Regular guest Matt Courtois and I discuss staging lessons with young learners. What is staging? How much should teachers deviate from their plans? How can we avoid running out of time in our lessons?Support the podcast by buying us a coffeeFor more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website: www.TEFLtraininginstitute.comSign up for our mailing listWatch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

in class. We discuss prediction activities, what engages students in stories, and how to do follow-up activities.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

TEFL guru Jeremy Harmer joins me to discuss deliberate learning. How important is input? Can students “pick up” language in the classroom with “study”? What is the role of grammar? And what does Jeremy think about Stephen Krashen’s ideas about language acquisition? For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Teacher trainer and regular guest Matt Courtois joins me to discuss observing new teachers. What should we do when new teachers struggle with teaching? What about when students complain? Why do we even observe teachers in the first place?For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

We talk to friends and experts and ask two questions about changes they’d like to see in classrooms: what common teaching practices would you like to see less? And, which less common teaching practices would you like to see more?Support the podcast by buying us a coffeeFor more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website: www.TEFLtraininginstitute.comSign up for our mailing listWatch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses

We discuss classroom activities teachers can use, what it means to get to know your students, and other ways of collecting useful data about our learners.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

I speak with Amol Padwad from Ambedkar University Delhi about teacher motivation and teacher development. What incentives make sense for teachers at different stages of their careers? What demotivates teachers from wanting to develop? And how can schools encourage all their teachers to develop without forcing them?For more podcast, videos and blogs, visit our websiteSupport the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training coursesWatch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Regular guest, Matt Courtois joins me to talk about how teachers can encourage young learners to be creative. We discuss what creativity is, why it is challenging at low level and share some of our favorite creative activities.Support the podcast by buying us a coffeeFor more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website: www.TEFLtraininginstitute.comSign up for our mailing listWatch as well as listen on our YouTube channel 

We talk about how fair the different criteria are, what are some common misunderstandings about the criteria and how teachers can help students improve their IELTS speaking scores.Watch Pete’s YouTube ChannelFor more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Kirsten Campbell from Busuu joins me to discuss how to keep learners engaged in learning using an app.Support the podcast by buying us a coffeeFor more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website: www.TEFLtraininginstitute.comSign up for our mailing listWatch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses 

Sandie Mourão joins me to discuss how to get young learners to play in English.

Regular guest Matt Courtois and I discuss what makes quality teacher talk. How should young learner teachers give instructions? How much should teachers grade their language? And when should teachers say nothing at all?Inside Online Language Teaching: Conversations About the Future That Became the PresentSupport the podcast by buying us a coffeeFor more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website: www.TEFLtraininginstitute.comSign up for our mailing listWatch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Ross Thorburn:  Matt Cuortois, welcome back to the podcast.Matt Cuortois:  Always a pleasure, Ross.Ross:  Always a pleasure for me, too. Today we're talking about teacher talk. I feel that usually when you hear about teacher talk, people talk about teacher talk time, but today we're not going to talk about that at all. We're going to talk much more about the quality rather than the quantity of teacher talk.There's obviously so many different aspects and everything to teacher talk, but one of the most obvious ones is giving instructions.Instructions I feel are important for more than one reason in class, because obviously,  if you don't get clear instructions, then everything else probably that you do in class is not going to work very well because the students don't know what to do.Also instructions, I feel, especially when you're teaching kids, it's maybe the time when there's the most communication in English because students are listening to you not just to repeat what you say afterwards, but they're actually listening so they know what to do afterwards.Matt:  It's also when teaching kids it's one of the largest chunks of time that a teacher should be talking, right?Ross: Hopefully, not too long.Matt:  That's probably one of the most common pieces of feedback I give to teachers is don't explain, show them what you expect them to do. It's so much simpler the language that you would be using by just showing them rather than explaining the whole process. Actually, any time you get a new board game like Monopoly or Risk or whatever.It always starts off the same way with you and your friend. Where you get out this instruction book and you look at these 40 or 50 steps, and the person is reading out every step of how to play the game and the same thing inevitably happens at the end of it where the person reading the instructions is like, so you guys get that?Ross:  Not really. Let's just do one round as a practice.Matt:  Yes, everyone always says it every time. Let's play a practice round and we'll figure it out and then we'll play for real. The board game is the exact same as a classroom activity, where the students are sitting there listening to this long process of do step one, step two, step three.It is all jumbled up in there. I think a much more effective way is just try it out for a practice round and then stop a minute, make sure they understand it and then go through the activity.Ross:  It's like a picture is worth a thousand words and I feel like a demonstration is worth a thousand instruction. A couple of things that work well for that one is that when you model something, typically there's more than one role that the teacher needs to model.One nice thing I saw a teacher do once is when demonstrating a dialogue is holding up one finger on each hand with those fingers facing each other and just using our two fingers as a way of showing like this is these two people talking. Then, you could also take on different voices for the two roles.That's another thing or you could physically move. I've seen teachers before, draw on the board two faces and then stand next to one face and put on one voice when you're demonstrating one role and then you switch to the other side of the board and stand next to the other face. That helps to make it salient to the students.Matt:  A lot of course book materials will also come with some extras that are useful for modeling. I know one school I worked at every set of course books comes with a tiger puppet. What a great way of instead of using your fingers and wiggling your fingers and you can be person A and then you can be talking to the tiger puppet on your hand as a person B.At another school, every teacher have finger puppets, they were able to have multiple people and on their fingers to show off the different roles within the conversation.Ross:  I love those ideas. Another thing teachers do before they get on to getting the students to do the activity is asking some checking questions. But I feel there are some checking questions that are much more valuable than others, right?Matt:  Yeah, the kinds of instruction checking questions you want short responses. Do you do A or do you do B? Are you the customer or are you the seller? It's clarifying key points of the task and the level of words that you're using, like six‑year‑old students, haven't studied words like unscramble, gap‑fill.To be honest, learning the word unscramble or gap‑fill isn't ever going to be useful for them outside of an English lesson. You don't want to spend that precious time teaching them the word like unscramble whenever there are those content words that you do want to focus on.See the rest of the transcript of this episode

