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.
Dr. Paul Thompson from the University of Birmingham talks to me about how teachers can use corpora and corpus data with students. We discuss the benefits of using corpora with students. What teachers and students need to know about corpora like COCA (The Corpus of Contemporary American English) to be able to use these effectively. Paul also tells us about his favorite corpus-based activities which teachers can use with students.
Professor Michael McCarthy joins me to talk about what vocabulary we should teach and how to teach it. Mike tells us about the most common words in English and what non-common words we should teach our students, what aspects of vocabulary we should teach at different levels and how to stop students from forgetting the vocabulary they’ve already learned.
