to become habitual. Many other errors can be left temporarily untouched.

Feedback can also be delayed. During a speaking task, for example, the teacher can note recurring errors and address them afterwards with the whole class. This preserves communicative flow whilst still creating an opportunity for learning.

The same principle applies to writing. Covering a student’s page in corrections is rarely productive. Working memory and attention are limited. A learner is far more likely to benefit from focused feedback on two or three recurring or important problems than from twenty corrections which they barely process. Research on written corrective feedback similarly highlights the importance of what learners actually do with the feedback they receive, rather than viewing teacher correction as an end in itself (Ferris, 2010; Storch & Wigglesworth, 2010).

Most importantly, correction should generate further processing. Simply showing students the correct form is often insufficient. Ask them to retrieve it again, discriminate between correct and incorrect versions, reconstruct the sentence or use the corrected pattern in another context.

Error correction should therefore not be conceived as the teacher’s attempt to eliminate every mistake. Errors are inevitable in language development.

The objective is to decide which errors matter now, when attention should be drawn to them, and what students should subsequently do with that feedback.

Correction is most effective when it becomes another opportunity for learning, rather than merely an indication that something was wrong!

5. How do we recycle language effectively across units so that students actually remember it months later?

One of the biggest problems in language curricula is that we confuse having taught something with students having learnt it. A structure appears in Unit 2, students practise it, take a test and everybody moves on. By Unit 6, much of it has disappeared.

That is not surprising. Forgetting is normal. A curriculum designed for durable learning must therefore engineer systematic recycling across units. Research on distributed practice and L2 vocabulary learning supports revisiting material across spaced encounters rather than concentrating all practice into a single period (Nakata, 2015; Nakata, Suzuki & He, 2023).

The first mechanism is interleaving. Rather than practising only the language belonging to the current unit, deliberately mix previous material with current learning. If students are studying holidays, for example, a retrieval task might combine where I went with previously learnt language relating to weather, transport, food, opinions and descriptions of people. Students now have to select the appropriate language rather than simply retrieve items from a predictable single set. L2 research has found benefits of interleaving for the longer-term retention of grammatical distinctions and foreign-language verb conjugation (Nakata & Suzuki, 2019; Pan et al., 2019).

Do Now tasks are ideal for this! The first five minutes of a lesson can retrieve language not merely from yesterday but from last week, last month and the previous term. An Exit Ticket can similarly include one item from today’s learning and one or two strategically selected items from earlier units. The important principle here is not the label attached to the activity, but the use of spaced, effortful retrieval.

We also need cumulative receptive and productive tasks. A listening text in Unit 5 should not contain only Unit 5 language. It can deliberately incorporate high-value material from Units 1 to 4. The same applies to reading. Productively, cumulative speaking and writing tasks should require students to mobilise language from several previous contexts rather than merely reproduce the latest unit.

Curriculum sequencing itself can facilitate this. Semantic proximity between adjacent units creates natural opportunities for recycling. A unit on daily routine can lead naturally into school life; school into free time; free time into health; holidays into travel, weather and accommodation. Previous language remains communicatively useful rather than disappearing because the textbook has suddenly moved to an unrelated topic.

Other useful techniques include planned carry-over language, deliberately identifying high-value chunks and structures which must recur in subsequent units; cumulative retrieval grids; interleaved translation; cumulative quizzes; old-language/new-context activities; and requiring students to reuse previously learnt structures with new vocabulary.

The important point is that recycling cannot be left to chance. When planning Unit 6, ask not only “What new language am I teaching?” but also “What from Units 1 to 5 am I deliberately bringing back, and in what form?”

A retrieval-driven curriculum therefore behaves less like a sequence of sealed boxes and more like an expanding network. New learning is constantly connected to old learning!

Ultimately, the test of recycling is not whether students recognise something when we show it to them. It is whether, months later, they can retrieve and deploy it rapidly without being told where it originally came from.

6. How do I embed culture in an EPI curriculum?

When people discuss embedding culture in MFL, the conversation often begins with content: festivals, food, monuments, famous people, films, music, literature and historical events. All of these can enrich a curriculum. However, if the overarching aim of EPI is to develop language fluency and successful communication, I would start somewhere else.

Hence, my first question would be:What culture-related issues could impede successful communication or interaction in the target-language country or countries?

Culture is not simply something we know about. Culture influences what people do with language! This is central to the notion of intercultural communicative competence, in which successful language use involves not merely linguistic knowledge but understanding how language, relationships, social practices and cultural meanings interact (Byram, 1997; Kramsch, 1993).

Take forms of address. A student may know the grammar of tu and vous, du and Sie, or tú and usted, but successful interaction requires more than grammar. Who uses which form with whom? Under what circumstances? Who normally initiates the move towards greater informality? A linguistically accurate choice can still be socially inappropriate. Research into interlanguage pragmatics has repeatedly demonstrated that grammatical competence alone does not guarantee pragmatically appropriate L2 performance (Kasper & Rose, 2002; Taguchi, 2015).

The same applies to requests. A learner may translate “Give me a coffee” perfectly accurately at sentence level but fail to understand how requests are conventionally softened in the target culture. So, when teaching ordering in a café, I would model not merely the vocabulary for drinks but culturally plausible openings, requests, responses, thanks and leave-taking.

Consider greetings. Teaching bonjour or hola as lexical equivalents of “hello” is insufficient. When are they used? Does one greet staff when entering a small shop? What happens when joining a group? When might handshakes, kisses or simply verbal greetings be expected? The language and the cultural script belong together.

The same principle applies to disagreement. Students can learn je ne suis pas d’accord, but authentic interaction requires sensitivity to how directly disagreement is normally expressed in different contexts. We can give students several ways of disagreeing, ask them to decide which might be appropriate in different situations and relationships, and then use them in mini-dialogues and role-plays.

Or take invitations and refusals. Students can role-play inviting someone out, but the cultural learning lies partly in how one accepts, declines, gives a reason, proposes an alternative and closes the exchange without sounding abrupt.

Culture can therefore be embedded naturally into EPI sequences through models, listening texts, dialogues, interactional retrieval, role-plays and communicative tasks. If students are learning requests, teach culturally appropriate requesting. If they are learning opinions, teach culturally plausible agreement and disagreement. If they are learning transactional language, teach the interactional routines surrounding the transaction.

Of course, literature, history, music, geography, festivals and the diversity of target-language societies remain valuable. But cultural learning should not become a succession of interesting facts detached from what students can actually do with the language.

From an EPI perspective, one of its most important purposes is to develop pragmatic and intercultural competence, helping learners understand not merely what to say, but what to say, to whom, when, how and why!

Because grammatical accuracy alone does not guarantee successful communication. You can produce a perfectly grammatical sentence and still get the interaction completely wrong!

Selected bibliography

Byram, M. (1997). Teaching and Assessing Intercultural Communicative Competence. Multilingual Matters.

DeKeyser, R. M. (Ed.). (2007). Practice in a Second Language: Perspectives from Applied Linguistics and Cognitive Psychology. Cambridge University Press.

Ellis, R. (2003). Task-Based Language Learning and Teaching. Oxford University Press.

Ellis, R. (Ed.). (2005). Planning and Task Performance in a Second Language. John Benjamins.

Ferris, D. R. (2010). Second language writing research and written corrective feedback in SLA: Intersections and practical applications. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 32(2), 181–201.

Karpicke, J. D., & Roediger, H. L. (2008). The critical importance of retrieval for learning. Science, 319, 966–968.

Kasper, G., & Rose, K. R. (2002). Pragmatic Development in a Second Language. Blackwell.

Kellogg, R. T. (1996). A model of working memory in writing. In C. M. Levy & S. Ransdell (Eds.), The Science of Writing. Lawrence Erlbaum.

Kormos, J. (2012). The role of individual differences in L2 writing. Journal of Second Language Writing, 21(4), 390–403.

Kramsch, C. (1993). Context and Culture in Language Teaching. Oxford University Press.

Li, S. (2010). The effectiveness of corrective feedback in SLA: A meta-analysis. Language Learning, 60(2), 309–365.

Lyster, R., & Saito, K. (2010). Oral feedback in classroom SLA: A meta-analysis. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 32(2), 265–302.

Lyster, R., Saito, K., & Sato, M. (2013). Oral corrective feedback in second language classrooms. Language Teaching, 46(1), 1–40.

Manchón, R. M. (Ed.). (2011). Learning-to-Write and Writing-to-Learn in an Additional Language. John Benjamins.

Nakata, T. (2015). Effects of expanding and equal spacing on second language vocabulary learning. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 37(4), 677–711.

X. (2023). Costs and benefits of spacing for second language vocabulary learning. Language Learning, 73(3), 799–834.

Pawley, A., & Syder, F. H. (1983). Two puzzles for linguistic theory: Nativelike selection and nativelike fluency. In J. C. Richards & R. W. Schmidt (Eds.), Language and Communication. Longman.

Segalowitz, N. (2010). Cognitive Bases of Second Language Fluency. Routledge.

Skehan, P. (1998). A Cognitive Approach to Language Learning. Oxford University Press.

Storch, N., & Wigglesworth, G. (2010). Learners’ processing, uptake, and retention of corrective feedback on writing. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 32(2), 303–334.

