Before anything else, a quick clarification.

This is Part 1, and its purpose is diagnosis rather than prescription. Part 2 will focus explicitly on classroom implications — what all this actually means for lesson design, routines and daily practice. Without that second step, this would simply be another complaint… and in my experience, teachers have heard plenty of those already.

Now, let’s address the elephant in the room.

In my experience, yes, a good chunk of students are lazy, disengaged and poorly motivated… and pretending otherwise helps no one. Some don’t revise. Some don’t practise. Some are content doing the bare minimum.

However laziness alone does not explain the scale and predictability of speaking failure. If it did, outcomes would be far more random. They aren’t. Speaking failure follows patterns, and it affects even motivated, conscientious students — the ones who listen, revise and genuinely try.

And that should make us pause… shouldn’t it?

As we say in Italy, la realtà è più testarda delle opinioni — reality is more stubborn than opinion.

So yes, demotivation exists. But in my opinion, the system itself still sets up far too many willing students to fail at speaking. That is the uncomfortable truth this first part sets out to unpack.

Why this post?

The second most important reasons for dropping languages in Year 9 (13 years of age for the non-UK readers) given by language learners to the Guardian in a survey the newspaper carried out ten years ago was that they didn’t feel confident speaking. It seems obvious then that, as teachers we need to make the enhancement of student self-efficacy (the feeling that they can do languages) as speakers one of our top priorities.

This requires, of course, the effective creation and implementation of instructional sequences in which highly comprehensible aural input is gradually converted into oral output through engaging activities, adequate scaffolding and, of course, tons of communicative practice.

Unfortunately, whilst many teachers do prioritize listening to comprehensible input and producing feasible output their top priorities, many more don’t…

16 reasons why students fail at speaking

Let us now explore the key reasons why so many students fail at speaking in secondary school settings. Once identified these, any program aimed at enhancing speaking will have to deliberately tackle each issue head on.

1. We often fail to develop the willingness to participate

This is the bit we don’t like admitting, largely because it forces us to look in the mirror not just as individual teachers but as departments and systems with habits that have quietly shaped student behaviour over time.

Research – e.g. MacIntyre, Clément, Dörnyei & Noels (1998) MacIntyre (2007) Dörnyei (2005, 2009) – shows that students don’t refuse to speak because they “can’t”, but because they won’t… and that reluctance, which is often labelled as attitude or apathy, is in fact learned through repeated classroom experiences where speaking has felt exposed, risky and socially costly.

If speaking is consistently associated with being put on the spot, with awkward pairings, with forced role-plays, with correction delivered at exactly the wrong moment — often with the best of intentions — then opting out becomes a rational act of self-protection.

Before we even talk about skills, we need to ask: have we made speaking emotionally doable? Have students experienced enough low-stakes success to feel that speaking is survivable… even routine

2. Students are asked to speak before they have enough language

In many classrooms, speaking is treated as something you “just do”, almost like a warm-up, despite the fact that it is one of the most cognitively demanding things we ever ask learners to do.

Students are asked to talk, role-play, improvise… before they have anything solid to draw on. And then we wonder why they freeze?

In my opinion, this is one of the most damaging practices, because it confuses exposure with readiness and activity with competence. Speaking is not practice — it is performance. You cannot retrieve what has not been stored. Or, as we say in Italy, non si può cavare sangue da una rapa.

3. They lack automatised sentence patterns

Students often “know” the language… but knowing is not the same as being able to use it under pressure, particularly when every sentence still has to be consciously assembled, monitored and corrected mid-flight.

There is only a very limited amount of items human working memory can juggle simultaneously as they speak and many students fail to produce fluent utterances because they are still assembling sentences word by word, like flat-pack furniture, while the clock ticks and the cognitive load rises.

Speaking does not allow time for that. Without automatised sentence patterns, everything feels effortful… and effort under pressure quickly becomes overload.

4. Vocabulary knowledge is shallow

This one is everywhere, and it often hides behind apparently decent test scores. Students recognise words on a page. They may even translate them accurately. But ask them to say those words, in a sentence, in real time — without preparation, without scaffolding — and suddenly nothing comes.

