Introduction

The new GCSE French, German and Spanish specifications have triggered one of the most significant changes in MFL textbook design for many years and, compared with previous generations of GCSE resources, the new books are much more attentive to phonics, high frequency vocabulary, grammar, dictation, reading aloud and preparation for what students will actually encounter in the examination. These are important improvement which should be acknowledged, particularly because the greater predictability of the vocabulary base and renewed emphasis on sound-symbol correspondences address weaknesses which many of us had criticised for a long time… so there is certainly a great deal here that deserves praise.

However, having examined the new GCSE resources currently available on the market, I am not convinced that the underlying model of textbook-based language learning has changed nearly as much as the surface features suggest. Although the books are better aligned with the specifications, the more important question is whether the sequencing, density and recycling of language reflect what research into memory and second language acquisition tells us about how knowledge becomes durable, retrievable and eventually usable under communicative pressure.And surely this is what should ultimately matter when we evaluate a textbook, rather than simply asking how neatly it maps onto a specification?

This post was prompted partly by the numerous teachers who have contacted me, as well as others posting publicly on social media, expressing concerns about the new textbooks, with one complaint recurring particularly frequently: the speed at which relatively complex grammatical structures are introduced, practised and then left behind. Some structures appear to receive remarkably little instructional space, even though many pupils will require weeks, rather than pages, to assimilate them securely… and this raises a fairly fundmental question: does the pace at which textbooks move through language actually correspond to the pace at which our students can realistically acquire it?

1. Coverage is not acquisition

This is the most obvious and glaring one shortcomings of all. The prescribed vocabulary of the new GCSE has considerable advantages because it makes lexical expectations much more transparent, although it also creates pressure on publishers to demonstrate that the required corpus has been covered, and herein lies the problem. The fact that a word occurs in a vocabulary box, a listening activity and perhaps a subsequent reading passage means that it has technically been recycled, yet has it really been learnt… and, more importantly, will the average student still be able to retrieve it three weeks later?

Vocabulary learning is incremental, with recognition normally preceding recall and receptive knowledge generally preceding reliable productive use, while the number of encounters required varies according to the learner, the word, the context and the depth of processing involved. Rather than asking whether every prescribed item appears somewhere in the course, therefore, we should be asking how frequently important language returns, how deeply learners process it and how often they retrieve it before independent production is expected,because a handful of encounters is unlikely to produce robust productive knowledg for the majority of learners.

2. Recycling remains insufficiently intensive

Publishers clearly recognise the importance of recycling, which represents an improvement over many previous courses, although meaningful recycling requires considerably more than making previously taught language reappear somewhere later in the book. Its effectiveness depends upon frequency, spacing, modality and retrieval, with important language ideally recurring through listening, reading, dictation, translation, speaking and writing at increasingly expanded intervals… yet how often does this really happen with sufficient intensity?

The traditional topical architecture of textbooks makes this difficult because, once pupils leave one thematic domain and enter another, much of its associated vocabulary inevitably becomes less prominent.In EPI we attempt to combine horizontal recycling, through which language is recycled intensively within a teaching sequence, with vertical recycling, through which high value language systematically resurfaces in later units, so that new knowledge is continually attached to an increasingly familiar linguistic core rather than being abandond once the class moves to the next topic.

3. The transition from input to output is too rapid

Many textbook sequences move remarkably quickly from initial exposure to productive performance, with a double page spread potentially introducing vocabulary, listening, reading and grammar before asking learners to translate, speak or write using material which they have only recently encountered. The individual activities may be excellent, although their proximity creates what I call a pedagogical compression problem, whereby stages of acquisition which might reasonably require several lessons are compressed into a few centimetres of textbook space… and how realistic is it to assume that because students have reached the bottom of the second page they are now ready to produce that language independently?

Recognising a structure during listening or understanding it in a reading text does not mean that the learner possesses a sufficiently robust representation to retrieve and manipulate it independently, particularly because receptive knowledge normally develops ahead of productive mastery. This is why EPI devotes considerably more time to modelling, structured input, listening, reading and controlled manipulation before scaffolding is progressively removed, since output becomes more productive when learners have sufficiently stable linguistic representations from which to generate it rather than being asked to produce language which has barely been encodd.

4. Complex grammar is dealt with too rapidly

This is the concern teachers have raised with me most frequently and the one which troubles me most when examining some of the new materials, since relatively complex structures are sometimes introduced, explained and practised within surprisingly little textbook space before another structure appears. The problem is not necessarily the quality of the explanations, many of which are perfectly clear, but the speed with which learners are expected to move from understanding a grammatical rule to processing and producing the structure… are we seriously expecting a structure to become available for spontaneous use simply because students understood the explanation and completed a couple of exercises?

Understanding how a tense is formed is qualitatively different from being able to retrieve it fluently, just as explaining where a pronoun goes does not mean that the appropriate pattern will become available during spontaneous communication. Proceduralisation requires extensive repeated processing across changing lexical contexts, which is why formulaic sequences and high frequency chunks provide such an important bridge between lexical and grammatical learning, allowing learners to develop increasingly fluent access before every component has necessarily been fully analysd.

Rather than opposing chunks and grammar, I favour a progression in which learners acquire useful multiword sequences, notice recurring patterns and subsequently use explicit grammatical explanation to refine and generalise them. The teachers complaining that complex structures appear to be “done” within a couple of pages are therefore identifying a genuine acquisition issue, because textbook progression and language acquisition operate on very different timescales… and perhaps this is the single most important point publishers need to reflec on.

5. Phonics and dictation need to serve listening development

The greater emphasis on phonics and dictation is one of the strongest features of the new GCSE, particularly after years in which many learners received insufficient systematic instruction in sound symbol correspondences or bottom up listening processes. However, phonics should support listening, vocabulary learning, reading, spelling and speaking rather than becoming primarily preparation for reading aloud, just as dictation should contribute to perceptual development rather than merely rehearse an examination question… otherwise are we really teaching listening, or simply teaching students to perform a particular tes?

Learners frequently fail to recognise words they know perfectly well on paper because they segment connected speech incorrectly, miss small grammatical words, confuse phonologically similar items or cannot map the acoustic signal rapidly enough onto stored lexical representations. A developmental listening curriculum therefore requires micro listening, partial transcription, segmentation, sound discrimination, transcript comparison and narrow listening alongside dictation, because the objective should surely be to teach students how to listen, rather than simply establish whether they understood a recording on a particular da.

6. The books contain too much material and exploit it too little

The sheer quantity of language and activities contained in the new books is impressive, although density can create an illusion of learning because novice learners often benefit more from repeated encounters with less language than from continuous novelty. Closely related listening and reading texts containing substantial lexical overlap, together with familiar activity formats requiring progressively more demanding processing, allow attention to shift away from decoding the task and towards increasingly rapid retrieval of the language itself… so why are we so often in such a hurry to give learners another text, another lexical set and another grammatical structur?

Reading texts illustrate the same issue because an interesting passage followed by several comprehension questions often disappears as soon as the page is turned, even though the same material could generate lexical retrieval, noticing, reconstruction, translation, dictation, grammar work, delayed recall and eventually speaking or writing.Fewer texts exploited much more intensively would often provide greater learning value than a larger number processed only once or twice, particularly when that repeated processing allows learners to experience the same language from different cognitive and linguistic perspectivs.

7. Examination practice should follow acquisition

The new GCSE understandably gives greater prominence to dictation, reading aloud, translation and other examination formats, and students obviously need to become familiar with them, although examination tasks primarily sample performance rather than create the linguistic knowledge from which performance emerges. If pupils repeatedly attempt GCSE style tasks before their underlying vocabulary, phonology and grammar have become sufficiently secure, instructional time risks being spent rehearsing the measurement of learning rather than creating it… which begs the question, are we preparing students for the examination or are we developing the language competence that will eventually allow them to perform well in that examination?

Some of the best preparation for GCSE speaking and writing should therefore initially look rather unlike GCSE speaking and writing, because intensive listening, reading, reconstruction, retrieval and controlled manipulation build the linguistic repertoire which students will eventually need when scaffolding disappears. Exam practice undoubtedly has its place, although the timing matters enormously because repeated testing of insecure knowledge does not somehow transform that knowledge into fluent competenc.

How we addressed these issues in our own IGCSE materials

These are precisely the problems we have attempted to address in our own IGCSE books, where we deliberately slow the learning journey down and substantially increase the amount and variety of processing before learners are expected to operate independently. Each unit works from a relatively controlled core of sentence patterns and lexical items which is repeatedly processed through receptive vocabulary building, narrow reading and listening, translation, consolidation and increasingly demanding retrieval, while the P.I.P.O. sequence moves from pre reading activation and intensive text exploitation towards consolidation and pushed output… with the book explicitly providing extensive recycling both within units and across the course, targeting orthography, lexis, grammar and syntax, meaning and discourse through input flooding and forced retrieval, and providing more than twenty activities within a unit.

The technology unit illustrates what this means in practice because the target language moves through matching, missing word activities, sentence puzzles and faulty translation before recurring in extended narrow reading texts which themselves generate comprehension, reconstruction, translation and retrieval, thereby ensuring that a text is not simply read, comprehended and then forgottn. Listening then recycles the same linguistic core through 6 listening activities word recognition, comprehension, gapped dictation, true/false/not mentioned discrimination and jigsaw listening, Spot the intruders or Gapped translation, with related texts varying the message while retaining substantial linguistic overlap, so that learners repeatedly encounter familiar language while the communicative content changes. Productive demands subsequently increase through sentence completion and progressively less scaffolded English to Spanish translation, rather than expecting independent production almost immediately after initial exposure.

Where a conventional textbook therefore compresses exposure, practice and performance into a double page spread, our deliberate choice has been to expand that journey across many pages, accepting that this means introducing less new language at any one time because the important criterion is not how much language students have met, but how much they can subsequently understand, retrieve and manipulate… and surely this is the distinction that matters most? If the students have covered hundreds of words and numerous grammatical structures but cannot access most of them several weeks later, what exactly have we coverd?

Better textbooks still require teachers to mediate them

None of this means that the new GCSE textbooks represent a backward step, since their greater attention to phonics, dictation, defined vocabulary, grammar and recycling constitutes genuine progress, while the amount of high quality material they provide gives teachers an extremely useful resource base. The fundamental problem is that publishers are required to cover a specification, whereas teachers are required to create the conditions in which acquisition occurs, and those two objectives, although closely related, are not identical… which is why departments need to resist measuring curriculum progress primarily through pages and modules completd.

Departments should therefore regard – and I am sure they do so already – the new textbooks as resource banks rather than curriculum scripts, adapting their pace according to what learners have actually mastered rather than according to the number of pages completed. Sometimes this will mean spending considerably longer on a double page spread than its design appears to envisage, while elsewhere it will mean sacrificing additional content in favour of narrow reading, narrow listening, recycling and controlled retrieval, because moving on when the foundations remain insecure merely transfers today’s learning problem into tomorrows lesson.

Ultimately, the most meaningful test of these new textbooks is not whether every vocabulary item, grammatical structure and examination task appears somewhere within their pages, but whether the curriculum built around them gives learners sufficient encounters, sufficiently deep processing and sufficiently well spaced retrieval for that language to remain available weeks and months later. Although I have had a less than positive history with Pearson, if I had to choose among the major new courses I must nevertheless give Pearson my vote, albeit narrowly, because its stronger emphasis on systematic recycling, phonics, grammar and gradual development of the new assessment skills makes it, in my view, the closest amongst the ones currently available on the market to an acquisition informed approach… Still far from ideal, of course, as it exhibits most of the flaws discussed above, some of them, e.g. how grammar is dealt with, in a big way.

Before ending, I do want to acknowledge how extraordinarily difficult these books are to write, because textbook authors are not working in a vacuum and many of the problems I have identified above are partly the product of the constraints under which commercial textbooks have to be produced. Authors have a fixed and often very limited number of pages, they have to satisfy specification requirements, publisher expectations and focus group feedback, while at the same time making the books visually appealing enough to survive in a market in which glossy photographs, design features, large headings and white space inevitably eat into the amount of room available for actual language practice… and once all of that is taken into account, how much space is really left for the kind of intensive recycling, narrow input and repeated grammar processing that acquisition actually demands? It is therefore important to distinguish criticism of the textbook model from criticism of the people who write the books, because I know from experience how many compromises textbook authors are forced to make and how much excellent pedagogical thinking can be squeezed by the realities of publication. For that reason, my criticisms should be read in a constructive spirit, because the new GCSE textbooks are in many respects considerably better than what came before and their authors deserve credit for responding to a demanding new specification under fairly unforgiving conditions.

Introduction

As l have experienced first-hand, Mandarin presents language learners with a particularly demanding set of challenges. They need to develop new sound categories, perceive and produce lexical tones, build sound–meaning connections, learn a large numbers of characters and develop an understanding of a vocabulary system whose morphology and writing system differ substantially from English.

This means that research specifically involving learners of Mandarin deserves our attention. General findings from cognitive psychology and second language acquisition are useful, of course, but Mandarin-specific research can tell us much more about what actually happens when learners encounter tones, characters, pinyin, spoken vocabulary and Chinese morphology.

The following eleven findings I extrapolated from literature I have been reading in preparation for an upcoming keynote for the Australian CLTANSW in September, have particularly important implications for classroom practice. They also connect in interesting ways with several principles underpinning Extensive Processing Instruction (EPI), i.e.: careful modelling, extensive receptive processing, controlled input, delayed production, retrieval practice, recycling, gradual fading of scaffolding and the movement from highly supported processing towards increasingly spontaneous language use. Of course, I am not claiming that these studies investigated EPI. They did not. The point is that their findings provide interesting empirical support for several of the learning principles on which EPI practice is based.

1. Focused listening practice can improve learners’ perception of Mandarin tones

Wang (2013) investigated beginning learners of Mandarin who received approximately six hours of focused tone training over three to four weeks.The learners improved significantly in their ability to perceive Mandarin tone contrasts. One finding I found very interesting- as it validates the EPI approach – was that perception-only training was effective. In other words, the learners did not have to spend all their practice time producing tones in order for learning to occur.

What does this mean for the classroom?

As I often reiterate on this blog, listening is not passive simply because students are not speaking. Consider the difference between asking students simply to listen to ten Mandarin words and asking them to decide:

Which tone did you hear?

Are these two words the same or different?

Which picture corresponds to the word?

Which word did the teacher say?

Which of two characters corresponds to the sound?

