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.
Professor Michael McCarthy joins me to talk about using corpora in language teaching. Mike tells us how teachers should use corpora when planning lessons, the advantages and disadvantages of showing corpora to students. We discuss how teachers can create their own corpora and how to use corpora to create better materials.
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.
Understanding what people in say from the sounds they make is all but impossible without context, even in our first language. So how can we make more use of this amazing tool which helps prediction, understanding, engagement and application? We discuss what context is, why it’s important and how to incorporate it when teaching adults, teaching kids and in teacher training.
