Introduction

In my experience, one of the most persistent myths in language education is that vocabulary growth comes from introducing lots of new words quickly. Research, however, tells a very different story. Vocabulary learning is slow, cumulative, and constrained by cognitive limits, especially when it comes to working memory and processing speed. These limits differ markedly between primary and secondary learners, which means the “right” number of words per lesson is not the same across phases.

What often goes missing from this discussion, however, is how vocabulary is taught. Muche research suggests that teaching words in isolation and teaching them as chunks or multi-word units place very different demands on the brain — and this has important implications for how much learners can realistically handle.

A necessary caution: what does it mean to “learn” a word?

Before addressing how many words can be taught in a lesson, I believe it is important to clarify what learning a word actually entails. Vocabulary knowledge is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon. Research consistently shows that knowing a word involves multiple dimensions: recognising its spoken and written form, understanding its meaning, knowing how it behaves grammatically, and being able to retrieve and use it appropriately (Nation, 2001; Schmitt, 2008). In classroom terms, this means that many words students encounter in a lesson may be noticed or partially understood without being fully learned or retained. The figures discussed in this chapter therefore refer to words or chunks that can realistically be taught for durable learning, not merely encountered or temporarily recognised.

Table 0. The dimensions of word knowledge

Dimension	What it involves	Classroom implications
Spoken form (phonological)	Recognising and producing the word’s sounds accurately	Learners may know a word in writing but fail to recognise it in listening
Written form (orthographic)	Recognising and spelling the word correctly	Spelling knowledge can support memory, especially at secondary level
Meaning (semantic)	Understanding what the word refers to	Meaning is often partial at first and becomes more precise over time
Form–meaning connection	Linking the sound/spelling to the correct meaning	This link is fragile in early learning and easily breaks under time pressure
Conceptual knowledge	Understanding the concept behind the word	Abstract or culturally unfamiliar concepts are harder to learn
Grammatical behaviour	Knowing the word’s part of speech and how it behaves grammatically	Includes gender, agreement, verb patterns, count/uncount status
Collocations	Knowing which words typically occur with it	Crucial for fluency and naturalness (e.g. make a mistake, not do)
Formulaic use / chunks	Knowing how the word functions inside common phrases	Supports faster processing and listening comprehension
Register	Knowing whether the word is formal, informal, slang, etc.	Prevents inappropriate usage in speaking and writing
Frequency	Knowing how common the word is	High-frequency words deserve more classroom time
Associations	Knowing related words (synonyms, antonyms, semantic fields)	Supports lexical networks and faster retrieval
Pragmatic use	Knowing when and why the word is used	Includes politeness, social norms, and discourse function
Receptive knowledge	Understanding the word when heard or read	Usually develops before productive knowledge
Productive knowledge	Being able to use the word accurately	Requires more practice and stronger memory traces
Automaticity	Retrieving the word quickly under pressure	Essential for fluent listening and speaking

L2 primary learners (approx. ages 5–11)

I have taught primary learners between the ages of 7 and 10 for 18 years and one thing that never ceased to surprise me was how fast their forgetting rate without constant revision was! This is because young learners face particularly strong cognitive constraints when learning vocabulary in an additional language. Working memory capacity is limited, attentional control is still developing, and phonological representations in the L2 are fragile and slow to stabilise. In addition, primary learners often have limited literacy skills in both their first language and the target language, which reduces their ability to use orthography as a support. As a result, vocabulary learning at this stage is highly incremental and depends heavily on repetition, salience, and recycling across time.

Table 1. Research findings: vocabulary learning in L2 primary learners

Research	Key findings relevant to “words per lesson”
Cameron (2001)	Vocabulary learning in young learners is gradual and fragile; introducing too many new words at once leads to shallow learning and rapid forgetting
Nation (2001)	Small numbers of new words should be taught explicitly, with repeated encounters over time; depth of processing matters more than quantity
Gathercole & Alloway (2008)	Children’s working memory capacity is very limited, strongly constraining how many unfamiliar items can be processed simultaneously
Pinter (2017)	Young learners benefit most when new vocabulary is embedded in familiar routines and recycled frequently
Kersten et al. (2010)	Vocabulary uptake improves when lexical load is low and exposure is distributed over time

Table 2. Studies informing how many words can be taught per lesson (Primary)

Study	Learners	Implication for words per lesson
Nation (2001)	Primary & early L2 learners	Around 3–5 new items can be taught effectively when recycling is built in
Cameron (2001)	Primary L2 learners	Fewer than 5 items per lesson supports retention
Gathercole & Alloway (2008)	Children	Working memory limits suggest very small lexical loads
Kersten et al. (2010)	Young L2 learners	Learning improves when lessons focus on few items, frequently recycled
Pinter (2017)	Primary learners	Depth over breadth; typically 3–4 items per lesson

What changes when words are taught in chunks?

In my experience, when vocabulary is taught as formulaic chunks (e.g. I like football, on the table, there is a dog) words are retained better by younger learners. One can also teach them more words, as the brain does not treat each word as a separate unit. Instead, the entire sequence can be processed as a single cognitive chunk.

Psycholinguistic research shows that:

• working memory operates on chunks rather than individual words (Miller, 1956; Cowan, 2001)
• frequently occurring multi-word sequences are stored and retrieved holistically (Wray, 2002; Ellis, 2003)
• chunking reduces the need for online grammatical computation, freeing cognitive resources for meaning (Ellis, 1996; Nation, 2013)

For primary learners, this is particularly important. Because attentional resources are limited and processing is slow, treating a phrase as one unit allows learners to engage with meaningful language without having to assemble it word by word.

In sum, while primary learners can typically only learn around 3–5 new items per lesson, those items can be multi-word expressions rather than isolated words. Chunking does not increase memory capacity, but it significantly increases the amount of functional language that can be processed and retained.

How this translates into KS2 practice (Years 3–6)

Based on the research above, and taking into account developmental changes in working memory, phonological automatisation, and classroom listening demands, the following ranges are realistic teaching targets, not exposure limits.

Table 3. Recommended teachable vocabulary load per lesson (KS2)

Year group	New items per lesson (taught for retention)	Notes
Year 3	2–3 items	Strong reliance on chunks; heavy recycling essential; listening load must be very light
Year 4	3–4 items	Chunks preferred; begin gentle variation within familiar frames
Year 5	4–5 items	Mix of chunks and high-frequency single words; listening tasks still limit capacity
Year 6	5 items (occasionally 6)	Greater tolerance for analysis, but chunking remains more efficient than isolation

These figures assume that items are recycled across lessons and revisited in multiple modalities. Teaching more items in a single lesson does not increase long-term retention.

