My friend Niamh Ryan, joins me to talk about evaluating teacher training. How can you tell if your training is making a difference?
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.
Dave Weller joins the show to discuss the benefits and limitations of AI for teachers. Dave explains how AI can help automate administrative tasks and free up time for the more creative aspects of teaching. He also talks about how AI can help teachers in lesson planning, creating customized materials, and analyzing student performance data to differentiate instruction. We also talk about some of the limitations of AI and why it is important to treat AI as a tool rather than outsourcing everything to it.
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.
Young learner expert, Annamaria Pinter joins me to talk about getting young learners to communicate with each other.
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?
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.
Professor Jonathan Newton joins me to discuss teaching listening skills. Does it make sense to talk about top-down and bottom-up approaches? How can we practice these in the classroom? And what are Jonathan’s top tips for improving students’ speaking skills?
Thom Kiddle joins me to talk about online teacher training courses. What makes them effective? What best practices are there for trainers? And what kinds of questions can teachers ask to help trainees reflect?
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.