Dave Weller joins me to talk about how to promote your writing. Dave tells us why you shouldn’t start a blog, where you can write instead, how to promote your writing across different platforms, how to find out what people search for online, how to choose a title for your writing and the key to writing a best selling book.Visit Dave’s website here.Support the show, and buy us a coffee.

For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Russ Mayne, author of Evidence-Based ELT, joins me to discuss where knowledge about teaching comes from. What common teaching ideas and practices are myths? What do we know about teaching from research? And how can teachers include more evidence-based scientific practices into their teachers?

Simon Galloway (author of Teaching Teachers Online) joins me to discuss using forums in online teacher training. We talk about how to encourage interaction between trainees, how to encourage trainees to post critical and reflective comments, and how to incorporate variety into forum tasks.

Gail Ellis, author of Teaching Children How to Learn, joins me to discuss learning to learn. Gail tells us the importance of encouraging metacognition, how to make learners more aware of the aims of activities, and how to encourage meaninful reflection.Support the podcast by buying us a coffeeFor more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website: www.TEFLtraininginstitute.comSign up for our mailing listWatch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

In our longest ever episode, we ask English language teaching legends Diedrick Van Gorp, Debbie Hepplewhite, Stephen Krashen, Vivian Cook, David Crystal, Jack Richards, Hugh Dellar, Penny Ur , Alan Maley and David Weller about their influences and what they learned from them.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Jake Whiddon and I discuss the two most common questions we get from young learner teachers: “How can I get my students to behave?” and “How can I get my students to pay attention?”

Mark Pemberton, co-CEO of Study Cat, joins me to talk about app-based language learning. Where is technology based language learning going? What are the limits of technology? Can these ever be overcome?For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