The second type of listening requires learners to make decisions about what they hear. They have to process the auditory signal closely.

The EPI connection

This fits very closely with the EPI emphasis on extensive receptive processing before extensive production. In EPI, learners are normally given substantial opportunities to process language through listening and reading before being expected to use it independently. The Mandarin evidence is particularly interesting because tone perception places such obvious demands on the learner.

Before repeatedly asking:

Can they say it?

we should perhaps ask:

Can they reliably hear it?

This is where the EPI listening techniques described on this blog and in the book Breaking the Sound Barrier: teaching learners how to listen can be extremely useful.

2. Being able to imitate a Mandarin tone does not necessarily mean that it has been learnt

Hao (2012) examined the perception and production of Mandarin tones by learners from different linguistic backgrounds.

Learners experienced particular difficulty with certain tonal distinctions, especially Tone 2 and Tone 3.

However, one especially interesting result was that learners could sometimes imitate tones more successfully than they could identify them.

This has enormous implications for classroom teaching.

Imagine this familiar sequence:

Teacher says the word.

Students repeat the word.

The repetition sounds excellent.

Teacher moves on.

What has actually been demonstrated?

Possibly very little.

The students may simply be copying an auditory pattern that is still present in their immediate memory. They have not necessarily constructed a sufficiently robust representation to recognise or retrieve that tone later.

What does this mean for the classroom?

We need to move beyond:

Hear → repeat

towards:

Hear → discriminate → identify → retrieve → produce

For example, after modelling several words, don’t immediately model them again.

Wait.

Then ask learners to identify what they hear.

Later remove the auditory model and ask them to retrieve the word themselves.

Then revisit it tomorrow.

And next week.

The EPI connection

This is almost a textbook illustration of why EPI distinguishes between modelling, receptive processing and independent production.

Choral repetition has a role. However, repetition immediately after a model should not be confused with mastery.

EPI deliberately provides substantial processing between initial modelling and freer production.

The support is gradually removed.

The crucial question becomes:

Can the learner retrieve the language when the teacher is no longer providing it?

3. Explicit instruction can improve Mandarin tone production

Wiener, Chan and Ito (2020) investigated explicit instruction and high-variability phonetic training in Mandarin tone learning.

Explicit information about tonal contours helped learners’ subsequent production of some tones, particularly rising and falling contours.

This is important because it challenges a simplistic assumption that learners simply need enough exposure and will eventually “pick up” Mandarin pronunciation.

Sometimes learners need their attention directed towards precisely what matters.

What does this mean for the classroom?

Before giving students dozens of examples, make the important feature clear and noticeable.

Explain it simply.

Model it clearly.

Contrast it with something different.

Then provide substantial practice.

The sequence might therefore be:

Explain briefly → model → contrast → discriminate → recognise → retrieve → produce

The explanation itself is not the learning.

It simply helps learners notice what they subsequently need to process.

The EPI connection

This fits the EPI principle of explicit modelling followed by extensive processing.

EPI does not reject explicit instruction. Quite the opposite.

However, explanation is kept purposeful and is followed by repeated encounters requiring learners to process the target feature.

Explanation directs attention. Processing builds the memory.

4. More voices and more variation are not automatically better for beginners

The same Wiener, Chan and Ito (2020) research produced another useful finding.

Exposing learners to several speakers did not automatically produce an overall advantage.

This matters because “authenticity” and “variety” are often assumed to be inherently beneficial.

Eventually, of course, learners need to understand Mandarin spoken by many different people.

But variability also makes the learner’s processing task harder.

What does this mean for the classroom?

A sensible progression may be:

clear and predictable → slightly variable → increasingly variable → naturalistic

rather than:

maximum variability from day one.

Initially, learners might hear a limited number of carefully articulated models.

Once the sound–meaning relationships become more stable, teachers can introduce:

different voices,

different speeds,

different surrounding language,

different contexts.

The objective is ultimately flexible comprehension, but difficulty needs to be calibrated.

The EPI connection

This connects strongly with narrow listening and controlled input in EPI.

EPI initially constrains vocabulary and structures so that learners repeatedly process a manageable linguistic system.

Variation is then introduced progressively.

This does not mean making language artificially easy forever.

It means:

stabilise first; vary later.

5. Difficult Mandarin tone distinctions can initially be made easier to hear

Cao, Pavlik and Bidelman (2024) investigated whether manipulating acoustic characteristics could improve learners’ perception of Mandarin tones.

They found that perceptual training improved tone identification and generalisation. Manipulating pitch range was particularly useful for aspects of the notoriously difficult Tone 2/Tone 3 distinction, although the effects differed according to the tone involved.

The broader finding is fascinating.

Sometimes making a difficult feature more noticeable initially helps learners develop the perceptual categories they need.

What does this mean for the classroom?

Teachers should not necessarily present beginners immediately with the most difficult possible version of Mandarin.We can temporarily exaggerate an important distinction, slow something down, isolate it, contrast two examples.Then we gradually remove those supports.

For example:

exaggerated contrast → clear natural contrast → natural speech → different speakers and contexts

The important point is that the scaffold is temporary.

The EPI connection

This is closely related to scaffolding and fading in EPI.Early processing is made highly accessible.As learners become more secure, support is progressively removed and processing becomes more demanding.The end goal remains natural language.We simply build a bridge towards it.

6. Chinese characters can sometimes interfere with learning the spoken word

Research by Zhang, Li and Liu (2021) provides one of the most counter-intuitive findings in this area.Adult learners learnt new spoken Mandarin words associated with pictures. Sometimes they also saw Chinese characters.The researchers manipulated how useful the characters were in signalling pronunciation and meaning. Characters containing partially misleading phonological information or semantically opaque information could impair recall of the spoken forms. Even useful orthographic information did not automatically produce better spoken-word recall.

What does this mean for the classroom?

More representations do not automatically mean more learning.Imagine presenting a beginner simultaneously with:

audio + character + pinyin + English + picture

Every element appears helpful.However, every element also competes for attention.If today’s objective is to establish a strong:

sound ↔ meaning

connection, it may sometimes be better to concentrate attention on that relationship before adding further representations.This does not mean delaying characters universally.It means sequencing information according to the learning objective.

Ask:

What exactly do I want the learner to encode right now?

The EPI connection

This connects strongly with EPI’s use of carefully controlled input and staged processing.The sentence builder, for example, is a scaffold rather than an invitation to process everything simultaneously.Teachers can temporarily foreground particular relationships:

sound → meaning

then:

written form → meaning

and later:

meaning → independent retrieval

The key principle underlying this approach is focused processing rather than information overload.

7. The way characters, pinyin and meaning are arranged on the page affects learning

Experimental Mandarin research comparing different layouts for characters, pinyin and English meanings has found that presentation format affects vocabulary learning. An adjacent presentation format, in which relevant information was physically close together, produced better learning than alternative layouts. Interestingly, what learners preferred was not necessarily what produced the strongest learning.

What does this mean for the classroom?

This sounds like a small design issue but it isn’t, actually. Every time the learner has to search across a page:

Where is the pinyin?

Which translation belongs to this character?

Which pronunciation corresponds to this item?

working-memory resources are being used for something that has nothing to do with actually learning Mandarin.So:

The EPI connection

This is directly relevant to sentence-builder design. A good sentence builder reduces unnecessary visual search and makes form–meaning relationships transparent.The purpose is not merely to make the worksheet attractive.It is to free cognitive resources for language processing.Good instructional design should make the language difficult enough to learn while making the interface as easy as possible to navigate.

8. More visual information can make Chinese characters harder, not easier, to learn

Hou and Jiang (2022) investigated 40 L2 learners of Chinese whose first languages used alphabetic writing systems.They examined two apparently helpful teaching techniques:

1. highlighting radicals,

2. and showing animated stroke order.

The results were surprising. Highlighting radicals increased reaction times and reduced character-recognition accuracy. Stroke-order animation also reduced recognition accuracy under the experimental conditions. The researchers interpret these findings partly in terms of cognitive load.

What does this mean for the classroom?

Imagine what a beginner may already be processing: shape, meaning, sound, tone.

Now add: coloured radicals, moving strokes, stroke numbers, pinyin, translation, pictures

We may believe that every additional feature provides another scaffold. The learner may instead experience something completely different: too much information.

I am not suggesting: Don’t teach radicals. Nor: Don’t teach stroke order.

My suggestion is: Don’t teach everything simultaneously simply because AI/technology allows you to. Try and resist the temptation and the suggestion of disinformed PD providers.

The EPI connection

This is highly consistent with EPI’s emphasis on managing cognitive load.

EPI deliberately constrains new language, recycles familiar material and gradually increases complexity.

The same principle should apply to visual presentation.

Less can sometimes produce more learning.

9. Understanding how Chinese words are built supports vocabulary knowledge

Zhang (2016) studied 171 learners of Chinese as a second language.

The study investigated morphological awareness: learners’ awareness of meaningful elements inside words and of how Chinese compounds are structured.

Both general morphological awareness and specifically Chinese compound-structure awareness predicted vocabulary knowledge.

This is an important finding because Chinese vocabulary should not be experienced as thousands of completely unrelated items.

Consider:

学生

学校

学习

The recurring 学 creates a connection.

Or:

电话

电视

电脑

Here 电 creates another lexical network.

What does this mean for the classroom?

When introducing vocabulary, don’t only ask:

What does this new word mean?

Also ask:

What does it remind us of?

Where have we seen this element before?

Which other words contain it?

Can you work out something about this unfamiliar word from what you already know?

Vocabulary learning becomes the building of networks, rather than the memorisation of isolated labels.

The EPI connection

This fits extremely well with intelligent recycling. In EPI, recycling does not mean simply showing exactly the same item repeatedly. Previously learnt material is brought back in new combinations and contexts. With Mandarin, morphological relationships provide an additional opportunity as teachers can recycle parts of words as well as whole words.That creates more connections in long-term memory and gives old learning a role in acquiring new learning.

10. Handwriting and typing may strengthen different aspects of Mandarin character knowledge

Shi, Hu and Zhu (2026) investigated beginner learners receiving substantial Mandarin instruction.The researchers compared handwriting and typing and found an intriguing pattern.Typing produced stronger performance on some measures involving character recognition and dictation, whereas handwriting produced stronger meaning-recognition performance. In other words, the two activities may strengthen somewhat different relationships within the learner’s representation of a character.

What does this mean for the classroom?

Based on the above findings, he question should not be: Is handwriting better than typing? That is probably too simplistic. Instead ask:

What do I want this activity to strengthen?

Do I want learners to recognise the character?

Retrieve its pronunciation?

Retrieve its meaning?

Produce its written form?

Connect sound, meaning and orthography?

Different activities may serve different purposes.

The EPI connection

This connects with an important EPI principle: practice should match the cognitive operation we ultimately want learners to perform.

Technology should not be judged by whether it is modern.

It should be judged by what it makes the learner’s brain do.

11. Retrieval practice improves the learning of Chinese vocabulary

Finally, a study which is particularly important for EPI. Harrington and Jiang (2013) investigated retrieval practice with university students learning Chinese. Over several weeks, learners completed relatively simple recognition activities involving Chinese words encountered previously.They had to retrieve information about whether particular forms had been encountered before.The words receiving this additional retrieval practice were subsequently learnt better than control items, with benefits evident in later vocabulary assessment.The significance is straightforward:

Seeing something again is not the same as retrieving it.

Suppose I learnt:学校last week.

The teacher can show me 学校 again today.

I look at it and think:

“Yes, I know that.”

That feels like successful learning.However, the answer was already in front of me.

Compare that with:

What was the Mandarin word for “school”?

Now I have to search memory.

That effort is important.

What does this mean for the classroom?

Every Mandarin lesson should contain opportunities to retrieve previously taught language. These can be extremely short:

What does this mean?

Which character did you hear?

Which word is missing?

Say the word before I reveal it.

Complete the phrase.

Translate this chunk.

Which phrase did we learn yesterday?

Write three expressions from last week from memory.

Listen and reconstruct.

Retrieve the missing character.

And crucially, retrieval should happen after delays.

Not only: five minutes later, but tomorrow, next week, three weeks later, next term.

The EPI connection

This is perhaps the clearest connection of all as retrieval practice sits at the heart of Extensive Processing Instruction. The EPI sequence repeatedly requires learners to process and retrieve high-frequency language through different modalities and with progressively decreasing support. Sentence builders provide substantial initial scaffolding.Then that scaffolding is gradually faded.

Learners move from recognition to cued recall to less-supported recall to independent retrieval

and ultimately towards increasingly fluent production. Activities such as delayed dictation, sentence puzzles, partial dictation, listening reconstruction, translation, retrieval grids and structured production are valuable not simply because they provide “practice”. They repeatedly force the learner to bring language back from memory. And this distinction is fundamental:

Re-exposure asks: “Do you recognise this?”

Retrieval asks: “Can you bring it back?”

For durable learning, Mandarin learners need both.

However, if we want language to be available tomorrow, next month and eventually in spontaneous communication, then at some point the answer has to disappear from the page.

That is ultimately what teaching for memory is about.

Conclusion

Taken together, these findings remind us that effective Mandarin teaching depends not simply on how much language learners encounter, but on how carefully we help them encode it, process it, connect it to what they already know, retrieve it repeatedly and retain it over time. This requires careful management of cognitive load, extensive receptive processing, purposeful recycling, repeated retrieval and the gradual removal of support as knowledge becomes more secure and increasingly accessible.

In an age in which AI and digital technology can provide learners with words, characters, pronunciations and translations within seconds, teaching for durable learning becomes increasingly important. Our role is to create the conditions in which Mandarin is encountered often enough, processed deeply enough and retrieved frequently enough to become part of the learner’s long term memory, so that the language they meet in our classrooms today remains available to them tomorrow, next month and, hopefully, many years from now.

A reform that deserves a much harder look

This article was prompted by a recent post by Steve Smith on FrenchTeacher.net questioning the direction in which modern language teaching in England has travelled under the influence of the traditionalist, knowledge-rich movement. His post made me reflect again on something I have been thinking about for some time.

What follows is my interpretation, not necessarily Steve’s. And I should make one caveat from the outset: I cannot prove a simple causal relationship between curriculum reform and the decline of French and German. Educational systems are far too complicated for that.

But the facts themselves are becoming very difficult to ignore.

