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.
Teacher Evaluation - A Double Edged Sword (with Professor Kathleen Bailey)
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.
Episode 200! Best and Worst Common and Uncommon Teaching Practices
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.
6th Anniversary Episode: Our Teachers' Teachers
No man is an island, and no teacher is either. We’ve all been influenced by someone in our own teaching, be it colleagues, trainers, authors or our own teachers. But who influenced them? In our longest ever episode, we ask English language teaching legends Diedrick Van Gorp, Debbie Hepplewhite, Stephen Krashen, Vivian Cook, David Crystal, Jack Richards, Hugh Dellar, Alan Maley, Penny Ur and David Weller about their influences and what they learned from them.
Behavior: the Elephant in the Classroom (with Chris Roland)
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.
5th Anniversary Podcast: The Best Language Learning Activities Known To Mankind
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?”
Xmas Special: What Kind of English Should Be in Our Coursebooks? (with Jack Richards)
Since it’s Christmas, we bring you a double length episode with Professor Jack Richards. We discuss a range of issues related to English and coursebooks: how has curriculum design changed? What influence has the CEFR had on coursebooks? How does English as a Lingua Franca affect what we should teach? What effect does all the English available outside the classroom on the internet have on students and teachers inside the classroom?
Haloween Special: Zombies of TEFL (with Diederik Van Gorp and Allan Crocker)
4th Anniversary Podcast: What Have You Learned From Learning a Language
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.
Episode 100! A Brief History of English (With David Crystal)
We celebrate our 100th episode by interviewing linguist, writer, editor, lecturer and broadcaster Professor David Crystal about the history of English. David takes us all the way back to the first surviving example of written English, to the birth of American English to the spread of text messaging to the present day with the internet and corpus linguistics.
Xmas Special - Native-speakerism and Discrimination (with Marek Kiczkowiak)
Episode 75! What's The Best Way to Learn a Language (With Dave Weller)
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.
3rd Anniversary Podcast: What Have You Changed Your Mind About? (with Carol Lethaby, Dave Weller, Karin Xie, Matt Courtois, Paul Nation & Simon Galloway)
We celebrate our third anniversary podcast by inviting six of our favorite guests to tell us what they’ve changed their minds about in language teaching over the course of their careers. Over the course of 35 minutes in our longest episode ever, Carol Lethaby, Dave Weller, Karin Xie, Matt Courtois, Paul Nation and Simon Galloway discuss grammar teaching, teaching roles, the Dunning–Kruger effect, communicative language teaching and more.
Podcast: Highlights from IATEFL 2019 (with Dave Weller, Simon Galloway & Matt Courtois)
In a special long form episode, we talk about our highlights from IATEFL 2019 in Liverpool with our favorite guests, Dave Weller, Matt Courtois and Simon Galloway. We discuss talks by Adrian Underhill, Alan Maley, Brian Tomlinson, Rob Bolitho, John Gray, Scott Thornbury, Silvana Richardson and many more.