How a lesson fits together
Every lesson in this bank holds the same nineteen activities, ordered the way a language is learned: recall first, then the new structure met inside real text, then the rule made explicit and checked, then practice with the support taken away, then production.
There is no house method here. Nothing on the sheet assumes a particular lesson structure, and Ofsted’s own research review for languages accepts that there is no single way to teach a language well. What the sequence gives you is a shape you can stretch across two or three lessons on one topic, or compress into a single hour — and a reason for every part of it that you can say out loud.
One — Start with what they already hold
Recall before anything new. Done cold and in silence, it tells you in one minute who has retained what, before you have committed to a plan. Matching pairs, translating into English, gap-fill, dictation.
Two — Meet the structure inside a text
The new language appears in real text before anyone names the rule. Pupils highlight it, say what they notice, then try one themselves. The reference box on the page can be printed or withheld: leave it in when a class needs the scaffold, take it out when you want the noticing to be genuine.
Three — Make the rule explicit, then check it
Now the rule is worked through, with examples and exceptions. Checking follows immediately and in three forms — in the ear, in word order, and against a deliberate error — because a pupil who has memorised the words and not the rule passes some checks and fails others.
Four — Practise with support, then without
Practice starts closed and heavily scaffolded and ends open. The sentence-builder columns let them produce language longer than they could write unaided; the picture task takes the columns away. Feedback happens while you circulate, because the teacher sheet carries every answer and every model answer.
Five — Read it, then close it
The long reading text sits late rather than early, and deliberately so: a cold unseen text at the start of a lesson produces guessing, not reading. The stretch task is where differentiation lives — there are no foundation and higher versions of a lesson, so what varies is who reaches it and how far in they get. The plenary closes on the endpoint, with the model answers on the teacher sheet only.
Four ways to run it
- One hour, one focus — activities 1, 3, 4, 16, 19. Recall, meet, apply, check, close.
- One topic across two lessons — 1, 3, 4, 5, 2, 7, 8, 9, 6, 10, then 11, 12, 13, 17, 16, 14, 15, 18, 19. Lesson one meets the structure; lesson two reads it and produces it. Both lessons run the full release — retrieval, modelling, checks, independent practice — and both close with the plenary.
- One topic across three lessons — 1, 3, 2, 4, 7, 8, then 5, 10, 9, 16, 6, 14, then 11, 12, 13, 15, 18, 19. The same sheet, opened three times, with nothing new to find in between.
- A lesson you are not there for — 1, 5, 10, 11, 12, 13, 18. Everything a cover teacher can set without speaking the language.
Reorder them however you like: the numbering never moves, so the dictation is still activity 17 even when you teach it third. The selector on every lesson decides which of them reach the desk.
If someone is watching the lesson
You are not being asked to justify our lesson structure, because there is not one. You are being asked to justify yours, and every part of the sheet is easy to account for:
Retrieval happens first and it is visible. New language is modelled before it is practised. Understanding is checked more than once and in more than one way. Scaffolding is deliberate and it comes off — the reference box and the builder columns are both optional by design. Practice is independent and feedback is live. Differentiation is by depth, not by worksheet: the same sheet goes to everyone.
Why this shape
Rosenshine’s principles of instruction describe the same architecture: begin with a review of prior learning, present new material in small steps, provide models, guide practice, check for understanding frequently, scaffold difficult tasks, then require independent practice. The nineteen activities are that sequence made concrete for a language classroom, where the review is vocabulary and form rather than facts, and the checking has to happen in the ear as well as on the page.
Rosenshine, Principles of Instruction (2012). Ofsted, curriculum research review series: languages (2021).