In 2025, Spanish finally overtook French as the most popular GCSE language. Spanish entries increased by 2.6%, French fell by 1.4%, and German fell by a further 7%. Spanish entries had risen from around 109,600 in 2020 to almost 137,000 in 2025, while French stood at around 133,000. German’s decline has been much more severe. The British Council’s 2026 Language Trends findings confirm the direction of travel: Spanish remains the most popular GCSE language; French fell again, albeit slightly; and German entries were 21.7% below their 2019 level. (British Council)

So here is my deliberately provocative hypothesis:

The knowledge-rich reform that was supposed to strengthen MFL may have helped put the final nail in the coffin of French and German.

Not because grammar is bad. Not because phonics is bad. Not because vocabulary knowledge is unimportant.

But because we may have foregrounded precisely those aspects of French and German which make children feel that these languages are difficult, at exactly the moment when what they desperately need is to experience success.

We have attacked the wrong problem

For years, research and teacher surveys have told us essentially the same thing about pupils who abandon languages.

They perceive them as difficult. They believe they require disproportionate amounts of work. And many fail to see their relevance to their lives and futures.

The broader national picture certainly gives little cause for complacency. The government’s EBacc ambition was for 90% of pupils to study the relevant combination of subjects by 2025. Yet Language Trends 2025 found that teachers in responding schools reported an average of only 53% of Year 11 pupils learning a language for GCSE. The socioeconomic divide is enormous: GCSE language uptake is more than 20 percentage points higher in the most affluent state schools. (British Council)

If difficulty and relevance are central problems, what should language education try to create first?

Surely a sense of:

I understand this. I can say things. I can communicate. I am becoming somebody who can speak another language.

Instead, the knowledge-rich movement has increasingly conceptualised beginner language learning through the explicit acquisition of three bodies of knowledge: vocabulary, grammar and phonics.

The revised GCSE itself reflects that conception. The new subject content for French, German and Spanish, first taught from 2024, formalises a curriculum built strongly around vocabulary, grammar and sound-symbol correspondences. (GOV.UK)

All three matter.

The question is not whether pupils should learn them.

The question is whether making them so visible, explicit and separable is the best way of creating motivated young linguists.

I increasingly suspect that it isn’t.

Why French and German may pay the highest price

This matters because languages are not equally affected by such a curriculum.

French presents beginners with a particularly awkward relationship between written and spoken language. Letters disappear. Word boundaries blur in connected speech. Liaison changes what pupils hear. A word confidently recognised on a page may seem to vanish completely when spoken naturally.

That does not make French intrinsically “too difficult”. But it does mean that foregrounding phonics and orthographic decoding can make one of French’s most intimidating features unusually salient to a beginner. Add to this that the new French curriculum is very grammar heavy and accuracy-orientated, with GCSE course books covering myriads of often challenging structures at break-neck speed. French grammar’s notorious difficulty gets amplified by the current curriculum in a way which is likely to alienate the typical non-resilient, easily distracted and short-term gratification driven teen. Not to mention the issue of relevance: surely, if relevance is key in intrinsic motivation, a grammar heavy curriculum is unlikely to appeal to today’s language learners…

German presents a different problem. Its sound-writing relationship is comparatively transparent. The difficulty lies much more in morphology, grammar and syntax: gender and case, adjective endings, word order, verb placement and the interaction between them.

Again, these things are learnable.

But if we present language primarily as an accumulation of explicit knowledge, French pupils encounter conspicuous phonological complexity and German pupils conspicuous grammatical complexity.

Spanish has an accidental advantage.

Its sound-symbol relationships are considerably more transparent for beginners, and much of its early morphology allows learners to perceive patterns relatively quickly. A knowledge-heavy curriculum therefore risks creating a profoundly ironic outcome: the reform is notionally language-neutral, but its effects may not be.

It may disproportionately expose precisely the features that make French and German feel harder.

And perceptions matter enormously.

A thirteen-year-old deciding whether to continue a language is not conducting a psycholinguistic analysis.

They are asking:

Am I any good at this?

If the answer feels like no, we have probably already lost them.

Where is the “can-do” factor?

This, for me, is the central weakness in the current settlement.

Language learning is unusual because knowledge and performance are psychologically inseparable.

Knowing ten grammatical rules does not necessarily make a child feel like a French speaker. Understanding a phonics rule does not necessarily make them feel capable of understanding French.

But understanding a teacher speaking French does.

Following a story does.

Understanding a joke does.

Reading something they could not have read six months earlier does.

Having somebody say something to them in another language and discovering that they understand it does.

Those experiences generate what might loosely be called the can-do factor.

And that emotional dimension isn’t fluffy decoration around learning. It influences whether pupils persevere with something difficult.

This is why I worry that MFL reform has confused what expert analysis tells us language consists of with what novice learners need language learning to feel like.

Of course language contains grammar, vocabulary and phonology.

But a cathedral contains bricks.

That does not mean the best way to make somebody fall in love with architecture is to begin by sorting the bricks.

And then there is EPI

There is an important complication here, and it should not be brushed aside.

Across England, large numbers of classroom practitioners report considerable success with Extensive Processing Instruction (EPI) and related approaches. Whatever one’s theoretical position on EPI, its influence on current MFL practice is undeniable.

This is important because EPI represents, in several respects, a very different response to the motivational problem. It places considerable emphasis on modelling, highly scaffolded input, repeated processing, extensive exposure and building confidence before expecting pupils to perform language independently.

Language Trends has documented the influence of EPI and changing pedagogical practice among responding schools.

That deserves attention.

But we must distinguish two entirely different claims.

One is:

“Teachers using this approach report better classroom experiences.”

The other is:

“National MFL policy has reversed the decline of language learning.”

Those are not remotely the same proposition.

The national indicators remain deeply troubling. Spanish’s growth is encouraging because it demonstrates that pupils have not simply rejected language learning altogether. But French continues to lose relative ground and German’s position is increasingly precarious. Language Trends 2025 described access to German as close to disappearing in some less affluent settings. (All Languages)

Indeed, the success reported by EPI practitioners may actually strengthen the argument for reconsidering the reform.

If approaches emphasising rich input, extensive processing, scaffolding and early communicative confidence are producing enthusiastic teachers and successful pupils, perhaps policymakers should be asking why.

The primary problem: we may be making a bad situation worse

Then we come to primary languages.

French remains the most widely taught language in English primary schools. Yet transition remains extraordinarily weak. Language Trends 2026 found that almost seven in ten state secondary schools could not organise Year 7 classes according to the language children had learned at primary school. (British Council)

There is already a structural problem here.

Now imagine adding an increasingly explicit knowledge-rich interpretation of language teaching.

We are asking primary teachers — many of whom are not language specialists and may themselves possess relatively limited confidence in French — to teach pronunciation, phonics, grammar and vocabulary explicitly and accurately.

That is an enormous ask.

French pronunciation is precisely the area in which a teacher with limited proficiency is likely to feel least secure.

And explicit grammar instruction requires sufficient linguistic understanding to answer the child’s devastatingly simple follow-up question:

“But why?”

A specialist can move flexibly between explanation, examples and abundant natural language.

A nervous non-specialist cannot always do that.

The danger is that the curriculum therefore becomes increasingly dependent on slides, isolated activities, scripts and packaged materials rather than the teacher’s ability to flood the classroom with comprehensible, engaging French.

And that takes us to a deeper problem which predates the present reform.

Primary French itself may be helping to undermine French

Even if we completely remove the knowledge-rich debate from the equation, I think we need to confront an uncomfortable possibility.

The way French is delivered in some primary schools may itself be contributing to its later decline.

That is not an attack on primary teachers.

Quite the opposite.

We have given teachers a specialist job without consistently giving them specialist linguistic preparation.

Many understandably depend heavily on ready-made schemes of work and online resources — for example, Language Angels. Such resources can offer useful structure and reduce teacher workload. But in my view, reliance on lower-quality or heavily scripted resources cannot substitute for a linguistically confident teacher providing large amounts of accurate, compelling spoken input and genuine interaction.

Language is acquired through enormous exposure to language.

Children need to hear it.

Understand it.

Respond to it.

Play with it.

Read it.

Encounter it again and again in meaningful contexts.

And listening and spontaneous interaction are precisely the areas in which a non-specialist teacher is most likely to lack confidence.

So imagine the child’s trajectory.

French is their first foreign language. They encounter it in primary school. Their experience is fragmented or overly resource-led. They arrive in Year 7 without a strong sense of achievement — and, because transition is so poor, may effectively start again.

Then somebody offers them Spanish.

New language. New beginning. More transparent pronunciation.

Which would you choose?

I suspect that what we sometimes interpret as attraction towards Spanish may partly be flight from an unsuccessful previous experience of French.

That hypothesis urgently deserves proper research.

Spanish has something else: cultural heat

None of this means pedagogy explains everything.

There is another elephant dancing rather cheerfully around the MFL classroom.

Spanish is culturally hot.

French, at least for many English teenagers at present, isn’t.

Spanish has enormous global popular-cultural visibility: Latin music, globally successful artists such as Bad Bunny, football, La Liga, streaming television and social media.

And then there is Spain itself.

For enormous numbers of British families — including working-class families for whom an abstract argument about “global citizenship” may mean very little — Spain is not abstract at all.

It is somewhere they actually go.

The airport announcements are in Spanish. The menus are in Spanish. The waiter speaks Spanish. Their parents attempt Spanish. Their friends go to Spain. They may return year after year.

The British Council itself pointed to Spanish’s growing popularity and cultural appeal when it overtook French at GCSE in 2025, while commentary around the figures highlighted tourism, football, music and the perceived practical reach of Spanish. (British Council)

That is relevance made tangible.

French remains an enormously important world language. France is our neighbour. Francophone Africa will matter increasingly economically and geopolitically. French has extraordinary cultural capital.

But that is not necessarily the France or the French-speaking world being experienced by a fourteen-year-old choosing GCSE options.

If pupils already regard languages as difficult, cultural desirability becomes educationally important.

Spanish begins with a motivational tailwind.

French increasingly begins with a headwind.

And what about senior leadership?

There is another factor that appears repeatedly in conversations among language teachers: the attitude of senior leadership.

This is harder to quantify nationally, and we should be careful not to pretend otherwise.

But it should not be dismissed.

Teachers frequently describe languages being squeezed by option blocks, timetable decisions, staffing shortages, minimum class-size requirements and assumptions about which subjects pupils actually “need”.

The 2026 Language Trends findings show how structural those pressures can become: nearly half of state secondary schools reported being unable to run A-level classes when minimum pupil numbers were not reached, while recruitment problems remained substantial, particularly around German and dual linguists. (British Council)

Once a language becomes marginal, a vicious circle begins.

Numbers fall.

Leadership reduces provision.

Reduced provision makes the subject less visible.

Lower visibility reduces numbers further.

The department shrinks.

Then somebody says:

“There simply isn’t demand.”

But demand is not independent of provision.

Sometimes institutions manufacture the decline they later cite as justification for further contraction.

German should make us particularly nervous here.

This is bigger than one teaching method

None of these explanations works alone.

That is precisely the point.

French and German may be caught in a perfect storm:

• a curriculum philosophy that foregrounds explicit knowledge and may inadvertently magnify pupils’ perceptions of difficulty;
• French phonology and German grammar making those effects potentially language-specific;
• insufficient emphasis on early communicative confidence and the feeling of “I can do this”;
• uneven primary provision, frequently delivered by non-specialists;
• poor primary-secondary continuity;
• excessive reliance in some settings on ready-made schemes and resources rather than abundant high-quality target-language input;
• cultural currents strongly favouring Spanish;
• staffing problems, especially in German;
• timetabling and financial pressures;
• and, in some schools, leadership cultures in which MFL is not sufficiently protected or valued.

Meanwhile, Spanish grows.

That last fact matters enormously.

If all languages were collapsing equally, we might reasonably conclude that English children simply do not want to learn foreign languages.

But they aren’t.

In 2010, government figures show that 25% of pupils at the end of Key Stage 4 entered French, compared with only 9% entering Spanish. By 2020, French had fallen to 20% while Spanish had risen to 17%. Then, in 2025, Spanish finally overtook French outright. (UK Parliament)

Something has changed.

We should be intellectually curious enough to ask what.

Ten years on, where is the transformation?

This is ultimately the question policymakers and advocates of the knowledge-rich turn need to answer.

Not:

Can pupils explain phonics?

Not:

Have departments rewritten their schemes of work?

Not even:

Is the new GCSE theoretically better sequenced?

The question is:

Do more children want to learn languages?

Because if our curriculum becomes more theoretically elegant while fewer pupils want the product, we have solved the wrong problem.

The evidence does not show the motivational transformation that England needs. The government’s EBacc aspirations remain far from reality. Socioeconomic inequalities remain enormous. German continues to contract. French has lost its position as the country’s leading GCSE language. Primary-secondary transition remains badly fractured. (British Council)

And yet Spanish demonstrates that decline is not inevitable.

That should be the most interesting finding of all.

Perhaps we should start with success

None of this requires abandoning grammar.

I teach grammar.

Nor does it require abandoning phonics.

Pronunciation matters enormously.

And nobody seriously disputes that vocabulary knowledge is fundamental.

The argument is about what occupies the foreground of the learner’s experience.

The child should experience language before constantly being invited to anatomise it.

They should hear enormous quantities of comprehensible language.

They should understand messages.

They should read.

They should interact.

They should encounter grammar repeatedly in meaningful language and then have their attention drawn to patterns when doing so helps them.

They should gradually discover that what once sounded like noise now carries meaning.

Because that moment is intoxicating.

It is one of the reasons people fall in love with languages.

And perhaps we have underestimated it.

The uncomfortable conclusion

The decline of French and German cannot honestly be attributed to one policy, one pedagogy, one government or one curriculum reform.

The evidence does not permit that conclusion.

But neither should that complexity become an excuse for refusing to interrogate the dominant policy assumptions of the last decade.

My interpretation is that the evidence now gives us good reason to take a much more uncomfortable hypothesis seriously.

We have attempted to make languages more rigorous by defining more precisely the knowledge pupils should acquire.

But in doing so, we may have made the experience of learning French and German feel more like learning about a language and less like acquiring one.

We may have made their hardest features more visible.

We may have underestimated motivation.

We may have undervalued comprehensible input.

We may have confused explicit knowledge with the psychological experience of becoming a linguist.

And we may have forgotten that before children choose French or German at fourteen, they first have to believe something much simpler:

I can do this.

Spanish currently seems better able to generate that belief — through linguistic accessibility, cultural relevance, travel, popular culture and, perhaps, the simple psychological attraction of a fresh start.

French and German have no inherent reason to die in English schools.