Why? Because much vocabulary knowledge remains receptive, not productive, and receptive familiarity creates an illusion of mastery that collapses the moment oral retrieval is required. Speaking exposes this gap brutally — and students feel it immediately.

5. Grammar exists as (declarative) knowledge, not as skill

I am sure you have all noticed this many times over: students can often explain a rule or complete an exercise successfully, yet fail to use that same structure when speaking, which can be deeply frustrating for both learner and teacher.

Grammar lives in their heads as something they know, not something they can do, and the transition from knowing to doing requires repeated procedural practice that is often under-engineered. Speaking requires fast, unconscious access. If grammar remains slow and explicit, it collapses under pressure. Again — perversus!

6. Cognitive load is simply too high

Speaking demands too much at once: vocabulary recall, sentence building, pronunciation, listening, anxiety management… all in real time, with no pause button.

If even one element is not automatised, the whole system buckles, often suddenly and dramatically.

This is why students “go blank”. Not because they are weak. In my opinion, it’s because their working memory is overwhelmed. Who wouldn’t struggle…?

7.Listening has been quietly underdeveloped — and this matters more than we think

Here’s an uncomfortable truth: many speaking problems are actually listening problems in disguise, even if they don’t present themselves that way.

If students cannot hear word boundaries clearly, or recognise familiar chunks at speed, how can they recycle them in speech? They can’t. But more importantly, listening is the primary model for speaking.

In my experience, high-quality listening provides language that is repeatable in the learner’s head — phrases they can rehearse mentally, rhythms they can internalise, and chunks that become familiar enough to surface later. When listening is frequent, rich and well designed, it floods the learner’s mind with target language, creating the raw material from which speaking eventually emerges.

When listening is reduced to “answer the questions and move on”, that modelling function is lost… and speaking later suffers accordingly.

8. Pronunciation, input engagement and the quality of listening

This is where pronunciation, listening and speaking collide — and where things often quietly unravel.

In my experience, listening only supports speaking when learners are actively engaged with how language sounds, not just with what it means, because emphatic pronunciation, clear stress and exaggerated intonation increase input engagement and help stabilise phonological representations. This kind of listening is replayable in the learner’s mind — students can “hear” the phrase again later, silently, because the sound-shape is strong.

Without this, pronunciation remains unstable, retrieval remains slow, and speaking feels risky. Poor pronunciation, then, is not merely an output issue — it is the delayed consequence of impoverished input.

9. Oral encoding of vocabulary and why transcripts matter

This links directly to how vocabulary is learned.

In many classrooms, vocabulary is still acquired largely through silent worksheet work, which means words are encoded visually but not orally, so students can recognise them instantly on the page yet struggle to retrieve them in speech. Yet vocabulary learning is faster and more durable when it happens aurally/orally and via interaction.

In my experience, listening done well, supported by the transcript, transforms this process: students hear the word, see it, rehearse it mentally, notice its pronunciation, and revisit it repeatedly in connected input. The transcript anchors sound to form, while repeated listening strengthens the phonological trace, making vocabulary genuinely speakable rather than merely recognisable.

10.Too little retrieval, too late

Speaking is a retrieval skill. Yet, in my experience, students do very little oral retrieval in low-stakes conditions. Then suddenly it’s the exam. High stakes. No safety net. In EPI we use oral retrieval practice through peer testing (e.g. Oral Ping-pong) as a pre-speaking activity for this reason.

What could possibly go wrong…?

11. Fear of making mistakes

This is not a personality issue. It is a classroom culture issue.

If mistakes are public, highlighted, or framed as failure, students quickly learn to play safe. They simplify. They limit themselves. They say less and less.

Fluency cannot survive in a culture of fear. Full stop.

12. Feedback that creates doubt, not confidence

Students are often told what went wrong, but not what went right, which leaves them unsure of what to trust in their own output.

Which sentences worked? Which patterns are safe? Which chunks can be reused confidently?

Without that clarity, students don’t build control — they build hesitation.

13. Speaking taught as an activity, not a skill

Pair work, role-plays, conversations… they look busy.

But activity does not equal development, and without modelling, rehearsal and recycling, speaking activities remain just that — activities. No durable skill emerges.

