Resources to support language (L1 and L2) teachers

This page offers a number of resources to support teachers and language development across the curriculum. It is divided into sections:

• General
• How awareness of L1 supports L2 learning, and vice versa. 
• Past SPaG (Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar) test papers
• Teaching grammar
  • Books and websites for teaching English grammar
• The language of school subjects
• For Primary schools (KS1&2)
  • A publicly available and editable spreadsheet of resources for primary language
• For Secondary schools/ colleges (KS3-5)
• Projects
• Relevant associations

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General

• The Languages Gateway hosted by the British Academy.
• The Council of Europe’s language resources such as the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR).
• ESOL provision in the UK  (2018)
• A rich and well organised collection of teaching material by linguists at Queen Mary UL: Teach Real English!  including:
  • teaching units on non-Standard varieties, language change, language variation, etc.
  • sample texts as audio and transcribed, with linguistic commentary
  • links to academic research
  • a Linguistics Research Digest run as a blog by linguists.
• Babel Magazine, published at the University of Huddersfield for secondary schools.
• A free online magazine called ‘Unravelling’ about linguistics run by and for students; it started in Singapore but has an international coverage.

Teaching grammar

• Grammatical comparisons of English with foreign languages:
  • French
  • German
• Grammar in the National Curriculum – resources provided by NALA (the National Association of Language Advisors) to help FL teachers to build on grammar taught in KS2 English.
• Non-standard grammar
  • The Scots Dialect Syntax Atlas – a wonderful website showing non-Standard features of Scottish English and where they are used (in Scotland)
  • The British Library’s archive of dialect material
  • Tweetolectology – geographical dialectology via Twitter! An ongoing project based in Cambridge.
• Grammar in the classroom – a page about how teachers actually teach grammar.
• Englicious  for pupils and teachers.
• The UCL grammar app for teachers.
• The UCL Internet Grammar for anyone, including teachers.
• Grammarianism – Bas Aarts’s blog about grammar teaching.
• Dick Hudson’s page on grammar for KS3 teachers.
• Dick Hudson’s page on grammar in the Secondary Strategy.
• Lingo Boingo – a small collection of online games (English and French) in grammatical analysis.

For Primary

• Online lessons in Language Science for primary schools in the USA.
• Phoneme-grapheme correspondences in different UK accents.

For Secondary

• The National Consortium for Languages Education.
• The Resources Portal for the National Centre for Excellence in Language Pedagogy.
• The York English Language Toolkit – a collection of background materials for teaching A-level English Language.
• A blog by linguists at QMUL summarising relevant linguistics research for teachers of A-level English Language.
• A collection of teaching units on linguistic topics called ‘Teach Real English’ also from the QMUL team.
• A site for supporting the study of literary language in A-level English Language (especially in the AQA exam).
• Research summaries for supporting a unified approach to literary and non-literary language in English, especially at A level.
• All Talk: resources for the study of spoken language produced by Tim Shortis and Julie Blake funded by BT.
• The LINC (Language in the National Curriculum) materials  on CD
• Emma Moore‘s ‘Language and Identity in the National Curriculum: A Scheme of Work‘
• The linguistics of French, German and Spanish (for providers of PGCE and other Initial Teacher Training courses).
• Two exotic classification systems (from Papua New Guinea), showing how gender and classifiers can be used to classify objects in very different ways.

Projects and organisations

• A scheme developed in Hampshire for training pupils as interpreters to support isolated EAL children.
• IRIS – a free, digital repository for materials used to collect data for research into second languages.
• OASIS – a collection of specially written accessible summaries of key research articles on second-language teaching.
• LCLC – the London Centre for Languages and Cultures, run by Oxford University and the Open University for London Schools.

Relevant associations

• British Dyslexia Association
• National Association of Advisers in English
• National Resource Centre for Supplementary Education