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.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Check our Dave’s book, Lesson Planning for Language Teachers, at https://amzn.to/31HJtpkWhat happens if the important decisions about planning get left to coursebook writers rather than teachers? How much of the coursebook should schools tell teachers to use? And what can you do if your school doesn’t let you deviate from the prescribed materials? Dave Weller, author of “Lesson Planning for Language Teachers” and friend of the podcast discuss.Ross Thorburn: Welcome back, Dave.Dave Weller: Hurrah! Nice to be back.Ross: Thanks. Dave and I were having a conversation a couple of nights ago, and we got talking about teachers uses of materials, right?Dave: Yes, perhaps in the over‑reliance of materials in the classroom.Ross: It reminded me of this quote from Ian McGrath, who says, "It's been argued that if teaching decisions are largely based on the textbook and the teacher's book, this has the effect of deskilling the teacher. If the person doing the teaching cedes to the textbook rights have responsibility for planning, he or she gradually loses the capacity to exercise the planning functions."He says, "The teacher's role is trivialized and marginalized to that of a mere technician." [laughs]Dave: It seems over my many year's teaching and training, one observation is that when I see teachers who have been encouraged to use, only use and teach from the materials they have. They seem to develop habitual actions in the classroom that they do without thinking without reflection. There is definitely a parallel there between the quotation from the graph that you read.The teachers executing their plan without really understanding or taking into account some of the learners. [laughs]Ross: At the same, it's quite obvious from a management point of view, why is a school you'd want to provide as much support as possible for your teachers? Both in terms of maybe getting teachers to teach as many hours as possible. You could minimize the planning. You want to ensure some minimal level of quality.Dave: Exactly. It comes from a good place to provide more materials, and more support is a wonderful thing for the schools to want to do. Especially from the terms of the quality of the class that the students have. At least if you know the teachers are using materials and following a strict pattern, then at least the students will reach some minimum level.It seems to be that there's a limit to downsides of perhaps hiring newer or less skilled teachers. It also can limit the upside, I believe, of letting those teachers then develop over time, because they're not allowed to.Ross: Absolutely. Over the next few minutes, how about we talk about how to find that balance between giving enough support, and then just limiting teachers to technicians?Dave: Sounds good.Ross: Great. From what you were describing earlier, obviously every teacher starts off as a new teacher, and every teacher, therefore, needs a lot of...Dave: I was born ready, Ross.[laughter]Dave: Not everyone's Dave Weller, though, are they?Ross: Obviously, there's an advantage to new teachers getting a lot of support, isn't there?Dave: Absolutely, yes. We often forget how intense an experience it is for teachers who travel halfway across the world. They're dealing with culture shock, new environments, new colleagues, and they're thrown into the classroom, the day after they arrive, when they still [laughs] have jet lag.In those situations, there's a lot to be said for the school providing a lot of support for those teachers until they can find their feet.Ross: I guess typically, what might that look like to describe so we're all on the same page here, something that's becoming more and more common in my experiences is giving the teachers not even like a recipe book, but like a PowerPoint or something to follow that your job as a teacher is to flick through this.You don't even necessarily even have to read the instructions because they're already on the PowerPoint for you. You might have suggested timings for just about everything, really almost like idiot‑proofing, teaching.At the extreme end, I've had managers asking me, "Can you write a script for the teachers?" The teachers, all they have to do in the class is read out the script. It's impossible for anyone to teach a bad class.Dave: That's interesting. Remember, that's with technology. Back in the day, I remember, when I first started, you were given the course book, and that was it. You had to pick things from there. You were given a certain guideline. Maybe each unit takes three lessons. There were six pages, so you do the math.[laughter]Dave: You went from there. You had a lot of autonomy over what to choose, how to sequence a lesson, you can move things around. You did have to rely a lot on your more experienced colleagues, which perhaps taught that course. Before, to give you ideas, it encouraged a definite interaction and collaboration, the staff from the people sharing ideas.Then I remembered a few years later, when maybe an update happened, course books are suddenly accompanied by teachers notes. First, people, the experienced teachers didn't use them at all. I just flicked through and pfft.[laughter]Dave: You turned your nose up at the book. We found that newer teachers would arrive and be very, very interested in pulling it out and teaching those lessons, as is until they became used to it. Then they found that they began with collaboration with input from their more experienced colleagues.They had more interesting ideas to try newer ideas, and they saw the benefit and the effectiveness of those in class. It naturally moved away from the teacher's notes. It's like training wheels on a bike, I guess.Ross: Obviously, the issue here is if the training wheels remain forever, then...Dave: Or mandated.Read the rest of the transcript here

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.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Matt Courtois and I talk about how to maintain discipline in your learner classes without using punishment. We discuss the problems with punishment, how to set rules, how to avoid boredom and more.Support the podcast by buying us a coffeeFor more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website: www.TEFLtraininginstitute.comSign up for our mailing listWatch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Simon Galloway (author of Teaching Teachers Online) joins me to discuss how to run webinars. We discuss how to make the most of breakout rooms, polls and chatboxes, why webinars should be part of distance learning courses and when to avoid using webinars.

Professor Brian Tomlinson from the University of Anaheim wrote his first coursebook with Rod Ellis in the 1960’s and has been involved in materials design since. We ask him: how do you write a great coursebook?For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Teacher trainer Diederik Van Gorp joins me to discuss the ingredients for a successful teacher training workshop. How much theory should trainers include? How can we make learning transfer more likely to happen? And what training activities work best in face-to-face training?Inside Online Language Teaching: Conversations About the Future That Became the PresentSupport the podcast by buying us a coffeeFor more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website: www.TEFLtraininginstitute.comSign up for our mailing listWatch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

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.Learn more about Campus TalkVisit COCASupport the podcast by buying us a coffeeFor more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website: www.TEFLtraininginstitute.comSign up for our mailing listWatch as well as listen on our YouTube channel 

How is grammar similar to lexis? What mistakes do we make when we teach grammar? And how can we include enough grammar to keep grammar obsessed students satisfied?Visit Hugh’s WebsiteFor more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Professor Thomas Farrell joins me to discuss MA TESOL courses: what are their shortcomings and how could these be improved? We discuss what is covered in MA courses, how they are taught, whether MA TESOLs ought to include a practicum, and much more.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Sara Cotterall joins me to discuss getting learners to self-assess. We discuss how self-assessment can boost student motivation, how to encourage learners to keep records of their learning, and how to incorporate self-assessment into learner evaluation.Visit Sara’s websiteFor more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

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.Visit Mike’s websiteSupport the podcast by buying us a coffeeFor more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website: www.TEFLtraininginstitute.comSign up for our mailing listWatch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

In this special length end of year episode, we talk with Chris Roland, author of Understanding Teenagers in the ELT Classroom about why students don’t always behave as teachers would like them to, why behavior gets discussed so little on teacher training courses and what teachers can do to better manage their students’ behavior.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Jonathan Newton joins me to talk about running group work successfully. We discuss the skills teachers need to make group work effective, common problems in group work activities and what to do after group work to maximize learning.