14. Exam speaking is a genre — and we rarely teach it as one

We tell students to “be natural”… yet the exam is anything but.

It is predictable, constrained and assessable. If we don’t teach it as a genre, students are left guessing. And guessing under pressure rarely ends well!

15. Fragile self-efficacy

After repeated negative experiences, students internalise a simple belief: I’m bad at speaking.

Once that belief takes hold, anxiety rises, working memory shrinks, and performance drops further… a vicious circle we see year after year.

16. Too much talking, too little fluency training

Ironically, there is often plenty of “speaking” in lessons — but very little deliberate fluency training.

Fluency does not emerge from random talk. It emerges from repetition, recycling and carefully controlled practice. Without that, progress is slow… if it happens at all.

A final sting in the tail: socio-cognitive load

One final layer we underestimate, in my experience, is socio-cognitive load.

Speaking drains cognitive resources not just linguistically, but socially: How do I sound? Who’s listening? Will I be corrected? Will someone laugh? All of this competes with language retrieval in real time.

So the load isn’t just linguistic. It’s social. Emotional. Relational. Exhausting.

Which is why the student who can write a decent answer may barely utter a sentence aloud… not because they don’t know it, but because the social cost feels too high.

And if we ignore that, we’ll keep designing speaking tasks that look great on paper… but fall flat in real classrooms, with real teenagers, on a rainy Tuesday afternoon…!

The uncomfortable conclusion

Some students are lazy and disengaged — absolutely, but in my opinion, far too many fail at speaking because they are expected to perform fluently with language that has never been made fluent… and then we act surprised!

At this point, it’s worth saying this explicitly: teachers working within EPI-informed approaches will already recognise the solutions to most of the issues outlined above, because those frameworks are designed precisely to address automatisation, oral encoding, input engagement and cognitive load. For colleagues working in more traditional, speaking- and listening-light pedagogical frameworks — often textbook-led or grammar-heavy — the solutions may be far less obvious, and it is those solutions that I will unpack carefully in the sequel.

If that sounds familiar, perhaps the issue isn’t the students after all…?

Part 2 will deal with what all this means for the classroom — and what to do instead.

Introduction

Vocabulary teaching is at the heart of every language classroom, yet most schools still teach words as items to memorise rather than meanings carried through communication. In 2023, Stuart Webb published a rigorous meta-analysis that, in my opinion, deserves every language teacher’s attention as it provides strong evidence that vocabulary is acquired most effectively through meaningful exposure – not memorised word lists or single-word drills. And the implications for modern language teaching are profound!

What Is Incidental Vocabulary Learning?

Incidental vocabulary learning refers to acquiring new words as a by-product of understanding messages. Learners are not studying words directly; instead, they encounter them naturally while reading, listening, watching, or having conversations. In this process:

Words are not learned as labels (e.g. dog = perro = chien).
Words are learned as components of meaning (e.g. je promène mon chien, sacar al perro, I walk my dog).

In other words, vocabulary grows not because students memorise lists, but because they track meaning in context repeatedly over time thereby reinforcing each lexical-item memory trace in long-term memory, building new associations with other lexis and contexts and deepening word knowledge. The learner’s brain forms a memory link between:

• sound
• written form
• position in a phrase
• real meaning in context
• emotional/cultural associations

Incidental learning builds usable language instead of mere translatable labels.

What Webb (2023) Found: The Evidence

Webb’s (2023) meta-analysis examined a large collection of studies looking at vocabulary learning through reading, listening, dual reading–listening, and viewing (e.g. video with captions). Here are the core findings, which in my view, every teacher should be aware of:

1) Incidental learning is real, measurable, and substantial

Learners gain vocabulary automatically through meaningful input—provided they encounter words repeatedly.

2) Listening + reading together beats listening or reading alone

The strongest learning happens when input is dual-modality: e.g. reading along with audio

3) Viewing + captions supports the best recognition gains

Captions help learners match sounds and forms, especially for high-frequency vocabulary.

4) Repetition of the same vocabulary matters more than text difficulty

Learners need many encounters with words. Repeating texts is more valuable than simplifying content

5) Incidental learning is strengthened by post-input tasks

Explicit follow-up boosts retention dramatically (e.g. dictation, retellings, shadowing).