Taguchi, N. (2015). “Contextually” speaking: A survey of pragmatic learning abroad, in class, and online. System, 48, 3–20.

Webb, S. (2009). The effects of pre-learning vocabulary on reading comprehension and writing. Canadian Modern Language Review, 65(3), 441–470.

Wood, D. (2010). Formulaic Language and Second Language Speech Fluency. Continuum.

Here is the list of the upcoming research-informed workshops for those who intend to pursue the EPI accreditation, want to learn a bit more about EPI or simply widen there repertoire of engaging activities across all four language skills. The links below will direct you to the University of Bath’s http://www.networkforlearning.org.uk where you will be able to enrol on your elected courses.

Becoming an EPI Teacher: A Deep Dive into Dr Conti’s Extensive Processing Instruction  Gianfranco Conti | 9 & 10 November         Find out more                                    15 & 16 February           Find out more ___________________________________

Phonics in MFL Gianfranco Conti | 17 November          Find out more                                  23 February           Find out more ____________________________________

Strategies for Effective Grammar Instruction Gianfranco Conti | 18 November            Find out more                                   24 February            Find out more __________________________________

Curriculum Design & Lesson Planning in MFL Gianfranco Conti | 23 & 24 November        Find out more _________________________________

Implementing EPI at KS4 for the new MFL GCSEs Gianfranco Conti | 2 December             Find out more __________________________________

Implementing EPI for Learners at KS2 Gianfranco Conti | 19 January    Find out more __________________________________

Becoming an Accredited EPI Teacher Program Gianfranco Conti | various   Find out more _______________________________________

Becoming an Accredited EPI Teacher – Final Assessment Tutorial Gianfranco Conti | tbc                     Find out more

Introduction

I have written extensively in my books and on this blog about the more obvious fundamentals of vocabulary teaching: retrieval practice, recycling, chunking, spacing and interleaving.

So, let us be clear: this is not another post about those things.

This post is about some of the less obvious reasons why vocabulary often does not stick or, just as importantly, why words that pupils apparently “know” are not available quickly enough when they need them most, especially in GCSE listening, speaking and writing.

1. Vocabulary needs an explicit input-to-output journey

A major weakness in vocabulary teaching is not that words are never recycled. The recently published MFL textbooks do recycle important vocabulary a few times. The bigger problem is that there is often no systematic relationship between the vocabulary encountered in input and the vocabulary subsequently expected in output. This is a major flaw that I have noticed in every single one of the MFL books published by ‘big’ publishers in the last five years. Especially in the new GCSE books.

By an input-to-output sequence, I mean something very simple: pupils first establish the meaning of a carefully selected core of language; they then encounter and process that same language repeatedly through listening and reading; once it has become sufficiently familiar, they retrieve and manipulate it with support before eventually using it more independently in speaking and writing. In other words, there is a substantive phase in which the target vocabulary is taught, an even more substantive input phase flooded with that vocabulary, and finally a pushed-output phase in which the target vocabulary initially taught is practised through interactional speaking and writing.

Boers (2021) is particularly useful here. His research synthesis discusses enhancing vocabulary learning through input, the movement from input to output, retrieval and practice rather than assuming that exposure alone will result in productive command. Research comparing input-only conditions with input followed by learning tasks has likewise found substantially greater vocabulary gains when learners have to do something further with the language rather than merely encounter it (Duong, Montero Perez, Desmet & Peters, 2021).

Why does this matter for GCSE? Because pupils can recognise vocabulary during classroom reading yet fail to retrieve the same language during speaking or writing! Repeated experiences of “I knew it but couldn’t use it” are also hardly conducive to self-efficacy (Bandura, 1997; Mills, Pajares & Herron, 2007).

The fix:

1. Decide on your high-value core first.
2. Pre-teach it.
3. Flood subsequent listening and reading with it.
4. Move through structured retrieval.
5. Only then expect freer production.

This continuity is central to MARS EARS, PIRCO (see image below) and the Sentence Builders approach: the language pupils are eventually expected to use is systematically prepared beforehand rather than appearing almost by accident at the production stage.

2. Do not make new vocabulary and new grammar compete for attention

This follows directly from point 1. A common curriculum sequence introduces a substantial amount of unfamiliar vocabulary and, at almost exactly the same time, asks pupils to understand a new grammatical rule.

That is asking working memory to deal with two major sources of novelty simultaneously, with potentially disastrous consequences for the less able and/or focused students.

Cognitive Load Theory reminds us that working-memory capacity is limited when processing unfamiliar information (Sweller, Ayres & Kalyuga, 2011). In second-language learning, the problem is particularly acute because even apparently simple sentences may require learners simultaneously to decode unfamiliar words, hold their meanings in memory, notice morphology and word order, and work out the underlying message.

The result can be superficial learning of both vocabulary and grammar, which later produces the familiar Year 11 complaint: “But we covered this.” Perhaps. But covering something and establishing a usable representation in long-term memory are very different things.

The exam consequences are obvious: if pupils have never had enough processing capacity to consolidate the lexical material properly, they will struggle to access it under pressure. If language lessons repeatedly generate overload and failure, pupils’ sense of competence can suffer too — important when self-efficacy is strongly related to persistence and achievement (Bandura, 1997; Mills et al., 2007).

The fix:

1. Establish the new lexical material first through highly comprehensible listening and reading.
2. Once much of that language has become familiar, use it as the known linguistic material through which pupils notice and work on the new grammatical pattern.
3. Only then move into heavier manipulation and freer use.

This is precisely why MARS EARS and PIRCO delay heavier grammatical manipulation until learners have built sufficient familiarity with the lexical material: reduce unnecessary novelty first, then ask pupils to analyse and manipulate.

3. Vocabulary needs to be taught through listening in context

This is one of the most important points in this post. Vocabulary learning in school is still heavily associated with print: vocabulary lists, knowledge organisers, textbook pages, flashcards and written retrieval.

Meanwhile, listening has historically been far more likely to be tested than systematically taught (Graham, 2017; Graham & Macaro, 2008). More recent work by Graham and Zhang has demonstrated that vocabulary can indeed be deliberately taught through listening and that different forms of explicit lexical support during oral input can promote vocabulary learning (Zhang & Graham, 2020; Graham & Zhang, 2024). Steven Smith and I have also advocated for substantive teaching of vocabulary to occur in every single input-to-output pedagogical cycle.

The consequence of a print-heavy diet is that a pupil can know perfectly well what a word looks like while possessing a far less stable representation of what it sounds like.

Listening also gives learners very little time. Native spoken-word processing begins extraordinarily quickly: lexical candidates can start being activated within roughly the first 100–150 milliseconds of speech input, and spoken-word recognition proceeds incrementally as the acoustic signal unfolds. For an L2 learner whose phonological representation of a word is weak, this is obviously brutal!

Matthews and Cheng (2015) found that the ability to recognise high-frequency words in speech correlated very strongly with listening comprehension; recognition of vocabulary at one frequency band alone accounted for 52% of the variance in listening scores in their sample. Masrai (2022), working with Arabic-speaking learners, similarly found a strong relationship between phonological vocabulary knowledge and listening comprehension.

So this is not solved merely by doing more phonics, reading aloud or dictation. Phonics matters because it helps stabilise sound–spelling representations, but pupils also need to meet vocabulary repeatedly in meaningful connected speech.

The fix:

1. Teach vocabulary through short, highly comprehensible listening contexts from the beginning.
2. Recycle the same lexical material through connected speech, not isolated word audio.
3. Gradually increase processing speed and complexity.
4. Keep sound–meaning mapping central throughout.

This is exactly why we created The Language Gym Listening Trainer, Dictation Trainer and Audio Boxing: to make pupils process familiar vocabulary repeatedly through the ear, in context and under progressively greater time pressure — not merely recognise it on a vocabulary sheet.

4. Knowing the meaning is not the same as knowing the word

A pupil sees chien and knows that it means dog. Good, but that does not demonstrate full lexical knowledge.Nation’s influential framework distinguishes knowledge of spoken form, written form, word parts, meaning, associations, grammatical behaviour, collocations and constraints on use (Nation, 2001). Schmitt (2010, 2014) likewise stresses that lexical knowledge has both breadth and depth.

Breadth asks how many words do I know? Depth asks how well do I know each one?That distinction matters enormously in the current GCSE climate because a finite prescribed vocabulary list can encourage the seductive idea that learning means accumulating form–meaning pairings. However, a pupil may know the basic meaning and still:

1. mishear the word;
2. spell it incorrectly;
3. place it incorrectly in a sentence;
4. fail to inflect it;
5. fail to recognise a common derivative;
6. fail to combine it with the right words;
7. or simply retrieve it too slowly.

Any of those can affect examination performance. From the learner’s perspective, repeatedly “knowing” vocabulary during revision but being unable to mobilise it successfully in an assessment is confusing and demoralising.

The fix: for your most important vocabulary, deliberately practise different dimensions of word knowledge. Sometimes identify the word aurally; sometimes reconstruct the spelling; sometimes manipulate the morphology; sometimes retrieve the surrounding chunk; sometimes place it in a new sentence.

This multidimensional treatment is built into the Sentence Builders books and Language Gym workouts: important lexical material is not simply presented and translated; it is repeatedly processed through different operations.