L2 secondary learners (approx. ages 11–16)

Secondary learners obviously benefit from several cognitive and experiential advantages as compared to their primary counterparts. First off, working memory capacity is greater, especially at 16 where it reaches the adult-like levels. Secondly, attentional control is more stable and learners are better able to analyse language explicitly. They also tend to have more developed literacy skills, allowing them to use spelling and morphology to support retention. As a result, vocabulary learning becomes more efficient, although it remains constrained by time pressure and real-time processing demands, particularly in listening.

Table 4. Research findings: vocabulary learning in L2 secondary learners

Research	Key findings relevant to “words per lesson”
Nation (2001)	Vocabulary acquisition is cumulative; teaching too many items at once reduces retention
Hulstijn (2001)	Intentional vocabulary learning is effective only when cognitive load is manageable
Schmitt (2008)	Knowing a word involves multiple dimensions, requiring repeated encounters
Field (2008)	Lexical overload impairs listening comprehension; fewer new items improve decoding
Vandergrift & Goh (2012)	Lexical familiarity is a strong predictor of listening success

Table 5. Studies informing how many words can be taught per lesson (Secondary)

Study	Learners	Implication for words per lesson
Nation (2001)	Adolescent L2 learners	Typically 6–10 new items per lesson with recycling
Hulstijn (2001)	Secondary learners	More than 10 items overloads processing
Schmitt (2008)	Secondary & adult learners	Learning requires multiple encounters; limits effective intake
Field (2008)	Secondary L2 listeners	Listening lessons should stay toward lower end (6–8 items)
Vandergrift & Goh (2012)	Secondary learners	Lexical familiarity constrains how many items can be processed

What changes when words are taught in chunks?

At secondary level, chunking supports processing efficiency and fluency rather than basic capacity expansion. Research shows that formulaic sequences are retrieved faster than novel combinations (Pawley & Syder, 1983; Conklin & Schmitt, 2008) and reduce the cognitive cost of real-time comprehension.

To sum up, while secondary learners can typically learn 6–10 new items per lesson, teaching these items as chunks allows teachers to expose learners to a far greater volume of language without increasing cognitive overload.

Teaching vs exposure: revisited through chunking

The distinction between teaching and exposure becomes clearer when chunking is considered.

• Teaching isolated words often leads to fragmented knowledge
• Teaching chunks supports immediate comprehension and production
• Exposure to many words inside a small number of chunks is cognitively efficient

Chunking therefore allows teachers to teach fewer items while delivering richer input.

Pros and cons of teaching words in isolation

Teaching vocabulary in isolation is not inherently wrong, but it has specific strengths and limitations.

Advantages

• supports semantic precision
• useful for low-frequency or content-specific nouns
• facilitates dictionary skills and explicit form–meaning mapping
• easier to assess in short written tasks

Limitations

• high cognitive load during listening
• weak support for fluency and real-time processing
• encourages word-by-word decoding
• delays access to functional language use

Isolated-word teaching is most effective when it is limited in quantity and quickly integrated into phrases or chunks.

When the words are cognates

Cognates occupy a special position in vocabulary learning. Because they share form and meaning with words in the learner’s first language, they place a much lighter burden on working memory and phonological decoding.

When teaching cognates:

• learners can often process more items per lesson
• sound–meaning mapping is faster
• retention is generally higher

In practical terms, lessons focusing on transparent cognates may safely exceed the usual word-count limits, provided pronunciation differences are explicitly addressed to avoid fossilisation.

Factors affecting the learnability of words

Before considering how many words to introduce in a lesson, it is essential to recognise that not all words are equally learnable. Learnability refers to the extent to which a lexical item can be easily noticed, processed, stored, and retrieved by learners. Cognitive factors such as phonological complexity and length interact with experiential factors like frequency, transparency, and conceptual familiarity. Pedagogically, this means that raw word counts are misleading unless we also consider what kinds of words are being taught.

Table 6. Factors influencing how easily words are learned

Factor	Effect on learnability
Frequency	High-frequency words are learned faster
Phonological simplicity	Simple, familiar sound patterns are easier to retain
Transparency / cognacy	Cognates reduce cognitive load
Imageability	Concrete words are easier than abstract ones
Morphological regularity	Regular forms are easier to generalise
Length	Shorter words and chunks are easier to process
Contextual support	Rich context aids retention
Prior knowledge	Familiar concepts are learned more easily

Learnability directly affects how many words can be taught in a lesson. Highly learnable items allow for slightly higher word counts; low-learnability items sharply reduce capacity. Effective planning therefore requires managing both quantity and quality of vocabulary.

Why listening lowers the threshold (even with chunks)

Listening remains demanding because learners must decode sounds, segment speech, and hold information in working memory under time pressure. Chunking, of course, reduces these demands but does not remove them, which is why listening-heavy lessons should operate at the lower end of recommended word counts.

Conclusion

Vocabulary learning is governed not by ambition but by cognition. Across both primary and secondary phases, learners can only process and retain a limited number of new items in a single lesson. Teaching vocabulary in chunks does not change these limits, but it allows each item to carry more meaning, structure, and communicative value. Effective curricula therefore prioritise fewer items, taught more deeply, recycled more often, and embedded in meaningful input over time.

Chunking does not allow us to teach more words — it allows us to teach language more effectively.

Introduction

If I have learnt one thing throughout 28 years of teaching, is that there is no such thing as “teaching SEN pupils” in the abstract. SEN profiles are so diverse, messy, and contradictory! However, research from cognitive psychology, SLA, and special education converges on a clear set of principles that consistently make MFL more accessible to learners with additional needs.

What follows are ten key things to bear in mind when teaching languages to SEN students, grounded in research and translated into classroom practice and materials design. Rest assured that none of these are gimmicks. Most are uncomfortable because they require us to slow down, simplify, and rethink what we mean by “progress”.

Finally, do note that I have included in this post a section dedicated solely to teaching dyslexic children, as research indicates that up to around 10 % of the UK population are estimated to have dyslexia — meaning a significant proportion of MFL learners may struggle with reading, processing and recall in ways that traditional materials and assessments do not adequately support

1. SEN pupils struggle more with retrieval than understanding

One of the most persistent myths in MFL – one that I always try to debunk in my posts – is that if a pupil cannot produce language, they do not “know” it. Research on working memory and retrieval (Gathercole & Alloway; Hulstijn) shows that recognition and recall are different cognitive processes.

Classroom implication

A pupil who can match la piscine to a picture but cannot spell or say it is not failing ! — they are operating at a different stage of acquisition.

Materials implication

Design tasks that separate recognition from production:

• matching before recall
• word banks before blank pages
• partial dictation before full dictation

If your material jumps straight from exposure to free writing, SEN pupils fall off a cliff. In my approach (EPI) this translates into having a robust Receptive Processing phase (the first ‘R’ in the MARSEARS framework).