But if we continue treating their decline as an unfortunate mystery rather than asking whether some of our own educational choices have contributed to it, we may eventually make that decline irreversible.

The reform that was supposed to save languages has certainly not saved French and German.

The more disturbing possibility is that it has helped hasten their decline.

And after nearly a decade of travelling down this road, we should at least be brave enough to ask whether it is time to change direction.

Introduction

Every year, the Language Trends England report provides the most comprehensive snapshot of the state of Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) in English schools. The 2026 edition paints a fascinating picture of a profession that is adapting rapidly to curriculum reform while continuing to battle what are, sadly, very familiar challenges. There is plenty to celebrate, but there are also some uncomfortable truths that policymakers can no longer afford to ignore, in my opinion. And buried within the report is one finding that, in my view, deserves far more attention than it has received.

International engagement is back on the rise

One of the report’s most encouraging messages is the continuing recovery in international engagement following the disruption caused by Covid-19 and Brexit. Increasing numbers of primary schools are once again developing links with partner schools overseas, taking part in international projects and engaging with organisations such as the British Council. This matters because authentic intercultural experiences provide a powerful motivational boost for language learning. The only disappointment is that around half of primary schools still report having no formal links with outside organisations, reminding us that access to these opportunities still remains highly uneven.

Languages are still fighting for curriculum time

If there is one finding that should concern every language teacher, it is this one; more than a quarter of primary schools now report that language lesson time has been squeezed to make room for literacy and numeracy, while around one in five secondary schools have also reduced Key Stage 3 curriculum time. We have known for years that exposure is the engine of language acquisition. Less curriculum time inevitably means fewer opportunities for meaningful processing, practice and retrieval. Teachers continue to perform miracles, but miracles are much easier when you are actually allowed to teach!

Transition remains the Achilles’ heel

For well over a decade, policymakers have insisted that improving transition between Key Stage 2 and Key Stage 3 should be a priority. The idea is simple: pupils should arrive in secondary school able to build on what they learned in primary school, not start all over again.

Yet the report shows that this ambition remains largely unrealised. Only around 2% of secondary schools report that all pupils continue studying the language they learned in primary school. In practice, this means that many pupils who have spent four years learning French arrive at secondary school only to be placed in Spanish, while others who continue with French often find themselves revisiting content they mastered years earlier because their classmates have very different backgrounds.

The result is a classic lose-lose situation. Some pupils are bored because they spend months repeating what they already know; others become frustrated because they have to abandon several years of learning and begin a completely new language from scratch. Either way, precious curriculum time is wasted and motivation suffers.

The encouraging news is that virtually everyone now recognises this as one of the biggest structural weaknesses in English MFL education. The disappointing news is that we have been recognising it for years. Acknowledging the problem has proved much easier than fixing it.

Spanish overtakes French: an overnight revolution? Not quite.

One of the headline findings confirms what many of us have been noticing for several years: Spanish has now overtaken French as the most widely entered GCSE language. This is certainly a landmark moment, but it is less a revolution than the culmination of a long-term trend.

Why has this happened?

In my view, several factors have gradually converged. Spanish enjoys a reputation among pupils as being easier to pronounce, easier to spell and, in many respects, more transparent than French. Teachers often find it easier to establish early success with beginners, and pupils typically experience fewer difficulties decoding and producing the language. Add to this the growing cultural visibility of the Spanish-speaking world—through music, sport, travel and popular culture—and Spanish has become an increasingly attractive option for many schools.

At the same time, French has suffered from an image problem rather than a linguistic one. For years, many pupils have arrived at secondary school believing that French is “hard”, often before they have even had a chance to experience it properly. Unfortunately, that perception has sometimes become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Interestingly, French still dominates in primary schools, although its share continues to decline while Spanish expands. This creates an awkward situation. Many pupils spend four years learning French in primary school, only to encounter increasing numbers of secondary schools offering Spanish instead. Others continue with French, but within a system where its overall presence is gradually shrinking.

Whether this shift ultimately benefits language education remains an open question. The real challenge is not deciding which language wins the popularity contest. It is ensuring that whichever language pupils learn, they learn it well. Ultimately, the quality of teaching, the coherence of the curriculum and the amount of curriculum time available matter far more than whether the language happens to be French or Spanish.

Teachers are embracing multilingualism

Another genuinely positive development is the growing recognition of pupils’ home, heritage and community languages. More schools are celebrating multilingualism as part of whole-school culture, encouraging pupils to compare languages, explore similarities and value linguistic diversity. This represents a welcome move away from seeing English and the curriculum language as existing in separate worlds. Instead, schools increasingly recognise multilingualism as an asset rather than a complication.

AI is becoming part of everyday teaching

AI is becoming part of everyday teaching. Artificial Intelligence is no longer a curiosity: 82% of state secondary respondents now use it either regularly or occasionally, while pupil use is also becoming more accepted. Teachers report using AI for vocabulary learning, revision, translation, feedback, research and, particularly at Key Stage 5, speaking practice. However, relatively few schools are explicitly teaching pupils how to design prompts, evaluate outputs critically and use AI ethically. Concerns remain about over-reliance, academic integrity, pupils submitting language beyond their genuine proficiency, and the absence of clear school or national guidance.

The CPD offer is not always keeping pace. Too much AI training remains generic, tool-led and commercially driven, focusing on impressive prompts and instant worksheet generation rather than subject-specific pedagogy. It often neglects linguistic accuracy, curriculum sequencing, cognitive load, safeguarding, assessment validity and the need to preserve pupils’ independent thinking. It is also frequently delivered as a one-off session with little follow-up, classroom evaluation or departmental implementation support. AI can reduce workload and enrich learning, but without rigorous, MFL-specific CPD it may simply help teachers produce more mediocre materials—and pupils avoid more of the thinking—at greater speed.

The report also exposes a familiar and troubling divide: independent schools are further ahead, with higher levels of regular AI use and around half allowing pupils to use it to support language learning, compared with only around a quarter of state secondary schools. This risks creating yet another educational chasm, with privately educated pupils gaining earlier access to guided, sophisticated uses of AI while state-school practice remains more cautious, uneven and constrained.

Teachers are responding impressively to the new GCSE

The report highlights the enormous amount of work departments have undertaken to prepare for the new GCSE specifications. Schemes of work have been rewritten, assessments redesigned, and much greater emphasis has been placed on phonics, reading aloud, dictation and vocabulary progression. Whatever one’s views on the reforms themselves, there can be little doubt that language teachers have responded with remarkable professionalism. The challenge now is ensuring that schools have sufficient time and support to embed these changes successfully.

Schools are creating more of their own resources

One particularly interesting trend is the steady move away from commercially produced resources towards materials created by teachers themselves. Schools increasingly report producing their own resources, adapting existing ones or drawing on freely available materials. On the one hand, this reflects creativity and professional expertise. On the other, it also raises questions about teacher workload. If hundreds of departments are independently producing similar materials across the country, one has to ask whether the profession is making the best use of its collective time and expertise.

The elephant in the room: EPI has quietly become the profession’s preferred approach

Hidden among the findings is what I believe is the single most significant pedagogical development revealed by this year’s survey. Asked to identify the instructional approach that best describes their teaching, more respondents selected Extensive Processing Instruction (EPI) than any other named methodology.

Pause for a second and think about what that actually means.

Here we have an approach that has received no government funding, no official endorsement, no multimillion-pound dissemination programme and no institutional marketing machine. It has spread the old-fashioned way: one teacher tells another; one department shares with another; schools adopt it because they believe it helps pupils learn better. In an educational landscape often dominated by centrally funded initiatives, this is quite extraordinary.

And let’s be honest. For years we have been told that meaningful change in education has to come through government projects, national hubs, centrally funded programmes or university-led initiatives. Yet the largest survey of language teachers in England tells a rather different story. The profession has quietly voted with its feet.

Does this mean EPI has solved every problem in language education? Of course not. No methodology should ever become dogma, and no serious teacher should stop questioning their practice. But when more than half of respondents identify with the same broad pedagogical approach, surely that deserves serious discussion. Whether people approve of EPI or not is almost beside the point.

The profession has spoken, but will the powers that be listen? It is the third consecutive time that EPI and The Language Gym team does better in the Language Trends Survey than the current government-sponsored initiative.

The finding nobody seems particularly keen to publicise

Curiously, this landmark finding has received almost no attention. Most discussions of the report have focused on AI, Spanish overtaking French, curriculum reform and the future of the EBacc. All important topics, certainly. Yet arguably the biggest shift in classroom pedagogy barely features in the commentary surrounding the report.

Why? I honestly don’t know. It may simply reflect editorial priorities. It may be that pedagogical shifts generate fewer headlines than policy announcements. Or perhaps there is a degree of institutional discomfort when one of the report’s biggest findings points towards a grassroots movement rather than a centrally funded initiative. After all, it is rather awkward when a methodology that has grown without government funding, without a national strategy and without institutional sponsorship emerges as the profession’s most widely adopted approach.

I cannot say. What I can say, objectively, is that one of the report’s most significant findings has not been given anything like the prominence one might reasonably have expected.

What this means for English MFL education

Taken as a whole, the report suggests that English language education is entering a new phase. Teachers are increasingly embracing evidence-informed practice, redesigning curricula, integrating AI sensibly and seeking greater coherence across Key Stages. At the same time, they continue to battle shrinking curriculum time, fragile post-16 provision, recruitment difficulties and persistent transition problems.

This is precisely where I believe EPI can make a meaningful contribution. Rather than offering teachers another collection of disconnected activities, trendy labels or fashionable buzzwords, EPI provides a coherent curriculum framework built around structured input, extensive processing, retrieval, recycling and carefully sequenced progression. It is designed not only to improve learning, but also to make teachers’ lives easier by providing consistency across year groups and reducing unnecessary planning.

Over the past decade I have had the privilege of working with thousands of language teachers in the UK and overseas who have adapted these principles to their own contexts. The report suggests that many schools are already moving in this direction. The challenge now is not to convince teachers that structured, evidence-informed instruction matters. They have already reached that conclusion. The challenge is to help departments implement these principles thoughtfully, critically and sustainably.

Conclusions

If I had to summarise Language Trends England 2026 in one sentence, it would be this:the profession is moving FASTER than the system.

Teachers are redesigning curricula, experimenting intelligently with AI, building richer multilingual classrooms and, perhaps most significantly, converging around a shared set of pedagogical principles—not because anyone has told them to, but because they believe those principles improve learning.

The challenges remain substantial. Curriculum time continues to shrink, transition is still far from fit for purpose. recruitment remains difficult, and language uptake beyond Key Stage 4 is still fragile.

Yet the overall picture is far from gloomy. On the contrary, what emerges from this report is a profession that refuses to stand still. Teachers are thinking critically, collaborating generously and constantly refining their practice despite mounting pressures.

Educational change has often been imagined as something that starts in Whitehall, universities or national agencies before filtering down into classrooms. The 2026 Language Trends report suggests the opposite may now be true. Some of the most important innovations in language education are emerging from classrooms themselves.

Perhaps it is time for the powers that be to spend a little less time telling teachers what they should be doing and a little more time paying attention to what teachers have already decided works!

Guest blog by Victoria Harris

When I first began exploring the work of Gianfranco Conti and associates, I was looking for curriculum rooted in solid progression, that had KS3 level learning but at a pace that KS2 could follow. What I found was much more than that. I discovered the principles of EPI.

This approach to learning languages not only helped me as teacher and consultant to really underpin a solid foundation in language learning, it also helped shape my awareness of the language beyond what I already knew.

The Reality

I’m going to be honest, Primary Languages in the UK are difficult. Most schools can barely fit a 30 minute lesson into the week. There is next to no space for retrieval in between and staff confidence has been at an all time low. As Conti states, motivation is a primary factor in sustained effort and success. If we can’t be excited to teach it, how can learners be excited to learn?

This is where EPI comes in. What I have seen since implementing EPI in my Linguastars classrooms is a clear and measurable shift – not only in outcomes, but in how children experience language learning itself.

A shift from performance to genuine learning

One of the most immediate impacts of EPI is the move away from surface-level performance towards deeper processing. Less isolated vocabulary and more integration into real life contextual speech.  Rather than rushing to produce language, pupils spend more time engaging with input—hearing, reading, and interpreting language in multiple ways. This has led to stronger retention and far greater confidence when pupils are eventually asked to produce language themselves.

Even when faced with 30 minute lessons, the productivity is high and that is fundamentally down to the carefully structured MARSEARS sequence, high frequency exposure and recycling of language… all embedded through motivational tasks and games.

EPI breaks learning into manageable steps, which has had a noticeable impact on pupil confidence. By reducing cognitive overload and allowing pupils to process language thoroughly before expecting output, learners feel more secure and less anxious. This is particularly evident in younger learners and those who may previously have struggled with language learning.

Implementation to Impact – A real look at how we use EPI at Primary Level.

It’s no secret that cognitive load is halved when learning a new language, so we must be careful in choosing the right vocabulary and surrounding structure when putting together our topics. To be able to fully build on skills and ensure recycling and interleaving is working, we break our topics into levels. For example, Ma Famille has 3 levels; saying who we live with, saying where we live and talking about our town. These 3 levels are designed to be taught over three years at KS2, meaning each level builds upon the next and recycling takes place within the remit of that topic. This enables pupils to process new knowledge and build on existing knowledge at the same time.

The example Sentence Builders below show the difference between levels 1 & 2 and would be used during the Modelling stage of the MARSEARS sequence.

Level 1 – Modelling                                                             

Level 2: modelling

As we progress through the sequence, children will explore phonics and grammar, they will process a multitude of listening and reading tasks designed to target micro processing skills in both sentence and word level before moving on to structured production in speaking and writing.

Level 1 – Receptive Processing                                                          

Level 2 – Receptive Processing

When we move to Structured Production  – we begin with speaking skills with a scaffold, we use a writing ladder to progress through varying levels of ability before returning back to speaking and removing the scaffold.

One of my favourite activities is ‘No Snakes, No Ladders’ for translation tasks. Every teacher who witnesses this comments that the children almost have no idea just how good they are at French because they are too invested in winning the game. It’s the perfect chance for me to come around, assess pronunciation and translation skills but also probe further.

We don’t often focus on the expansion element of MARSEARS at Primary Level, but rather use it as a space for misconceptions or consolidation. From there we assess core elements of the topic before moving to communicative tasks such as surveys, conversation or writing pieces.

