Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Assuming that the pupils themselves have not changed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Overcompensating for concerns about behaviour

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

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

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

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

6. Talking about routines rather than rebuilding them

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

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

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

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

7. Using assessment primarily to expose what has been forgotten

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9. Introducing too much novelty at once

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

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

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

10. Forgetting that teachers are experiencing a return too

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

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

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

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

Conclusions

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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