5. Pupils usually need many more encounters than neat CPD soundbites suggest

There is no magic number of encounters after which a word suddenly becomes “learned”. That needs saying clearly.Webb (2007) demonstrated continued growth across repeated encounters and, crucially, showed that different dimensions of vocabulary knowledge develop at different rates. Uchihara, Webb and Yanagisawa’s (2019) meta-analysis confirmed the general relationship between frequency of encounter and incidental vocabulary learning.

The problem is that research findings are sometimes translated into suspiciously tidy CPD claims such as “six encounters” or “eight encounters”. However, Six or eight encounters may produce some learning under certain conditions, but that is very different from saying they will produce a durable, multidimensional lexical representation capable of rapid retrieval months later.

This distinction matters because neat low encounter numbers are extremely convenient for overloaded schemes of learning and compact textbooks. If hundreds of items have to be “covered”, reassuring teachers that a handful of encounters will do makes the curriculum fit the available pages. Thing is tthe learner’s memory does not care how many pages the publisher has.

A textbook study by Bergström and colleagues, for example, found that target vocabulary in the materials they examined was not recycled sufficiently to support vocabulary development — a useful warning against equating textbook appearance with genuine learning opportunities.

The fix:

1. Stop asking “How many times have I taught this?”
2. Start auditing how many meaningful encounters your core vocabulary actually receives across a unit, term and year.
3. Distinguish basic familiarity from durable, fast, productive knowledge.

This is why our Sentence Builders materials and Language Gym resources deliberately recycle a relatively constrained lexical core intensively. I would rather pupils know 100 high-value items extremely well than “cover” 300 that disappear three weeks later.

6. Spacing is not enough: number, quality, modality and phonological stability all matter

Everyone has heard about spacing, distributed practice and interleaving. Important? Absolutely. But spacing weak learning does not magically turn it into strong learning.Four other variables matter enormously:

1. How many encounters pupils receive.
2. What they actually do during those encounters.
3. Which modalities they process the word through.
4. How stable the phonological representation becomes.

First, number matters, as we have just seen (Webb, 2007; Uchihara et al., 2019).

Second, quality matters. Depth-of-processing work and vocabulary-specific research suggest that encounters requiring richer semantic and formal processing are generally more memorable than superficial exposure (Craik & Lockhart, 1972; Laufer & Hulstijn, 2001).

Third, modality matters, although teachers should resist simplistic claims that “more modes are always better”. Research on multimodal vocabulary learning is mixed, partly because extra visual information can help under some conditions and create extra cognitive load under others. The important point for MFL is much more basic: vocabulary required for both listening and reading cannot sensibly be practised almost exclusively in print.

Fourth, the phonological representation has to stabilise. A pupil who is uncertain what a word actually sounds like is going to struggle to recognise it rapidly when embedded in connected speech, however confidently they can recognise the spelling.

GCSE exposes all four weaknesses. The listening paper does not reward vocabulary that exists only orthographically; spontaneous speaking does not reward vocabulary that requires four seconds of conscious search.

The fix: plan the learning history of high-value vocabulary across:

1. sound and print;
2. receptive and productive processing;
3. recognition and retrieval;
4. shallow and deeper processing;
5. repeated encounters over sufficient time.

This is very much the design principle behind PIRCO, MARS EARS, the Sentence Builders books and the Language Gym: repeated encounters, yes — but repeated encounters that actually do different cognitive work.

7. Eventually vocabulary has to become fast

This is one of the most neglected distinctions in school vocabulary teaching. A pupil can retrieve parce que after four seconds. Technically, they know it. The provlem is that in real-time listening or speaking, four seconds is an eternity.

Fluent language processing depends partly on automaticity: frequently required linguistic material has to become accessible with progressively less conscious attention (DeKeyser, 2007; Segalowitz, 2010).

This matters because working memory is limited. If a learner has to consciously search for the meaning of every second word, very little capacity remains for understanding the message. Likewise, in speaking, if almost every lexical item requires deliberate retrieval, the learner has fewer attentional resources available for syntax, morphology, pronunciation and planning the next part of the utterance.

The listening data discussed earlier make the point starkly. Matthews and Cheng’s learners’ ability to recognise spoken high-frequency vocabulary was very strongly associated with overall listening comprehension.

GCSE listening is therefore partly a race against processing time. Knowing vocabulary is not enough; learners need to access it quickly.

The fix:

1. Establish the vocabulary accurately first.
2. Practise increasingly rapid recognition and retrieval through familiar language.
3. Introduce time pressure gradually.
4. Keep success rates high enough that speed practice strengthens rather than destabilises knowledge.

This is one reason Language Gym games such as Audio Boxing and the vocabulary/listening trainers use repeated, increasingly rapid responses. The target is not frantic speed. The target is automatic access.

8. Small structural words deserve far more attention

Vocabulary teaching naturally privileges content words such as environment, cinema, holidays, football, and technology. They are salient, carry obvious semantic meaning and look good on vocabulary lists.

However, language is held together by large numbers of high-frequency function and structure words: articles, pronouns, auxiliaries, prepositions, conjunctions, particles, negators and similar items. 55% of every text we read or listen to consists of such words.

Field (2008) demonstrated how L2 listeners tend to rely heavily on content words and can underprocess function words. The latter are particularly difficult because they are often short, unstressed and phonologically reduced in normal connected speech.

This matters because the pupil can recognise all the impressive content vocabulary and still completely misunderstand the message if they:

1. miss the negative;
2. miss the pronoun;
3. miss the tense-bearing auxiliary;
4. miss the preposition;
5. miss the conjunction expressing contrast.

The whole interpretation may then change! This has obvious implications for GCSE listening and reading papers, but also for speaking and writing accuracy. The irony is that many of these words are among the highest-frequency items in the language, yet they often receive less deliberate practice precisely because teachers assume they are easy.

The fix: when planning a unit, identify not merely the topic vocabulary but the small structural words and chunks that pupils need to process automatically. Give them deliberate listening and retrieval practice too.

This is why Sentence Builders do not consist merely of lists of nouns and adjectives. The recurring small structures surrounding the content words are part of what pupils repeatedly process and retrieve.

9. Not every word needs the same level of mastery

Vocabulary lists often imply that every item deserves equal treatment. However, research distinguishes clearly between receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge (Nation, 2001; Webb, 2008). Learners normally understand substantially more vocabulary than they can spontaneously produce. That is not a defect; it is a normal feature of lexical development.

The curriculum-design mistake is assuming that every item on a GCSE list needs to become equally retrievable in speaking and writing. Trying to automatise everything can actually result in automatizing nothing, because practice gets spread too thinly.

Some words are so useful that pupils should be able to retrieve them rapidly and accurately across many contexts. Others need to be readily recognised in reading and listening but may not justify the same investment in productive practice. A third group may be useful extension vocabulary for some learners.

This distinction is particularly important where curriculum time is limited. Every five minutes spent repeatedly retrieving a very low-value productive item is five minutes unavailable for a word or chunk pupils may need constantly.

The fix: classify vocabulary explicitly into:

1. productive core;
2. productive extension;
3. receptive recognition.

Then teach accordingly.

This principle runs throughout the Sentence Builders approach and our Language Gym resources: prioritisation matters. The aim is not to pretend every item is equally important but to ensure that the highest-value language receives the heaviest processing and retrieval load.

10. Retrieval practice is excellent. A culture of constant judgement is not necessarily excellent.

I have advocated retrieval practice for years. The evidence supporting it is strong: retrieving information from memory improves later retention more effectively than simply restudying it (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006; Karpicke & Roediger, 2008). In my opinion, though, there is a difference between retrieval as learning and retrieval as constant judgement, and that distinction is getting blurred.

In many schools, retrieval has become the compulsory Do Now at the beginning of every lesson, often with marks attached. For the pupil who repeatedly succeeds, this is absolutely fine. But what about the pupil who repeatedly scores:

1. Monday: 3/10.
2. Wednesday: 4/10.
3. Friday: 2/10.

And this happens in the first five minutes of the lesson. You have just begun every lesson by reminding that pupil that they are failing.

Agarwal and colleagues (2014) found that low-stakes retrieval can actually reduce test anxiety, but the operative words are low stakes. The motivational consequences are different when every retrieval episode becomes a scored judgement.

This also risks widening attainment gaps when the bulk of vocabulary learning is effectively delegated to pupils at home. Organised learners with strong routines and support arrive prepared, retrieve successfully and become more confident. The pupils who do not study effectively arrive behind, fail the quiz and fall further behind.

A Matthew-effect dynamic can then emerge. If the same learners spend three years beginning language lessons by being shown that they are poor at vocabulary, departments should not be surprised when some of them do not opt for GCSE.

The fix:

1. Keep retrieval frequent.
2. Make much more of it in-class.
3. Keep it predominantly low-stakes.
4. Engineer high-success practice.
5. Give immediate corrective feedback.
6. Use formal vocabulary tests diagnostically rather than turning every lesson into a mini judgement day.

The Language Gym trainers were designed precisely to generate huge amounts of individual retrieval without requiring every error to become another public or formal mark.

11. Relevance matters as much as frequency – if not more!

This point is especially important in England under the reformed GCSE.