All language students speak a first language, but what do we do with it? Some teachers ban it. Some teachers use it to teach English in. Some schools make students sign a pledge never to use it. Penny Ur tells us about what we can do take advantage of students first language, when to avoid it and when even to encourage it.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channelRoss Thorburn: Hi, Penny. To start off, a lot of teachers ‑‑ I certainly count myself as one of these ‑‑ mix up, as Vivian Cook puts it, "Minimizing L1 in the classroom with maximizing L2 in the classroom."Obviously, those two concepts aren't mutually exclusive. Less first language doesn't necessarily mean more English, does it? Are there any reasons that you think teachers might legitimately want to ban students' first language from their classrooms?Penny Ur: “Ban”, certainly not. One of my slogans [laughs] is “never say never”. In education in general, language teaching in particular, there's nothing I can think of which include no recommendation, which would include the word never or always. There is a place for the L1 in the classroom. The question is what that place is, how to limit it, and what to limit it to.The golden rule perhaps is, as Vivian Cook says, "The aim is to maximize the use of L2." If you're speaking the target language, and you're speaking it all the time and your students aren't understanding it, then they're not learning very much.It makes sense to use the L1 here and there to facilitate understanding so that when you do use the L2, they understand. L2 should only be used comprehensively. If L1 use occasionally can help that comprehension, by all means, use it.A classic example is introducing a new word in a monolingual class. If you know the students' mother tongue, it's so much quicker and easier to explain the meaning of that word by just giving a quick translation than it is by lengthy explanations in the target language at the end of which the students may not understand.The end of which [laughs] very often one of the members of the class shouts out the L1 equivalent anyway. Why did you bother to go round the world trying to avoid it? I'd say there is a place. The main point is to make sure that L2 is used most of the time and that it is used comprehensively.Ross: That's so true, isn't it? Most teachers, and certainly when I come across a word that I don't understand in my second language, what do I do? I translate it. I'm sure that's what most people do.Penny Ur: Most people use bilingual dictionaries. They don't use monolingual dictionaries. If they want to find the meaning of a word in another language, they look up a dictionary that tells them what it is in their language. It's the most sensible and quickest way to do it.Ross: Why then do you think so many teachers ban L1 from their classes or even schools? For example, where I've worked before have signs up saying, "No Chinese." Why do you think there's such an aversion to students' first language being used anywhere in language classrooms?Penny Ur: Partly because it's a slippery slope. For a lot of teachers, once they start using L1, it's so easy to do that they slip into using it much too much. I've observed lessons where the teacher is using the L1 70, 80 percent of the time. There's not much time left for the target language.What we need to get teachers to implement in the classroom is that the target language is the language we want to use most of the time. One of the reasons why teacher‑trainers discourage the use of L1 is because they're afraid teachers are going to overuse it. It is a well‑grounded fear because, as I said, I've seen it happen. It does happen in a lot of situations. That's one reason.Another reason is that in modeling classes where you could use the L1, expatriate teachers coming from the UK or coming the States and teaching, say, in Europe, they simply don't know the students' mother tongue, so they can't use it. They make a virtue of necessity. I can't use your language so I shouldn't be using your language. It's better to use only English.There's another rather insidious message coming across here that English is not only the target language, in the case of teaching English here, which is what we're mostly talking about. English is in some way the superior language, and we should be using it in some way. The students' language is inferior and should be taken out.This is a very dangerous and not legitimate message coming across, particularly in these days when we're teaching students English in order to enable them to become multilingual users of English. In other words, or bilingual at least, where we're not teaching a Spanish speaker to become an English speaker.We're teaching a Spanish speaker to remain a Spanish speaker who also has a good command of English and can use it, where necessary. We're training bilinguals, not imitation native speakers. Bilinguals' repertoire of languages, the first time it functions side by side with the new language, English, and therefore has a place also in the learning of their language.Ross: A student studying English as a second language can never ever become an English‑speaking monolingual, can they? Why try to imitate that?Penny Ur: No. It's a case of knowing where and when it's appropriate to insert a little bit of L1 or to use translation as one of the techniques for testing, or for explaining new vocabularies, as I said before. It's a fairly complex issue but you don't really gain anything by giving blanket instructions, like never use the L1.Ross: For teachers who can speak the same L1 as their students, which I think is probably the majority of English language teachers out there, when might it be useful for them to use that?Penny Ur: Legitimate uses for L1, apart from vocabulary, explaining a grammar point. Very often, you need to do this in L1. Again, I'm talking about monolingual classes whose language you understand and speak yourself. Explaining grammar. Often the grammar that you're explaining, the words you need to know to explain it are far more difficult than the grammar itself.Explaining the difference in present simple and present progressive, for example. It's very, very common tenses and aspects that the language you need to explain the difference is much more difficult. Therefore, it makes sense to do it if you