If you regularly listen to this podcast, the chances are you listen because you want to be a better teacher. But what is the best way to become a better teacher? Is it attending training? Is it being observed by your boss? Is it watching your peers teach? In a special end of year double length episode, Professor Thomas Guskey, author of Evaluating Professional Development talks to us about the best way to help teachers learn and the evidence for workshops, peer observations and what the best teachers do that the rest of us don’t.
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.
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.
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.
Timing causes so many problems for teachers – activities which run on too long, running out of time at the end of a lesson, not finding time to plan or reflect – but we rarely discuss time and how to deal with it. In this episode Ross and Trinity CertTESOL course director Allan Crocker discuss the issues related to time; how time influences how we teach, the problems it causes and how we can spend it better.
We spend a lot of our time asking questions, either to our students, our trainees or ourselves. What makes an effective question? We discuss different models of asking questions to students, typical mistakes trainers make in asking questions and the most powerful questions we can ask ourselves to reflect.
You've probably heard (possibly on this podcast) about the discrimination "non-native English teachers" can face finding jobs, in being promoted or receiving equal pay. But how does Native-speakerism affect what happens inside the classroom? How do attitudes about native speakers affect the content in our course books, the confidence of teachers and the goals of our students? We speak with Marek Kiczkowiak to find out.
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 talk with Stephen Krashen, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, about the teacher research knowledge gap: what do teachers need to know about second language acquisition, what are the barriers stopping them and what we can do to solve this problem. We discuss open access journals, the Grateful Dead compressible input, compressible output and evidence based language teaching.
All language lessons need a context. Language must be learned and practiced in context. Without context, students cannot remember or use new vocabulary. You've probably heard these arguments before (possibly on this podcast), but are they true? We discuss the pros and cons of context with our friend and teacher trainer (and former many other things!) Diederik Van Gorp.
In the the words of McKinsey, "we're all marketers now". But what can teachers and schools do to better promote themselves? We interview three ESL marketing experts (David Weller, Jonny Arthur and Peter Liu) about how (if you're a teacher) you can promote yourself and (if you're a manager) how you can promote your school.
Everyone learns from their experiences in the classroom, and if you’re listening to this, you’ve probably learned from theory too. What are the differences and similarities between the two? Ross and Dave Weller discuss the differences between theory and practice in teacher development and the most effective was to learn from theory and learn from practice.
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.
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.
