Introduction

In 28 years of teaching Modern Foreign Languages, I’ve noticed something both astonishing and depressingly predictable: misbehaviour does not explode randomly; it clusters in certain hotspots where the cognitive, social, emotional and organisational load of our subject crashes headlong into teenage psychology. When these elements align, behaviour unravels quickly. Even relatively “good” groups can become difficult in a matter of seconds, especially when there is ambiguity, downtime, or a loss of teacher presence. If I’m honest, most classroom disasters I’ve lived through didn’t come from bad content… they came from bad conditions, which is something we don’t often want to admit to ourselves because it feels like accepting a personal failure rather than recognising the structural mechanics at play in the adolescent brain.

Here are ten such hotspots and the solutions that I have devised and applied in my classrooms over the years.

1. Transitions — The Bermuda Triangle of MFL Lessons

Transitions are the pedagogical equivalent of leaving the front door open. For 20–40 seconds, the scaffolding that was holding the lesson together suddenly disappears and students enter a strange limbo where the “rules” feel suspended. They haven’t started the new task yet, and the old one is no longer active, so behaviour pours into the void. Because your attention is divided, you simply don’t have the bandwidth to micro-manage thirty teenagers simultaneously. In my observation, they smell this gap instantly… and once the domino falls, who stops the chain, especially when the task change was poorly framed and three students decide to interpret “put your boards away” as “take a tiny social holiday”?

Solutions

1. Script the transition with short, clear commands.
2. Front-load instructions before any movement happens.
3. Rehearse transitions early in the year so it becomes muscle memory.
4. Keep transitions under 30 seconds — slow transitions invite chaos.
5. Pre-position resources so nobody needs to move unnecessarily.

2. Pair Work — Mini-Social Experiments With Real Behavioural Consequences

Pair work seems innocent on paper, but in reality it exposes hierarchies, insecurities and alliances. One pupil becomes the “boss,” the other the follower; one speaks, the other disappears into the wallpaper. The loud students dominate, the timid ones vanish, the middle ones negotiate roles instead of doing the task. If I’m honest, half of what looks like “bad behaviour” in pair work is really survival behaviour — “I’d rather be quiet than wrong.” In my observation, this is the moment where the socially skillful child thrives, effortlessly controlling the conversation while the anxious or less confident one retreats, and that retreat isn’t just verbal but cognitive: they stop engaging altogether, and you’ve lost them for the next 10 minutes.

Solutions

1. Keep pairs stable to remove constant renegotiation.
2. Assign roles explicitly (speaker, listener, note-taker).
3. Use micro-tasks with strict limits so there’s no time for drama.
4. Circulate from the moment students begin to signal presence.

3. Speaking Tasks — Where Anxiety Meets Opportunity

Speaking tasks are emotional minefields. Students know their pronunciation is imperfect, their grammar uncertain, and their fluency patchy. Hence, they preemptively protect themselves from embarrassment. They become silly, adopt jokey accents, or hide behind “I don’t know” because it is safer than trying. In my experience, the “clown” is often the most terrified student in the room… they just wear a different armour. In my observation, the student who does the fake accent is not trying to be clever—he is trying to distance himself from the vulnerability of being judged, because if it’s “just a bit of fun” then nobody can accuse him of actually trying and failing, which is a fate worse than death in the teenage social economy.

Solutions

1. Start with choral repetition to diffuse spotlight anxiety.
2. Give sentence starters so students don’t start from nothing.
3. Let them rehearse in pairs first before you invite the whole class.
4. Praise approximations, not perfection, to normalise risk-taking.

4. Listening Tasks — Cognitive Overload = Behaviour Dip

Listening is brutal for many students because it combines decoding, memory, concentration, prediction and note-taking. Their brains juggle too many things at once, and the first wobble hits hard: “I didn’t get it.” The second wobble hits even harder: “Everyone else probably did.” That’s when avoidance starts — not because students are malicious, but because their nervous system is overloaded. In my experience, behaviour in listening tasks isn’t rebellion… it’s embarrassment wearing invisibility. And in my observation, it is often the quietest students who suffer the most, because they freeze internally before they ever act externally, and by the time you notice, their motivation has already slipped out of the room and is waiting by the corridor door.

Solutions

1. Pre-teach key chunks so students aren’t decoding from zero.
2. Gist first, detail second — don’t drown them in precision immediately.
3. Use micro-listening activities that isolate tiny skills.
4. Keep audio segments short so students never hit panic mode.

5. Resource Distribution — The MFL Olympics

Movement is behavioural lighter fluid. The moment pupils stand up, the room becomes a social space, not a learning space. Eyes meet; gossip restarts; objects travel; boundaries weaken. In my experience, even “well-behaved” groups fall apart during handouts — because handing out sheets isn’t just giving paper, it’s activating a dozen micro-interactions. And the worst bit? It happens quietly and slowly, so you don’t notice until it suddenly becomes noisy and you realise that you have managed to create, without intending to, a miniature bus station with zero supervision. The result is always the same: chaos that takes twice as long to fix as it took to create.