Here is a sample of our ‘Familia 2’ topic in Spanish where a pupil has been able to write a descriptive  piece on where they live and who with. Notice how there is also mention of pets which is from another topic!

The whole MARSEARS sequence is a journey, and it’s a real misconception of Primary Teachers in the UK that children should be speaking from day 1. Of course, it’s a language, it is designed to be spoken. But just as a baby doesn’t speak from Day 1, they witness, they process, they test, they refine – this is what we apply to learning a second language.

One of the biggest triumphs for me though is the embedded skills that are now transferring to other areas of the curriculum. Pupils making links in their own languages through reading, phonics and even speech and language. The impact has been nothing short of astounding.

Greater engagement and inclusivity

Because EPI emphasises comprehension, repetition, and structured interaction, it creates an inclusive learning environment where all pupils can succeed. Activities are accessible yet challenging, and every child has the opportunity to participate meaningfully.

Let’s also not forget those low confidence teachers… Their motivation has improved; their understanding has improved. They now smile when lessons begin and get involved. Creating that culture of ‘we’re in it together’ is pivotal in Primary Languages.

The feedback we get at Linguastars is “I wish I had learned languages this way, I would have understood a lot more”.

It takes time, and that’s ok

Implementing EPI in primary classrooms has reshaped both my teaching practice and my pupils’ learning experiences. It wasn’t overnight, this takes real thought into how you want to present each topic, how they interlock and interleave. It’s an investment, but the impact is evident not only in improved outcomes, but in the confidence, engagement, and resilience pupils gain in language learning. It reinforces the idea that when we prioritise how learners process language, we unlock more meaningful and lasting progress.

                        Victoria Harris – Director of Linguastars Education

                               

(BA Hons Key Stage 2/3 Education – Modern Foreign Languages)

Victoria is a Qualified Language Teacher and Consultant with over 12 years of experience in leading and developing languages at Primary Level, preparing pupils for their KS3 journey and liaising with Secondary schools for successful transition. Her most recent work includes curriculum development and school improvement across the North-West of England and partnering with brands to bring language learning to real world context.

Walk into many language classrooms and you will hear a familiar refrain:

“Right, now discuss your holidays with your partner.”

The intention is admirable. After all, students learn to speak by speaking… don’t they? Not quite.

One of the most persistent misconceptions in language teaching is the belief that speaking practice, in and of itself, causes speaking development. But does it really? If simply getting students to talk were enough, why do so many learners, after years of pair-work, role plays and supposedly communicative activities, still struggle to express even the simplest ideas fluently and confidently?

How many times have we witnessed students perform perfectly during a listening or reading activity only to freeze completely when asked a simple follow-up question? Why do some learners appear successful during highly scaffolded classroom tasks yet struggle the moment the support is removed? And perhaps most importantly… how do we bridge the gap between knowing language and actually using it?

Decades of research in second language acquisition suggest that speaking proficiency emerges not from speaking alone but from a complex interaction between input, memory, retrieval, automatisation, interaction and fluency development (Krashen, 1985; Levelt, 1989; DeKeyser, 2007; Ellis, 2008). In other words, successful speaking instruction is not simply about creating opportunities for students to talk. It is about carefully engineering the conditions that make successful talking possible.

This distinction matters enormously in UK secondary schools and, indeed, in many Australian classrooms I have observed, where teachers must work with mixed-attainment groups, limited curriculum time, examination pressures and learners whose exposure to the target language is often restricted to just two or three lessons per week. Under such circumstances, every minute matters. Every activity matters. Every interaction matters!

The ten principles outlined below are not intended as a new methodology. Rather, they represent a synthesis of what we know from research, classroom observation and successful practice. Although many readers will recognise echoes of Extensive Processing Instruction (EPI), these principles extend far beyond any single approach. Whether one identifies as communicative, task-based, EPI-oriented or eclectic, the underlying cognitive and linguistic principles remain remarkably similar.

Ultimately, the question is not:

“How can I get my students to speak more?”

The question is:

“How can I make speaking possible for more students?”

1. Flood Learners with Comprehensible Oral Input Before Expecting Output

One of the most persistent misconceptions in language teaching is the idea that speaking practice causes speaking development. In reality, speaking develops primarily from extensive processing of comprehensible oral input. Before learners can produce a structure confidently, they need to have heard it repeatedly, processed it successfully and encountered it in multiple meaningful contexts (Krashen, 1985; Ellis, 2008; VanPatten, 2017).

This principle seems almost self-evident, and yet it is astonishing how often it is ignored. Students are routinely asked to discuss topics for which they possess neither sufficient vocabulary nor sufficiently automatised structures. The result? Hesitation, frustration and, ultimately, silence.

Approaches such as EPI have contributed significantly to the profession by foregrounding the importance of extensive teacher modelling, structured listening and repeated encounters with high-frequency language before any significant expectation of independent production (Conti & Smith, 2019). However, the principle itself extends well beyond EPI. It is supported by decades of research showing that language acquisition is fuelled primarily by successful comprehension.

Before students discuss free-time activities, for example, they might first:

• be pre-taught the key target vocabulary (in both the oral and written form)
• engage in narrow listening;
• listen to multiple short texts containing the same core language;
• complete listening discrimination tasks;
• engage in tasks targeting the various micro-skills of listening
• participate in teacher-led modelling;
• engage in choral repetition;
• complete simple comprehension checks.

Notice what is happening here: the teacher is not avoiding speaking, but, rather, they are building the foundations upon which successful speaking will later rest. After all, as I repeat ad nauseam in my workshops: how can students say something they have not yet heard?

2. Prioritise Retrieval Over Exposure

A common problem in modern language classrooms is the illusion of learning whereby, students often recognise language perfectly when they see it on a worksheet, a sentence builder or a PowerPoint slide, yet struggle to retrieve that very same language when asked to speak.

Why? Because recognition is not retrieval. Students may recognise a phrase instantly when they encounter it in print, yet, under the pressure of real-time communication, suddenly find that the language they appeared to know so well has somehow vanished. This is because recognising language and retrieving language are fundamentally different cognitive processes (Karpicke & Roediger, 2008).

Retrieval practice strengthens memory pathways, improves accessibility and dramatically increases the likelihood that language will be available when learners actually need it (Agarwal & Bain, 2019).

Many more language teachers these days are indeed embedding retrieval practice in their lessons. However, crucially, they tend to do it through worksheets or apps (e.g. Quizlet), not aurally and orally. This limits the limits of transferrability of retrieval practice to speaking tasks.

This is why in EPI, structured production lessons always contain opportunities for active oral retrieval:

• quick-fire translation;
• delayed repetition;
• oral ping-pong;
• retrieval grids;
• no-snakes-no-ladders;
• vocabulary races;
• sentence races;
• mini-whiteboard retrieval tasks.

The goal is not simply to revisit language but to force learners to reconstruct it repeatedly from memory and, as much as possible, through the oral medium.

3. Recycle Language Relentlessly Through the Oral Medium

One of the greatest weaknesses of many language programmes is not that language is insufficiently recycled, but that it is recycled predominantly through reading and writing. As we have mentioned in the previous paragraph, though, speaking fluency depends heavily upon repeated oral processing (Nation, 2007; Segalowitz, 2010).

A high-frequency chunk such as:

“Je pense que…”

should not simply appear in textbooks, worksheets and vocabulary lists. It should be heard, repeated, manipulated, retrieved, expanded and reused repeatedly over weeks, months and even years because automaticity is built through repeated successful processing. Effective oral recycling activities include:

• choral repetition;
• faulty echo;
• delayed dictation and repetition;
• oral sentence builders;
• either-or listening;
• oral retrieval games;
• Oral ping-pong
• Sentence-builder wars
• Trapdoor
• Things in common
• speed-dating conversations;
• Entry and Exit-ticket routines

The aim is not mindless repetition.The aim is repeated meaningful encounters that gradually transform fragile declarative knowledge into accessible procedural knowledge. And isn’t that precisely what fluency requires?

4. Automate High-Frequency Language

Fluency is largely a consequence of automatisation. As language becomes proceduralised, learners devote fewer cognitive resources to form and more to meaning, interaction and message construction (DeKeyser, 2007; Segalowitz, 2010).

This simple observation has profound implications for classroom practice. If learners must consciously assemble every utterance word by word, communication will inevitably be slow, effortful and fragile. However, when frequently used chunks become automatised, students suddenly appear more fluent, more confident and more spontaneous—not because they have acquired more grammar, but because they can access familiar language rapidly and efficiently.

This is why successful speakers possess extensive repertoires of high-frequency formulaic language. Such chunks function as cognitive shortcuts, reducing processing demands whilst simultaneously enhancing fluency.

GCSE Speaking Survival Chunks

Function	French	Spanish	German
Giving an opinion	À mon avis	En mi opinión	Meiner Meinung nach
Personal opinion	Je pense que…	Pienso que…	Ich denke, dass…
Justifying	… parce que c’est…	… porque es…	… weil es … ist
Adding information	En plus	Además	Außerdem
Contrasting	Par contre	Sin embargo	Andererseits
Referring to the past	Le week-end dernier…	El fin de semana pasado…	Letztes Wochenende…
Referring to the future	À l’avenir…	En el futuro…	In Zukunft…
Talking about plans	J’ai l’intention de…	Tengo la intención de…	Ich habe vor…
Expressing preference	Je préfère… parce que…	Prefiero… porque…	Ich ziehe … vor, weil…
Describing a photo	Sur la photo, il y a…	En la foto hay…	Auf dem Foto gibt es…
Describing actions	On peut voir quelqu’un qui…	Se puede ver a alguien que…	Man kann jemanden sehen, der…
Speculating	Peut-être que…	Quizás…	Vielleicht…
Giving an example	Par exemple…	Por ejemplo…	Zum Beispiel…
Concluding	Pour conclure…	Para concluir…	Zusammenfassend…

What makes these chunks particularly valuable is not their grammatical sophistication but their extraordinary transferability. They can be deployed across virtually every GCSE role play, photo card and conversation task. Students who can retrieve and deploy such chunks automatically gain thinking time, extend responses more naturally and reduce the cognitive burden associated with spontaneous communication (Nation, 2013; Segalowitz, 2010).

Activities specifically designed to build fluency through repeated retrieval and increasing time pressure are especially valuable. Examples include Paul Nation’s 4/3/2 Technique, Market Place and Messengers activities (Nation & Newton, 2009), as well as fluency-building tasks developed within EPI such as Chain Reaction, Faster, Fast and Furious, Timed Pyramid Translation and the Role-Play Carousel (Conti & Smith, 2019).

The objective is not merely repetition. It is successful repetition under gradually increasing communicative pressure. This is where automaticity begins to emerge…

5. Build Speaking from Chunks Before Grammar Rules

Research consistently suggests that learners initially acquire language as formulaic sequences rather than as abstract grammatical systems (Wray, 2002; Ellis, 2012).Unfortunately, classroom practice often reverses this process: students are taught rules first and language later.

Yet how many native speakers learned the imperfect tense before they learned how to say “I used to play football”? How many toddlers mastered subordinate clause formation before producing useful chunks? The answer is obvious: language comes first. Analysis later.

A more effective approach is often to teach useful high-frequency chunks before analysing the grammatical mechanisms that underpin them.

Grammar remains enormously important, but its role is often to explain, organise and extend language that learners have already encountered and begun to internalise (Ellis, 2008).

In other words, as I have often reiterated on this blog: grammar frequently works best when it follows acquisition rather than attempting to replace it.

6. Teach Speaking as a Set of Micro-Skills

One reason speaking can be so intimidating for learners is that it is not a single skill. It is actually a remarkably complex orchestration of multiple cognitive processes occurring almost simultaneously (Levelt, 1989). To answer even a simple question, learners must:

• understand the question;
• retrieve relevant vocabulary;
• encode grammar;
• assemble the sentence;
• pronounce accurately;
• monitor output;
• maintain interaction.

When teachers simply instruct learners to “have a conversation”, weaker students are often overwhelmed because too many demands are placed upon working memory at once.

Breaking speaking down into manageable micro-skills allows teachers to provide targeted support whilst reducing complexity. For example, before a role-play students might practise:

1. Reading key sentences aloud (articulation and pronunciation)
2. Engage in oral retrieval practice in pairs (lexical retrieval)
3. Correct inaccurate sentences uttered the teacher or a partner (monitoring)
4. Engage in an oral sentence puzzle race (sentence assembly)

Each component can then be combined gradually until genuine interaction becomes possible.

7. Move from Controlled Practice to Spontaneous Communication

One of the greatest mistakes in language teaching is assuming that spontaneous communication emerges suddenly. Of course, it does not. Like virtually every complex skill, speaking develops progressively through carefully sequenced practice (Anderson, 1983; DeKeyser, 2007).

An effective progression might look like this:

Comprehensible Input → Retrieval → Guided Practice → Structured Interaction → Semi-Spontaneous Interaction → Spontaneous Communication

Notice the gradual shift…Support is not removed abruptly. It is withdrawn progressively as competence develops. This principle is particularly important in mixed-attainment classrooms, where learners require different amounts of scaffolding before they can operate independently.

Teachers who rush too quickly towards free production often discover that students have little to say. Teachers who scaffold appropriately often find that students surprise themselves with what they can say.

8. Reduce Cognitive Load

One of the greatest strengths of EPI lies in its systematic management of cognitive load. Speaking places enormous demands on working memory because learners must simultaneously generate ideas, retrieve vocabulary, encode grammar, monitor pronunciation and sustain interaction (Sweller, 1988; Skehan, 1998).

How can we expect successful communication when learners are drowning in cognitive overload?

EPI addresses this challenge through a carefully sequenced progression. Learners first engage extensively with comprehensible input, ensuring that meaning is secure. They then move into chunking aloud, through teacher modelling, choral repetition and oral sentence-building activities. Once language has become increasingly familiar, learners engage in oral retrieval practice games such as Faster, Fast and Furious, Oral Ping-Pong and retrieval races. This is followed by structured role plays, where communicative demands remain tightly controlled, before eventually progressing towards more demanding information-gap activities, where learners must exchange genuinely unknown information.

Notice what happens at every stage…The linguistic challenge remains broadly familiar whilst the communicative challenge gradually increases.

Rather than asking learners to create language from scratch, the approach progressively increases independence whilst maintaining a high probability of success (Conti & Smith, 2019).

For mixed-ability classrooms, this careful sequencing is often the difference between participation and silence.

