Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So how do we eventually get to extended writing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The journey is essentially:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Selected bibliography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The fix:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The fix:

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

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

3. Vocabulary needs to be taught through listening in context

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

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

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

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

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

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

The fix:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The fix:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. Eventually vocabulary has to become fast

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

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

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

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

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

The fix:

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

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

8. Small structural words deserve far more attention

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9. Not every word needs the same level of mastery

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

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

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

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

The fix: classify vocabulary explicitly into:

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

Then teach accordingly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The fix:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The fix:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The bottom line

Why do words fail to stick? Usually because:

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Courses

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

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