We speak with friends and experts about teacher training and what needs to change. Our guests are David Nunan, Kathleen Bailey, Thomas Guskey, Steve Walsh, Mark Hancock, Marek Kiczkowiak, and Chris Rolland.
Jane Willis joins us to discuss the drawbacks of PPP and the benefits and challenges of using task cycles for language lessons.
Students need to speak to learn a language and the more students talk, the more they learn. Not according to Professor Stephen Krashen. For 40 years he has championed the concept that what students should be doing in class is reading (and listening), not speaking. In this episode, Stephen tells Ross some of the arguments against forcing students to speak, something which might not just be inefficient, but in some cases counterproductive.
In this episode, I had the privilege of speaking with Professor Lesley Painter Farrell about how we can help students retain more language lessons for the long haul. During the podcast, Lesley outlines the difference between short-term learning and long-term memory. We discuss evidence-based techniques teachers can implement to optimize retention. Lesley also shares some simple but effective techniques such as recycling content across lessons, building in reflection time, avoiding cognitive overload, and using retrieval practices. Listen now to uncover how we can help our students remember more.
Professor Kathi Bailey joins us to discuss teacher evaluation. Teacher evaluation can do so much good, but it can also end up doing even more harm. Professor Bailey tells us about what supervisors can do to earn trust, why supervision and evaluation is important, and how everyone can make the most out of the process.
You taught the vocab, you practiced the grammar, drilled the pronunciation, checked the concepts, played the listening and… the students understood next to nothing. But why?! We ask Mark Hancock (author of Pronunciation Games, English Pronunciation in Use and Pron Pack) what makes authentic English listening so difficult for students and what teachers can do to help learners understand connected speech.
The end of the year means performance review time. How often do you go into a performance reviewing thinking “I’m really excited about this”? If you’re anything like us, probably never. We talk about why performance reviews get a bad reputation, why they’re not all bad and what teachers and managers can do to get the most out of them.
For our 75th episode, we discuss a question which is both very simple and highly complex: What’s the best way to learn a language? We challenged each other to fit everything we could about language learning onto a single page of A4 paper, then compare our notes in a marathon 60-minute discussion. For maximum effect, prepare your own notes on “What’s the Best Way to Learn a Language” before you listen.
The second of our two-part special on technology in the classroom, with Ray Davila, where we discuss the drawbacks of the increasing involvement of technology in education. We talk about what gets neglected instead of technology (where did the budget for those interactive whiteboards come from anyway?!), the effects on how teachers are assessed and evaluated and if technology might eliminate the need to learn a language altogether in the near future…
We celebrate our third anniversary podcast by inviting six of our favorite guests to tell us what they’ve changed their minds about in language teaching over the course of their careers. Over the course of 35 minutes in our longest episode ever, Carol Lethaby, Dave Weller, Karin Xie, Matt Courtois, Paul Nation and Simon Galloway discuss grammar teaching, teaching roles, the Dunning–Kruger effect, communicative language teaching and more.
We interview second language acquisition legend, Vivian Cook about his career in second language teaching and learning. Professor Cook tells us about how L2 users think differently to monolinguals, his own experiences as a language learner, teacher and researcher and what has changed in language teaching over the course of his career.
Timing causes so many problems for teachers – activities which run on too long, running out of time at the end of a lesson, not finding time to plan or reflect – but we rarely discuss time and how to deal with it. In this episode Ross and Trinity CertTESOL course director Allan Crocker discuss the issues related to time; how time influences how we teach, the problems it causes and how we can spend it better.
We spend a lot of our time asking questions, either to our students, our trainees or ourselves. What makes an effective question? We discuss different models of asking questions to students, typical mistakes trainers make in asking questions and the most powerful questions we can ask ourselves to reflect.
You've probably heard (possibly on this podcast) about the discrimination "non-native English teachers" can face finding jobs, in being promoted or receiving equal pay. But how does Native-speakerism affect what happens inside the classroom? How do attitudes about native speakers affect the content in our course books, the confidence of teachers and the goals of our students? We speak with Marek Kiczkowiak to find out.
In our second of two podcasts recorded at IATEFL Liverpool (this one recorded at the end of day one), we speak with our favorite podcast guests Matt Courtois, Simon Galloway & Dave Weller about how teachers and trainers can challenge themselves and discuss sessions by Paula Rebolledo, Adrian Underhill and Julie Choi & David Nunan.
In a special long form episode, we talk about our highlights from IATEFL 2019 in Liverpool with our favorite guests, Dave Weller, Matt Courtois and Simon Galloway. We discuss talks by Adrian Underhill, Alan Maley, Brian Tomlinson, Rob Bolitho, John Gray, Scott Thornbury, Silvana Richardson and many more.