The increased use of frequency evidence in selecting examination vocabulary has a perfectly sensible rationale. High-frequency vocabulary has high utility and gives learners greater coverage across texts and contexts. However, frequency is a linguistic statistic. It is not a theory of motivation. A word can be highly frequent in a corpus yet have little immediate relevance to the life of the children you teach! Conversely, something that pupil desperately wants to say may not sit high enough on somebody’s frequency list.

Research informed by Self-Determination Theory reminds us that perceived competence, autonomy and meaningfulness can influence engagement and persistence (Deci & Ryan, 2000). Dörnyei’s work on L2 motivation likewise shows the importance of connecting language learning to learners’ developing identities and goals (Dörnyei, 2009).

That matters in England because the challenge is not merely achieving good GCSE grades; it is persuading enough pupils to take the GCSE in the first place.

A curriculum driven exclusively by frequency risks becoming highly efficient statistically while being emotionally and communicatively remote from the learner. That is not an argument against frequency; it is an argument against making frequency the sole criterion.

The fix:

1. Retain a carefully selected high-frequency lexical spine.
2. Leave controlled space for language pupils actually want to understand and say.
3. Use relevance as a motivational complement to frequency, not a replacement for it.

This is something we have always tried to do in the Sentence Builders books: combine high-frequency reusable language with content that gives pupils something worth communicating.

12. Do not mistake a vocabulary list for a vocabulary curriculum

This final point brings everything together: a vocabulary list tells you what pupils may need to know. It tells you almost nothing about how well they will know it. A list cannot tell you:

1. whether pupils can recognise the words in connected speech;
2. whether their phonological representations are stable;
3. whether they can retrieve them rapidly;
4. whether they know their grammatical behaviour;
5. whether they have met them enough times;
6. whether the encounters involved sufficiently deep processing;
7. whether they can use them productively;
8. whether they will remember them six months later.

That distinction matters particularly under an examination system built around prescribed vocabulary. There is an understandable temptation to equate curriculum quality with coverage: “We have taught 400 words this year.”

That figure is almost meaningless without knowing what pupils can actually do with those words.

Nation (2001), Schmitt (2010) and Webb and Nation (2017) all point in different ways towards the same central conclusion: lexical knowledge develops incrementally and along multiple dimensions.

The real unit of curriculum planning therefore should not simply be the word introduced. It should be the learning history of the word.

The fix: for the highest-value vocabulary, ask four questions repeatedly:

1. How often have pupils processed it?
2. How deeply have they processed it?
3. Through which modalities?
4. How quickly can they now access it?

That is also, ultimately, the rationale behind MARS EARS, PIRCO, Sentence Builders and The Language Gym. They are not simply different activities; they are attempts to engineer a coherent learning journey so that language does not merely get taught but becomes available.

The bottom line

Why do words fail to stick? Usually because:

1. they were not processed sufficiently often;
2. they were not processed sufficiently deeply;
3. they were not processed through enough useful modalities;
4. their phonological representations remained unstable;
5. they were recognised but not retrieved enough;
6. they were learned but never made fast.

Why do pupils sometimes “know” a word but fail to recognise it in listening? Because knowing its written form and meaning does not guarantee a sufficiently robust phonological representation or sufficiently rapid aural lexical access.

Why can pupils succeed on vocabulary tests but fail in GCSE speaking and writing? Because successful isolated retrieval does not automatically guarantee fluent access while working memory is simultaneously dealing with grammar, meaning and message construction.

And why can a curriculum apparently cover huge amounts of vocabulary without producing confident linguists? Because coverage is not mastery.

So I would stop asking “Have they learned the vocabulary?” and ask instead:

1. How deeply do they know it?
2. How long will they retain it?
3. Can they recognise it in connected speech?
4. Can they retrieve it accurately?
5. Can they access it fast enough when they actually need it?

References

Agarwal, P. K., D’Antonio, L., Roediger, H. L., McDermott, K. B. & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Classroom-based programs of retrieval practice reduce middle school and high school students’ test anxiety. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 3, 131–139.

Bandura, A. (1997). Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control. Freeman.

Boers, F. (2021). Evaluating Second Language Vocabulary and Grammar Instruction: A Synthesis of the Research on Teaching Words, Phrases, and Patterns. Routledge.

Craik, F. I. M. & Lockhart, R. S. (1972). Levels of processing: A framework for memory research. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 11, 671–684.

Deci, E. L. & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The ‘what’ and ‘why’ of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behaviour. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268.

DeKeyser, R. M. (Ed.). (2007). Practice in a Second Language: Perspectives from Applied Linguistics and Cognitive Psychology. Cambridge University Press.

Dörnyei, Z. (2009). The Psychology of Second Language Acquisition. Oxford University Press.

Duong, T. M., Montero Perez, M., Desmet, P. & Peters, E. (2021). Learning vocabulary in spoken input- and output-based tasks. TASK.

Field, J. (2008). Bricks or mortar: Which parts of the input does a second language listener rely on? TESOL Quarterly, 42(3), 411–432.

Graham, S. (2017). Research into practice: Listening strategies in an instructed classroom setting. Language Teaching, 50(1).

Graham, S. & Zhang, P. A. (2024). Learning vocabulary through listening: The role of strategy use and linguistic proficiency. AILA Review, 37(2), 241–265.

Karpicke, J. D. & Roediger, H. L. (2008). Repeated retrieval during learning is the key to long-term retention. Journal of Memory and Language, 57, 151–162.

Laufer, B. & Hulstijn, J. (2001). Incidental vocabulary acquisition in a second language: The construct of task-induced involvement. Applied Linguistics, 22(1), 1–26.

Masrai, A. (2022). The relationship between two measures of L2 phonological vocabulary knowledge and L2 listening comprehension. TESOL Journal.

Matthews, J. & Cheng, J. (2015). Recognition of high-frequency words from speech as a predictor of L2 listening comprehension. System, 52, 1–13.

Mills, N., Pajares, F. & Herron, C. (2007). Self-efficacy of college intermediate French students: Relation to achievement and motivation. The Modern Language Journal, 91(3), 417–442.

Nation, I. S. P. (2001). Learning Vocabulary in Another Language. Cambridge University Press.

Qian, D. D. (2002). Investigating the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and academic reading performance. Language Learning, 52(3), 513–536.

Roediger, H. L. & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249–255.

Schmitt, N. (2010). Researching Vocabulary: A Vocabulary Research Manual. Palgrave Macmillan.

Schmitt, N. (2014). Size and depth of vocabulary knowledge: What the research shows. Language Learning, 64(4), 913–951.

Segalowitz, N. (2010). Cognitive Bases of Second Language Fluency. Routledge.

Sweller, J., Ayres, P. & Kalyuga, S. (2011). Cognitive Load Theory. Springer.

Uchihara, T., Webb, S. & Yanagisawa, A. (2019). The effects of repetition on incidental vocabulary learning: A meta-analysis of correlational studies. Language Learning, 69(3), 559–599.

Webb, S. (2007). The effects of repetition on vocabulary knowledge. Applied Linguistics, 28(1), 46–65.

Webb, S. (2008). Receptive and productive vocabulary sizes of L2 learners. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 30(1), 79–95.

Webb, S. & Nation, P. (2017). How Vocabulary Is Learned. Oxford University Press.

Zhang, P. A. & Graham, S. (2020). Vocabulary learning through listening: Comparing L2 explanations, teacher codeswitching, contrastive focus-on-form and incidental learning. Language Teaching Research, 24(6).

Here is a list of all my upcoming online workshops I will conduct for the University of Bath Spa’s Network For Learning. As you can see below it covers a vast array of topics and includes new topics. Every workshop is evidence based and offers a wide range of effective hands-on classroom activities.

Courses

Assessment that Advances Learning in MFL  Gianfranco Conti | 1 OctoberFind out more ___________________________________ Becoming an EPI Teacher: A Deep Dive into Dr Conti’s Extensive Processing Instruction  Gianfranco Conti | 9 & 10 NovemberFind out more 15 & 16 February           Find out more ___________________________________ Phonics in MFL Gianfranco Conti | 17 November          Find out more                                  23 FebruaryFind out more ____________________________________ Strategies for Effective Grammar Instruction Gianfranco Conti | 18 November            Find out more                                   24 February            Find out more __________________________________ Curriculum Design & Lesson Planning in MFL Gianfranco Conti | 23 & 24 November      Find out more _________________________________ Meaningful Play: Having purposeful fun in the MFL Classroom Gianfranco Conti | 25 November    Find out more _________________________________ Implementing EPI at KS4 for the new MFL GCSEs Gianfranco Conti | 2 DecemberFind out more __________________________________ Writing that Scores – Preparing Students for the new MFL GCSE Writing Exam Gianfranco Conti | tbc    Find out more __________________________________ Becoming an Accredited EPI Teacher – Final Assessment Tutorial Gianfranco Conti | tbc                     Find out more __________________________________ Applying Memory Research to L2 Vocab Instruction – Classroom & Curriculum Design Strategies for Long Term Retention Gianfranco Conti | tbc    Find out more __________________________________ From Rehearsed Answers to Exam-Ready Performance – GCSE Speaking Exam Gianfranco Conti | tbc    Find out more _________________________________ _Implementing EPI for Learners at KS2 Gianfranco Conti | tbc    Find out more __________________________________ Making Listening Count – Preparing Students for GCSE ListeningGianfranco Conti | tbcFind out more __________________________________ Becoming an Accredited EPI Teacher Program Gianfranco Conti | variousFind out more _______________________________________ Developing Fluency across all 4 Language Skills Gianfranco Conti | tbc    Find out more ____________________________________ Bridging the Gap between KS3 & KS4 Listening Gianfranco Conti | tbc    Find out more ____________________________________

Network for Learning Bath Spa University Newton Park Bath BA2 9BN www.networkforlearning.org.uk  01225 876564   nfl@bathspa.ac.uk To stop receiving these bulletins please unsubscribe from this list.

