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.
Simon Galloway (author of Teaching Teachers Online) joins me to discuss how to run webinars. We discuss how to make the most of breakout rooms, polls and chatboxes, why webinars should be part of distance learning courses and when to avoid using webinars.
Dr. Paul Thompson from the University of Birmingham talks to me about how teachers can use corpora and corpus data with students. We discuss the benefits of using corpora with students. What teachers and students need to know about corpora like COCA (The Corpus of Contemporary American English) to be able to use these effectively. Paul also tells us about his favorite corpus-based activities which teachers can use with students.
Professor Michael McCarthy joins me to talk about what vocabulary we should teach and how to teach it. Mike tells us about the most common words in English and what non-common words we should teach our students, what aspects of vocabulary we should teach at different levels and how to stop students from forgetting the vocabulary they’ve already learned.
Student behavior and trying to control student behavior is huge worry for many teachers of young learners and teenagers, yet it’s also one of the least talked about. In this special length end of year episode, we talk with Chris Roland, author of Understanding Teenagers in the ELT Classroom about why students don’t always behave as teachers would like them to, why behavior gets discussed so little on teacher training courses and what teachers can do to better manage their students’ behavior.
All language students speak a first language, but what do we do with it? Some teachers ban it. Some teachers use it to teach English in. Some schools make students sign a pledge never to use it. Penny Ur tells us about what we can do take advantage of students first language, when to avoid it and when even to encourage it.
Professor David Carless from the University of Hong Kong joins me to talk about feedback. David tells us why our students should spend more time reading and acting on feedback than teachers spend writing it, how we can use examples from outstanding students to help students give feedback to themselves and how much should the content of feedback be based on teachers’ ideas as opposed to students.
I speak with Rhonda Oliver, SLA expert with young learners about tasks and interactions with young learners. Does speaking with other students help students learn language? How can teachers design tasks which students will find interesting? And which students should teachers pair their students with to get the most out of group work tasks?
Ian McGrath, author of Learner Autonomy, Teacher Autonomy: Future Directions talks to us about teacher autonomy. How can teacher education help make teachers more autonomous? How do observations from supervisors and student testing encroach on teachers’ decision making? And how can observations and testing be redesigned to give teachers the freedom to teach students the way they need to be taught?
Wendy Arnold passes on a wealth of experience of teaching and writing about young learners. Wendy tells us about how young learners' home lives affect their development, how the expectations of teachers and materials writers can effect student achievement and the problems associated with one size fits all curricula and coursebooks.
Parents are one of the most important factors in determining how successful students are. In this episode, Jake Whiddon and I discuss how to involve parents in young learners’ learning. Why is it important to involve students' parents in language learning? How can we demonstrate learning to parents? What can teachers do to help parents understand language learning?
