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.
Jane Willis joins us to discuss the drawbacks of PPP and the benefits and challenges of using task cycles for language lessons.
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.
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?
We interview second language acquisition legend, Vivian Cook about his career in second language teaching and learning. Professor Cook tells us about how L2 users think differently to monolinguals, his own experiences as a language learner, teacher and researcher and what has changed in language teaching over the course of his career.
Whoever you are, whatever you teach, you’ll probably use a coursebook. How can you make the best use of the coursebook you've been given? We celebrate our fiftieth episode by interviewing world expert on language learning materials, Professor Brian Tomlinson from University of Anaheim about how teachers can better adapt their coursebooks.
Materials creation can be both an outlet for teachers' creativity and an opportunity to make lessons more relevant to students. On the flip side they can also be a giant time-drain and introduce uncertainty to students. Find out what you can use as materials, how to evaluate how useful they are and when it might just be better to stick to the course book.