2. Cognitive load kills learning faster than lack of ability

Cognitive Load Theory (Sweller) is, of course, brutally relevant to SEN learners. Overloaded working memory doesn’t result in slower learning — it results in no learning at all.

Classroom implication

If a task requires pupils to simultaneously:

• read instructions
• decode new vocabulary
• apply grammar rules consciously step by step
• and write accurately

…you are not teaching language; you are testing executive function.

Materials implication

Reduce load by design:

• one linguistic focus per task
• minimal text per page
• predictable task formats (this is key! Don’t be afraid to be repetitive)
• visual consistency
• 98% comprehensible input (note: 98% comprehensible input does not mean simplified content, but content made accessible through scaffolding, repetition, and chunking)

A “busy” worksheet is often inaccessible before the pupil even starts!

3. Listening must be the engine, not the afterthought

Many SEN pupils (especially dyslexic learners) process language far more effectively through sound than print. SLA research consistently supports the primacy of input — yet textbooks still privilege reading and writing – and not the accessible sort either!

Classroom implication

Listening should dominate early sequences:

• teacher modelling
• choral repetition
• narrow listening
• listening with purpose, not just “play and answer”

Materials implication

Design materials where:

• listening precedes reading
• texts are short, repeated, and recycled (e.g. the EPI’s narrow listening)
• audio is exploited multiple times in different ways (e.g. the EPI’s thorough processing techniques)

If listening is just “activity 3”, SEN pupils are already excluded.

4. Patterns must be made visible

SEN pupils are less likely to infer grammatical patterns implicitly. This is not laziness; it’s a cognitive difference. Research on explicit instruction (Norris & Ortega; Spada & Tomita) shows that guided noticing matters. However, research also shows that complicated grammatical explanations are less accessible by students with a lower IQ or less developed executive function.

Classroom implication

Do not assume pupils will “pick it up”. Show them:

• colour-coded structures
• sentence frames (e.g. EPI’s sentence builders)
• chunked patterns

Materials implication

Avoid presenting:

• vocabulary lists without structure
• grammar rules without exemplars

Instead, design lexico-grammatical chunks:

voy a + infinitive
me gusta + noun

Patterns first. Labels later. The greatest applied linguists on the planet agree that teaching chunks should come first and explicit grammar explanation should come later – Ellis & Shintani (2014), N. Ellis (2015), Nation (2013), VanPatten (2015), Webb & Nation (2017), etc. In EPI, this is reflected by having a short and snappy Awareness-raising phase (the first A in MARSEARS) immediately after the initial modelling through sentence builders and visual aids and a more robust explicit grammar teaching phase (the E in MARSEARS) after three or for lessons of receptive and productive retrieval of the target chunks.

5. SEN pupils need overlearning, not coverage

Forgetting curves are much steeper for many SEN learners. What looks like “they’ve done this already” is often they’ve seen it once.

Classroom implication

Hence, Recycling is not revision — it is core instruction. If the average child requires

Materials implication

Good SEN-friendly materials:

• reuse the same language across lessons
• vary tasks, not language
• return to the same chunks in different contexts

If your scheme introduces new language every lesson without revisiting old material, SEN pupils are permanently behind. This is one of the biggest shortcoming of the textbooks currently in use in most UK schools, e.g. Stimmt, Viva, Mira,, Dynamo, Tricolore, Studio. Possibly the worst ones are the recently published textbooks based on the new GCSE – often by no fault of the authors, in my opinion, who are constrained by the number of pages set by the publishers and by the ridiculous high volume of content they need to cover.

Table 1 –Encounters with a lexical item required by learners of different abilities (from the average ability ones to those with severe SEN) to develop a BASIC knowledge of it

Key clarification (important)

• These encounters must be meaningful, not just visual exposure
• Repetitions work best when they are:
  • spaced (not crammed)
  • multimodal (listening, reading, speaking, matching)
  • embedded in chunks, not isolated words

6. Independence must be earned, not demanded

Textbooks often assume pupils can work independently after one model despite decades of research suggesting otherwise! Sociocultural theory argues that learning happens most reliably in the Zone of Proximal Development—i.e., when pupils can succeed with structured guidance that is then gradually withdrawn (Vygotsky, 1978). Reviews of scaffolding research emphasise that effective support is not “help for the weak”, but a deliberate design feature that enables learners to process language they only partially control and to internalise procedures over time (Malik, 2017; Ertugruloglu, 2023). In the UK MFL context, the Teaching Schools Council’s MFL Pedagogy Review also warns—implicitly for exactly this reason—that textbooks should be chosen for how well they support planned teaching of vocabulary/grammar/phonics and should often be supplemented rather than relied on as the sole engine of learning, because many published materials don’t provide enough structured practice and guided attention to detail for all learners to access them independently. Read this article if you want to know more on this topic: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2331186X.2017.1331533

Classroom implication

Remove scaffolds gradually, not suddenly as we do in EPI, where students arrive at production only after a highly structured journey from input to output which gradually moves from receptive retrieval at sentence-level to more challenging work with connected text in the Receptive phase and then scaffolds the progression from easier productive retrieval at sentence level (e.g. Oral Ping-pong) to harder information-gap tasks (e.g. ‘Back-to-back’ or ‘Ask the experts’) in the Structured Production phase.

Materials implication

Build tasks that move from:

• full support → partial support → no support

Not:

• support → (nearly) nothing

For SEN learners, the “blank page” is often the point of collapse. This is another major pitfalls of currently available textbooks, even when a lower-ability specific version of the textbooks does exist. The scaffolding is so bad, that the Listening and Reading activities are not logically linked with the ensuing Speaking and Writing activities! Bizarre, of course, as the former are meant to scaffold the latter. Hence, do ensure that, as we do in EPI, the receptive activities are carefully designed and implemented in a bid to ensure that speaking and writing skills emerge seamlessly and organically from the listening and reading activities staged at the beginning of your instructional sequences.

7. Writing is the hardest output — treat it as such

Writing combines:

• recall
• spelling
• grammar
• motor skills
• working memory

For SEN pupils, this is the highest-load skill. Even higher than speaking! The typical textbook expects students to read one or two texts, do a reading comprehension tasks or two on each and then write something similar. This is not going to help the average learner, let alone an SEN child!

Classroom implication

Do not use writing as your default proof of learning. This is the most commonly made mistakes with SEN pupils. Do plenty of scaffolding (see the previous point) ! Give them highly structured 100% feasible output.

Materials implication

Before extended writing, include:

• sentence completion
• sentence manipulation
• ordering tasks
• easy sentence-puzzle games
• copying with attention

If the first time pupils write independently is for assessment, you’ve set them up to fail. Delay writing assessment with SEN pupils as much as humanly possible

8. Pace matters more than enthusiasm

Fast-paced lessons are often praised — but for SEN pupils, speed frequently equals panic.

