What I wish I'd known in my first five years of teaching languages

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that belongs only to new teachers. Bone-deep, relentless, the kind that comes from caring enormously, trying everything, and still feeling like you are somehow getting it wrong. I remember it clearly. And I remember wishing, more than once, that someone would sit down next to me and say: here is what actually matters.

So this post is that conversation. Not a how-to guide, not a research summary, just the things I genuinely wish someone had told me in those first five years. I have been in the classroom for over two decades now and most of what follows I learned the hard way.

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1. You do not need more resources. You need fewer, better ones.

In my first year I spent hours, many Sunday evenings, sometimes Saturday mornings too creating engaging resources or browsing TES to supplement the textbook we were using at the time. OHP acetates (you probably have no idea what these are), gap fills, card sorts, extension tasks, listening activities built from scratch. I thought the more I added to what the textbook offered, the better and richer the learning experience would be. I thought visible busyness on the desk equalled learning. It did not.

The truth is that cognitive science has known for a long time that variety for variety's sake can actually hinder language acquisition. When students encounter the same vocabulary in the same sentence builders, same knowledge organisers, same structures repeatedly, across lessons, across weeks, the language sticks. Novelty was never the goal. Consolidation was.

Before I go any further, a quick word on what these tips are and are not. Everything I share here has worked in my own classroom and still does; but that is my context, my students, my school. None of this is meant as instruction. Think of it as a conversation with a colleague over coffee: things you might want to consider if you are feeling overwhelmed by the sheer volume of advice out there, everyone telling you that you need to do this, and this, and this. That noise is real, and it is exhausting. Take what is useful, leave what is not.

Classroom tip 1: Pick three or four core activities you believe in: a retrieval task, a sentence builder task, a structured speaking activity and use them consistently. Students should know the format so well they barely need to read the instructions. That frees cognitive space for actual language learning.

This doesn't mean you're locked into these activities for the rest of your teaching career. It's simply a starting point. From there, you and your students can gradually build a broader repertoire together.

2. Behaviour management and language teaching are not separate problems.

I used to treat them as two different things: first I had to sort out the behaviour, and then I could teach. But the relationship runs deeper than that. A lot of low-level disruption in MFL classrooms can come from anxiety; speaking in front of peers in a language you barely know is genuinely terrifying for many students. Another point I significantly underestimated in my early years, though, was something more straightforward: the lack of clear routines. So much of what I was dealing with came down to students not knowing exactly what was expected of them, moment to moment. I had not sweated the small stuff enough. What time they should be in their seats, how they entered the room, what they did in the first two minutes of the lesson. I had glossed over all of it, assuming it would sort itself out or they will just know and behave as expected. It does not and they did not know. Consistency matters enormously. Clear, predictable expectations, held to every single lesson, remove a huge amount of the friction that eats into learning time. Once I tightened those routines and stuck to them, calmly, every time, the atmosphere shifted in a way that no amount of engaging activities had managed on its own.

When I started building more predictable, low-stakes oral routines into every lesson, things like choral repetition, partner echo activities, and 'no hands up' cold calling with support visible on the board, the atmosphere changed. Students who once went quiet or acted out had something to hold on to. Praise matters a lot in my classroom too, but I don't just hand it out. I save it for when it's really earned. That's what makes it mean something.

Classroom tip 2: Try ‘cover and recall’: project a sentence in L2 and ask students to copy it quietly, then cover it and try to write it from memory. It is silent, accessible, and it can work as a transition activity. More importantly, it tells you immediately who is struggling.

3. Marking is not the same as feedback, and feedback is not always written.

I spent the first few years of my career writing detailed comments on every piece of work. Red pen, green pen, margin notes, stickers. Students glanced at it for about eight seconds before turning the page.

