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"Reflections of a language teacher.
Always learning."


From Supported to Self-Sufficient: Building independence in the MFL classroom
This post is a follow-up to the Linguascope Adaptive Teaching Webinar, which Jennifer Wozniak-Rush and I run on Tuesday 2nd June. A lot of the conversation in our recent webinar centred on how we support students better: how we scaffold, adapt, and respond to where learners are in the moment. And that conversation matters enormously. But several of you came back afterwards with the same question, and it is a good one: 'If we are always scaffolding, always supporting, always a
Silvia Bastow
Jun 79 min read


Writing Tasks That Actually Prepare Students for GCSEs (Focus on Higher) - Not Just Fill Time
Let me be honest about something. I spent years setting writing tasks that were, in hindsight, busywork dressed up as learning. Fill in the gaps. Copy the model answer. Write five sentences about your family using the sentence starters on the board. Students were writing. Pens were moving. The room was quiet. It looked like learning. It wasn't. The problem only became clear when I started reading the new GCSE German specification carefully - not just skimming it, but actually
Silvia Bastow
May 139 min read


Why students underperform in GCSE writing – and how over-scaffolding and misunderstandings about “complex language” make it worse
From a GCSE examiner’s point of view, I believe most students do not underperform in writing because they lack ideas, motivation or effort. Much more often, they underperform because they have been taught a version of GCSE writing that does not reflect how writing is actually assessed. Year after year, the same issues surface in exam papers. Students rely heavily on scaffolds , they misunderstand what “complex language” really means and accuracy at sentence level is sacr
Silvia Bastow
Jan 47 min read


30+ Fun and Effective MFL Games for the Languages Classroom
One of the most powerful ways to build confidence, fluency and motivation in the MFL classroom is through purposful games. I believe that well-chosen, low-prep activities can transform the energy of a lesson while driving serious progress in retrieval, phonics, grammar and spontaneous use of the target language. Below is a bumper list of 30+ tried-and-tested MFL games you can use across key stages. They work brilliantly in German, French, Spanish and beyond. ⭐ Retrieval & M
Silvia Bastow
Dec 3, 20256 min read


What I Learned from Paul Nation’s Webinar on Word Frequency and Vocabulary Learning
When we talk about teaching languages, it’s easy to get caught up in the grammar structures, the tenses, or the ever-growing pressure of...
Silvia Bastow
Apr 5, 20257 min read
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