Implications for the Language Classroom

What teachers should avoid

Webb’s findings undermine several common practices:

Traditional Practice	Why It Fails
Single-word lists	No meaning, no memory trace
“One text per week, new topic each time”	Not enough repeated encounters
Teaching listening without transcripts	Cannot see word forms → no retention
Simplifying texts to avoid “difficult words”	Eliminates repetition of valuable language

Vocabulary does not grow through exposure to many different texts.
Vocabulary grows through recycling meaningful language in a few carefully chosen texts.

What Teachers Should Do Instead

Principle from Webb	Classroom Response
Dual-modality input works best	Always pair listening + text (transcript, subtitles)
Repetition builds memory	Use the same resource 3–5 times with varied tasks
Input + follow-up = optimal	Always do a deep-processing task after listening/reading
Captions support mapping	Use subtitles intentionally, not casually
Tasks should focus on meaning	Don’t ask students to hunt for words, but for ideas

Practical Classroom Tasks Aligned with Webb (2023)

Below are tried and tested research-driven activities that turn incidental exposure into lasting acquisition.1) Shadow-Read

Students read and speak along with the audio of a text (story, dialogue).

Why it works: Links sound + meaning + printed form, strengthening long-term memory.

2) Micro-Retell with Constraints

Students retell a short text using only key phrases (e.g. je voudrais…, me gusta…, era muy…).

Why it works: Forces retrieval of chunks with meaning, not isolated words.

3) Partial Dictogloss

Students listen and reconstruct parts of the text using memory + collaboration.

Why it works: Builds deep processing + syntactic awareness without grammar lectures.

4) Captioned Video + Chunk Hunt

Learners watch a clip twice, first for meaning, then highlight repeated phrases.

Why it works: Focuses on high-frequency building blocks, not single words.

5) Repeated Text Cycle

Use the same text across 3–4 lessons with different activities:

Day	Activity
1	Predict → Listen + Read for gist
2	Shadow-Read + Chunk Identification
3	Dictogloss + Micro-Retell
4	Fluency Role-Play using the chunks

Why it works: Provides multiple encounters, transforming incidental learning into stable, usable vocabulary.

How Webb’s research Supports the EPI Approach

Webb’s conclusions sit squarely behind the EPI methodology. Extensive Processing Instruction insists that students need deep recycling of comprehensible input, not single-exposure topic teaching. Webb shows that vocabulary only sticks when:

• it is encountered many times in meaningful input
• listening + reading occur together
• follow-up tasks reprocess chunks, not words
• repetition happens across lessons, not within a single session

This is exactly the design principle behind sentence builders, narrow listening, narrow reading, and multimodal phonology work in EPI. The model does not “teach vocabulary”; it engineers repeated encounters with communicative chunks. EPI, therefore, is not simply a teaching style: it is a curriculum response to what Webb’s data demonstrate. It prioritises recycling, retrieval, multimodal exposure, and deep processing, which are the precise conditions Webb identifies as drivers of durable vocabulary acquisition.

Conclusion: From Word Lists to Meaning-Driven Input

Webb’s (2023) research proves that vocabulary thrives when language is encountered repeatedly in meaningful contexts, not memorised as isolated items. The future of MFL teaching is not in bigger word lists, but in smarter recycling, deeper processing, and multimodal exposure.

Don’t teach words. Teach experiences containing words.

Introduction: Confessions of a very Imperfect Head of Department

Before I go any further, let me say this very very clearly: I have made several of the mistakes I am going to write about. Not in theory, not in a textbook sense, but in my very own department, with my own colleagues, with real children sitting in real classrooms!

When I first became a HoD nobody sat me down and said: “Here’s how you lead people while also protecting a fragile subject that…half of school already thinks is optional.” Like many of you, I was promoted because I was “good at teaching languages”, which, as I always reiterate on this blog, is not remotely the same thing as being trained to be a middle manager. Nobody showed me how to handle that colleague who quietly undermined everything I said or did in corridor chats, or how to stand up to senior leadership when their latest data “initiative” quadrupled everyone’s workload overnight!