I have rarely been as concerned about a development in language education as I was about the pedagogy promoted by the National Centre for Excellence for Language Pedagogy (NCELP), led by Emma Marsden and Rachel Hawkes. This was not because everything the NCELP advocated was wrong. Far from it. Explicit attention to phonics is important, vocabulary selection matters, grammar matters, frequency matters and careful sequencing and recycling are essential. My problem was never with these individual principles, several of which I have advocated myself for years, but with what happened when they are assembled into a pedagogy and, more importantly, with the model of language learning underpinning it.

At the heart of NCELP was a deceptively attractive idea: systematically teach the building blocks of language — phonics, vocabulary and grammar — carefully sequence them and provide sufficient practice, and learners will gradually become able to put them together and communicate. This sounds perfectly logical and makes for a wonderfully tidy curriculum. However, knowing the components of a language and being able to deploy them rapidly and accurately under the enormous processing pressure of real-time communication are two very different things! This is a distinction well established in the skill-acquisition literature (Anderson, 1982; DeKeyser, 1998, 2007).

Take a Year 8 learner attempting to say something relatively simple in French. They may need to retrieve vocabulary, select the correct verb form, apply agreement, organise words syntactically, retrieve accurate phonological representations and monitor what they are saying, whilst simultaneously thinking about the message they want to convey. For an experienced speaker this happens largely automatically; for a novice, whose working memory is already heavily taxed, it can be enormously demanding. Words and rules can eventually be assembled into fluent speech, but only once a great deal of the language involved has become sufficiently familiar and automatised for its retrieval to place relatively little burden on working memory.

This is why I found NCELP’s deliberate de-emphasis of unanalysed chunks particularly difficult to reconcile with what we know about fluent language use. Decades of research into formulaic language, from Pawley and Syder through Wray, Ellis, Conklin and Schmitt, Boers and others, have shown that fluent speakers do not generate every utterance from individual words by applying grammatical rules from scratch. Language is massively phraseological: we store and retrieve countless multi-word sequences, collocations and partially fixed constructions, dramatically reducing processing demands. For a novice learner, therefore, a familiar sequence such as je voudrais aller, ich möchte gern or me gusta mucho is not somehow pedagogically inferior because every component has not yet been fully analysed. Quite the opposite: it gives them something they can understand, retrieve and use whilst the underlying grammatical system develops.

This does not mean teaching endless prefabricated phrases which learners cannot manipulate. Chunks and highly familiar sentence patterns provide cognitive scaffolding from which greater generativity can develop. Once learners possess a sufficiently large repertoire of familiar language, we can draw their attention to patterns, substitute elements, contrast forms, explain rules and progressively help them recombine what they know. The choice is not between “chunks” and “grammar”; good language teaching exploits the interaction between the two.

The problem becomes even more obvious when we consider listening. Before meaning can be constructed, learners must segment a continuous acoustic stream, recognise phonemes and syllables, identify word boundaries, activate lexical representations, parse syntactic relationships and retain information in working memory. Research by Field, Cutler, Goh, Vandergrift and others has demonstrated how demanding these lower-level processes are, particularly for novice listeners. This is why I have argued for years that listening should be conceived primarily as modelling and processing practice rather than merely comprehension testing.

Explicit phonics can undoubtedly help, and NCELP was right to give phonics greater prominence. However, phonics is not listening, just as knowing vocabulary is not listening and knowing grammar is not listening. The learner has to integrate all of these things in fractions of a second whilst speech continues to arrive through their ears. Breaking language down into three neat “pillars” may make curriculum progression easier to document, but it risks giving a misleading picture of how communicative competence develops. The components matter enormously; what ultimately matters is whether learners can integrate them rapidly enough to understand and produce language in real time.

I had similar reservations about the prominence given to frequency in vocabulary selection. NCELP was right to challenge the often arbitrary vocabulary choices found in traditional topic-based textbooks, and corpus frequency data can be extremely useful. However, frequency is a useful criterion, not a curriculum. It tells us how often a lexical item occurs in a corpus but it does not tell us how useful that word will be to a thirteen-year-old, how learnable it is, which constructions it combines productively with, whether it facilitates meaningful interaction or whether pupils actually want to say it! A sensible curriculum balances frequency against communicative usefulness, generative potential, learnability, cultural relevance and learner interest.

This brings me to what I regard as the biggest weakness of the whole enterprise: motivation. We are not teaching miniature linguists who have voluntarily enrolled on a university language course; we are teaching children, most of whom have not chosen the language and many of whom already believe that languages are difficult. Research deriving from Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985; Ryan & Deci, 2000), Bandura’s work on self-efficacy, Dörnyei’s work on L2 motivation and the literature on willingness to communicate all point to the importance of perceived competence, success and agency. Pupils need to experience themselves understanding and using language. They need those moments when something which previously sounded like meaningless noise suddenly makes sense, or when they discover they can sustain a short interaction without consciously constructing every sentence. Those experiences of competence are not fluffy motivational extras; they are central to whether adolescents decide language learning is something they can succeed at.

This was also one of the recurring concerns expressed by teachers about NCELP materials on social media and teacher blogs. The criticism was not simply that teachers disliked phonics, explicit grammar or systematic vocabulary instruction; many of the teachers criticising NCELP used all three. Concerns repeatedly centred on the atomisation of language, the nature of the activities, the relative lack of meaningful communication, the treatment of chunks and the dryness of some materials. Steve Smith, for example, whilst acknowledging the logic behind much of the approach, famously described some materials as “dull as ditchwater” and questioned the extent to which communication had become secondary. Other experienced practitioners raised similar concerns, although others responded positively to NCELP and that should also be acknowledged. The reaction was not unanimous, but neither was the resistance insignificant.

One of the most unhelpful tendencies in education is to assume that university researchers possess “the evidence” whereas teachers merely possess opinions, with resistance to research-informed initiatives consequently interpreted as conservatism. Teachers spend thousands of hours observing what happens when particular activities and sequences encounter actual children. That evidence is contextual and fallible, but so is much educational research when one attempts to generalise from controlled studies to whole-school curriculum design. Research should inform practice, whilst sustained classroom experience should interrogate research. When substantial numbers of experienced teachers independently raise similar concerns, policymakers should at least consider that they may be noticing something important.

This is why what is happening in Northern Ireland deserves careful scrutiny. Rachel Hawkes chaired the Modern Languages Working Group involved in developing the proposed curriculum, and the language surrounding the new direction has a distinctly familiar feel, with considerable emphasis on systematic linguistic construction, carefully specified knowledge and progression towards fluency. None of those things is inherently problematic; indeed, I strongly support systematic curriculum design. My concern is whether Northern Ireland is importing not merely sensible principles from NCELP but the same underlying conception of language learning which shaped the FAILED English initiative.

The context makes this particularly worrying because language education in Northern Ireland is already fragile. Language Trends Northern Ireland 2025 paints a deeply concerning picture of declining participation, with German GCSE entries having more than halved since 2002, a third of responding schools reporting that lower-attaining pupils are discouraged from taking a language and more than a third reporting that senior leaders may advise pupils against choosing one. In such an environment, the last thing language education needs is a curriculum which risks making the subject feel even more technical, analytical and linguistically atomised to the pupils we are desperately trying to retain.

There is something extremely seductive about a curriculum built around precisely specified phonics, vocabulary and grammar. Everything can be sequenced, mapped, inspected and assessed, and on paper the progression looks impeccable. The danger is that we confuse the tidiness of the curriculum with the messier reality of acquisition, because what the teacher has covered and what the learner can retrieve automatically under communicative pressure are emphatically not the same thing!!!

A pupil may have “covered” the perfect tense and still fail to recognise j’ai mangé in rapid speech. Another may know hundreds of high-frequency words yet struggle to understand a short conversation because their phonological representations are weak and they cannot segment the speech stream efficiently. Another may explain adjective agreement perfectly on a worksheet and still be incapable of applying it whilst retrieving vocabulary and planning a message. None of this is surprising if we understand the distinction between declarative knowledge and proceduralised competence, yet curriculum documents have a persistent tendency to equate what has been explicitly taught with what learners have acquired.

Northern Ireland therefore has an opportunity to take what was useful from NCELP without reproducing what, in my view, went badly wrong! – so badly wrong, that despite having invested several millions of pounds in it, the UK government didn’t renew their contract. Teach phonics systematically, select vocabulary intelligently, teach grammar explicitly, sequence learning carefully, use frequency data where they genuinely help and recycle relentlessly. However, put communicative competence at the centre of the architecture. Give learners large amounts of highly comprehensible listening and reading, exploit repeated language patterns and formulaic sequences, establish strong sound-form-meaning mappings, scaffold production heavily before expecting spontaneity, and teach grammar in a way which helps learners analyse and extend language they have already begun to internalise rather than expecting grammatical knowledge to magically transform itself into fluent speech.