9. Train Interaction Explicitly

Real communication involves far more than producing accurate language. Learners must learn how to maintain conversations, negotiate meaning, respond appropriately and keep interaction moving forward (Long, 1996; Gass & Mackey, 2015). Yet interaction is often assumed rather than taught. Students are expected to converse without being given the tools necessary to do so.

Interactional competence deserves the same attention as grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary.

Role-play carousels, information-gap tasks, speed-dating conversations and collaborative problem-solving activities all provide opportunities to develop these skills. Through repeated participation in structured interactions, learners gradually develop greater flexibility and responsiveness.

Communication, after all, is not merely about producing language. It is also and more importantly about managing relationships through language.

10. Create a Low-Anxiety Speaking Environment

Speaking is frequently the most anxiety-provoking aspect of language learning (MacIntyre, 1999; Dörnyei, 2009). Students know that their mistakes are immediately visible. They know that hesitation can be noticed. They know that pronunciation errors are difficult to hide. Consequently, anxiety can consume valuable cognitive resources that would otherwise be available for communication.

This is why classroom climate matters so much. Teachers can reduce anxiety by:

• normalising mistakes;
• encouraging pair work before whole-class speaking;
• celebrating effort;
• providing structured support which is gradually faded (see above)
• ensuring frequent experiences of success.
• providing pre-task planning (giving the students preparation time to brainstorm key vocabulary, predict likely mistakes, etc.)
• allowing rehearsal before performance;
• staging priming tasks (easier tasks that prepare the students for more complex tasks)
• being diagnostic and formative more than summative (i.e. giving feedback that identifies and helps solve problem rather than assigning a grade)

What This Means for Mixed-Ability Classrooms

Perhaps the greatest challenge facing language teachers today is not the examination system, curriculum time or even student motivation. Rather, it is the reality that every lesson unfolds in front of learners whose linguistic knowledge, confidence, processing capacity and prior experience may differ dramatically.

How, then, do we create conditions in which all learners can experience success? This is precisely where the principles outlined above become so powerful. They do not depend upon every learner reaching the same endpoint at the same time. Instead, they focus on processes that are accessible to virtually all students: processing input, retrieving language, recycling high-frequency chunks, building automaticity and participating in structured interaction.

The strongest students may ultimately produce more sophisticated language, deploy a wider range of structures and express more nuanced meanings. Yet weaker learners can still participate successfully because they are drawing upon exactly the same core repertoire of language. The difference lies not in the process itself but in the extent to which each learner can exploit it.

This perhaps explains why approaches such as EPI have resonated so strongly with many teachers. Their emphasis on highly comprehensible language, extensive recycling, careful sequencing and systematic management of cognitive load provides practical solutions to some of the most pressing challenges facing mixed-attainment classrooms. However, it would be a mistake to view these principles as belonging exclusively to EPI. They are equally compatible with communicative approaches, task-based learning and many other contemporary methodologies because, at their heart, they reflect fundamental truths about how languages are learned.

Ultimately, speaking does not emerge because we tell students to speak. It emerges because we have spent weeks, months and years helping them process, retrieve, recycle, automate and recombine language until it becomes sufficiently accessible for communication to occur.

And that, surely, is the real challenge facing language teachers…

Not how to make students speak more.

But how to make speaking possible in the first place!

When speaking is treated as a process rather than a performance, more learners participate, more learners succeed and, perhaps most importantly, more learners begin to see themselves as genuine users of the language rather than merely students studying it.

Why Personality Matters More Than Most Leadership Books Suggest

If you spend enough time reading leadership literature, attending leadership conferences or scrolling through educational social media, you soon encounter the very same message: effective leadership is primarily about behaviours. Develop the right habits, follow the right systems, adopt the right strategies and success will follow.

There is some truth in this, of course. However, after spending years visiting well over one hundred schools annually, both in the UK and internationally, I have become increasingly convinced that one factor receives far less attention than it deserves: personality. Temperament shapes leadership more profoundly than many of us would like to admit!

This is not because personality determines whether someone becomes an effective leader. If anything, the opposite seems true. Some of the most successful Heads of Department I have encountered could not be more different from one another! Some are warm, nurturing and relationship-driven. Others are analytical, highly structured and relentlessly focused on standards. Some are visionaries who seem permanently dissatisfied with the status quo (e.g. me). Others quietly build strong cultures through consistency, patience and attention to detail.

What interests me is that these differences are not random. As I move from school to school, talking not only to Heads of Department but also to the colleagues who work for them, I repeatedly notice the same pattern. The very qualities that make leaders successful often become the source of their greatest difficulties. The highly innovative leader can create instability. The highly organised leader can create bureaucracy. The highly supportive leader can avoid difficult conversations. The highly charismatic leader can stop listening…

I visit around 100 schools a year in my work as a consultant, and the more schools I visit, the more convinced I become that leadership is as much about understanding ourselves as it is about understanding pedagogy, curriculum or management.

The Big Five Personality model

The Big Five Personality Model is the most widely researched and scientifically supported framework for understanding human personality. Developed through the work of psychologists such as Lewis Goldberg, Paul Costa and Robert McCrae during the 1980s and 1990s, it emerged from decades of research analysing the personality traits people use to describe themselves and others Rather than placing individuals into fixed categories, the model measures personality across five dimensions: Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. Its popularity stems from its strong empirical foundation, cross-cultural validity and ability to predict important outcomes such as leadership effectiveness, job performance, wellbeing and interpersonal relationships.

Why the Big Five Has Stood the Test of Time

Whenever personality is discussed, people often think of colourful quizzes that place individuals into neat categories. Such frameworks can be entertaining, but most have relatively weak scientific foundations. The Big Five is different. Why?

Emerging from decades of research conducted across multiple countries and cultures, it is widely regarded as the most robust and empirically validated model of personality currently available (Costa & McCrae, 1992; John, Naumann & Soto, 2008). One reason it remains so influential is that it consistently predicts meaningful outcomes, including workplace performance, leadership effectiveness, job satisfaction, wellbeing and interpersonal relationships (Barrick & Mount, 1991).

What makes the framework particularly appealing is that it does not place people into boxes. You are not an “Openness person” or a “Conscientiousness person”.Instead, each of us possesses all five traits to varying degrees. Think of them as five sliders rather than five categories. Every leader displays a unique combination of these dimensions, and it is that combination that influences how they communicate, make decisions, respond to pressure, manage conflict and inspire others. For instance, as a middle manager, I was high in Openness to Experience and Extraversion, moderate in Agreeableness and Conscientiousness and low in neuroticism (although some of my colleagues may disagree on this one…).

As you read the descriptions below, you will almost certainly recognise aspects of yourself in several of them! In fact, if you only recognise yourself in one, you are probably oversimplifying your own personality or not being completely honest with yourself….

Openness to Experience: The Innovator

Openness reflects intellectual curiosity, creativity, imagination and a willingness to explore new possibilities. People who score highly on this dimension are naturally drawn to ideas, innovation and experimentation.

In leadership, this often manifests itself as a tendency to challenge assumptions and ask uncomfortable questions. Why are we doing it this way? Is there a better alternative? Are we confusing tradition with effectiveness?

Research consistently links Openness with creativity, innovation and strategic thinking (Judge et al., 2002), which is hardly surprising. Organisations improve because somebody somewhere decides that existing practice is not good enough. Most talented language learners score highly in this trait.

Looking back on my own career, I can see this trait at work repeatedly. When I first began questioning many of the dominant assumptions surrounding communicative language teaching and started advocating approaches that eventually evolved into EPI, I was frequently told that I was over complicating matters, challenging setttled wisdom or trying to fix something that was not broken. Had I been less open to alternative possibilities, I would probably have accepted those criticisms and moved on.

However, Openness comes with risks: one of the most common leadership mistakes I observe amongst highly innovative leaders is that they become addicted to novelty. They move from initiative to initiative, conference to conference, idea to idea, often leaving colleagues exhausted in their wake. Innovation is exciting. Implementation is not. Yet successful departments are built far more often through consistent implementation than through constant innovation… a statement that may not win me many friends amongst educational influencers!

For MFL leaders, Openness can be enormously beneficial because our profession is constantly evolving. New specifications, new technologies, new research findings and now AI are transforming the landscape. Leaders who remain intellectually curious are often better equipped to navigate these changes. The challenge lies in ensuring that curiosity serves improvement rather than distraction.

Conscientiousness: The Architect

If Openness generates ideas, it is Conscientiousness that turns them into reality!This dimension reflects organisation, self-discipline, reliability and persistence. In the literature, this is the personality trait most consistently associated with professional success across occupations (Roberts et al., 2009).

Highly conscientious leaders create clarity. Expectations are explicit, systems function properly and deadlines are met. Staff know what is expected of them and can generally trust that commitments will be honoured.

Whenever I think about Conscientiousness, I am reminded of the years spent developing Sentence Builders, refining resources and building The Language Gym. None of those projects emerged from flashes of inspiration alone. They required thousands of hours of repetitive, often unglamorous work. The reality is that ideas are cheap. Execution is expensive and requires many hours of work and the ability to delegate effectively – something not many individuals are keen to do.

Conscientiousness also has a darker side, though. Many conscientious leaders become victims of their own strengths. Because they value organisation and precision, they can gradually drift towards perfectionism, excessive control and bureaucratic thinking. They begin to assume that every problem can be solved through another procedure, another spreadsheet or another monitoring process.

I have occasionally encountered departments where systems became so elaborate that they seemed to consume the very energy they were supposed to save. From marking to assessment, from predicted-grades monitoring to retrieval-practice schedules.

For MFL leaders, Conscientiousness is invaluable when designing curricula, sequencing content, ensuring progression and maintaining consistency across classes. However, language learning remains a profoundly human endeavour. Not everything that matters can be measured and not everything that can be measured matters.

Extraversion: The Influencer

Extraversion refers to sociability, assertiveness and the tendency to gain energy from interaction with others. Research consistently associates Extraversion with leadership emergence (Judge et al., 2002). In simple terms, extraverts are more likely to become leaders because they are often more willing to speak up, take charge and influence others. Thst’s me through and through.

Much of my professional life now involves standing in front of audiences ranging from twenty teachers to several hundred. I enjoy those interactions enormously. I enjoy debating ideas, provoking discussion and engaging with colleagues. Yet one lesson I have learned over the years is that visibility should never be confused with wisdom.

Some of the most insightful teachers I have encountered barely speak during workshops. They listen, reflect and contribute only when they have something genuinely valuable to add. Highly extraverted leaders can sometimes fall into the trap of believing that because they communicate effectively, they are also listening effectively. Unfortunately, the two are not always correlated.

For MFL departments, Extraversion can be particularly useful because language subjects often require enthusiastic advocates. Whether promoting uptake, defending curriculum time or building departmental identity, leaders frequently need to persuade others of the value of languages.The challenge is remembering that some of the department’s most important voices may not be the loudest.

Agreeableness: The Connector

Agreeableness reflects empathy, kindness, cooperation and concern for others.Highly agreeable leaders tend to create environments characterised by trust, psychological safety and collegiality. Their staff often feel valued, supported and respected.

Given the mounting pressures facing education, it is difficult to overstate the importance of these qualities. One aspect of my career that has surprised me over the years is the sheer number of teachers who contact me seeking advice, reassurance or support. Many of these individuals are complete strangers. Whenever possible, I respond. Not because I feel obliged to, but because I remember how isolating teaching can sometimes feel, particularly early in one’s career.

However, leadership is not friendship, and this is where Agreeableness can become problematic.The leaders I have seen struggle most with difficult conversations are often highly agreeable individuals who genuinely care about their colleagues. They worry about upsetting people. They delay challenging conversations. They hope problems will resolve themselves.

Unfortunately, they rarely do. For MFL departments, Agreeableness can help create cultures in which teachers willingly share resources, collaborate and support one another. Such environments are often highly enjoyable places to work. Yet harmony and effectiveness are not synonymous. A department can be warm, supportive and collegial whilst simultaneously tolerating weak practice.

The most effective leaders somehow manage to combine kindness with accountability. This what I love about Tom Ball, my last Head of Department ever, the only one I have ever worked under, who managed to combine both consistently.

Neuroticism: The Sentinel

Of all the Big Five dimensions, Neuroticism is probably the most misunderstood.The term sounds negative, yet research suggests that moderate levels of Neuroticism can actually confer important advantages (Nettle, 2006). Individuals who score moderately highly on this dimension often notice problems earlier, prepare more thoroughly and think more carefully about risks. In other words, they worry for a reason.

Throughout my career I have occasionally found myself at the centre of heated professional debates. Whether discussing methodology, curriculum design or aspects of language acquisition research, criticism has never been in short supply. What has always struck me is how differently people respond to criticism. Some become consumed by it. Others move on remarkably quickly.

Leaders who score very highly on Neuroticism often struggle because they ruminate. They replay conversations. They imagine worst-case scenarios. They carry professional worries home and struggle to switch off.

At moderate levels, however, Neuroticism can be useful. It can prevent complacency. It can encourage preparation. It can promote vigilance. Hence, for MFL leaders, a moderate degree of concern about uptake, examination outcomes or curriculum quality is probably healthy. Complete indifference would hardly be desirable.

The key, as always, is balance, isn’t it?

The Leadership Lesson Nobody Talks About

After visiting hundreds of schools and observing countless leaders, I have become increasingly convinced that leadership failure rarely stems from a lack of strengths. More often than not, it stems from strengths taken too far. The visionary can becomes chaotic, the organiser can become bureaucratic, the communicator can becomes overpowering, the nurturer can become too permissive and, finally, the vigilant leader can become too anxious and burn out.

In other words, our greatest strengths often contain within them the seeds of our greatest leadership challenges. This is why self-awareness matters so much.

Mind you: the goal is not to become somebody else. The goal is to understand your own tendencies sufficiently well that you can compensate for them. The innovative leader needs discipline. The conscientious leader needs flexibility. The extravert needs to listen. The agreeable leader needs courage. The vigilant leader needs perspective.

Perhaps that is the most valuable lesson the Big Five has to offer. Not a set of labels or a collection of boxes to fit yourself of others in, but rather a useful framework for understanding why we lead the way we do and how we might become slightly better versions of ourselves.

After all, leadership is rarely about perfection. As I always say in my workshops, it is usually about recognising our predictable mistakes before they become costly ones.

The events

This June and July I will be delivering a ‘Teaching Lexicogrammar: from modelling to spontaneity’ workshop in London (17th June) and Manchester (1st July) focused on one of the biggest challenges in language teaching: how we help learners move from heavily scaffolded classroom performance to genuinely fluent and spontaneous communication. You can obtain the details of the workshops and information on how to enroll by contacting University of Bath Spa’s Denise Martin here: d.martin@bathspa.ac.uk.