So I did what a lot of us do: I improvised. Copied what I’d seen other HoDs do. I fired off late-night emails. I avoided potentially challenging conversations. I designed curriculum as though everyone on team had my experience, my fluency, my personal obsessions with chunks, listening-for-learning communicative language teaching and fluency. And yes, when I now visit language departments all over globe, I see so many of same patterns played out again and again, often by really good, really well-intentioned people who are often times just trying to keep their heads above water.

In this post, I want to walk through 17 of most common mistakes I see MFL Heads of Department make and unpack what they look like in real life. You may recognise yourself in some of these; I certainly do! Nobody’s perfect, and no language teacher is truly trained sufficiently to become a middle manager on day one.

If you find yourself wincing at a few of these, you’re in good company. I still wince when I look back at some of my early emails.

Let’s dive in.

1. Avoiding difficult conversations

This is, as I always reiterate on this blog, one of things I witness most when I visit languages departments all over globe. And, to be absolutely honest, it was one of my worst habits as a new HoD.

I remember a colleague who never used target language beyond the first five minutes of lesson. I knew it. They knew it. Students definitely knew it. I watched from back of classroom… worksheets full of isolated word lists, random bits of vocabulary that didn’t quite link to anything else, and I walked away thinking, “I’ll bring it up next time, when they’re less stressed…”.

Guess what? Next time…never came.

When we avoid these conversations — about weak practice, poor TL use, unprofessional habits, that colleague who “forgets” to set homework week after week — those behaviours don’t just continue, they slowly become culture. In MFL, that often means every student is essentially studying a slightly different subject depending on who their teacher is, with wildly different expectations for TL use, for speaking, for writing, for basic accuracy.

2. Acting like a ‘mini-SLT’ instead of a subject leader

Another mistake which is commonly made – especially by the more ambitious amongst us – is to imitate senior leadership rather than to lead the subject. In my case, at the early stages in my career, it felt, at times, like “proper leadership” meant repeating whole-school messages, tightening compliance, checking everybody’s exercise books three times a term, and sending out yet another “reminder” that mocks looked “non negotiable”.

When a HoD spends more energy enforcing whole-school rules than deepening subject pedagogy, you slowly end up with a polite, obedient team that has stopped thinking. You get staff who know exactly what colour pen to mark in, but can’t articulate why a particular sequence of TL input is more effective than another. Policy starts to matter more than language learning, and department drifts into bureaucratic rule-following instead of linguistic growth.

I knew I’d tipped over into “mini-SLT” when one colleague joked, “You sound just like deputy head.” It was meant as a compliment. It made me feel slightly sick.

3. Poor soft skills in communication (especially tone, volume, and timing of emails)

Sadly, this is an area where even very kind, very caring leaders do huge damage without realising it. I still remember one Sunday night, exhausted, sitting with my laptop open at 10:43 pm, typing an email that began, “Final reminder:” in subject line. I hit send. On Monday morning, a colleague walked in looking like they’d been hit by a truck and said, “I saw your email and thought I’d forgotten something massive.” I hadn’t meant to create anxiety; I was just trying to “get things done”. That’s the last time I have ever sent such e-mail. But sadly, many of my own HoDs or HoFs did subsequently send them to me or other colleagues in the years that followed.

Sharp messages, late-night urgency, or a constant stream of micro-instructions erode morale far more than we admit. This can look like:

• Cold, transactional phrasing: “Final reminder. Data due tomorrow.”
• Late-night or weekend emails with implied urgency — sent when we are finally catching up, of course, but landing in someone else’s only quiet moment.
• Instructions with no greeting, no context, no appreciation, just a list.
• Using ALL CAPS or aggressive formatting to show frustration.
• Firing off three follow-up emails instead of just walking down corridor for a five-minute chat.

Over time, staff begin to dread inbox more than they dread 9Y on a Friday. That’s not a great sign.

4.Confusing ‘being busy’ with being strategic

Once upon a time, in the very early stages of my career, the department I was working in was drowning in trackers , sheets, meetings, and colour-coded spreadsheets. Everyone looked extremely productive. Yet, if you’d asked a simple question like, “Are year 8s actually understanding basic word order?” the room would have gone quiet.