Most importantly, engineer success early and often, because the central problem facing school language education is not that twelve-year-olds cannot explain grammatical terminology or manipulate isolated linguistic components accurately enough. It is that far too many pupils conclude, often very early, that languages are difficult, that they are not very good at them and that continuing with them would therefore be irrational. Once that self-perception has taken hold, another carefully sequenced grammar progression is unlikely to rescue them.

NCELP was an ambitious attempt to translate selected strands of second-language research into a coherent national pedagogy, and some of the principles it promoted were sound, some of its research was valuable and some teachers undoubtedly benefited from its resources. My criticism is not personal; it concerns the pedagogical architecture which emerged and, in particular, what I regard as an excessive faith in the systematic teaching and manipulation of linguistic components as the principal route towards communicative competence.

Northern Ireland now has something England did not have when NCELP was launched: hindsight. It can examine the research, look carefully at what happened in classrooms, listen seriously to the teachers who used the materials and ask whether the answer to an existing crisis of motivation and uptake is really to make language learning more systematically componential. If the result is that pupils know more about how the language is constructed but feel less able or less inclined to actually use it, we will have achieved precisely the opposite of what language education urgently needs, and given the precarious state of language uptake in Northern Ireland, that is a risk I simply do not think we can afford to take.

Introduction

I think this is something we sometimes forget when planning that all-important first lesson back.Several weeks may have passed without the retrieval demands, sustained attention, routines an social constraints of school, which means that knowledge which appeared perfectly secure before the holidays may suddenly seem much less accessible. Moreover, often classroom habits have weakened, sleeping patterns have shifted (they surely have in my teenage daughter’s case!) and, particularly during adolescence, the young person sitting in front of us may have changed physically, emotionally and socially in ways which are not immediately apparent.

Teachers are experiencing their own return too and this is worth remembering. After several weeks away from the relentless decision making, emotional regulation and sheer social intensity of teaching, suddenly there are timetables, hundreds of names, emails, meetings, behaviour issues, new classes and lesson preparation all competing for our attention… which perhaps explains why social media in the weeks before schools reopen tends to fill up with teachers worrying about difficult classes, behaviour, workload and how they are going to establish expectations from the very beginning.

The first lesson after a substantial break is therefore a rather unusual lesson, because its purpose is partly curricular and partly restorative: we are beginning the process of recreating the cognitive, affective and behavioural conditions in which successful learning can resume. With this in mind, here are ten mistakes I would be particularly wary of and which I experienced firs-thand throughout my career, both as a maker and and an observer of those mistakes.

1. Assuming pupils can simply pick up where they left off

Several weeks without regular retrieval matters and, although a pupil may have been able to retrieve a particular phrase almost automatically before the break, they may hesitate over exactly the same phrase on their return. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the underlying learning has disappeared, since there is an important distinction between knowledge which has effectively been lost and knowledge which has simply become temporarily more difficult to access.

Research on spacing and retrieval gives us good reason to expect this. Kim and Webb’s (2022) meta-analysis of 48 L2 learning experiments found a medium-to-large overall advantage for spaced practice, with longer spacing particularly beneficial for delayed retention, while the broader L2 vocabulary literature has repeatedly shown the value of combining repetition with retrieval rather than relying on massed exposure alone. The obvious implication is that when retrieval has not occurred for several weeks, fluency of access should not be taken for granted.

This is why I would devote a substantial proportion of the first lessons back to recycling and reactivation, starting with recognition before recall, receptive processing before demanding production and heavily cued retrieval before progressively removing the scaffolding. The familiar “But you did this last year!” may be factually accurate, yet having encountered something previously does not guarantee immediate and fluent access to it after a lengthy period without practice.

The return to school should therefore be regarded, at least initially, as a period of memory reactivation, during which previously established representations are brought back into active use before large amounts of new learning are layered on top of them.

2. Assuming that the pupils themselves have not changed

It isn’t only pupils’ access to language that may changed during the holidays… the pupils themselves may have changed too, and this is something which is particularly easy to overlook when we know a class well and naturally expect to resume the relationships and dynamics we had established before the break.

Children and adolescents can develop surprisingly quickly over a relatively short period. Physical development, confidence, self-consciousness, friendships, peer status and emerging identity can all shift, and developmental research has shown that adolescence is a period during which sensitivity to peer evaluation, social acceptance and belonging becomes particularly salient.

Consequently, the mental model one formed of a pupil during the previous year may need some recalibration. The very confident pupil may have become more self-conscious, the quiet pupil may have become much more assertive, friendships which made certain pairings work extremely well may have changed and somebody who required considerable reassurance a few months earlier may return noticeably more mature and independent.

This can be particularly striking around the ages of 12–13, the Year 7 to Year 8 transition in the English system, when a summer of only six or seven weeks may coincide with quite considerable physical and socio-emotional development. Peer relationships are becoming increasingly important and, for some pupils, concern about how one looks and sounds in front of others can intensify considerably.

The implications for language teaching are obvious because our subject frequently asks young people to expose themselves socially through pronunciation, accent and public performance. A child who happily volunteered answers or performed a dialogue before the summer may feel rather differently a few weeks later; equally, somebody who previously avoided participation may return much more confident. I have witnessed this phenomenon may times over, especially in the transition from year 7 to 8 in England.

So, part of returning to school involves getting to know one’s pupils again, rather than allowing the labels and expectations formed during the previous year to determine immediately how we interact with them now

3. Requiring highly visible performance before confidence and automaticity have returned

The first two issues come together particularly powerfully when pupils are required to speak publicly, since speaking another language exposes pronunciation, accent, grammatical accuracy and retrieval speed simultaneously and, during adolescence, it often does so in front of the audience whose judgement matters enormously: one’s peers.

After several weeks without using th language, retrieval may simply be slower, while at the same time a pupil’s sensitivity to peer evaluation may have increased. A hesitation during private rehearsal with a partner is cognitively unremarkable; exactly the same hesitation, when produced unexpectedly in front of thirty classmates, can acquire an entirely different emotional significance.

This is not merely speculation Horwitz, Horwitz and Cope’s (1986) seminal work identified communication apprehension and fear of negative evaluation as important dimensions of foreign-language classroom anxiety, while MacIntyre and colleagues’ work on willingness to communicate placed perceived communicative competence and situational confidence close to the actual decision to speak. More recently, Lou, Li and Zhao’s (2024) meta-analysis of 50 independent studies found a moderate negative relationship between L2 anxiety and willingness to communicate.

This does not mean avoiding individual questioning or public speaking, of course. It does suggest that the first lessons back may lend themselves particularly well to choral response, pair rehearsal, receptive processing, scaffolded production and low-stakes retrieval, with more exposed individual performance becoming increasingly appropriate as accessibility and confidence return.

4. Trying to make the first lesson fun at all costs

The return from a long break can generate another understandable teacher anxiety: I need to get them enthusiastic about my subject again. Language teachers may be particularly conscious of pupils returning saying that they have “forgotten everything”, that languages are difficult or that they simply cannot do French, Spanish, German, Mandarin or whichever language they are studying, and with a new class there is also a perfectly natural desire to make an immediate positive impression.

The result can sometimes be a spectacular first lesson packed with games, competitions, movement, technology, humour and constant changes of activity. There is absolutely nothing wrong with pupils having fun in our lessons, and I would be rather worried about a language classroom in which they never did; the issue for me is what is generating that enjoyment and what pupils subsequently associate that positive feeling with.

Research into motivation and self-efficacy is relevant here. Bandura (1997) identified mastery experiences as particularly powerful sources of efficacy beliefs, and in language learning perceived communicative competence has repeatedly been associated with willingness to communicate. Recent meta-analytic work on L2 emotions is also interesting, with enjoyment showing a substantial positive association with willingness to communicate, although an association of course does not demonstrate that entertaining activities themselves cause durable motivation.

Imagine instead the pupil entering the room convinced that “I’ve forgotten everything” and, forty minutes later, after carefully scaffolded listening, reading and retrieval, realising that they can still understand a substantial amount, reconstruct familiar sentences and successfully participate in a short exchange… “Wow, I actually remember loads.”

That is enjoyment generated by competence, and I would argue that it has considerable motivational value because the positive emotion becomes associated with succeeding at the language itself. Games, humour and competition can contribute enormously to this when they are designed around successful processing and retrieval (what I call in my workshops ‘Meaningful fun’); the important consideration is whether the pupil leaves primarily remembering the game or remembering that they were surprisingly good at French.

5. Overcompensating for concerns about behaviour

There is an almost opposite anxiety at the beginning of the school year, particularly when one knows that a challenging class is waiting: the feeling that authority must be established immediately and that any sign of softness during the first lesson will create problems later.

Behaviour is understandably one of teachers’ major concerns and there is every reason to establish high expectations immediately, because pupils benefit from classrooms which are orderly, predictable and consistent. At the same time, firmness does not require an atmosphere of threat, and an opening lesson dominated by sanctions, warnings and descriptions of what will happen when things go wrong can inadvertently establish an emotional climate which sits rather awkwardly alongside our expectation that pupils should subsequently take risks with unfamiliar language.

