The best way to identify your students’ level and group dynamics. Ask yourself the following questions for each group: -

What is their level?

Are they going to find your planned task too easy or too hard?
What have they responded well to in the past?

Think about timing: –

How are you going to pace your different activities?
How many different activities are you going to include in your lesson?

Ensure you are clear in your objectives for your lessons. What pieces of language do you want them to be able to use at the end of the class?  Before you start any activity, make sure they know what sort of language you want them to produce. If it is topic-based, brainstorm some useful vocabulary, if it is verb-based, conjugate the verb beforehand.

Visual aids
Visuals are a good way of provoking a reaction. It helps you focus on something concrete, not always talking about the students themselves. Start off by asking very open questions, such as ‘What can you see on this page?’. Then move to reactions – ‘How does this picture make you feel?’, ‘What do you think this message is?’

Role play
If there is just the assistant and one student, this is a classic scenario for a role play. Prepare the vocabulary for the role play. Is it a structured GCSE role play or more open ended? Decide on your scenario at the outset and help your students find the phrases they might need.

Pronunciation
Working with individuals is an excellent opportunity for pronunciation practice. In large classes this is rare. Try tongue twisters!

Working with texts
If you work with short texts, then this will help communication. If you use long texts, you will spend too much time looking at comprehension. The Internet is often good for bite-sized chunks. Always have some good open ended questions to ask which move your students beyond the actual text. ‘What do you think?’, ‘Do you agree?’ etc.

If you have to teach individuals at advanced level for a fairly long time slot, it is very important to plan and vary activities. If you do the same type of activity for an hour, they will get bored easily. Use some of the lessons on FLAs Online to help you, such as ‘Internet Headlines’, ‘Fun with Dice’, and ‘Controversy Cards’. Use pictures and get them to talk about how the picture makes them feel.

If you take the same student on a regular basis, ask them to prepare their own texts on subjects they are interested in. Suggest a website for them to look at. Encourage them to make notes in their other classes of things they don’t understand or interest them so you can recap. In short, try to individualise the lesson, which along with good planning, should improve their performance.

If you have weak students who are reluctant to speak, it is crucial to provide them with a model of what you want them to say. Try to keep this as simple and lively as possible. Maybe a maximum of three sentences, but including a simple opinion: e.g. ‘I go jogging twice a week. It’s great fun!’

Students learn better when they have some sort of textual support. It’s not cheating, it’s like a helping hand. Once they understand the model sentence, you can teach them to adapt it and make new sentences.

Another activity you can try is to prepare some flashcards in one colour with questions you want them to ask you, e.g. ‘Do you have brothers and sisters?’, ‘What is your house like?’ Then prepare another set of cards in a different colour with answers to the questions. Distribute the cards amongst your group. Get pupils to answer you a question and then give your reply. The pupil with the correct answer card also wins the question card. When all the questions have been asked, work with pupils to put the questions and answers in the third person. Then collect all the cards, mix them up and hand them out again.

Try some of the lessons on FLAs Online, such as ‘Who wants to be a millionaire?’ and ‘Through the keyhole’.

Pair cards
If your students are having problems remembering verb forms in any tense, you could make some cards, e.g. one with ‘ich’ and one with ‘tanze’, one with ‘du’ and one with 'tanzt’, mix them up and get the students to pair them up. You could do two sets and get different groups to match them against the clock.

Multiple choice
If your students are bored of learning verb endings or practising spelling, you can make it into a game by using your own questions, e.g. ich a) tanze, b) tanzt, c) tanse, d) tanz, or you could look in magazines such as ‘Marie Clare’ for ready made quizzes.

Year 13 and 14 - Taboo
More advanced students sometimes get bored with games, but you could try ‘Taboo’. It is a board game that you can buy in the UK, but you can also make your own version. The principle is that one student has to describe a word and the other students guess what it is. However, there is a short list of 3-4 forbidden words which they cannot use, e.g. if the word is ‘cruise’ the forbidden short-list may be ‘boat’, ‘sea’, ‘seasickness’ or ‘the Nile’.  It’s a good way to revise vocabulary and to get into the habit of thinking in the foreign language.

To make the most of ‘Taboo’, use it to revise some vocabulary after studying a particular theme or to revise something the students just learnt with a language teacher.

Teaching pronouns
The best way to teach pronouns in all languages is to use movement of some kind. Think of five sentences you want to use to practise the order of pronouns and write each word from your sentences on a separate piece of card. Give the cards to the students so that each student has one or two words and get them to stand up holding the words in front of them. Then tell them the sentence in English.

For example, in French, cut up the words from ‘je lui donne un cadeau’. Tell the students to form the sentence ‘I am giving her a present’. The students then have to move around to get the words in the right order.

If you are asked or you decide to arrange a ‘Language Taster Day’ for a primary school, it is the ideal opportunity to show students how language learning can be fun. You could do colours, numbers, a short shopping dialogue, a song, a poem or animals.

The thing to remember with younger learners is to use lots of movement to reinforce meaning and to make things fun. Look at the ‘Gymnastics’, ‘Alphabet Games’, ‘Calendar’, 'Fun with Dice', 'Making Dialogues Fun' and 'Adjective Addiction' lessons on FLAs Online

With older students you can organise debates. Balloon debates are where each person is either famous or has a job (e.g. doctor, dentist, farmer etc) and they have to persuade the others that they shouldn’t be thrown out of the balloon.