In our subjects it is frighteningly easy to lose hours to vocabulary graphs, elaborate marking rubrics, TL target documents, assessment matrices, “distance from grade” trackers, and all sorts of beautifully formatted artefacts that, when you look honestly, make absolutely no measurable difference to listening, speaking, or long-term retention.

I once created a very sophisticated assessment overview with twelve different data points per student. We spent days on it. At end of term, I realised: it hadn’t changed my teaching with even one single class!

Being busy is not same as moving curriculum forwards.

5.Over-focus on exam results at expense of curriculum and learning

I understand exactly how and why this trap happens, because I have fallen into it more than once — especially after a bad results year, especially in the listening skill. Pressure comes down from above, governors want explanations, SLT wants action plans, and suddenly everything narrows to that spreadsheet in August.

When results dominate, learning sadly becomes a short cut. Soul killing! In our subject, that’s when you start seeing:

• Grammar cramming in year 11 without proper conceptual understanding behind it.
• Memorised paragraphs that students cannot adapt or understand, but can faithfully reproduce under timed conditions.
• Rehearsed speaking answers that sound fluent until you ask one unscripted follow-up question.
• Exam “hacks” that game reading papers instead of building genuine reading skills in language.

I remember a bright student who got a very high grade after months of intense rehearsal. A year later, I bumped into them and they said, “I can’t really say anything in language now, I’ve forgotten it all.” The grade remained. Language did not.

6. Micromanaging planning and resources

At one point, one of my HoDs was so desperate for consistency that they tried to control everything: lesson formats, fonts on slides, order of activities, even suggested jokes. It looked incredibly neat. It was also slightly dead. Over-controlling how lessons must look kills ownership, creativity, and sense that teacher is a professional making live decisions with real learners in front of them. In languages, this often takes form of:

• Rigid scripts that nobody dares deviate from, even when class clearly needs something else.
• Compulsory task types every lesson (“there must be a retrieval quiz, then a drilling task, then a listening…”).
• Strict formatting rules for resources that turn planning into an exercise in graphic design rather than pedagogy.

Result? Lifeless delivery instead of meaningful interaction in TL. Students learn how to survive structure, but not necessarily how to communicate. This often happens in Depts which buy in my approach and apply it in a very rigid and prescriptive way, failing to grasp that EPI proposes a pedagogical evidence-based framework (MARSEARS) which is about scaffolding not stifling learning. Teacher creativity is encouraged every step of the way. What is prescriptive is the imperative to scaffold intelligently from modelling to spontaneity, to allow for masses of exposure to high quality input through effective and engaging activities and to allow for tons of retrieval practice.

7. Making decisions without involving staff

This one is painfully common, and I say that as someone who has absolutely been guilty of it in my more “efficient” phases. You’re under time pressure, SLT wants a new KS3 curriculum, exams are changing, you’ve got three meetings this week, so you think, “I’ll just sort it myself and present it neatly.”

Top-down decisions produce compliance, not commitment. In MFL, this often looks like:

• New sentence builders landing in inbox with no discussion of why structures were chosen.
• Marking symbols changed overnight.
• Homework routines transformed because “SLT wants more independence”.
• KS3–KS4 transition redesigned without asking those teaching most of KS3.

I once introduced new assessment system that I was extremely proud of. It was elegant. It was logical. It was also utterly disconnected from daily reality of two part-time colleagues juggling four year groups each. They did what I asked, but they never owned it — and it quietly withered after a year.

8. Giving feedback without classroom or subject context

I’ve sat in line management meetings where someone said to a languages teacher, “You need to use more TL” and then moved on to next agenda item as if they’d just given life-changing development. I’ve probably done a version of this myself, earlier on.

Generic advice is cheap; contextualised modelling is hard. Vague phrases like:

• “Use more target language.”
• “Improve pronunciation work.”
• “Challenge more able learners more.”

mean almost nothing unless they are grounded in subject-specific routines, co-teaching, or at very least concrete examples.

The few times I actually went into classroom with colleague, modelled a high-TL routine, then sat down afterwards and said, “Did you notice how I…?” were honestly far more powerful than all those airy bullet points on performance management documents.

