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.
Tasks and task-based learning are often associated with adults and higher level learners. But can we use tasks and task-based teaching with young learners? Jane Willis, author of Doing Task Based Teaching and A Framework for Task-based Learning joins us to talk about using TBL with beginners and very young learners.
What shapes the ways we teach? What influences teachers' views and beliefs about language learning?
Trinity College London teacher trainer Karin Xie and I discuss what factors we see influencing teachers' ideas about teaching and talk about how our own experiences have informed our views of language teaching and learning.
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.
We know that the majority of the world's English speakers are not native speakers, so what does this mean for how we teach English? Marek Kiczkowiak talks to us about teaching English as a lingua franca (ELF). Is ELF a variety of English? How can teachers approach teaching it? In what situations is it helpful to students (and when might it not be)?
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?
Michael Epstein from online classroom space provider ClassIn joins me to talk about interactions in online classes. We talk about the potential of getting learners working alone in breakout rooms, preparing learners to work in groups online and making the best use of online tools like chat boxes during whole class interactions.
Have you ever thought about starting your own school, start-up or just going freelance? As the educational landscape changes due to Covid, branching out on your own is becoming a necessity for many teachers. This week I speak with three people who have gone from being teachers to becoming their own bosses. Peter Liu tells us how he got the inspiration for his online education company, Jake Whiddon tells us why he founded his own school after fifteen years of working for other people and Ed Dudley tells us what kind of people should avoid going freelance.