Otherwise decide on a topic to discuss and divide the class into two groups, ‘for’ and ‘against’. Give the groups 15 minutes to prepare a presentation and nominate a group leader to present. Make sure that each member of the opposing group gets the chance to challenge the speaker so the most confident students don’t take over.  Then, the second group leader presents their point of view and the other group asks the questions.

You can also give less serious topics for smaller groups to discuss, e.g. ‘Beckham is better than Ballack’ or ‘Spaghetti is better than Spirelli’, which will also generate discussion and improve vocabulary.

You might find that your students are bored of discussing drugs, alcoholism and the standard A level discussion topics. Look at some teen magazines from your country and use the articles in there to decide on ideas for topics and improving their vocabulary.

If your school has the CILT Pathfinder ‘Advancing Oral Skills’, that has some great ideas. You can also try the FLAs Online lessons ‘Running Dictation’, ‘Internet Headlines’ and ‘Controversy Cards’.

The Edexcel exam has a unit where students have to defend an opinion and stick to it, so you can help them by giving them phrases that help them do this and saying they disagree with the examiner.

Even if your students are quite advanced and motivated, you still need to plan carefully so as to stimulate them.  If you do one text or the same activity for an hour you will all get bored, so think how to structure your class.

Start by looking at the news. Use the ‘Internet Headlines’ from FLAs Online. Have a short text for them to read out to practice pronunciation. ‘Fun with Dice’ is also good.

You could also get them to watch a film or programme on TV (ideally in the foreign language, but an English one is OK). Give them some questions in French/German/Spanish etc for them as a stimulus to encourage them to give their opinions on the programme. Get them to look at film reviews in French/German/Spanish on the Internet to help them improve their vocabulary.

Encourage them to note down things of interest from their other lessons to discuss with you. Ask the language teacher if you can revise things that they found difficult in their lesson. If you have a fairly small class, try to individualise the lesson so that you can really concentrate on their improvement.

It’s always important not to single out shy students in front of the class so their confidence isn’t further damaged. You need to go for easy topics with them to help their confidence. First of all, find a GCSE textbook and choose a topic. Get the shy students to read aloud and give them sentences to agree with or disagree with. Then get them to prepare a short presentation giving them lots of help with the structure. You may have to adapt this idea depending on whether all your students are shy or just some of them.

Once you have carried out this task, try it again with another GCSE topic, then build up to AS and A level if appropriate.

You can talk about news items as an introduction to the class. If your students are not of a high enough level, you could write out real headlines from a newspaper from your country (using the Internet if you don’t have current newspapers) and get the students to try to guess the news story.

You could also cut some adverts out of a magazine and see if the students can guess what product the advert is trying to promote.

Assistants who teach in primary schools are in an excellent position to get children in the UK interested in languages. You may be the first person they have ever heard speaking your language and will be interested in hearing about where you come from. This will hopefully give them an easier start when they start secondary school. Try to make the lessons fun by using lots of games and gestures. Primary school students are often keen to get actively involved and are less concerned about getting things wrong, but give them plenty of encouragement and don’t over correct them.

It’s important to remember that when you first learn a language at a young age, it is usually through speaking, listening and copying, not so much reading and writing. Younger children are often quicker at learning new vocabulary and pronunciation.

When language learning was made compulsory (it’s not compulsory after Year 9 now) it was decided that language learning should be practical and useful, so there was a move to topic based/tourist language. Schools and teachers are under pressure to achieve good exam results to improve their position in school league tables, so teachers often stick to topics very closely.

Therefore, many students find it difficult to create language and put it together themselves because they have been used to learning answers by heart. This is why foreign languages are less popular than other subjects post GCSE.

It may be frustrating for FLAs, but you can’t change the system yourself! However, you can make small changes by identifying structures/vocabulary that you want the pupils to be able to master and you concentrate on that. It is certainly helpful to break sentences down for pupils so that they understand the function of each element. Think small and help at word level, then sentence level.

If you are finding it hard to get to know people, especially local people who are not fellow FLAs, you could try to set up an ‘intercambio’, where you meet someone and talk in English for an hour, then in your language for an hour. Advertise at school as someone may have a friend or family member who wants to improve their language skills.  

Do you like sport, drama or art? You might be able to get involved with training the football/hockey team, the school play or something else. It’s a good way to get more involved in school life.

Most local councils run evening classes in subjects ranging from another language to pottery or ICT. These are often quite cheap and a good way to get to know people.

Ensure your personal safety! However desperate you are to meet people, don’t advertise your phone number on any public place otherwise you could put yourself in danger.

The Cambridge Certificate of Proficiency in English (CPE) is the highest level of the Cambridge exams in English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL). It is a very advanced level exam, set at Level C2 of the Council of Europe’s Common European Framework for modern languages.

Successful candidates receive a certificate awarded by University of Cambridge ESOL Examinations. The certificate is recognised by universities and employers throughout the world. All candidates receive a statement of results, showing how they performed in each of the five papers. You can find out more about how to take the exam on the CPE website.

Becoming a teacher in the UK
The British Council sends out a green leaflet to all FLAs, it provides details of all the routes to becoming a fully qualified teacher in the UK. All the necessary information can be found on the National Centre for Languages website (CILT).