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.
“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” Maya Angelou. But how to get started? We speak with Professor Alan Maley, author of Creativity and English Language Teaching, about how constraints can prompt creativity in teachers and what teachers can do to bring in their lives, interests and personalities to make the classrooms more creative.
Texts are a starting point for many lessons. But what about using a text with no words? Mark Hancock (author of Pronunciation Games, English Pronunciation in Use, Pron Pack and Pen Pictures) tells us about basing lessons around pictures and using these to generate stories, descriptions, language needs and much more.
Ian McGrath, author of Learner Autonomy, Teacher Autonomy: Future Directions talks to us about teacher autonomy. How can teacher education help make teachers more autonomous? How do observations from supervisors and student testing encroach on teachers’ decision making? And how can observations and testing be redesigned to give teachers the freedom to teach students the way they need to be taught?
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.
