Who: Former Head of MFL (24 years, Ripon Grammar); MA in SLA (Institute of Education); co-author with Conti of The Language Teacher Toolkit, Breaking the Sound Barrier (2019) and Memory (2021); author of Becoming an Outstanding Languages Teacher and Thinking About Language Teaching (2025).
What: Research commentary, book reviews and classroom ideas. Mostly UK MFL policy (GCSE), so a lot of it is irrelevant to EFL. The listening and Nation posts transfer well.
Stance vs Conti: Same camp, different emphasis. Smith weights comprehensible input and communicative interaction more, with micro-listening as a supplement. He would downplay analysis at A1–A2.
Note: Blogger blocks automated crawling, so posts were located through the browser.
Processed notes
- Bottom-up listening micro-drills - a repertoire
- Field’s process model of listening - eight priorities
- Learners decode far less than teachers think (fuzzy lexical representations)
- Mnemonics build declarative knowledge, not proficiency
- Nation’s Four Strands - balance input, output, language focus and fluency
- Nation’s eight principles of learning as a task checklist
- Rod Ellis’s eight principles of task-based teaching
- Smith and Conti’s ten principles of language teaching
- Why L2 listening is hard - cognitive and affective barriers
Next to process
- Deeper pass done. Next: Let’s Get Them Talking! (2026).