This is particularly relevant given what we know about foreign-language anxiety. A recent meta-analysis and systematic review of interventions targeting foreign-language anxiety examined 37 primary studies, reflecting just how substantial the evidence base around anxiety in language learning has now become (Xiong et al., 2024).

I would therefore aim for high expectations, high structure and low threat, with boundaries and consequences made perfectly clear while ensuring that pupils also encounter abundant opportunities for successful participation. These things can coexist perfectly well and, in my experience, usually do in the most effective classrooms.

6. Talking about routines rather than rebuilding them

Once one accepts that structure and predictability are particularly valuable after a long break, the next question is how those routines are best restored, and here I think there is sometimes too much emphasis on explaining expectations rather than actually rehearsing the behaviours which constitute them.

A lengthy presentation about equipment, books, homework, behaviour and classroom procedures may communicate useful information, although procedural habits are ultimately rebuilt through enactment. If one wants pupils to respond efficiently during listening, use mini-whiteboards properly, move rapidly into pairwork, retrieve language silently before answering or check work in a particular way, the first lesson provides an excellent opportunity to rehearse all of those behaviours while pupils are actually learning.

There is an affective advantage here too because pupils spend more of the lesson experiencing what successful participation looks and feels like, while the teacher simultaneously observes which routines have survived the break and which require further reinforcement.

Expectations obviously need to be made explicit where necessary, although much of the real work of rebuilding classroom routines occurs through repeated successful enactment… routines are largely rebuilt by doing them.

7. Using assessment primarily to expose what has been forgotten

Once pupils have begun reconnecting with the language, teachers quite reasonably want to know what has survived the break, particularly when curriculum time is limited or an examination class is involved, so some form of diagnosis can be extremely valuable.

The question is what information the assessment gives us and what the pupil learns about themselves from the experience. A less confident language learner may return after several weeks, encounter material they have not retrieved for some time, struggle to access it quickly and receive a score which appears to confirm that much of their previous learning has disappeared, when what we may actually be observing is temporary retrieval difficulty.

For pupils whose language self-efficacy is already fragile, the message “I’m rubbish at languages” can emerge remarkably quickly from such experiences, which is why I would initially favour low-stakes diagnostic procedures such as recognition activities, listening tasks, sentence completion, mini-whiteboards and scaffolded retrieval, progressively reducing support as accessibility improves.

The balance obviously changes with age and context. An older examination class may require fairly rapid diagnostic information, whereas a younger class may benefit from substantially more reactivation first. Assessment can therefore be used from the outset, although I would want it to advance reactivation as well as measure it.

8. Trying to compensate for the break by moving too quickly

Initial classroom observation may reveal gaps and, with schemes of work waiting, assessment dates approaching and the inevitable pressure to cover the curriculum, there is a very understandable temptation to conclude that the class needs to catch up immediately.

Yet linguistic knowledge is only one of the systems being reactivated. Pupils are also reacclimatising to the cognitive rhythms of school, including waking earlier, sustaining attention across several consecutive lessons, inhibiting distractions, following multi-step instructions and switching repeatedly between very different tasks and subjects.

Sleep is particularly relevant during adolescence, when biological changes already favour later sleep timing, meaning that a return from holiday schedules to early school mornings can add another source of fatigue during the first days back. This does not imply lowering expectations; it simply means taking account of the total cognitive demands being imposed at the same time.

Large amounts of unfamiliar vocabulary, new grammar, complicated instructions and demanding spontaneous production can create substantial cumulative load when pupils are simultaneously readjusting to school routines. A relatively modest amount of content, processed successfully and combined with substantial retrieval, may provide a considerably stronger foundation for what follows… sometimes temporarily slowing down allows us to accelerate more effectively later.

9. Introducing too much novelty at once

The previous point concerns the overall quantity of demand, while another dimension worth considering is how much of that demand is unfamiliar. Novelty consumes attention and even pupils returning to the same school may be dealing with different timetables, rooms, seating arrangements, altered friendship dynamics, unfamiliar teachers in other subjects and changed expectations, while pupils transitioning into an entirely new school obviously face a considerably greater adjustment.

For returning language classes there is therefore considerable value, I think, in making at least some elements of the lesson reassuringly familiar. Familiar language and well-established task formats reduce unnecessary processing demands and allow more cognitive capacity to be devoted to retrieving and strengthening linguistic knowledge.

This certainly does not imply spending the first few weeks endlessly revising old material. New language should enter the curriculum and pupils should encounter appropriate challenge; the issue is the proportion of unfamiliar elements arriving simultaneously, because a lesson containing familiar language and familiar procedures alongside a manageable amount of new material creates a very different processing environment from one in which the vocabulary, grammatical content, task format and classroom routines are all new at the same time.

10. Forgetting that teachers are experiencing a return too

There is one final person’s cognitive and affective state which deserves consideration… the teacher’s. During a substantial holiday teachers regain considerable autonomy over their time and then, almost overnight, return to an environment characterised by continuous decision making, social interaction, behaviour monitoring, emotional regulation, time pressure and almost relentless task switching.

There are timetables to remember, names to retrieve, technology to operate, emails to process, new pupils to get to know and dozens of small administrative demands competing for attention, and once the perfectly understandable anxiety many teachers feel about new or challenging classes is added to this, teacher cognitive load becomes part of the pedagogical equation.

This is why an enormously elaborate first lesson can sometimes be a poor choice even when it looks magnificent on paper. Six activities, complicated technology, frequent movement, intricate differentiation and multiple transitions all consume teacher attention at precisely the moment when one’s own classroom automaticity is being re-established.

A calm, purposeful lesson built around activities the teacher knows extremely well can free attentional resources for things which may matter considerably more during those first encounters: observing pupils carefully, rebuilding relationships, monitoring behaviour, noticing changes and responding intelligently to what is actually happening in the room. The cognitive demands of a lesson fall on the person orchestrating it as well as on the people learning from it.

Conclusions

The central point I would make is that returning after a long school break involves considerably more than opening the scheme of work at the next page. Retrieval has weakened, habits need re-establishing, pupils may have changed, friendship groups may have shifted, sleep patterns may have altered and teachers themselves are readjusting to the extraordinary cognitive and emotional intensity of classroom life, all of which makes the first few lessons a period of recalibration as much as curriculum progression.

The precise balance will obviously depend on context. A pupil entering a new school, a 12- or 13-year-old returning to a familiar teacher and an older learner approaching an important examination have very different needs, and no sensible account of teaching would prescribe exactly the same rentrée lesson for all three. What seems transferable is the broader principle that the conditions for learning sometimes need to be rebuilt before we can reasonably expect learning to proceed at its previous pace.

For language teachers this matters especially because our subject combines memory demands with an unusually public form of performance. Learners have to retrieve words rapidly, manipulate unfamiliar structures, distinguish and reproduce unfamiliar sounds and frequently do all of this in front of their peers, which means that memory, confidence, perceived competence and classroom climate interact continuously.

Consequently, if my pupils left that first lesson having understood a substantial amount, successfully retrieved language they thought they had forgotten, spoken without experiencing unnecessary anxiety and rediscovered a sense that they were actually quite capable language learners, I would regard that as a very productive beginning… even if we had covered rather less new material than the scheme of work suggested.

Perhaps the most encouraging sentence one could hear at the end of that first lesson is therefore something along the lines of “I thought I’d forgotten everything… actually, I remember quite a lot.” Behind that apparently simple observation lies something rather important: memory is being reactivated, confidence is returning and the learner is beginning the new school period with evidence of their own competence.

And that, ultimately, is what I think the first language lesson after a long break is largely about: rebuilding the cognitive, affective and social conditions which make sustained learning possible, so that when we do accelerate, introduce novelty, demand greater independence and move the curriculum forward, we are doing so with learners who are ready to come with us.

(If you are interested in knowing more about this or other issues in modern language instruction, join my workshops on www.networkforlearning.org.uk or purchase my books )

References

Andrews, J. L., Foulkes, L. & Blakemore, S. J. (2021). Peer influence in adolescence: Public-health implications for COVID-19. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 25(7), 585–587.

Bandura, A. (1997). Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control. New York: Freeman.

Horwitz, E. K., Horwitz, M. B. & Cope, J. (1986). Foreign language classroom anxiety. The Modern Language Journal, 70(2), 125–132.

Kim, S. K. & Webb, S. (2022). The effects of spaced practice on second language learning: A meta-analysis. Language Learning, 72(1), 269–319.

Lou, Y., Li, C. & Zhao, H. (2024). A meta-analysis of the relationship between L2 willingness to communicate and L2 anxiety. Contemporary Foreign Languages Studies, 24(1), 150–160.

MacIntyre, P. D., Clément, R., Dörnyei, Z. & Noels, K. A. (1998). Conceptualizing willingness to communicate in a L2: A situational model of L2 confidence and affiliation. The Modern Language Journal, 82(4), 545–562.

Nakata, T. & Webb, S. (2016). Does studying vocabulary in smaller sets increase learning? The effects of part and whole learning on second-language vocabulary acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 38(3), 523–552.

