For everyone who has attended the ALL Social Zoom events this academic year we post here details of how to go about

i) Gaining an ALL certificate for your work in the Target Language challenge
ii) Submitting your Reflective writing 'Reflections on principles' to the ALL prize competition

Both challenges have a deadline of the end of June 2024.

Please click here to read Misbah's full story.

This presentation from the ALL HMO Team introduces you to the work of the Association in supporting Language teachers at all stages in their career.

Contact ALL through [email protected].

ALL hosts regular Social meeting for ECTs and trainee teachers of Languages on Zoom.

Please check the Events page for details.

‘Thank you all, you are so kind’

- ALL’s national welcome to Language teacher trainees

on 30^th. September 2020

The quote above is a line from the Chat at this Zoom event where over 200 trainees and others, from all over the UK, and abroad, came together for an informal drop-in, and heard from others about :

The family of ALL Members and how we share

Thoughts from recent trainees

Keeping a treasure chest

The joys of teaching languages

Support for trainees from other Language teachers

First thoughts on job applications

And joined in a Jargon Quiz in the Breakout rooms

A short version of the Chat and Quiz contents are in a separate document

A couple more quotations :

So encouraging to see other people forming part of the language teaching army because it can sometimes feel like a one-woman fight!

Feeling so inspired after this webinar. Thank you. I will definitely look to becoming a member. You are a fab bunch!

ALL First Friday, October 2020

Chris Jadav

As we rapidly approach the start of a new month and indeed a new half-term, I'm crossing off my list of jobs not yet done and remembered an enthusiastic offer to write up the October First Friday meeting. Why did I do that I ask myself (?) and then remember the enthusiasm I felt seeing the gallery of attendees, including some experienced sages of the MFL world, alongside the weary but keen expressions of those of us much newer to the profession. It was an hour well spent.

It underlined to me, as an RQT, how much I've learnt in the past couple of years, much of it from ALL members, and indeed how far there is to travel, but that we don't need to do that alone even if our own departments may seem small and distant. The generosity of the teaching community and especially the MFL community has been well documented but is no less significant for that.  Again, at the end of a long week, colleagues were willing to share the wisdom and encouragement of years as well as to share successes, questions and concerns from their classrooms that week. It was good to be part of a group coming together to ask questions, share experiences and try to work out how to get better together for the sake of our students. It was also good fun.

There were many practical ideas shared of ways to encourage and inspire learners but the take home message for me from the session was remembering to create a Leonardo da Vinci moment. I found this especially pertinent in light of how time pressed we are at present, trying to squeeze our curriculum content into shorter lessons and make up for as much lost learning as possible. It highlighted to me how 'force feeding' as much content as possible into each session might well be driving the joy out of some of my lessons and that I needed to be a bit more imaginative in the weeks ahead. This isn't to suggest that we shouldn't be presenting learners with challenges or being rigorous in our delivery but to recognise as Charlie Berney  succinctly put it,  that even if the content that needs to be taught is sometimes boring in and of itself, the output doesn't have to be .

It meant I went back to Mary Glasgow resources to find suitable film clips to liven up my Día de Hispanidad / Día de las Razas and that the very dull vocabulary section on helping at home was enlivened by creating comic strips and a quick game of charades along the way. When asking the Year 11s to write a piece about their holidays I wasn't afraid to take my imaginary elephant up to the top of the Eiffel Tower and slip and bump back down to the bottom... It's a meagre start but it's something and the challenge will be to keep being creative in the weeks and months ahead. According to Einstein, "Creativity is intelligence having fun" so when I feel the curriculum content pressure squeezing in, I'll endeavour to keep a space for it and see what fruit it yields in the weeks and months ahead. And I'll definitely be making a date in my diary for First Fridays in the months ahead.

Book here :

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/all-trainees-nqt-and-rqt-social-relax-join-in-and-share-tickets-120658668325?aff=ebdssbonlinesearch

Simon Coffey from King's College London shares this open access article which describes a workshop he did with a PGCE group last year.

Please click here for more information.

The OASIS database (https://oasis-database.org) makes research in language studies more accessible to those who don't have time or money to access research findings behind paywalls.

OASIS holds about 1,500 one-page summaries written in non-technical language - all summaries are freely available, and new summaries arrive every week.

The summaries cover a very wide range of topics including:

multilingualism            computer-assisted language learning            feedback
CLIL                            assessment                                                    classroom teaching
language policy          language learning theories                             motivation
self-efficacy                 language learning across the lifespan            teacher identity
neurolinguistics           heritage, home, and community languages     and many more!

OASIS also holds summaries of large systematic reviews of whole areas of research.

***Note*** The monthly newsletter about new summaries has ceased!

So, signing up is the only way you can receive notifications about new summaries. It takes just a minute. You will then receive an email containing links to new summaries. You can: 

1) Sign up to all summaries. Every week you will receive an email with url links to all new summaries that week. We recommend this option if you have wide-ranging interests.

OR

2) Subscribe to keywords that match your interests. Every week you will receive an email with links to new summaries that match your selected keywords.

Sign up here: https://subscriptions.oasis-database.org/

Camilla Smith writes: The Languages PGCE team at UCL IoE believes that culture and language are inextricably linked, and we work with our diverse ST cohort to develop their own intercultural competence, as well as encouraging them to do so with their own learners.

Read here the story of the visit by student teachers and tutors to the UCL exhibition 'Not just words'.