9. Ignoring workload impact when introducing change

Often, in my experience, this isn’t malice. It’s just that leaders (again, I include my past self here) are living in a slightly different reality from classroom-heavy colleagues. You have one fewer class, maybe, or more PPA, or simply the illusion that an extra 15 minutes here and there isn’t a big deal.

Burnout, however, is rarely caused by teaching alone! It is usually created by poorly costed initiatives. In MFL, this might mean:

• New vocab sequencing that doubles prep time for every unit.
• Assessment cycles that require marking every single written task in excruciating detail.
• Phonics routines added “on top” of everything else, rather than built into what already exists.
• KS3–KS4 transitions redesigned with beautiful intent, but no training or time allocation.

I remember introducing a new homework system which, on paper, looked wonderfully consistent and rigorous. In practice, it meant my NQT was spending Sunday evenings creating and uploading materials instead of sleeping. Improvement had turned into punishment.

10. Substituting policy for culture

There was a year when our department handbook could have doubled as a doorstop. It had everything: TL expectations, marking codes, assessment calendars, behaviour protocols. It was, in many ways, an impressive document.

And yet, if you’d walked into some classrooms, you wouldn’t have seen half of it happening.

Paperwork doesn’t create habits; people do. In languages, we often write policies that look very rigorous — TL use percentages, minimum marking frequencies, beautifully spaced assessment points — but if we haven’t invested in modelling, habits, and supportive culture, they stay on paper.

I still remember a new colleague saying, “I tried to do everything in handbook for a week and I thought I was going to die.” That was a sobering moment.

11. Allowing toxicity to build within the team

This one is uncomfortable, but it is crucial A department can look perfectly functional on timetables and spreadsheets yet be slowly poisoning itself from the inside. Toxicity often hides behind linguistic identities or personal histories: the “native speaker” vs “non-native speaker” divide, the grammar purist vs communicative enthusiast, the EPI vs traditional teaching supporter, the “I did year abroad” vs “I learned later” status game. Warning signs include:

• Whisper networks and cliques forming around language choices or teaching styles
• Sarcasm, eye-rolling, private mockery of colleagues who struggle or dare to try something new
• Passive-aggressive behaviour, like quietly withholding resources or only sharing them with favourite people or not replying to emails
• Public compliance but private resistance — running down agreed routines in corridor chats
• Favouritism, where more fluent or more charismatic teachers seem exempt from accountability

I once convinced myself that a particularly sharp-tongued colleague was “just being honest”. It took me far too long to realise their constant negativity was making newer staff think they were failing every day.

12. Designing curriculum around strongest teacher (or themselves)

This is a very easy trap when you are , yourself, flamboyant, very fluent or confident in language and command great classroom discipline. You build schemes that you would love to teach, with dense texts, subtle grammatical twists, and organic TL improvisation — and then you hand them to a non-specialist, or a new colleague, and quietly wonder why it isn’t working.

A curriculum that relies on expert improvisation is a curriculum that will collapse in real classrooms. In our subject, this often looks like:

• Sequences that only make sense if you are comfortable going off-script in TL.
• Grammar explanations that assume encyclopaedic knowledge of exceptions.
• Listening tasks that “work” because you ad-lib half of instructions.

I remember sitting in on a cover lesson where a non-specialist was trying to deliver one of my brilliantly “rich” lessons. It was painful. They weren’t bad; my curriculum was simply not built for reality of most teachers.

13,Creating double standards

Nothing destroys credibility faster than inconsistency. I wish I had grasped that earlier in my career.

In many Languages departments, some teachers quietly get away with:

• Very little TL use.
• Bare minimum (or less) marking.
• Missing deadlines again and again.

while others — often those who are conscientious, reflective, and possibly younger in career — are held tightly to every rule. It is human. Every leader has their favourites and cheerleaders on the team. But this is possibly the one of the most harmful behaviours I have witnessed in my career.

I remember one colleague saying to a HoD of mine, “It’s fine, I know [X] will never be challenged, so why am I knocking myself out?”. The HoD later came to see me asking if that was the generally feeling amongst the team. I said I wasn’t sure. She then said that hearing that complain from my colleague had felt like a punch in the stomach but didn’t do anything about it. That colleagues who had complained left at the end of that year.