Although the workshop is rooted in Extensive Processing Instruction (EPI), it is absolutely not “just for EPI teachers”. In fact, much of what I will discuss applies to any teacher who wants students to remember more language, speak with greater confidence, retrieve language faster and become less dependent on prompts and memorised scripts.

One important feature of the session is that participants will not simply hear about the activities theoretically. Throughout the workshop, teachers will experience many of the tasks first-hand exactly as learners would. Malay — a language unfamiliar to most participants — will be used extensively to model and practise activities so that attendees can directly experience what it actually feels like to learn, retrieve and produce unfamiliar language under varying levels of cognitive load.

The content

The session will unfold progressively, following the same input-to-output journey we ideally want our students to experience in the classroom.

We will begin with the WHY behind EPI.

• Why many learners fail to become fluent despite years of study
We will look at what actually happens cognitively when students try to speak. Using simple teacher-friendly explanations of Levelt’s speaking model, I will show why speaking overloads so many learners: they must plan ideas, retrieve vocabulary, apply grammar, organise word order, pronounce accurately and self-monitor — all at speed.

At this stage, participants will experience short interactive activities in Malay designed to simulate the cognitive demands novice learners experience when attempting spontaneous production.

• Why “communicative activities” often fail weaker learners
We will discuss why throwing students into spontaneous tasks too early frequently leads to hesitation, guessing, anxiety and fossilised errors. I will explain why fluency is not built through pressure but through carefully sequenced processing and retrieval.

Teachers will take part in interactive demonstrations showing the difference between unsupported performance and carefully scaffolded processing.

We will then move into the EARLY PHASES OF FLUENCY BUILDING.

• Building strong phonological representations through oral input
Participants will explore how carefully structured oral work strengthens pronunciation, automatisation, listening accuracy and confidence whilst reducing cognitive overload.

A range of interactive Malay-language activities will be modelled at this stage so participants can experience how repeated oral processing gradually strengthens recall and fluency.

• Making repetition purposeful and engaging
One of the major themes of the workshop will be how to recycle language intensively without lessons becoming mechanical or repetitive. We will discuss how retrieval, repetition and interaction can coexist successfully when tasks are designed around cognitive principles rather than entertainment alone.

Teachers will participate in a series of highly interactive retrieval routines in Malay in order to experience how repeated processing can remain cognitively engaging and motivating.

The workshop will then focus on TRANSITIONAL TASKS.

• How to bridge the gap between comprehension and independent production
This is arguably the area where many language lessons break down. I will show how transitional tasks reduce cognitive overload whilst gradually increasing retrieval demand and learner independence.

Participants will work through staged Malay-language activities that demonstrate how learners can be guided progressively from recognition towards increasingly independent production.

• Helping learners proceduralise language rather than merely recognise it
We will examine how carefully sequenced retrieval and reconstruction tasks help learners move vocabulary and grammar from short-term performance to longer-term automatised use.

Again, the activities will be modelled interactively so teachers can directly feel the difference between shallow familiarity and proceduralised control of language.

We will then move into STRUCTURED SPEAKING.

• How oral scaffolds and sentence builders support fluency
I will show how oral scaffolds can be designed to balance challenge and accessibility, enabling students to speak successfully whilst gradually reducing support over time.

Teachers will complete scaffolded oral tasks in Malay that illustrate how effective support can increase confidence whilst still maintaining sufficient challenge.

• Moving from controlled production to freer communication
Participants will explore how highly structured oral work can gradually evolve into semi-structured communicative interaction and eventually into spontaneous communication.

At this stage of the workshop, teachers will participate in fluency-oriented communicative activities that gradually remove support and increase spontaneity.

Finally, the workshop will culminate with FLUENCY TRAINING.

• How to engineer fluency systematically
We will explore how cumulative retrieval, oral rehearsal and carefully sequenced communicative practice can build speed, confidence and automaticity over time rather than leaving fluency development to chance.

Participants will experience a sequence of fluency-training activities in Malay specifically designed to demonstrate how automatisation emerges through repeated successful retrieval and structured communicative practice.

Throughout the workshop I will continuously connect classroom practice to cognitive science and SLA research, but always in a very practical and teacher-friendly way.

Most importantly, teachers will leave with a much clearer understanding of how fluent performance develops and how classroom routines can be engineered to support that development more effectively, regardless of whether they identify as “EPI teachers” or not.

Why you may want to attend this workshops

Because many of us sense that there is often a gap between what our students can do with support in class and what they can actually retrieve and use independently under pressure. This workshop is about understanding why that gap exists and, more importantly, what we can do about it in practical classroom terms.

Whether you fully embrace EPI, partially draw on it, or do not use it at all, the session will provide a very large number of concrete, adaptable ideas rooted in cognitive science, skill-acquisition theory and real classroom practice. Above all, the workshop aims to help teachers build classrooms where students feel more successful, more confident and more fluent — not through gimmicks or unrealistic communicative demands, but through carefully engineered sequences that make language easier to process, retain and retrieve over time.

Importantly, one of the reasons EPI has attracted increasing attention internationally is that many teachers have reported substantial gains not only in fluency and retention, but also in student confidence, motivation and continuation rates. This aligns with research suggesting that learner self-efficacy — the feeling that “I can do this” — is one of the strongest predictors of sustained engagement and uptake in languages. By making input more comprehensible, reducing cognitive overload and allowing students to experience success earlier and more frequently, EPI seeks to create the conditions under which more learners remain motivated enough to continue studying languages beyond the compulsory years.

Guest post by Annelise Gill, German teacher of 14 years at a public secondary school in Adelaide, South Australia.

Introduction by Gianfranco

In this post, a very passionate and indefatigable German teacher working in a state school in Adelaide, details her experience with EPI, spanning a few years, working with large mixed ability classes. Her EPI journey has not always been easy, but has paid massive dividends, as the data Annelise reports below clearly evidence. I want to thank her for sharing her journey here with us and for being such a strong advocate for EPI over the years.

Annelise’s Post

I first met Gianfranco in September 2022, when he presented a joint session to the German and Italian language associations in Adelaide. I had never heard of him before and took advantage of the opportunity for some fully funded PD! I walked away from those 2 days thinking that this was how all language classes need to be taught. It seemed completely logical and so simple. I was ready to throw away textbooks and old-fashioned ROTE learning then and there.

But I knew I needed more training first. So, I enrolled for his online sessions and over the next two years completed all the modules for his ‘Becoming an EPI teacher’ course. Along the way, I implemented what I was learning as I learnt it, so the classes I was teaching progressively got more and more of the EPI method. I could see that, even with only a ‘half dose’ of the methodology, it was having a huge impact. Behaviour issues reduced. Engagement increased exponentially. And slowly, but surely, grades improved – even from those distinctly unwilling to try!

Halfway through having completed the modules, I began tracking data on my classes, with the goal to seeing them through all 3 years of middle school. I compared this with results from previous year levels and the improvement was astounding. The only students who failed were the ones who didn’t turn up to class. Even the most reluctant, unwilling learners were absorbing enough during lesson to earn pass grades on the end of term summatives. I have always regularly surveyed my classes for feedback, but the answers started to change. The kids started telling me they loved German, and that increases every year. Students with learning difficulties still felt successful because the learning was done in so many different ways, they could still access it.

Images show: Year 8 and Year 9 assessment data across three years, with definitive iprovement in grade bands across consecutive years. 2023 is pre-EPI. 2024 was partial EPI. 2025 was full EPI. In IBMYP – ‘A band’ = 7-8 grade, ‘B band’ = 5-6 grade, ‘C band’ = 3-4 band.

At a practical level, this method isn’t just better for the students – it’s better for the teacher as well. It definitely took some hard work and a lot of time investment to transform our 4 year levels of curriculum over to this format. Mostly that was because, as I am at an International Baccalaureate school, the pre-made units in the Sentence Builder books did not usually align with what we were teaching, and we had to make all our own resources. But now that that work has been done, teaching German has become infinitely easier for me. My PowerPoints have an accumulated wealth of activities built into them and it’s easy to pick and choose what to do on a given day, to match your own and your class’s energy level. There’s nothing left to prepare except printing out the sentence builders and occasional worksheets – generated for me each time by the SentenceBuilders and Text Activities websites.

Differentiation is also significantly easier. This whole process is designed to meet the lowest level students where they’re at, so that EVERYONE can be successful. There is no differentiating down for anyone. You only have to differentiate up – and personally, I’ve always found that much easier! The Language Gym books and resources have been great for this – they provide ready-made extension work that supports the higher level students so they are appropriately challenged. Still with minimal extra work for me, still giving the students what they need. It’s a win-win.

My biggest brag point for having made this change is that in just about every lesson, every student has practised reading, writing, listening and speaking skills, and received instant personalised feedback on their skills. Prior to changing to EPI, there is no way I could have said this with any confidence. Speaking was the last skill we spent time on because the student attitudes were just too hard to battle. Now it’s the first – they are listening and speaking before any writing happens.

I have to confess that I do use various prizes as additional motivation for many of the games! But making it clear when we are and are not using prizes has not been a problem, and students will still participate in the ‘practice only’ activities. Every class has their own favourites. But for me, in every subunit I teach, we play Quickfire Translation, Delayed Dictation and Sentence Stealer. I also really love Trapdoor, One Pen One Dice and Running Dictation/Translations, and we do these frequently! I love that the activities aligned with MARSEARS also address the range of physical needs students have – so they aren’t just sitting still, there is movement in different ways as well.

No new method is without its implementation challenges. The first and biggest was the time investment in making the transition. This workload would have been greatly reduced by using ready-made units by Language Gym, and only doing one unit of one year level at a time. Secondly, getting my language colleagues on board with these changes was not always easy. There were many discussions and compromises where I did the vast majority of the unit transformations so they would be more inclined to ‘follow me’. Some teachers of the other languages did observations of my classes to see how they ran and most have implemented at least some aspects of EPI into their teaching and are seeing positive change. Leadership was usually verbally supportive, but this hasn’t always translated to practical support. I completed most of the training modules at my own expense, outside of school hours and in addition to my usual workload. I have also privately funded most of the resources that EPI commonly uses, such as the whiteboards, textas, dice, (prizes), Language Gym books and even the website subscriptions at times – though some resource replacements and additional copies of books were eventually funded.

Each year we add a few more activities to each unit to increase the options available. We tweak sentence builders to align with the interests of the student cohort in front of us. I endeavour to try at least two new activities each term, to keep things fresh. I am most definitely still learning things as I do this, even though I’m more than 3 years into it. But the units now run smoothly and I am able to walk into a classroom with little forethought about the teaching plan, and have a full lesson of engagement with the language.

I have had many other preservice teachers and German colleagues from other schools come to observe, and they all walk away inspired and enthused because they see how the students feel about language and how involved they are in the lessons. I have now made many presentations at various conferences and professional development days about EPI – sometimes about using the method itself and making changes to your teaching, other times just showing groups more of the games and activities. One unexpected benefit was realising how easily this method and many of these activities are transferred to other subject areas entirely, and developing a PD session for my site about this, repeating it a number of times, has proven invaluable in gaining deeper support from leadership as well as other faculties at my site, as now this isn’t just ‘a languages thing’.

You don’t have to enrol and complete any of the EPI modules in order to start making this change. I highly recommend doing the first module, ‘Becoming an EPI teacher’, and you can easily get the ball rolling with just that one behind you (watch out – you’ll get hooked and want to keep going anyway!). But you don’t even have to do that. You can start implementing the activities and using sentence builders (that you’re probably already using in some format) in a MARSEARS process just by reading the many blog posts that he, and others like me, have written. No financial outlay required.

If you’re on the fence about making the change to EPI, just jump. You will not regret it.

Annelise’s bio

Annelise Gill is a long time German and EALD teacher in public education in South Australia. Having instilled the EPI approach firmly into the German curriculum at her site she has since been working on spreading the word and making this approach even more accessible to other languages and subjects. She makes regular presentations for sites, language associations, and professional development events on various aspects of EPI. She is passionate about teaching the students we have in front of us, and firmly believes that this is a fantastic method that easily caters to all students.

Introduction

There is a persistent tendency in language teaching to explain listening failure almost exclusively in linguistic terms: students struggle because they do not know enough vocabulary, because their grammar is weak, because they have not had enough exposure, because they are not applying the “right” listening strategies, or because they supposedly lack resilience, concentration or motivation.

Often, of course, this diagnosis is correct. Vocabulary knowledge, grammatical competence and phonological familiarity remain the strongest predictors of listening success (Nation, 2013; Vandergrift & Goh, 2012), and without them there is no listening competence to speak of.

However, as I have repeatedly argued on this blog over the years, especially in my work on listening pedagogy, decoding and micro-listening, this explanation is incomplete, because listening in a second language is not merely a linguistic act. It is also a highly demanding cognitive activity which places considerable strain on working memory, attentional control, processing speed, inhibitory control and executive functioning, particularly when learners are required not only to process language accurately in real time, but to sustain that processing repeatedly over extended periods whilst simultaneously managing uncertainty, stress, partial comprehension and continual decision-making.

In other words, what listening exams frequently measure is not simply whether students know the language, but whether they can continue accessing and deploying that knowledge efficiently once cognitive fatigue begins to accumulate.

What Listening Actually Involves

I know I have repeated this ad nauseam, but let me say it once again: listening in a second language is arguably one of the most cognitively expensive things we ask novice and intermediate learners to do. Unlike reading, where learners can pause, re-read and control the pace of processing, listening unfolds in real time and disappears almost instantly, forcing the learner to process, interpret and integrate incoming information under severe temporal pressure.

The learner must:

• decode the acoustic signal,
• segment the speech stream into meaningful units,
• retrieve lexical meaning,
• interpret grammatical relationships,
• suppress competing interpretations,
• hold partial meaning in working memory,
• integrate new information with previous clauses,
• and construct a coherent mental representation of meaning,

all within fractions of seconds!

Research over the last two decades has shown repeatedly that these processes rely heavily on:

• working memory (Baddeley, 2003; Andringa et al., 2012),
• attentional control (Mackey et al., 2010),
• processing speed (Segalowitz, 2010),
• executive functioning (Miyake & Friedman, 2012),
• and automaticity (DeKeyser, 2007).