Classroom implication

Calm, predictable pacing reduces anxiety and improves retention.

Materials implication

Design sequences with:

• repeated task types
• familiar routines
• clear expectations

Surprise is motivating for some pupils; it is destabilising for others.

9. Differentiation should be built in, not bolted on

SEN pupils should not always be working on “the easier sheet”. Research on inclusive design stresses universal design for learning.

Classroom implication

Design tasks with multiple entry points, not multiple worksheets.

Materials implication

A good task allows:

• all pupils to start
• some to go further
• no one to be exposed as “different”

Ramped difficulty beats personalised worksheets every time.

10. Progress for SEN pupils is often invisible unless you know where to look

Traditional assessments privilege speed, accuracy, and written output. SEN progress often shows up first in:

• faster recognition
• reduced hesitation
• improved pronunciation
• willingness to attempt

Classroom implication

If you only value what you can mark, you will miss most progress.

Materials implication

Include low-stakes checks:

• oral responses
• mini whiteboards
• matching and sorting tasks
• listening discrimination

These reveal learning long before writing does.

Specific advice for teaching MFL to dyslexic children

Table 2 – Teaching strategies specifically aimed at dyslexic children

Teacher Strategy	Why this Matters Specifically for Dyslexic Learners	Research Basis
Explicit teaching of sound–spelling correspondences (as we do in EPI)	Dyslexia is strongly associated with phonological processing difficulties; learners do not reliably infer grapheme–phoneme links implicitly	Snowling (2000); Hulme & Snowling (2016)
Overt phoneme segmentation and blending in the target language (as we do in EPI)	Dyslexic learners struggle to segment spoken words into phonemes, which directly affects spelling, decoding and pronunciation	Goswami (2008); Ziegler & Goswami (2005)
Slow, exaggerated modelling of pronunciation (as we do in EPI)	Reduced phonological sensitivity means fast or “natural” speech often collapses into noise	Szenkovits & Ramus (2005)
Consistent font, spacing and visual layout across materials (as we do in EPI)	Visual stress and reduced visual tracking make dense or changing layouts disproportionately difficult	British Dyslexia Association (2018)
Avoidance of copying from the board as a learning activity (in EPI this is done sparingly after much modelling)	Copying overloads visual processing and working memory without strengthening language representations	Elliott & Grigorenko (2014)
Teaching spelling as pattern-based, not word-by-word (as we do in EPI)	Dyslexic learners do not retain arbitrary orthographic forms well but benefit from rule-based generalisations	Seymour (2014)

Why EPI is particularly suitable for SEN learners

Many of the principles outlined above are not incidental features of Extensive Processing Instruction (EPI); they are foundational to its design. EPI is particularly well suited to SEN learners because it systematically removes the very barriers that traditional MFL materials create.

First, EPI places input before output. SEN learners are not rushed into premature production; instead, they are given repeated, highly comprehensible exposure to language through listening and reading before being expected to retrieve it independently. This aligns closely with what we know about the recognition–recall gap in SEN profiles.

Second, EPI actively controls cognitive load. Sentence builders, chunked input, and tightly staged activities mean that learners are rarely asked to process multiple new elements simultaneously. The linguistic focus is narrow, explicit, and sustained over time, which allows SEN pupils to build secure mental representations without overload.

Third, EPI makes patterns visible and reusable. Grammar and vocabulary are not treated as separate pillars but as interlocking parts of lexico-grammatical chunks. For SEN learners who struggle with abstraction, this concreteness is critical: they are not asked to infer rules from sparse examples but are immersed in recurring, meaningful structures.

Fourth, EPI is built around recycling and overlearning. The same language appears again and again across different tasks and modalities, reducing forgetting and increasing automaticity. This is precisely what SEN learners need, yet what textbooks rarely provide.

Finally, EPI embeds scaffolding as a progression, not a crutch. Sentence builders, guided tasks, and structured production phases allow learners to move gradually towards independence. Support is not removed abruptly; it fades as confidence and competence grow.

In short, EPI does not “adapt” to SEN learners after the fact. It is inherently inclusive by design, and what makes it effective for SEN pupils is exactly what makes it effective for everyone else.

Conclusion

Teaching MFL to SEN pupils is not about lowering expectations. It is about changing the route.

When we slow input, reduce cognitive load, foreground patterns, recycle relentlessly, and scaffold intelligently, SEN pupils do not merely cope — they often outperform our expectations. The uncomfortable truth is that many of the practices we label as “SEN strategies” are, in fact, good language teaching full stop.

If SEN pupils struggle in our classrooms, the question is not whether they are capable of learning a language, but whether our materials and sequences are capable of teaching one.

Design for the margins, and the centre takes care of itself.

Intoduction

The first lessons after a holiday are far more consequential than they appear on paper, because although they look like “normal lessons” on the timetable, pedagogically they are anything but! In my experience, what we do in January very often determines whether the rest of the term feels calm, purposeful and cumulative, or whether it slowly turns into a fight against disengagement, widening gaps and the erosion of standards. The mistakes teachers make at this point are rarely the result of poor practice; more often, they emerge from good intentions colliding with fatigue and an underestimation of just how much the holiday has disrupted pupils cognitively and behaviourally.

Common January Mistakes in Language Classrooms (All Phases)

Mistake 1: Assuming pupils will just slot straight back in

In my experience, this is the single most common January error, because we tend to assume continuity where actually there is none! Pupils return with weaker retrieval, frayed routines and a noticeably lower tolerance for sustained cognitive effort. And when teachers behave as if “nothing has changed”, they often find themselves spending weeks firefighting behaviour, attention and effort that could have been stabilised early on. In my opinion, January requires a deliberate reset in which expectations, routines and focus are re-established explicitly, calmly and unapologetically. Otherwise, the term begins on borrowed time and never truly recovers!

What has always worked with my classes instead included: silent starter retrieval tasks on entry, explicit re-modelling of classroom routines, short and highly structured tasks with clear success criteria, and timed activities that re-establish pace and focus while signalling that standards are back where they belong.

Mistake 2: Starting immediately with new or demanding content

I see this every year, often driven by a sense of pressure to “get going”, to cover ground quickly, or to make up for perceived lost time. The result is frequently the introduction of new grammar, complex texts or cognitively heavy tasks in the very first lessons back, yet pupils don’t experience this as challenge; they experience it as failure! In my opinion, January should begin with reactivation rather than progression, because pupils need time to reconnect with familiar language, rebuild confidence and feel competent again before anything genuinely new is layered on top.

What works instead includes sentence reordering using previously taught structures, translation of familiar language in both directions, listening to already-known texts with confidence-building tasks, and scaffolded sentence expansion that reminds pupils what they already know they can do.

