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.
We talk to friends and experts and ask two questions about changes they’d like to see in classrooms: what common teaching practices would you like to see less? And, which less common teaching practices would you like to see more? Guests include Penny Ur, Karin Xie, Ian McGrath, Kathleen Baily, Donald Freeman, Rod Bolitho, Anne Burns and Tessa Woodward.
Paul Thompson from Birmingham University joins me to talk about English for academic purposes. What is academic English? How much does it vary between subjects? How can teachers assigned to teach academic English figure out what to teach? Which activities from general English classes translate best to academic English classes? And asides from listening to lectures, what do university students need English for?
Dave Weller joins me to talk about how to promote your writing. Dave tells us why you shouldn’t start a blog, where you can write instead, how to promote your writing across different platforms, how to find out what people search for online, how to choose a title for your writing and the key to writing a best selling book.
Why don't we teach writing more? Is writing less interesting than other skills? Or less useful? Or just harder to teach? We (Ross, Tracy and Matt Courtois) speak to published author and ESL writing specialist David Tait about how to teach writing and the students who thrive when writing that we forget about when teaching speaking.
