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.
I speak with Amol Padwad from Ambedkar University Delhi about teacher motivation and teacher development. What incentives make sense for teachers at different stages of their career? What demotivates teachers from wanting to develop? And how can schools encourage all their teachers to develop without forcing them?
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.
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.
As a teacher trainer, one of the most uncomfortable experiences in telling trainees they failed something; a class, an assignment or possibly even a whole course. We speak Trinity College London CertTESOL and DipTESOL course director with Felicity Pyatt about what to do when that happens. How to decide to ‘fail’ a trainee, how to break the news and how to help trainees bounce back.
In our second of two podcasts recorded at IATEFL Liverpool (this one recorded at the end of day one), we speak with our favorite podcast guests Matt Courtois, Simon Galloway & Dave Weller about how teachers and trainers can challenge themselves and discuss sessions by Paula Rebolledo, Adrian Underhill and Julie Choi & David Nunan.
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.
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.
Becoming a teacher trainer is super popular career goal for new teachers, but it can also seem pretty daunting. How can you move from teaching into training?We speak with three teacher trainers (Simon Galloway, Ray Davila and Dave Weller) about their careers; where they started, where they are now and how they got there.