Mistake 3: Talking too much to compensate for forgetting

In my opinion, holiday rust triggers one of the most counterproductive teacher instincts: the urge to explain more. We remind, re-explain, justify and elaborate, while pupils sit there passively, nodding along, without actually retrieving anything themselves. Although longer explanations can feel reassuring in the moment, they do very little to rebuild learning, and in my experience what pupils need in January is not more teacher talk but more structured opportunities to remember, process and reuse language, even if that initially feels slower and less impressive.

What works instead includes mini-whiteboard retrieval questions, choral repetition and reading aloud, partial-to-full dictation, and error-spotting tasks that focus on familiar language and force active engagement.

Mistake 4: Treating behaviour as a secondary concern

There is often a temptation to “let things slide” in the first week back, because it’s January, pupils are tired, and nobody wants to start the term feeling heavy-handed. In my experience, this is a mistake, because January is a behavioural hinge point and what you allow in the first lessons back very quickly becomes the norm. In my opinion, routines around entry, silence, equipment and transitions need to be reset explicitly and consistently, not harshly but clearly, because calm firmness early on saves an enormous amount of energy later.

What works instead includes immediate “do now” tasks, rehearsed stop–start signals, short timed tasks that limit off-task behaviour, and whole-class response strategies that keep everyone cognitively involved.

Mistake 5: Planning ‘fun’ lessons with no linguistic payoff

I understand the instinct completely: after a long break, we want pupils to enjoy being back, to ease them in gently and to avoid unnecessary stress. However, in my experience, “fun” without linguistic purpose does not rebuild habits, confidence or competence, and while pupils may enjoy it in the moment, they often leave having learned very little, with the underlying problems still intact. In my opinion, January engagement needs to be purposeful, so activities should feel accessible and motivating while also clearly moving language learning forward.

What works instead includes: low-stakes retrieval games, listening bingo built around known language, competitive sentence-building tasks, and tightly scaffolded speaking games that balance enjoyment with progress.

Mistake 6: Forgetting to engineer early success

This mistake is subtle but crucial, because pupils returning from a break are more vulnerable than we often realise, particularly those who already struggle with languages. In my experience, if the first lessons back end in confusion or failure, motivation drops alarmingly fast, which is why January lessons should be designed to end with visible success, whether that means correct answers, completed sentences or something pupils can point to and think, “I can still do this”. Confidence first, stretch later – that has always been my motto in the first couple of weeks back from any holiday break.

What works instead includes highly scaffolded writing tasks, intentionally high-success listening activities, whole-class correction that normalises accuracy, and exit tickets that show tangible progress.

January Mistakes at GCSE Level (Assuming December Mocks Have Taken Place)

At GCSE, January is not a neutral reset, because pupils return with mock results, grades and a strong sense of where they believe they now “stand”. In my experience, this is the point at which January can either become a moment of strategic repair or the moment when underperformance quietly fossilises.

GCSE Mistake 1: Treating January as a “fresh start”

December mocks have already generated valuable diagnostic information, and when that data is ignored, a critical opportunity is wasted! Rather than restarting schemes or ploughing on regardless, January should be used to prioritise the highest-impact gaps revealed by the mocks, particularly in listening decoding, verb control and core structures. For example, if a class performed reasonably well in reading and writing but collapsed in listening, January lessons might include short, slowed-down listening extracts reused across several lessons, with pupils underlining cognates, identifying verb endings or matching phrases to meanings before ever attempting exam-style questions.

GCSE Mistake 2: Reteaching everything the mock exposed

When January turns into a catalogue of weaknesses, pupils quickly feel overwhelmed and demoralised, which in my opinion is one of the fastest ways to kill momentum. A more effective approach is to identify the two or three biggest leverage points per skill and focus relentlessly on those, because less content and more precision almost always produce better results. For instance, instead of revisiting every tense pupils used incorrectly in the writing paper, a teacher might focus exclusively on improving the accuracy of the present tense and one past structure, using sentence transformation tasks, guided translation and short paragraph rewrites where success is visible and measurable.

GCSE Mistake 3: Teaching to the mock paper rather than the skill deficit

Simply repeating mock-style tasks does very little if pupils don’t understand why they struggled in the first place. In my experience, progress accelerates when teachers diagnose the real issue, whether it is speed of processing, decoding, retrieval failure or accuracy, and then design tasks that directly train that skill – rather than rehearse the paper itself. For example, if pupils ran out of time on the reading paper, the solution is not another full reading paper but timed micro-reading tasks in which pupils practise scanning for key information under strict time limits, gradually increasing both speed and confidence.

GCSE Mistake 4: Neglecting listening after poor mock results

Listening is frequently the weakest GCSE paper and also the hardest skill to rebuild if it is postponed. January is therefore the moment to make listening central again through short, repeated extracts, decoding-focused tasks, dictation and confidence-building exposure that rebuilds competence rather than anxiety. A realistic approach might involve playing a 20–30 second extract several times across a lesson, first for gist, then for specific words, then as a partial dictation, before finally linking it to a short exam-style question.

GCSE Mistake 5: Using mock grades as fixed labels

Pupils very quickly internalise December outcomes as destiny, particularly those who underperformed, and unless this narrative is actively challenged, effort often drops. In my experience, mocks need to be reframed explicitly as information rather than judgement, with clear messaging about what is fixable and how. For example, teachers might share anonymised class data showing common errors and explicitly state that these are skills problems, not ability problems, before modelling how targeted practice can improve a specific question type.

GCSE Mistake 6: Failing to engineer post-mock success

After receiving results, pupils are psychologically exposed, and if January lessons reinforce failure, the damage can be long-lasting. GCSE lessons during this period should therefore be designed to end with visible success, such as improved listening scores, cleaner sentences or measurable gains pupils can recognise and trust. This might involve ending a lesson with a short listening task that pupils previously failed in the mock but now complete successfully after targeted practice, or a brief writing task where everyone produces a correct, exam-valid sentence using a structure they struggled with before Christmas.

GCSE Mistake 7: Obsessing over grade boundaries instead of controllable gains

After December mocks, conversations often drift towards grades, boundaries and questions like “how many marks do I need for a 6, 7 or 8”, yet in my experience this focus is largely unhelpful in January. Pupils fixate on outcomes they cannot control and lose sight of the behaviours and skills that actually move marks, while borderline pupils can become paralysed by the feeling that the gap is either too big or unfairly small. A more productive approach is to translate grades into concrete, controllable actions, so instead of telling a pupil they are “three marks off a grade 5”, a teacher might show them that improving one listening question type or securing verb accuracy in one writing bullet point reliably yields those marks.