Solutions

1. Put all materials on desks before students arrive.
2. Use resource monitors, so you don’t become the distribution bottleneck.
3. Minimise the number of paper items, because loose sheets invite mischief.

6. L1 vs L2 Use — The Great Escape Route

Students use L1 not because they hate the subject, but because it’s a refuge. When comprehension falters, they flee to where identity is intact. Once they start chatting in L1, the linguistic risk evaporates — and so does your task. In my observation, a single whispered joke in the dominant language can wipe out ten minutes of careful preparation, especially if the joker is a high-status student. And if you try to fight it with brute force, you loose the room, because you’ve turned a linguistic struggle into a power struggle, and that’s a battleground you will definately regret stepping into.

Solutions

1. Use the target language strictly for routines, not for complex instructions.
2. Dual-code instructions (spoken + visual) so students truly understand.
3. Model the desired behaviours, practise them, then ask for independent performance.

7. Mini-Whiteboards — High Engagement, Higher Risk

Students love MWBs because they’re informal, reversible, playful. That same informality is also why they often get abused if you let them. Once the “boards up / boards down” protocol slips, MWBs become shields, sketchpads, punching bags, or theatre props. And the moment someone draws an eyebrow, a sword, or a meme, you’ve not just lost the task — you’ve created a performative object ! – and the entire row will now compete to produce something “better” and more amusing, because adolescence thrives on humour-as-escape. In my experience, this is the hotspot teachers always underestimate.

Solutions

1. Create simple, fixed signals (“boards up”, “boards down”).
2. Limit response time to 10 seconds so boards don’t become canvases.
3. Use MWBs for micro-tasks only
4. Keep the pace as high as possible, without excluding ‘slower’ learners

8. Group Work — Democracy at Its Noisiest

Group work reveals power structures immediatly. One pupil becomes moderator, another critic, another retreats, and someone else turns into the entertainer. Once emotional energy rises, the task becomes irrelevant. In my observation, group work isn’t collaboration unless it is tightly framed — otherwise it’s a miniature parliament with no speaker. And because each student thinks someone else is responsible, nobody feels personally accountable. The result? The task becomes theatre, and you become the reluctant observer of a social experiment no textbook warned you about.

Solutions

1. Never exceed three students per group.
2. Assign roles clearly, otherwise everything becomes “someone else’s job.”
3. Use timed challenges, which compress focus and limit drift.

9. Retrieval Tasks — The Confidence Cliff

Retrieval is a form of exposure. The confident student sees competence; the insecure student sees humiliation waiting to happen. When they don’t know the answer, the protection behaviours activate: humour, sabotage, indifference, refusal. In my experience, “I don’t care” almost never means “I don’t care”… it means “I’d rather be seen as stubborn than stupid.” And in my observation, this is strongest in mid-range ability students, because they sit between high performers they admire and lower performers they fear being compared to… a perfect storm of insecurity.
One strategy that works wonders is turning retrieval into peer-testing games: two students quizzing each other quietly, privately, score kept between them, not projected to the class — because suddenly retrieval isn’t a public performance, it’s a partnership, and students laugh together at mistakes rather than at each other; the social shield becomes collaborative rather than adversarial.

Solutions

1. Present retrieval as low-stakes so errors are normalised.
2. Use paired correction so students fail privately, not publicly.
3. Keep the format predictable, because predictability lowers anxiety.
4. Integrate peer-testing games where partners quiz each other, swap roles, and keep their own mini-scores — this reframes retrieval as cooperation, not exposure.

10. Teacher Turned Away — Goodbye, Withitness

I strongly believe that behaviour control is profoundly visual. The moment your gaze leaves the class—loading audio, fixing the projector, adjusting a cable—the social contract between you and your students evaporates! Whispering begins, objects migrate, and the illusion of adult supervision collapses. In my experience, students don’t need freedom to misbehave; they need the belief that they are unobserved. And when they feel unseen, even if only for five seconds, the fragile web of attention and authority collapses like a poorly built card tower trying to accomodate one extra card.

Solutions

1. Prepare tech in advance, before pupils enter.
2. Maintain visual scanning, even while managing devices.
3. Move physically around the room during setup.
4. Give students a clear “setup task”, so dead time disappears.

Conclusion

Behaviour in MFL is not a seperate issue from teaching; it is teaching. Our lessons contain more social, linguistic and organisational transitions than almost any other subject, which is precisely why routines must be rehearsed, transitions scripted, instructions dual-coded, and tasks predictable.
If we treat behaviour as “something that happens to us,” we are forever reacting; if we treat it as something that is engineered, anticipated, designed for, we stop firefighting and start teaching.

Because what’s the alternative???
More chaos, more interruptions, more students performing avoidance, and more teachers quietly asking themselves why their meticulously prepared linguistic activities keep crumbling mid-lesson.

When we plan behaviour as deliberately as we plan input, practice and output, everything changes: the room calms, cognitive load drops, and—almost inevitably—students start learning.