can in the students' L1. That's one place.Another very useful use [laughs] of the L1 is contrastive analysis in order to avoid mistakes. A lot of mistakes that students make come from interference from their mother tongue. If you bring this up to the surface and explain to them, "Look, your mother tongue says it this way, English says it that way, and that's why you're making this mistake," you can help your students avoid mistakes.For example, in Hebrew, which is my other language and the language of my students, after "afraid," they will always say "afraid from" because that's what it says in Hebrew. You have to teach them, "Look, Hebrew says 'afraid from,' English says 'afraid of.'" You've got to make sure you know the difference.Another example, most languages where English uses the present perfect progressive, as in "We've been talking for several minutes," most languages would use the present tense in that context. Most of the languages I know about, anyway.Most languages say, "We are speaking for several minutes." That's what students will tend to do unless they are made aware of the difference. That's another very useful aid using the L1. There are one or two more, but those are the main ones.Ross: What about then for teachers who can't speak the same first language as their students? What can those teachers do? Is there any way that those teachers can somehow make use of their students' L1 in the classroom?Penny Ur: Obviously, the teachers themselves can't because they simply don't know the language. To allow students to write down new words with the L1 equivalent themselves in their vocabulary notebooks or wherever they're noting the new words, to explain to each other if necessary using the L1.Make it clear that the L1 is not an illegal, illegitimate thing to bring into the classroom. If it helps you, use it.Ross: Those are mainly examples of what the teacher can do to use their students' first language or mother tongue to teach. What ways can teachers encourage students, maybe, to use their first language in the class to help with language learning, maybe in activities, or tasks, or elsewhere?Penny Ur: One thing which I found students really enjoy ‑‑ again, we're talking about monolingual classes here where the teacher speaks the students' language ‑‑ is translating. Not translating entire passages because that gets a bit tedious, but for example, translating a sentence.Or looking at the translation of a particular word or phrase within the context of how would you say this word or phrase in your mother tongue? Or the other way around. Here's a sentence in mother tongue, how would you say this in English? Helping them to get to the right answer in English. That's one which students really enjoy, even in a very elementary level.I've done reading comprehension, for example. I've given them a short text to read with a picture. Something fairly short story or something. A little anecdote, a little joke. Then ask them the comprehension questions in their mother tongue and ask them for an answer in their mother tongue.That way, I ensure that firstly, they spend most of their time just doing the reading and not doing the comprehension work, because the comprehension work, they do pretty quickly. Second, it gives me a very, very quick insight into whether they've understood or not. Reading the questions is also reading comprehension.The trouble is that it's also a bit tedious. [laughs] It's boring. Whereas the texts themselves, the little stories are quite interesting to read. What I'm doing is by giving it in mother tongue, I'm letting the students spend most time on the reading, which is interesting and fun, and as little time as possible on the task which show me that they've understood or not.A lot of teachers would not accept this, but that's my justification for doing the questions in mother tongue. That's another activity.The third one, which I would look at again on the level of contrastive analysis is let's look at a couple of translations. Take a word. How would you translate this into your mother tongue? Let's explore the differences.Perhaps, the mother tongue is more informal. The mother tongue one is matched to gender and the English one isn't. All sorts of things which can simply raise student's awareness of meanings of words in the target language.Ross: Finally then, we need to end with some sort of a caveat that we obviously want most of our classes most of the time to be done in English. How can we avoid opening the L1 floodgates and students using too much of their first language in class?Penny Ur: Opening the floodgates is a good metaphor for this. Firstly, the teacher needs to be very disciplined him or herself. If there's, say, an instruction which you want to give, and there's a word in the sentence which they don't understand. Say, "Put the words into columns," and they don't know the word "columns."A tip to the teacher is: don't translate the entire sentence. If the only problematic word there is the word "columns," then say the whole sentence in English and just put in an oral gloss on the word "columns." Keeping to English as much as you can and only translating where it's necessary for comprehension. That's one.Another one, doing oral daunting activities. The place where the floodgates do open, students lapse into L1, is when you ask them to discuss things in groups, and you're not there hovering over them. If they all speak the same L1, if they're doing the discussion task in groups, they're likely to lapse into L1. Teachers find this all over the place.What can you do to stop this? Two main strategies here. One is make the task one which you know they can do using the language at their disposal. It has to be an easy task. Slightly i‑1, as it were in Krashen's terminology. A bit below the normal level that you're doing your reading comprehension in. Easy task you know only demands language which they can use.The second strategy is within the group itself, appointing one language monitor whose job it is to jot down every time anybody says something not in the target language, not in English, or uses the mother tongue.This has an amazing effect on students because if they know that their names are going to be written down every time they use the mother tongue, this is likely to deter them from doing so. It acts as a deterrent.