GCSE Mistake 8: Ignoring option strategy and question selection

Another GCSE-specific oversight is failing to revisit option strategy after mocks, because many pupils lose marks not through lack of language but through poor decision-making under pressure. They attempt all bullets when fewer would score higher, over-write weak answers or panic when encountering unfamiliar vocabulary. January is the ideal moment to address this explicitly by modelling how to choose the strongest bullet points in writing tasks, how to abandon a weak listening question and move on, or how to prioritise questions that play to a pupil’s strengths, which is not exam-technique overload but decision-making training that pays off disproportionately.

GCSE Mistake 9: Treating speaking as a future problem

Because speaking exams feel distant in January, they are often quietly deprioritised, yet in my experience this is a mistake because the language required for speaking overlaps heavily with writing and listening success. Delaying speaking preparation increases anxiety later while missing opportunities for reinforcement now. January speaking work does not need to involve full role plays or mock exams; short, controlled speaking routines using already-secure language, brief photo descriptions or rehearsed answers to familiar questions can be woven into lessons without pressure, keeping speaking alive and preventing the spring term from becoming a panic-driven boot camp.

GCSE Mistake 10: Misaligning revision with frequency and payoff

After mocks, pupils often revise indiscriminately, working through long vocabulary lists, obscure topic words or low-frequency structures that feel impressive but deliver little return. In my opinion, January is where this must be corrected, because GCSE success depends disproportionately on high-frequency language used accurately rather than on linguistic breadth for its own sake. Teachers can address this by refocusing pupils on a core lexical and structural spine, revisiting how a small set of verbs behaves across multiple tenses or contexts, which often improves performance across listening, reading and writing simultaneously.

January at GCSE is not about acceleration; it is about precision repair. Teachers who chase coverage tend to spend the spring firefighting, while those who use January to target the right deficits build confidence, competence and momentum that lasts all the way to the exams.

Conclusion

In my experience, January is never a neutral moment in the language classroom. What we do in the first few lessons back is either a decisive point of recalibration or the quiet beginning of drift. The mistakes teachers make at this time are rarely dramatic; they are subtle, well-intentioned and entirely understandable. We often rush because we feel behind. We explain more because pupils look rusty. We push on because the syllabus looms. And yet, those instincts – which I remember all too well – often create more problems than they solve, especially when it comes to our more vulnerable students.

What January really demands is restraint, precision and, most importantly, clarity of purpose. Not more content, but the right content. Not more talk, but better designed opportunities for pupils to retrieve, process and succeed. At GCSE in particular, January is not about acceleration or reinvention; it is about repair, alignment and restoring pupils’ belief that progress is still within reach.

When teachers resist the urge to panic and instead use January to reset routines, rebuild confidence and target high-leverage skills, the rest of the year becomes calmer, more efficient and ultimately more successful.

In short, January doesn’t reward urgency; it rewards intentionality. Get January right, and you don’t just recover from the holidays… you quietly set the conditions for everything that follows!

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.

Introduction

If we are honest, most teachers still treat listening as an assessment tool rather than a teachable skill. We press “play,” provide a set of questions, and call it “practice.” Then—when the real paper comes—students freeze, panic, and guess. We insist that we “taught them the vocabulary,” and yet the marks vanish into thin air.

The painful truth is this: listening success in listening exams has almost nothing to do with being able to recall words in silence. It hinges on dozens of micro-skills that operate in real time, under cognitive pressure, with incomplete information, unpredictable pronunciation and messy discourse. The candidates who survive are the ones who can decode, infer, track, and emotionally self-regulate.

This article breaks down those micro-skills into 10 clusters. Each cluster has a short explanation and a crystal-clear mini-table you can use in lessons, CPD, revision banks, or student training.

If you do want to know more on each of the above points and on how to implement instruction in every single one of the micro-skills listed in this post, join my brand new workshop on this topic here: https://www.networkforlearning.org.uk/courses/2026-01-25/epi-ks4-phonics-1-jul-2024-dudley

1. Perceptual Skills (Bottom-Up Decoding)

As John Field and other prominent researchers have evidenced, listening begins at the ear, not at the memory. No amount of grammar teaching or vocabulary drilling can compensate for a student who cannot segment the sound stream! When the brain receives speech, it needs to ‘chop’ it into meaningful parts—phonemes, syllables, chunks—and match them to stored representations. Fail here and everything else collapses like dominoes. These skills are not remedial; they are the neurological foundation on which higher comprehension sits. This is, of course, a recurrent theme on this blog and in my book “Breaking the sound barrier’.

Table 1

Micro-Skill	What It Means	Why It Matters
Phoneme discrimination	Recognising minimal sound differences (/u/ vs /ou/, /é/ vs /è/)	Avoids lexical confusion: mer ≠ mère. Small sound errors trigger wrong interpretations.
Syllable segmentation & stress	Hearing rhythm, breaks and prosody	Enables chunking; prevents “audio soup” in languages with compressions (e.g., French).
Coarticulation decoding	Recognising liaison, elision, reduction (j’sais pas)	Real speech ≠ orthography; failure blocks comprehension even with known vocabulary.
Phonological→lexical mapping	Matching sound to stored word form automatically	“Nearly recognising” words collapses meaning; automation preserves working memory.

2. Lexical Access Skills

Unfortunately, students do not have the luxury of pausing a speaker – not in most exam tasks, at least. The exam demands instant recognition. When the brain needs two seconds to recall “samedi,” the next six seconds of input are already gone. Skilled listeners know that listening is not about individual words; it’s about clusters of meaning. Chunks, paraphrases, contextual interpretation—they allow students to retain speed and control.

Table 2

Micro-Skill	What It Means	Why It Matters
Rapid high-freq retrieval	Instant recognition of everyday vocabulary	Listening is speed-based; slow retrieval = missing subsequent segments.
Chunk recognition	Recognising multi-word units (il y a, c’est pour)	Cuts cognitive load; improves resilience to accent and speech rate.
Semantic flexibility	Accepting paraphrase / approximate meaning	Exams rarely match textbook wording; prevents panic.
Sense disambiguation	Choosing correct meaning via context	Avoids false friends (e.g. stage, coin).

3. Grammar-in-Listening Skills

Grammar here is not a worksheet. It is auditory navigation in a ridiculous narrow time window (2 seconds per sentence!). In spoken language, tense, person and agreement are lightning-fast signals which in our first language we interpret in a few milliseconds. They tell you who is acting, when it happened, and how ideas connect. A listener who cannot hear tense markers or subordinate clauses spends the exam chasing nouns and building wrong timelines.

Table 3

Micro-Skill	What It Means	Why It Matters
Tense recognition by sound	Detecting time reference in speech	Timeline answers hinge on morphology, not vocabulary.
Pronoun identification	Tracking je/tu/il/elle/nous/vous/ils	Correct agent = correct interpretation; mistakes spread through the entire item.
Adjective agreement (audio)	Hearing gender/number cues	Reveals who is being described; essential in dialogues.
Subordination cues	parce que, quand, si, bien que	Marks clause boundaries; filters essential vs padding.

