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.
I ask Andrew Wright, author of Storytelling with Children and Creating Stories with Children about using stories in language classes. Are stories more than a vehicle for teaching language? How should teachers react to students’ creations? And what can teachers do to encourage creativity with learners when writing stories.
How should teachers familiarize themselves with the assessments they need to prepare their students for? Which test strategies should teachers teach? What effect do students’ expectations of test-prep have on teaching? Pete Jones tells us about approaches towards helping students prepare for language tests.
In reaction to Covid19, many teachers and schools have had to move their English courses online. But where to start? Dr. Marek Kiczkowiak tells us about his experiences creating online language courses for students and what he’s learned about online platforms, marketing and social media along the way.
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.
Who is responsible for teacher development? Should teachers be forced to develop? What stops teachers from developing? Dr. Kathleen M. Bailey is professor of Applied Linguistics at the Monterey Institute of International Studies joins us to talk about teachers’ attitudes towards development, why much of what happens in our classrooms is unknown to teachers and what to do about these issues.
I speak with Steve Walsh, Professor of Applied Linguistics at Newcastle University about the quality of teacher talk and the effect this has on student learning. Steve talks with us about the questions that teachers ask as well as the rules and roles which influence how we interact with our students.
Ross speaks with Ekitzel Wood about online marketing ethics and discrimination in teacher recruitment. We know data from Facebook was used in the last US Presidential Election, but how does your Facebook information change the job advertisements that you see? Online marketing affects the jobs we have access to, who are colleagues are and the expectations our students have. Hear the power schools now have to discriminate by gender, age and race, and how this affects you.
We celebrate our 100th episode by interviewing linguist, writer, editor, lecturer and broadcaster Professor David Crystal about the history of English. David takes us all the way back to the first surviving example of written English, to the birth of American English to the spread of text messaging to the present day with the internet and corpus linguistics.
Young learner and teens expert Chris Roland talks to us about giving differentiated support to students. We discuss which students we are trying to help when we differentiate, which students teachers tend to forget about when they plan and how to differentiate without needing to spend twice as long preparing materials as usual.
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.
Russell Stannard joins me to talk about online teaching. We discuss some of the current challenges that teachers around the world are facing due to Covid19 forcing classes to go online, and we also talk about what the longer term effects on teaching and learning will be. How will this encourage learner autonomy? How will it change the role of the teacher? And how could it create more learning outside of the classroom?
Regular guest Matt Courtois returns to discuss teaching groups of young learners online. We focus on some of the advantages of online teaching – what is it possible to do online, that isn’t possible to do offline? How to get students to genuinely and meaningfully communicate with each other online? And why tech problems and glitches might actually be the best part of online language lessons.
Lots gets said about the value of graded readers, but how can teachers use these in class? We speak with Diploma in TESOL course director Anne Carmichael about using graded readers with students at different levels, how teachers can integrate different skills using graded readers and how teachers can deal with new language from the texts.