Paul Nation is one of the world’s leading researchers on and writers on vocabulary, reading and fluency, has written dozens of books and been publishing research on these topics since 1970. Paul is Emeritus Professor in Applied Linguistics at the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies (LALS) at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand and has taught in Indonesia, Thailand, the United States, Finland and Japan.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channelTracy: Hey everybody. Welcome to our podcast.Ross Thorburn: Hey everyone. On our podcasts, I think we spent a lot of time talking about speaking, but we haven't ever really directly tackled the idea of fluency.Tracy: That's true.Ross: Today we've got, once again, Paul Nation, emeritus professor at the School of Applied Linguistics and Applied Language at Victoria University, New Zealand, to talk to us about fluency and vocabulary and how those two things link together.Tracy: Paul is one of the world's leading researchers and writers on vocabulary and fluency. We are incredibly lucky to be able to have him on our podcast.Ross: As usual, we've got three areas that we'll cover in the podcast. Firstly, we will ask Paul why fluency is important. Then secondly...Tracy: ...how can teachers help students develop fluency, and the third one...Ross: ...what are some common mistakes that teachers make in teaching vocabulary and helping students become fluent?Why is fluency important?Tracy: Hello Paul.Paul Nation: Hello.Tracy: How are you doing?Paul: Good.Tracy: Before we go onto fluency, let's start off by talking about vocabulary.Paul: No problem.Tracy: Why have you dedicated so much of your career to vocabulary and vocabulary research?Paul: There's a couple of reasons why I focus on it. I guess being important is one of the reasons. The vocabulary knowledge underlies every language use skill, and without vocabulary, you can't do much in the way of listening, speaking, reading or writing.The other reason I'd probably focus on is that it's been a very poorly researched area in the past. In fact, some of the worst researched areas that I know of in applied linguistics are actually in vocabularies.Ross: Can you tell us a bit about fluency then? To start off, why is fluency so important?Paul: One of my favorite stories about that is when I was in Japan. We went on a train. We weren't quite sure whether we were going to the right place or not. I looked around the carriage, and there was a very studious looking young woman there wearing glasses, looking like a student.I asked her, "Is this the train to Osaka?" She looked at me, and a look of dismay came over her face. She buried her hands in the face. "Oh my goodness, what have I done?" If I caused her to lose face, what's going to happen as a result?Anyway, someone further down the carriage, a man said, "Yes, Osaka." As the train went along, this woman pulled out a book and started reading it. Being nosy, I dropped my pen on the floor and had a quick look at what the book was.She was reading a book called "The Macro Economics of Agriculture" in English. I couldn't read a book called The Macro Economics of Agriculture in English, even being a native speaker. When we got off the train, she came up to us and said, "Where are you going?" I bet that she'd been practicing that sentence for the last 20 or 30 minutes before we got to the station.I said the name. She said, "Follow me." We had a conversation. Here was someone with enormous knowledge of the language and yet not fluent in some of the basic things that she could have quite easily become fluent. It meant that these avenues of use of it were closed off to her.I think it's important that about a quarter of the time on a course to spend getting fluent in reading, getting fluent in writing, using just the little bit that you know even, but making sure that you can use it.Ross: Paul, with fluency, I think there's this concept that, for students, they only really become fluent or develop fluency at maybe intermediate or advanced levels. You wouldn't think of a beginner as being fluent. When do you think it's useful for students to start to develop fluency?Paul: I can't talk about anything nowadays it seems without having to get onto what I call the four strands. The four strands are simply learning through input, learning through output, deliberate learning, and developing fluency.Each one of those that I call a strand, which in the basic principle is that in a well‑balanced language course there should be roughly equal amount of time spent on each of these four strands at every single level of proficiency.If you're learning a language for survival, David Crab and I did some research to set up a survival vocabulary for foreign travel, which is about 120 words and phrases, that if you know those, you can do quite a lot in the language.You can travel around. You can get food. You can find accommodation. You can be polite to people and so on like that. The thing is, you could learn those, but the other thing is you've got to learn them fluently.That means that you can say them in a way that people will understand. When people reply, you need to be able to interpret what they say at a speed which will make it useful for you. Even then learning, a survival vocabulary, you've got to get fluent and that kind of fluency is quite easy to develop.You keep getting people to repeat it over and over again to you and get faster and faster and faster. You keep practicing and practicing and doing that. It's very important because a lot of students have quite a lot of knowledge of English, but they don't have the fluency to put it into practice.How can teachers help students develop fluency?Tracy: Paul, can you please share some practical activities which teachers can use in the classroom to help their students and develop those skills to be more fluent?Paul: I've written lots of books, but the one that I liked the most, one that gave me the greatest satisfaction having written it is called, "What Should Every EFL Teacher Know," because of near I sort of wanted after training teachers and teaching English and that for well over 50 years.I thought if I can sit down, reading all the research, and say in a simple, clear and direct way what do I think EFL teachers should be doing, then there's something wrong with...I haven't spent my life well.I wrote that book and then as, part of doing it, I sat, and I thought, "Well, what if I had to choose 20 teaching techniques and activities, what would they