4. Information-Processing Skills

Real listening is messy! People talk in tangents, change topics, contradict themselves, and correct what they just said. The new GCSE (16+ English examination) exploits this. It throws lexical echoes, decoys and story fragments at students. Those who hunt for every word…drown. Those who track meaning—the communicative core—surf.

Table 4

Micro-Skill	What It Means	Why It Matters
Key idea extraction	Understanding core message	New GCSE prioritises communicative comprehension.
Selective attention	Following one thread amid noise	Protects working memory; prevents narrative derailment.
Rejecting irrelevant detail	Ignoring lexical echoes & decoys	Examiners deliberately plant traps.
Listening through ambiguity	Continuing despite unclear segments	Fuzziness tolerance = expert listener behaviour.

5. Discourse & Pragmatic Skills

Students who treat listening as word matching will always be outplayed by students who listen like humans. Inference, tone, speaker stance—these are quietly assessed. A teenager talking about school, a grandma describing her holidays, a customer complaining about a delayed bus—each has a different pragmatic fingerprint. The exam rewards those who can read it.

Table 5

Micro-Skill	What It Means	Why It Matters
Topic boundary detection	Spotting shifts in topic/time	Prevents cross-segment contamination.
Speaker intention inference	Detecting stance: complaint, praise, irony	Many tasks ask “What does the speaker think?”
Register recognition	Formal vs casual vs polite	Context and tone shape meaning.
Pronoun reference resolution	Who is “they/her/him/it”?	Multi-speaker texts require correct referents.

6. Top-Down Knowledge Activation

Expert listeners don’t walk into an audio blind. They predict.
Holiday → transport, accommodation, activities.
Restaurant → ordering, prices, complaints.
School → homework, teachers, schedules.
These schemas filter noise and create a safety net when perception falters.

Table 6

Micro-Skill	What It Means	Why It Matters
Scenario prediction	Anticipating typical content from topic	Shrinks semantic space; speeds matching.
Schema use	Using real-world scripts (shop → price)	Filters noise; stabilises comprehension.
Cultural inference	Interpreting norms, politeness, understatement	Prevents literal mis-translation of speaker intention.

7. Metacognitive Skills

Metacognition is the secret weapon of powerful listeners.Students who plan before listening, who monitor while listening, and who evaluate afterwards learn from every exposure. Students who just “sit and hope for clarity” never improve. The new GCSE favours candidates who regulate themselves.

Table 7

Micro-Skill	What It Means	Why It Matters
Planning	Prepare vocabulary & mindset pre-listening	Pre-activation reduces processing cost.
Monitoring	Tracking comprehension during audio	Prompts recovery rather than panic.
Evaluation	Post-audio reflection	Builds procedural memory; reduces repeated errors.
Strategy switching	Pivot between bottom-up and top-down	Experts adapt; novices stay fixed.

8. Numeracy & Quantification Skills

The examiners adore numbers. Not because they’re difficult, but because they are unforgiving. A single misheard digit, a misinterpreted 24-hour clock, or an unspotted discount instantly annihilates otherwise perfect work.

Table 8

Micro-Skill	What It Means	Why It Matters
Cardinal & ordinal decoding	vingt-et-un, trois cents, premier	Single-digit mistakes kill entire answers.
Time & scheduling	24h clock, timetables	Core authentic domain; fast and unforgiving.
Prices & currency	2,50€, réduction, moitié prix	Common exam ambush; requires rapid accuracy.

9. Resilience & Cognitive Control

The hardest truth when it comes to high-stake examinations: good listeners are emotionally stable listeners. In my experience – not merely as a teacher, but as a language learner too – when average students miss a sentence, they panic. Markers stop, attention collapses, and everything becomes a blur. High performers, instead, simply keep going. They don’t need perfection; they need enough cues to maintain coherence.

Table 9

Micro-Skill	What It Means	Why It Matters
Noise tolerance	Continue processing despite uncertainty	Mirrors native listening; prevents collapse.
Decoy resistance	Ignoring lexical bait	Protects against superficial matching.
Global coherence tracking	Holding the big picture	Local errors matter less when global meaning remains.

10. Task-Handling Skills

Finally, listening is not just hearing—it is scoring. Understanding is useless unless students can map it correctly into exam answers. Most students who “understood” still lost marks because they listened for the audio, not the question.

Table 10

Micro-Skill	What It Means	Why It Matters
Mapping input → answer	Converting understanding into mark format	Students often “understand” but don’t score.
Scanning (listen for X)	Filtering by target info	Reduces working memory overload.
First vs second pass	Pass 1 = gist, Pass 2 = precision	Professional listeners layer comprehension.

Conclusion

Listening exams have – fortunately – quietly moved beyond “hear the keyword → tick the box.” They test the way real people listen, not the way textbooks pretend they do. Students who cram vocabulary lists and stare at worksheets will drown. Students who build automatic decoding, flexible interpretation, cultural competence, number sense and emotional resilience will thrive.

The message of this post is quite simple: Train micro-skills explicitly and repeatedly. And most importantly—teach your learners to stop hunting for words and start listening for meaning.

In the second part, which I will publish over the next few days, I will deal with the tasks you can stage in order to practise the above skills.

PLEASE NOTE: If you do want to know more about each of the points above and on how to implement them in the classroom, join my brand new workshop on this topic on 10th December here: https://www.networkforlearning.org.uk/courses/2026-01-25/epi-ks4-phonics-1-jul-2024-dudley. If you are in the Coventry area, you can join me at President Kennedy School on 5th December for a whole-day workshop on Listening (morning) and Metacognition (afternoon).

Introduction

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

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

1. Transitions — The Bermuda Triangle of MFL Lessons

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

Solutions

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

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

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

Solutions

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

3. Speaking Tasks — Where Anxiety Meets Opportunity

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

Solutions

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

4. Listening Tasks — Cognitive Overload = Behaviour Dip

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

Solutions

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

5. Resource Distribution — The MFL Olympics

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

Solutions

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

6. L1 vs L2 Use — The Great Escape Route

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

Solutions

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

7. Mini-Whiteboards — High Engagement, Higher Risk

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

Solutions

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

8. Group Work — Democracy at Its Noisiest

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

Solutions

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

9. Retrieval Tasks — The Confidence Cliff

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

Solutions

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

10. Teacher Turned Away — Goodbye, Withitness

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

Solutions

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

Introduction

One of the most under-discussed sources of disruption in MFL (Modern Foreign Languages) classrooms is not the listening exercise, not the dialogue drill, not even the grammar explanations (which, if I’m honest, can test even the saintliest patience!). It’s the transition — those fragile 20–40 seconds when students glide (or stumble…) from one activity to another.

