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.
We celebrate our 100th episode by interviewing linguist, writer, editor, lecturer and broadcaster Professor David Crystal about the history of English. David takes us all the way back to the first surviving example of written English, to the birth of American English to the spread of text messaging to the present day with the internet and corpus linguistics.
Young learner and teens expert Chris Roland talks to us about giving differentiated support to students. We discuss which students we are trying to help when we differentiate, which students teachers tend to forget about when they plan and how to differentiate without needing to spend twice as long preparing materials as usual.
As a teacher trainer, one of the most uncomfortable experiences in telling trainees they failed something; a class, an assignment or possibly even a whole course. We speak Trinity College London CertTESOL and DipTESOL course director with Felicity Pyatt about what to do when that happens. How to decide to ‘fail’ a trainee, how to break the news and how to help trainees bounce back.
Russell Stannard joins me to talk about online teaching. We discuss some of the current challenges that teachers around the world are facing due to Covid19 forcing classes to go online, and we also talk about what the longer term effects on teaching and learning will be. How will this encourage learner autonomy? How will it change the role of the teacher? And how could it create more learning outside of the classroom?
Regular guest Matt Courtois returns to discuss teaching groups of young learners online. We focus on some of the advantages of online teaching – what is it possible to do online, that isn’t possible to do offline? How to get students to genuinely and meaningfully communicate with each other online? And why tech problems and glitches might actually be the best part of online language lessons.
Lots gets said about the value of graded readers, but how can teachers use these in class? We speak with Diploma in TESOL course director Anne Carmichael about using graded readers with students at different levels, how teachers can integrate different skills using graded readers and how teachers can deal with new language from the texts.
“Coursebooks make good servants, but poor masters.” But who is usually the master in the language classroom? The teacher or the coursebook? Ian McGrath joins us to discuss how coursebooks can be used, what affect they have on teacher autonomy and how teachers can make themselves the masters rather than servants.
For our last podcast of the year (and the decade!) we interview prolific TEFL author Mario Rinvolucri. “Most of the vocabulary teaching that gets done is based on texts, written, audio, or video. The problem with this kind of text-based teaching is that everything is external to the learner: the text hits him or her from outside. It makes much better motivational sense to have the new words rise from a situation that is internal to the students, where they create the situation that ushers in the need for new words.” Today we explore this idea with Mario Rinvolucri, author of “Vocabulary” and “Humanizing Your Coursebook”, how teachers can make vocabulary teaching more student-centered.