14. Confusing kindness with rescue

This one often comes from a genuinely good place. You see someone struggling, you’re worried about students and want to be protective. So you step in. That might mean:

• Planning lessons for weaker teachers “just this once” — which turns into half a term.
• Creating assessments on their behalf, every time.
• Handling parents’ emails for them because “it’ll be quicker if I do it.”

I have absolutely done this many times over, and initially it felt virtuous, almost heroic. Over time, I realised I was creating dependency. Those colleagues never quite developed muscle to handle things themselves, and I became silently resentful while telling everyone I was “just being supportive”. There is no harm co-planning and co-teaching lessons, but as happens with everything, you must act like a scaffold which gradually build self-efficacy and competency until it is finally removed.

True kindness is helping someone grow, not doing their professional work for them.

15. Rewarding compliance over professional thinking

If we’re honest, many systems in schools make it easier to reward the person who always nods and says yes rather than the person who thoughtfully challenges what is potentially a flawed idea – especially when it refers to a schoolwide initiative which does not apply to language learning. In the short term, compliant people make your life easier. In the long term, they can stall progress. As you might expect, I have often be that teacher who challenged such flawed initiatives.

This often results in:

• Sidelining the colleague who questions exam-obsessed, short-term fixes.
• Ignoring the teacher who points out that a certain marking policy is all cost, no impact.
• Praising those who uncritically follow ineffective routines because they are “so reliable”.

I can think of at least one colleague whose awkward questions annoyed me at time but, looking back, were absolutely spot on. I didn’t so much shut them down as fail to properly listen. That was my loss, and department’s.

16.Driving improvement without modelling or co-teaching

Expectations without demonstration are, frankly, wishful thinking. Yet we do this all the time.

In languages, it often sounds like:

• “We need much more TL use across department.”
• “Everyone must embed phonics more explicitly.”
• “We want to see more spontaneous speaking.”

all announced in meetings, perhaps with a handout, and then… nothing. No modelling, no co-teaching, no “come and see this in my lesson next Tuesday”.

The most powerful shifts I’ve seen were when a HoD said, “Come and sit in my room for 20 minutes; watch how I handle this,” or even better, “Let’s teach this bit together.” I didn’t do that nearly enough in first years; I relied far too much on bullet points.

17. Forgetting their emotional impact on teachers and subject uptake

This last one is both the most subtle and, in some ways, the most important. Leadership is not just a set of actions; it’s an emotional climate.

A HoD can often

• Make a nervous newly qualified teacher feel like languages is the most exciting subject in the building.
• Make a whole school fall back in love with idea of learning another language.
• Or, sadly, make an entire year group decide that languages are joyless, high-stress, and best avoided at options time.

I remember speaking to a student who said, “Languages just feels like something teachers are stressed about all the time.” That sentence has stayed with me. It wasn’t about curriculum or assessment; it was about emotional temperature we had created.

Our reactions to mistakes, our tone in meetings, the way we talk about exams, how we respond to SLT pressure — all of that seeps into staff, then into classrooms, then into students’ long-term relationship with language.

Conclusion: MFL Leadership Is a Human Curriculum

A language department doesn’t thrive because it has perfect progression-tracking documents or beautifully aligned schemes of work. They are useful, don’t get me wrong, but if that were true, some of the most impressively documented departments I’ve seen would also be the happiest, and they often are not. It thrives when teachers feel trusted, supported, challenged, and genuinely part of a shared linguistic culture rather than isolated technicians delivering pre-packaged lessons. When leaders invest in people, they quietly protect curriculum. When leaders model habits, those habits become normal. When leaders grow trust, subject grows with it.

Effective MFL leadership is not about control — it’s about culture. It is not about emails — but relationships. It is not about short-term grades — but long-term linguistic growth and confidence.

And if, as you’ve read this, you’ve realised you are making some of these mistakes right now, you are not alone. Every leader slips into at least a few of them when they are tired or under pressure. The point is not to be perfect; the point is to notice, to adjust, and to remember that, ultimately, we are not just curating schemes of work. After all, we are curating human beings’ experience of language — staff and students — and that is, in every sense, a human curriculum.