The research on feedback is quite humbling in this regard. What changes student performance is acted-upon feedback, the kind where students read a comment and then do something with it, immediately, in lesson. Written marking that goes into a book and stays there is largely performative, useful for the teacher’s conscience, departmental / school policy or the SLT as evidence, not for the learner’s progress.

Classroom tip 3: Try ‘feedback into action’ slots. Return work without the grade / mark, give students five minutes to read your comments, and then set one specific task they must complete in response: rewrite a paragraph, replace three weak verbs, or correct four specific errors you have pre-selected. Students engage with the feedback because they cannot close the book until they’ve done something with it.

4. The students who are quiet are not necessarily fine.

The students who cause no trouble, who sit at the back and nod, who submit work that is technically adequate, these are the students who quietly slipped through the cracks, until I finally stopped rushing past them. Some had been coasting for a long time - passive learners. Some were deeply anxious and had simply learned to be invisible. Some had undiagnosed difficulties.

I wish I had been more curious earlier. Curious, not suspicious. The question ‘What is going on with this student?’ is one of the most important habits a teacher can build. We are much better now at identifying and supporting our vulnerable students, and rightly so but there is a group who still tend to slip through. The ones without a 'label'. No EHCP, no flag on the register, no one chasing you about them in briefings. They just quietly exist at the back of the room, doing just enough, and nobody notices because nobody is really looking. Those are often the students who needed the most from me and got the least, simply because they never demanded anything.

Classroom tip 4: Build in a brief 'check-in' mechanism that does not rely on students raising their hands. Traffic light cards, mini whiteboards held up, or even a simple thumb-up/sideways/down check at a transition point give you a read on the room without singling anyone out.

5. You are allowed to not know something.

This one is embarrassing and took me a while to admit. In my early years I was terrified of being caught out not knowing how to translate something from German into English (yes, English, not the other way round) precisely, searching for the right word and coming up blank, or forgetting the gender of a German noun I should probably have known. Rather than just saying so, I would bluff my way through it.

What I was modelling, without realising it, was that not knowing something is something to hide. In a language classroom, that is about the most counterproductive message you can send.

When I started being honest about it, saying ‘I know what I mean but I’m struggling to find the English word, can anyone help me?’ or ‘Let me look that up and you do the same, and we’ll see what we find’, something shifted. Students started doing the same. They stopped treating gaps in their knowledge as failure and started treating them as something to go and find out. That is exactly the relationship with language learning you want them to have.

Classroom tip 5: Keep a small 'we looked this up' section on the board or in students' books: a running record of things the class investigated together. It normalises not knowing, and students often remember those words better precisely because finding them felt like solving something.

6. Relationships are not the soft bit. They are the infrastructure.

Everything I have described above, the routines, the feedback, the curiosity about quiet students, only works inside a relationship. Not a friendship, not informality, but genuine mutual respect and the sense that you, the teacher, actually want this group of humans to succeed.

Students learn more from teachers they trust and respect. The research on this is pretty clear. Invest in knowing your students’ names correctly pronounced, their previous language learning experiences, and their relationship with the subject. It pays.

Sometimes, as a young teacher, we try to be liked and popular with our students and classes and in doing so, we can easily forget that this isn't a popularity contest, and we're not high school stuednts anymore ourselves. What matters is that our students trust and respect us. They don't have to love us! We've got plenty of people for that already 😉!

Classroom tip 5: Learn to pronounce every student's name correctly, and if you're unsure, ask them to teach you. It takes two minutes at the start of the year and the message it sends, that their identity matters in your classroom, lasts a lot longer than that.

I could write another ten things I wish I'd known. But if you are in your first few years and you are reading this at 10pm on a Sunday having just finished creating new resources, cutting up cards or laminating, let me say just this: the fact that you are still thinking about it, still looking for better, still caring, that matters more than any of the above. The rest you will work out. We all did.

If you found this useful, I would love to hear how you are dealing with these challenges in your own MFL classroom. Drop a comment below, the conversation is always better when more teachers are in it.