Neurolinguistic research using fMRI and EEG methodologies has further demonstrated that L2 listening recruits substantially more frontal-lobe activity than L1 listening, especially in lower-proficiency learners, because processing remains effortful rather than automatised (Abutalebi, 2008; Perani & Abutalebi, 2005). In practical terms, this means that novice listeners must consciously allocate attentional resources to processes which, in expert listeners, occur automatically and below conscious awareness.

As I have often pointed out in earlier posts, what students know certainly matters, but how efficiently they can process what they know often determines whether performance remains stable under pressure. A learner with reasonably secure vocabulary but weak decoding or slow retrieval may perform far worse than expected simply because each listening decision costs too much cognitive effort.

The Nature Listening Exams

As we all know, exam listening papers are usually composed of:

• multiple short extracts,
• repeated cycles of listening and responding,
• continual task-switching,
• and sustained cognitive engagement across thirty to forty-five minutes.

This entails:

• repeated high-load processing,
• cumulative cognitive effort,
• and fatigue accumulation over time.

Students are required to:

• listen,
• decode,
• interpret,
• infer,
• decide,
• and respond,

again and again, often with relatively little cognitive recovery time in between.

A typical exam listening paper may involve well over one hundred separate micro-decisions, each requiring rapid allocation of attentional and working-memory resources. Whilst any individual extract may appear manageable in isolation, the cumulative effect of repeated processing under pressure is far more substantial than many teachers realise.

Hence, the bottleneck is very often not the difficulty of the text itself, but rather the learner’s ability to sustain accurate processing across repeated listening events.

Cognitive Fatigue: What It Is and Why It Matters

Cognitive fatigue refers to the gradual decline in mental efficiency following sustained effortful processing (Borghini et al., 2018; Hockey, 2013). In listening contexts, this fatigue manifests itself through:

• reduced attentional control,
• slower processing speed,
• weaker error monitoring,
• diminished working-memory efficiency,
• reduced inhibitory control,
• and increasing susceptibility to distraction.

Crucially, learners do not suddenly “switch off”. Rather, because attentional resources become progressively depleted as processing demands accumulate, they gradually lose the ability to process accurately and efficiently, even though outwardly they may still appear focused and compliant.

Across the school day, this process is cumulative. A learner sitting a listening paper at 3pm is not cognitively equivalent to that same learner at 9am. Prior lessons, emotional stress, sustained concentration, social interaction, screen exposure and decision fatigue all consume cognitive resources, particularly in adolescents whose executive-control systems are still developing neurologically (Blakemore & Choudhury, 2006).

Within a listening paper itself, fatigue often evolves in a recognisable sequence:

• early phase → relatively efficient processing,
• middle phase → attentional drift and increasing effort,
• later phase → greater reliance on guessing, partial cues and heuristics.

This aligns closely with research on attentional depletion and executive control (Kahneman, 2011; Miyake & Friedman, 2012), as well as with studies showing that sustained cognitive effort progressively reduces accuracy in tasks requiring rapid auditory discrimination and working-memory updating (Warm et al., 2008).

As I have often reiterated in previous discussions of listening instruction, the issue is rarely that learners stop trying. Rather, the cognitive system itself becomes less efficient over time.

Who Is Most Likely to Be Affected?

Not all learners are equally vulnerable to cumulative listening fatigue. Those most affected are usually the learners for whom each listening event already carries a high cognitive cost.

Learner profile	Why they are vulnerable	What it looks like in class/exams
Students with poor working memory	Cannot hold enough information online long enough to integrate meaning	“I understood the beginning but lost the rest”
Slow lexical retrievers	Lexical access is too slow for real-time processing	“I knew the word — but only afterwards”
Weak phonological decoders	Cannot reliably map sounds onto known words	Confusions such as fui/fue or je vais/j’ai
Poor segmenters	Struggle to identify word boundaries	Hear an undifferentiated stream
Fragile grammar processors	Miss small but crucial grammatical cues	Tense and negation errors
Low-automaticity learners	Processing remains effortful and conscious	Rapid fatigue accumulation
Anxiety-prone learners	Anxiety consumes working-memory resources	Performance collapses after mistakes
Learners with weak attentional control	Cannot efficiently reset after failure	One error destabilises several subsequent items
Students with limited vocabulary depth	Too much input remains uncertain	Heavy reliance on guessing
Students with auditory-processing difficulties	Speech processing itself is effortful	Need excessive repetition
Fatigued or overloaded learners	Reduced cognitive reserves	Stronger late-day decline

As I have often stressed on this blog, many of these learners are not weak in any simplistic sense. Rather, because the cognitive cost of each listening event is substantially higher for them than for more automatised listeners, fatigue accumulates earlier and more aggressively.

Listening Twice (or Three Times): Help or Illusion?

Most exam boards replay listening extracts twice, whilst Pearson uses three repetitions.

On the surface, this appears entirely beneficial, and indeed there are important advantages:

• reduced immediate memory load,
• opportunities to confirm interpretations,
• greater support for lower-proficiency learners,
• improved local accuracy (Vandergrift & Goh, 2012).

However, the situation is more nuanced than it first appears.

Repeated listens do not eliminate global cognitive fatigue. In fact, they may contribute to it! Why?

Firstly, some learners reduce attentional effort during the first hearing because they know another opportunity is coming, a phenomenon linked to effort-regulation theory (Hockey, 2013). Secondly, incorrect initial interpretations can become reinforced rather than corrected, especially when learners engage in confirmation bias rather than fresh processing during subsequent listens. Moreover, whilst replay may reduce local task difficulty, it simultaneously extends the cumulative duration of high-load processing across the paper.

In other words: repetition helps locally, but it does not fully solve the broader problem of cumulative fatigue. In fact, it may exacerbate it!

Implications for Teaching

If listening performance reflects not only linguistic knowledge but also processing efficiency, cognitive stamina, decoding automaticity and attentional resilience, then classroom practice must address all of these dimensions explicitly and systematically.

As I have argued repeatedly in my CPD and writing, merely “doing more listening” is often insufficient if the underlying sub-processes remain weak, fragile and effortful.

1. Build Stronger Linguistic Foundations

Vocabulary breadth and depth remain the strongest predictors of listening success (Nation, 2013). However, vocabulary knowledge must become rapidly accessible, not merely recognisable, because listening does not allow learners the luxury of extended retrieval time. This means:

• cumulative retrieval,
• narrow recycling,
• delayed retrieval,
• frequent low-stakes reactivation,
• and rapid retrieval practice.

For example:

• “Write five verbs you can use with je vais”
• “Past, present or future?”
• “Translate rapidly: I used to eat / I ate / I am going to eat”

The goal is not simply memory, but speed and automaticity of access.

2. Develop Aural Competence Explicitly

As I have often emphasised in earlier posts, many listening failures originate not in comprehension but in perception. Learners therefore need systematic work on:

• phonological discrimination,
• segmentation,
• reduced forms,
• chunk recognition,
• syllabic awareness,
• and stress/rhythm perception.

Practical classroom examples include:

• pero/perro discrimination,
• je vais/j’ai contrast tasks,
• chunk-marking exercises,
• rapid dictation races,
• syllable grouping activities,
• shadow reading,
• and selective dictation.

Even five minutes daily can significantly reduce future cognitive load because learners gradually begin to process these forms more automatically.

3. Increase Processing Efficiency and Automaticity

Automaticity matters enormously because the less effort each micro-decision requires, the more cognitive resources remain available for comprehension and inferencing. As I have repeatedly argued on this blog, speed of processing is not an optional extra. It is central to successful listening. Useful classroom routines include:

• three-second sentence exposure,
• rapid chunk reconstruction,
• constrained listening retrieval,
• timed sentence rebuilding,
• rapid-fire tense identification,
• disappearing transcripts,
• and rapid-response mini-whiteboard routines.

For example:

1. Show a sentence for three seconds.
2. Remove it.
3. Play it aloud.
4. Students reconstruct it from memory.

Such activities force faster parsing, retrieval and integration.

4. Train Attentional Recovery

One of the biggest problems weaker listeners face is that one missed word destabilises subsequent processing, creating a cascade effect across multiple items. Students therefore need explicit practice in:

• recovering after failure,
• resetting attention,
• tolerating ambiguity,
• and continuing to process despite partial loss.

Teachers can train this by:

• deliberately inserting unknown words,
• interrupting extracts,
• masking small sections,
• or using “recover and continue” listening routines where students must keep processing despite uncertainty.

5. Reduce Cognitive Load Strategically

Research in Cognitive Load Theory (Sweller et al., 2011) strongly suggests that instructional design matters enormously.Teachers should therefore:

• pre-teach essential lexical items,
• reduce unnecessary task complexity,
• sequence input carefully,
• avoid overloading students with simultaneous demands,
• and progressively increase difficulty.

Importantly, simplifying cognitive demands does not mean “dumbing down”. It means allocating attentional resources more intelligently.

6. Build Listening Stamina Indirectly

Importantly, stamina is not built simply by making students endure increasingly long listening texts.As I have consistently argued in my work on listening pedagogy, stamina improves primarily when processing becomes less effortful.This means:

• stronger decoding,
• faster retrieval,
• better segmentation,
• more automatised grammar recognition,
• and greater attentional efficiency

In other words:students become more resistant to fatigue not because they “try harder”, but because each listening event gradually costs less cognitive effort.

The Role of Micro-Listening (MCL) Tasks

This is where micro-listening tasks — or MCL tasks, as developed extensively in my book Breaking the Sound Barrier — become particularly powerful. Those familiar with my work will now that MCL tasks consist of:

• short,
• highly interactive,
• cognitively manageable listening cycles,

usually lasting between ten and twenty seconds. Each cycle typically involves:

1. listening,
2. making a rapid judgement,
3. responding immediately,
4. receiving corrective feedback.

As I have repeatedly maintained in my writing on listening pedagogy, these short cycles are far more aligned with the actual cognitive architecture of listening than the traditional “play a long text then answer comprehension questions” approach.

Those of you who are familiar with my book ‘Breaking the sound barrier: teaching learners how to listen’ (Conti & Smith, 2019) will know that MCL tasks are not random quick listening games. Each one targets a specific listening sub-process.

Listening sub-process	What the learner is training	Example MCL task	Student response
Phoneme discrimination	Distinguishing similar sounds	pero/perro	Choose correct word
Segmentation	Identifying word boundaries	jevaisaucinéma	Mark chunk boundaries
Morphological parsing	Detecting grammatical morphology	je mange/j’ai mangé	Identify tense
Negation processing	Detecting negation cues	je n’aime pas	Positive or negative?
Person identification	Recognising subject/person markers	hablo/habla/hablan	Identify speaker
Lexical retrieval	Rapid meaning access	Hear-and-match	Give rapid meaning
Syntax parsing	Understanding grammatical relations	“Who did what?”	Assign roles
Distractor resistance	Ignoring misleading lexical cues	Keyword trap task	Reject distractor
Working-memory updating	Holding and integrating meaning	Listen-hold-select	Retain then decide
Error detection	Monitoring linguistic accuracy	Correct vs incorrect version	Identify the change
Discourse integration	Linking clauses coherently	Cause-result matching	Identify logical relationship
Attentional reset	Recovering after missed input	Interrupted listening	Continue processing

Because the tasks are:

• short,
• interactive,
• repetitive,
• feedback-rich,
• and cognitively manageable,

they reduce overload whilst simultaneously increasing engagement and attentional reset. Moreover, because processing becomes faster and more automatised over time, fatigue accumulates much more slowly.

This is one of the most important points to understand: students do not become resistant to listening fatigue because they “try harder”; they become resistant because processing gradually becomes less effortful.

Conclusion

Ultimately, listening performance reflects the interaction of:

• linguistic knowledge,
• aural competence,
• processing efficiency,
• attentional control,
• working-memory capacity,
• executive functioning,
• and cognitive stamina.

Overemphasising any one of these variables inevitably produces a distorted understanding of why learners succeed or fail.

The danger in many classrooms is that we continue to interpret listening breakdown purely as a knowledge deficit, when in reality it is often the product of cognitive overload interacting with fragile processing systems, inefficient decoding, weak attentional recovery and insufficient automaticity.

If we genuinely want students to perform better in GCSE and A-Level listening exams, then we need to move beyond the simplistic notion that more listening practice alone is the solution. What matters is not simply how much learners listen, but how efficiently, accurately and sustainably they are able to process what they hear under pressure and across time.

And that, in my view, changes the pedagogical conversation quite profoundly.

If you want to find out more on this topic, read my book ‘Breaking the sound barrier: teaching learners how to listen’ (Conti and Smith, 2019)

Selected References.

• Andringa, S., Olsthoorn, N., van Beuningen, C., Schoonen, R., & Hulstijn, J. (2012). Determinants of success in native and non-native listening comprehension: An individual differences approach. Language Learning, 62(1), 49–78. Wiley.
• Baddeley, A. (2003). Working memory and language: An overview. Journal of Communication Disorders, 36(3), 189–208. Elsevier.
• Blakemore, S.-J., & Choudhury, S. (2006). Development of the adolescent brain: Implications for executive function and social cognition. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 47(3–4), 296–312. Wiley.
• Conti, G., & Smith, S. (2019). Breaking the Sound Barrier: Teaching Language Learners How to Listen. Piefke Trading Singapore.
• DeKeyser, R. (2007). Practice in a second language: Perspectives from applied linguistics and cognitive psychology. Cambridge University Press.
• Field, J. (2008). Listening in the Language Classroom. Cambridge University Press.
• Hockey, G. R. J. (2013). The Psychology of Fatigue: Work, Effort and Control. Cambridge University Press.
• Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Penguin Books.
• Mackey, A. (2010). Input, interaction and corrective feedback in L2 learning. Oxford University Press.
• Nation, I. S. P. (2013). Learning Vocabulary in Another Language (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.
• Roussel, S., Joulia, D., Tricot, A., & Sweller, J. (2021). Learning subject content through a foreign language should not ignore human cognitive architecture: A cognitive load theory approach. Educational Psychology Review, 33, 1225–1249. Springer.
• Segalowitz, N. (2010). Cognitive Bases of Second Language Fluency. Routledge.
• Sweller, J., Ayres, P., & Kalyuga, S. (2011). Cognitive Load Theory. Springer.
• Vandergrift, L., & Goh, C. C. M. (2012). Teaching and Learning Second Language Listening: Metacognition in Action. Routledge.
• Wallace, M. P. (2020). Individual differences in second language listening: Examining the role of vocabulary knowledge, working memory, and personality. Language Teaching Research, 24(6), 707–727. SAGE Publications.