be? The top ones that people should know."I came up with a list of those which are in the book. The ones for speaking fluency, one is a very interesting technique called Four, Three, Two, where the students choose an easy topic, and then they sit down with a partner and teacher says, "Go."For four minutes, they have to talk about that familiar, easy topic. After exactly four minutes, the teacher says, "Stop. Change partners." Then everybody moves onto a new partner.Then for three minutes, the same people, half of the class have to talk again to their partner saying exactly what they said before to the new partner, but doing it in three minutes. After three minutes, they move onto another partner. Then they have to do it in two minutes. That's a very simple, easy but very effective technique for developing spoken fluency.Another one would be repeated delivery of a talk, which is a bit like Four, Three, Two because repetition is one of the ways of developing fluency. It's what I call the will beat a path to fluency, that is you keep doing the same thing over and over again until you get good at it.Another way of developing fluency is a rich and varied map where you do similar things but not exactly the same thing. You change it in some way so that you keep coming at the same stuff, but you're doing it in different ways.A very useful technique for that is called Linked Schools where people might read about something. Then they might write about the same topic, and they would have to get up and speak about that topic.Having now read about it, written about it, when they come to speak about it, they can do this speaking with a lot of knowledge and use that speaking as an opportunity to develop fluency in speaking, drawing on that knowledge.Common mistakes teachers make in teaching vocabulary and helping students become fluentRoss: I remember, Paul, a few years ago, in fact, I think we did a podcast about this, I remember reading a paper that you wrote that was warning teachers of the danger of teaching vocabulary in lexical or semantic sets.Can you tell us about some other examples maybe of where you think there's a gap between what research says works with teaching vocabulary and what teachers tend to do for teaching vocabulary?Paul: The lexical sets was interesting because once again, the research is starting to show that there are sort of niceties to that lexical set idea comparing immediate learning compared with a long‑term retention from it.There's interesting research which shows that the interference is greater with say, if you learn fruit together. It becomes harder with fruit, which in some ways resemble each other like apples or more like oranges. Then they are like bananas.You're more likely to get interference between apples and oranges than you are between apples and bananas in terms of the word form and its meaning. That's funny.I would say that the greatest mistake is one I've mentioned already, which was the idea of vocabulary needs to be taught. I would say another belief that's encouraged by people who haven't read the research is that vocabulary needs to be learned in context.They often express this negatively in the sense that it's not good to learn vocabulary out of context and the research is quite the opposite. Learning vocabulary out of context is highly effective and highly efficient.The idea, for example, of using bilingual word cards or bilingual flashcard programs is a very good idea. You'd have this often criticized because it says all the vocab isn't learned in context.If it's part of a well‑balanced program where there's opportunities for learning from input‑output in fluency development, which are all in context. Then some deliberate learning, using the first language translation, learning the word without any illustrative context around it is very effective and efficient.Tracy: That one is interesting. I think that's very different to what most teachers believe and what gets taught on most of the teacher training courses.Paul: Steve Crashing criticized this saying that this learning will not be learning which will be of use when you come to use the language normally. I tackled him on this at a conference one time, and I said, "Does this apply to vocabulary? The idea that deliberate learning doesn't result in the kind of knowledge you need for a normal language used."He said, "Yes, it applies to vocabulary." I said, "Good." We went away, and we got one of our PhD students working on it. She showed the deliberate decontextualized learning of vocabulary resulted in both implicit knowledge and explicit knowledge.Implicit knowledge is a kind of knowledge that you need for normal language use, this kind of flash card learning. You can learn enormous amounts in a very short time, but they out very important principles to follow when you do this learning.These are principles, which have been well‑established by psychological research or research in psychology over the last almost 100 years, or so, involving repetition, spacing of the repetitions, retrieval that means not looking at the word and the meaning together all the time, but having to try and retrieve or recall the meaning that went with the word.If you can't recall it, you have a look. The idea of spaced retrieval is very important. The idea of varying the order of the words being learned, so you're not learning them in the same serial order or anything like it.There are simple guidelines for that learning, but they're very important guidelines. If learners are trained in how to do that, training is not a big deal for that, they could learn large amounts in a very short time.This allows them to make good progress through extensive reading and extensive listening and things like that, because they bring all this background knowledge of decontextualized learning, which now becomes contextualized through their reading and listening.More from Paul NationRoss: Paul, I'll put a link to your University of Victoria web page. Is that a place for people to go if they want to find out more about your work?Paul: Yeah. The latest thing on the website is the updated vocabulary levels test, which is the most useful test for teachers of English as a foreign language to do, to measure the learners' vocabulary size. Then I wrote a book for learners called "What Do You Need to Know to Learn a Foreign Language?" That's free for download.Ross: Thanks so much again for taking the time to come and talk to us.Paul: No problem. Good luck with your work.Ross: Thanks, Paul.Paul: Bye everyone.Tracy: Bye.