Xiong, Y., Zhang, Q., Zhao, L. et al. (2024). A meta-analysis and systematic review of foreign language anxiety interventions among students. Journal of Language and Social Psychology.

Intoduction

I am obviously biased. I co-created The Language Gym, so nobody should expect me to pretend otherwise. However, there is astrong research-informed case for using it which goes well beyond the fact that students enjoy the games.

The Language Gym was built around a simple metaphor: learning a language is rather like training in a gym. You do not become stronger by lifting a weight once, and you do not become fluent because you encountered je voudrais, me gustaría or ich möchte three weeks ago. Language learning requires repeated encounters, extensive processing and retrieval, with learners gradually becoming faster and more independent. Research on vocabulary learning, retrieval and automaticity strongly supports these principles (Webb, 2007; Nation, 2017; Hui & Godfroid, 2021).

The website is one of the most affordable ones on the market whilst has probably the largest content and variety of activities. Our content grows each and every day whilst our subscription fees haven’t increased for a while now. Memory research underpins the whole architecture of the site and of each and every unit in a bid to create durable retention of the target grammar and vocabulary.

Over 3,000 schools worldwide, alongside a large number of private tutors, subscribe to The Language Gym every year. In this post, I will explain why so many institutions and individuals from every corner of the globe, from the Falklands to China, from Sweden to Malawi, from Russia to Japan, trust us to support their pupils’ language learning.

What is in The Language Gym?

The Language Gym has grown into a large language-learning environment for French, Spanish, German and Italian, with resources targeting listening, reading, vocabulary, grammar and production. Crucially, its different components are interconnected so that learners can encounter the same language repeatedly through different tasks and processing demands.

Among its main features are:

• Vocab Trainer – 12 games recycling vocabulary and chunks through listening, reading and writing, moving from recognition towards increasingly fluent production, including the very popular Beat the Robot.
• Listening Trainer – 12 games targeting a range of listening and micro-listening skills with increasing complexity.
• Dictation Trainer – nine games scaffolding dictation from recognition towards production.
• Boxing and Audio Boxing – two of our most popular games, designed to increase the speed of recognition of familiar language through the written and oral medium.

Importantly, the Vocab Trainer, Listening Trainer, Dictation Trainer and Boxing/Audio Boxing games all share the same vocabulary, which means that the same lexical material can be recycled again and again whilst the processing demands change. A chunk encountered visually in one activity can subsequently be processed aurally, retrieved from memory, written from dictation and finally recognised against the clock. This is exactly the sort of varied recycling that research on repeated encounters and retrieval would predict should strengthen learning (Webb, 2007; Nation, 2017).

• Sentence Trainer – activities targeting sentence processing and construction, including Sentence Puzzle, Gapped Sentences and Delayed Copying.
• Rock Climbing – intensive practice of sentence construction and target-language syntax.

These two components are similarly interconnected: Rock Climbing and the Sentence Trainer recycle the same vocabulary, allowing learners to process familiar lexical material whilst shifting the focus increasingly towards sentence construction, syntax and retrieval.

• Verb Trainer and Grammar activities – extensive practice of high-frequency verbs and grammatical structures.
• Teacher tools – allowing teachers to set work and monitor students’ performance.
• Create Your Own Games – allowing teachers to turn their own language into a substantial bank of interactive practice.
• PowerPoints based on our Sentence Builders Trilogy books for French, Spanish, German and Italian, with the games on the website matching the units in the Trilogy series.

This interconnectedness is important because students are not constantly being confronted with new vocabulary simply because they have moved to another activity. Instead, the language stays relatively stable while the cognitive and linguistic demands change: recognition becomes retrieval, reading becomes listening, listening becomes dictation, and increasingly supported processing can gradually give way to more independent production.

It isn’t really about games

Students may experience The Language Gym as games, but pedagogically something much more important is happening. They repeatedly recognise language, retrieve meanings, discriminate between similar forms, map sound onto meaning, reconstruct sentences and eventually retrieve language with decreasing support.

Webb (2007) demonstrated cumulative benefits from repeated encounters with vocabulary, while Nation (2017) stresses both the quantity of encounters and the quality of processing involved. This is therefore not repetition for repetition’s sake. The principle is:

Recycle the language, vary the processing.

There is also the issue of speed. Knowing that chien means dog is not the same as recognising chien instantaneously during connected speech. Research into L2 automaticity demonstrates the importance of developing faster, more efficient lexical processing (Segalowitz et al., 1998), while Hui and Godfroid (2021) have shown the importance of processing speed and automaticity in L2 listening.

This is one of the rationales behind Boxing and Audio Boxing. Learners repeatedly process familiar language under time pressure so that the question gradually changes from “Do I know this?” to “How quickly can I recognise this?”

Training listening rather than merely testing it

The Listening Trainer reflects another principle I have argued for over many years: listening needs to be trained, not simply tested through comprehension questions.

Field (2003) highlighted the importance of perceptual processing and lexical segmentation in L2 listening, while subsequent research has confirmed the relationship between efficient lower-level processing and successful comprehension.

The 12 Listening Trainer games therefore target different listening and micro-listening processes with increasing complexity. Audio Boxing adds speeded aural recognition, while the Dictation Trainer provides nine activities progressing from supported recognition towards production. Learners are therefore not merely asked whether they understood a recording; they repeatedly practise some of the processes which make understanding possible.

Create your own games in minutes

This is one of the features which makes The Language Gym particularly useful even if you do not use our materials.

Teachers can import their own chunks or vocabulary lists directly from Word or Excel and turn them into a substantial bank of interactive practice. From the same language list, in only a few minutes, you can create 12 Vocab Trainer games, 12 Listening Trainer games, nine Dictation Trainer games and as many Boxing and Audio Boxing games as you like.

Think about what that means in practice. The language taught on Monday does not have to disappear into an exercise book afterwards. It can be recycled through reading, listening, recognition, retrieval, dictation, writing and speeded processing over subsequent lessons and homework.

This is also why The Language Gym is useful for both EPI and non-EPI teachers. You can import language from a sentence builder, but equally from a conventional textbook, your department’s scheme of learning, a GCSE unit or simply a vocabulary list you created yourself. Retrieval, recycling and automaticity do not belong to any particular methodology; they are fundamental dimensions of language learning.

The Sentence Builders Trilogy connection

For teachers using our Sentence Builders Trilogy, the integration goes considerably further.

The Language Gym contains PowerPoints based on our Trilogy books for French, Spanish, German and Italian, while the games on the site match the units in the Trilogy series. Students can therefore encounter language through teacher-led classroom instruction and the books, practise it through the PowerPoints and then recycle the same material extensively online.

This creates something I believe is enormously important: curricular coherence. Instead of constantly introducing new language simply to create variety, we can keep familiar language in circulation whilst changing what learners are required to do with it.

And finally… the Workouts

I have deliberately left the Workouts until last because, for me, they are the real jewels of The Language Gym.

The Workouts provide something which textbooks and busy teachers often struggle to provide in sufficient quantities: lots and lots of carefully scaffolded practice and recycling.

Through Vocabulary, Grammar, Reading and Listening Workouts, learners repeatedly encounter and manipulate language across a wide range of activities, gradually moving from input towards output, with support progressively reduced and retrieval demands increased.

This matters because one of the greatest mistakes we can make in language teaching is to confuse presentation with acquisition. Students do not acquire a structure because we explained it and they completed five questions on it. They need repeated successful encounters followed by opportunities to recognise, process, manipulate and retrieve it. Webb’s (2007) research on repeated encounters and the wider literature on retrieval and distributed practice provide strong support for this kind of extensive recycling.

For EPI teachers, the relationship with the EPI sequence is obvious: input → extensive processing → structured production → increasingly independent output. For non-EPI teachers, the benefit is just as significant because whatever methodology or textbook you use, students need substantially more practice than can normally fit onto a few textbook pages.

And don’t forget the Locker Room

Finally, there is the Locker Room, which houses our extensive collection of downloadable worksheets. These provide teachers with ready-made offline activities which can complement the digital practice and be used for classroom work, homework, cover lessons or additional consolidation.

Taken together, this is what makes The Language Gym much more than a gaming website: interconnected trainers, listening and dictation practice, speeded recognition, teacher-created games, Trilogy-aligned materials, extensive Workouts and downloadable worksheets, with the same language deliberately recycled across different forms of processing.

Students do not learn a language because we have covered it. They learn it because they have processed and retrieved it often enough for what was once slow, effortful and fragile to become increasingly fast, stable and automatic.

That, ultimately, is why we called it The Language Gym.

References

Field, J. (2003). Promoting perception: Lexical segmentation in L2 listening. ELT Journal, 57(4), 325–334.

Hui, B., & Godfroid, A. (2021). Testing the role of processing speed and automaticity in second language listening. Applied Psycholinguistics, 42(5), 1089–1115.

Nation, I. S. P. (2017). How vocabulary is learned. Indonesian Journal of English Language Teaching, 12(1).

Segalowitz, N. S., Segalowitz, S. J., & Wood, A. G. (1998). Assessing the development of automaticity in second language word recognition. Applied Psycholinguistics, 19(1), 53–67.

Webb, S. (2007). The effects of repetition on vocabulary knowledge. Applied Linguistics, 28(1), 46–65.