Emmer & Evertson (2013) suggest that up to 25% of classroom misbehaviour occurs during transitions!, and I must confess, having survived nearly 30 years of lively MFL rooms, I’d say that in languages itsometimes feels more like 40%. Why? Because unlike other subjects, MFL lessons are transition-packed ! : book → sheet, sheet → mini-whiteboard, whiteboard- device, pair → whole class, listening → oral rehearsal, and so on.

And each of these tiny shifts, if not tightly handled…becomes an invitation for things to go, as my grandmother used to say, a ramengo.

1. Transitions create behavioural “grey zones”

During a transition, the whole structure of the lesson, which a second earlier felt solid enough, suddenly dissolves into a sort of temporary void: no immediate task, no strong focal point, and—crucially—your attention is split between giving instructions, loading audio, locating the right slide, and wondering where that worksheet has vanished to…arggggggh!

This is what I often refer to (half-jokingly, half-traumatically) as the behavioural vacuum where disaster can happen. Why? Because vacuums get filled quickly—with chatter, shuffling, “accidental” pencil tapping, partner-related negotiations, and… the occasional tango-style manoeuvre in the aisles.

I remember once, in a tough school in Bedfordshire, during what I thought was a perfectly innocent “move to your new speaking partner” transition, one of my Y8s decided—completely spontaneously—to stop on the way to inspect another pupil’s pencil case collection. Ten seconds later half the class was involved! All because I’d left a 3-second clarity gap.

Implication for MFL:
If transitions aren’t scripted like micro-routines, students will improvise. And their improvisation rarely matches ours.

2. Ambiguity is the enemy

Transitions force pupils to juggle quite a few thoughts:

• What do I put away?
• What do I take out?
• Where do I sit?
• Who’s my partner now?
• Have I lost my pen again?
• And (inevitably): “Sir, is this due in today?”

If instructions are drip-fed (“Take out your whiteboards… no, don’t write yet… wipe them first… actually, swap with your partner… wait, sit down…”), students are likely to fill those blanks with disruptive behaviour.

In my experince, ambiguity during transitions is rocket fuel for misbehaviour. Pupils aren’t misbehaving because they’re malicious; they’re misbehaving because the situation invites too much choice.

Implication for MFL:
Give complete, front-loaded instructions.
Say it once, say it clearly, check it.
Visual cues help massively—a tiny icon in the corner of the slide can do miracles.

3. Slow transitions invite trouble

A 40-second transition feels short, but multiply that across a lesson and you’re looking at four or five minutes of semi-unmanaged time. Enough to fit in:

• three whispered conversations
• two desk rearrangements
• the great pen-lid hunt
• and, on particuarly bold days, a semi-philosophical debate about why they have to do listening at all.

In my experience, the slower the transition, the more some students interpret it as “down time.” And once they’ve slid into that mindspace, recovering them is like trying to herd caffeinated cats.

Implication for MFL:
Aim for 30-second, high-clarity transitions.
Use timers, model what “fast” looks like, celebrate improvements.
Speed is structure.

4. Teacher presence weakens during transitions

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: during transitions, we often turn our backs at the exact second when we should be most present. Loading the listening track… switching worksheets… pulling up the next slide… and bang—your withitness evaporates.

Students are masters at sensing microscopic shifts in teacher attention. If they sense you’re half-occupied, they fill the gap.

I vividly remember a class in which I simply turned to plug in my laptop charger. Five seconds, tops. When I turned back, one pair had built a tiny Eiffel Tower out of glue sticks. Slow transitions create opportunities; reduced presence magnifies them.

Implication for MFL:
Move through the room as the transition unfolds.
Narrate what you see: “Table 1 is ready… fantastic… back row almost there…”
This creates presence without confrontation.

5. MFL has inherently more social transitions

Because MFL is built around interaction—pair work, role swaps, dialogue practice—our transitions are naturally social, which makes them, of course, inherently much riskier than other subjects, especially if you are big on Communicative tasks. More talking, more movement, more negotiation = more chances for distraction.

Implication for MFL:
Reduce unnecessary movement.
Keep pairings stable for whole phases, not for micro-tasks.
Train “instant roles”: Partner A speaks first; Partner B listens; swap on the signal.

So what should language teachers actually do?

Below are the high-yield practices that, over the decades, have kept my lessons more or less sane—even on those days when the behaviour gods were in a particularly mischevious mood.

1. Script transitions like micro-routines

“Books closed → pens down → eyes on me.”
Practise the routine separately. Yes, it feels silly. Yes, it works.

2. Announce transitions before they begin

“In a moment, you’ll switch to listening. You’ll need your book closed and pen ready.”
Pre-cueing reduces anxiety and faffing.

3. Use clear, affirmative language

Not “Don’t talk while you set up.”
But: “This transition is quick and silent. Start now.”

4. Reduce the number of transitions full stop

Chunk tasks. Have everything on desks already. Every avoided transition is a behaviour win!

5. Keep transitions fast

Use a countdown.
Show what a “good transition” looks like (literally model it—kids love the absurdity).
Make it a class norm.

6. Maintain visibility and movement

Presence prevents escalation.

7. Practise transitions deliberately

One minute of practice in September saves ten headaches in March. And trust me, I’ve paid the price of not doing this often enough.

Conclusion: Transitions are where MFL lessons win or lose the behaviour battle

In my experience and according to research, misbehaviour during transitions isn’t merely a sign of “difficult students”, it’s also a sign of unstructured space. When transitions are scripted, predictable, fast, and well-rehearsed, behaviour stabilises—not because students magically become better, but because the environment leaves them little room for drift. This has always been my greatest concern in the challenging schools I worked at.

In languages, where we transition far more often than most subjects, mastering transitions is—not to exagerate— close to a survival skill. It protects pace, it reduces cognitive load, and it creates the calm, purposeful atmosphere in which acquisition can actually happen.

27th November – Face-to-face course at the James Hornsby School, Basildon (Essex) MFL Conference: a deep dive into Dr Conti’s Extensive Processing Instruction. Enroll here: https://www.networkforlearning.org.uk/courses/2025-12-26/epi-conference-1-jul-2023

1^st December – Online: Implementing EPI at Key Stage 2. Click on the following link to enroll: https://networkforlearning.org.uk/courses/2026-02-04/epi-ks2-4-jul-2024

3rd^st December – St Colman’s College Newry (Northern Ireland) – Becoming an EPI teacher.

5^th December –Listening and Metacognition (Coventry) at Futures Education Institute. Enroll by contacting Nick Mort on Nicholas.Mort@futuresteachingalliance.org.uk

8^th December – Broadwater School, Godalming, Surrey. See details below.

10^th December – Beaconsfield High School, Buckinghamshire. Contact Lauren Manney (see details in image below).

9th December – Star Salford Academy (Manchester) – See details in flyer below