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.
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.
Letterland teacher trainer Lesley White tells Ross about phonics. We touch on the history, the advantages of phonics over other approaches, different options to teachers within the phonics system and some of the differences between learning to read in your first language and in your second language.
We break our record for the most guests on one show ever! Hear experts from the TEFL industry with over 200 years of collective experience share their favorite language learning activities. We speak with Edmund Dudley, John Hughes, Matt Courtois, Brian Tomlinson, Ben Beaumont, Dave Weller, Wendy Arnold, Debbie Hepplewhite, Ray Davila and Diederik Van Gorp and ask them all the same question: “What’s your favorite language teaching activity?”
Ross interviews phonics expert, Debbie Hepplewhite MBE about what phonics is and why it’s so important. Debbie tells us about vocabulary enrichment, the importance of recycling, why English is so difficult to read, and much more. Debbie has worked as an adviser to the British Government for the parliamentary inquiry ‘Teaching Children to Read’ (March 2005) and she helped to inform Sir Jim Rose’s ‘Independent review of the teaching of early reading’ (Final Report, Jim Rose, March 2006) and in 2012 was awarded an MBE from the Queen for services to education.
What stages do students pass through in learning a language? Stephen Krashen, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, tells us about the conduit hypothesis. We discuss the role of reading, the growing importance of listening and how to encourage students to read and acquire more through comprehensible input.
We meet with friends, family and special guests to hear about how language learning experiences affect and inform our views of language learning. In our longest podcast ever, we hear from Patsy Lightbown, Professor at Concordia University Canada about language learning experiences in Africa and North America; from teaching guru Ben Beaumont, from Trinity College London about the trauma of learning French at high school; from Janice Thorburn, former German and French teacher about learning German through grammar-translation and what that meant for her teaching later in her career; from our regular podcast guest Matt Courtois, about language immersion in Nepal, Russia, China and Bolivia led to very different outcomes; and from author and teacher trainer Wendy Arnold about how in spite of being a native English speaker in Peru, she failed her English exams at school.
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.
The second of our two-part special on technology in the classroom, with Ray Davila, where we discuss the drawbacks of the increasing involvement of technology in education. We talk about what gets neglected instead of technology (where did the budget for those interactive whiteboards come from anyway?!), the effects on how teachers are assessed and evaluated and if technology might eliminate the need to learn a language altogether in the near future…
All language lessons need a context. Language must be learned and practiced in context. Without context, students cannot remember or use new vocabulary. You've probably heard these arguments before (possibly on this podcast), but are they true? We discuss the pros and cons of context with our friend and teacher trainer (and former many other things!) Diederik Van Gorp.
We speak with Carol Lethaby about what neuroscience can do for language teaching. We know more about how the brain works and how learning occurs than ever before, so why does so little of it get used? Carol is an English language teacher, teacher trainer, ELT consultant and author who has coauthored Just Right Second Edition (Cengage Learning) and English ID (Richmond Publishing) as well as articles on Neuroscience in IATEFL Voices and Neuromyths in the Teacher Trainer Journal.