Professor David Carless from the University of Hong Kong joins me to talk about feedback. David tells us why our students should spend more time reading and acting on feedback than teachers spend writing it, how we can use examples from outstanding students to help students give feedback to themselves and how much should the content of feedback be based on teachers’ ideas as opposed to students.Support the podcast by buying us a coffeeFor more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website: www.TEFLtraininginstitute.comSign up for our mailing listWatch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Follow David Carless on TwitterDavid Carless at HKU

On this week's podcast, Lesley Painter-Farrell joins me to talk about reflection. We discuss why reflection is so important, different ways teachers can reflect and the best question you can ask yourself after teaching a lesson.Inside Online Language Teaching: Conversations About the Future That Became the PresentSupport the podcast by buying us a coffeeFor more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website: www.TEFLtraininginstitute.comSign up for our mailing listLesley Painter-Farrell - TESOL - The New School

Matt Courtois and I talk about how to incorporate movement into language classes.Ross Thorburn:  Matt, welcome back to the podcast. To start off with, why is movement important? Because I must admit, it's something that I try to include in every lesson I do, whether it's teaching kids or adults or even doing training for teachers, so for you what why is it important?Matt Courtois:  It's important for a few reasons. First is, a lot of parents and students sign up for courses at learning centers, because they want something that's more interactive and fun. That's one reason, I don't necessarily think that's the most important.I think, with young learners, they have a lot of energy as well, and sitting and listening to a teacher for an hour is not a realistic expectation, they do need to get up and move around to work off some energy.Ross:  If you watch what students do when they're unsupervised. For example, if you teach kids and there's a break in the middle of the class, watch kids playing when they're not being supervised by a teacher, they're probably usually running around, so if you force them to sit down, you're going against the natural flow of what they want to be doing.I don't think that means you mean to get the kids running around all the time, but I think need to get them at least doing what they would naturally do some of the time.Matt:  You can see them in classes with young learners especially, you can see their legs start to shake, like at that point, they can't focus on learning, they're focusing on staying in their seats and not running around. That's what they're focused on. They can't focus on whatever it is that teachers talking about. I don't think that's necessarily the most important reason. To read the rest of the transcript, click here

I speak with Rhonda Oliver, SLA expert with young learners about tasks and interactions with young learners. Does speaking with other students help students learn language? How can teachers design tasks which students will find interesting? And which students should teachers pair their students with to get the most out of group work tasks?Visit Rhonda Oliver’s WebpageSupport the podcast by buying us a coffeeFor more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website: www.TEFLtraininginstitute.comSign up for our mailing listWatch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

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?For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Wendy tells us about how young learners' home lives affect their development, how the expectations of teachers and materials writers can effect student achievement and the problems associated with one size fits all curricula and coursebooksFor more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Parents are one of the most important factors in determining how successful students are. In this episode, Jake Whiddon and I discuss how to involve parents in young learners’ learning. Why is it important to involve students' parents in language learning? How can we demonstrate learning to parents? What can teachers do to help parents understand language learning?  Get 10% off all purchases from StudyCat. Use the discount code: RossInside Online Language Teaching: Conversations About the Future That Became the PresentSupport the podcast by buying us a coffeeFor more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website: www.TEFLtraininginstitute.comSign up for our mailing list

Dave Weller and I discuss the most useful questions teachers should ask themselves to reflect, what needs to be in place before teachers can reflect and what stimuli can help to prompt reflection.Check out Dave’s book: Reflective Teaching JournalFor more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Inside Online Language Teaching: Conversations About the Future That Became the PresentSupport the podcast by buying us a coffeeWatch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

How can we help students improve their listening and reading? Traditionally, teachers teach skills like predicting, skimming, scanning and guessing from context. In this episode, Michael Swan presents reasons why we should avoid this approach, the reasons students find comprehension difficult and what alternative approach teachers should take to improving listening and reading skills.Support the podcast by buying us a coffeeFor more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website: www.TEFLtraininginstitute.comSign up for our mailing listWatch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses

Thom Kiddle from NILE joins me to talk about what assessments should measure. Should we separate skills or integrate them? Should language tests measure how complex learners can make their speech, or how well they can adapt their speech to the listener? And when is it useful to test grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation? Check out all the tutor led online courses at NILESupport the podcast by buying us a coffeeFor more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website: www.TEFLtraininginstitute.comSign up for our mailing list

Letterland teacher trainer Lesley White tells Ross about phonics. We touch on the history, the advantages of phonics over other approaches, different options to teachers within the phonics system and some of the differences between learning to read in your first language and in your second language.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channelRoss Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the podcast. This week, I'm speaking to Lesley White. Lesley is a trainer at Letterland. She's got many, many years of experience working there as a young learner, teacher‑trainer. She's been running phonic sessions in the UK and overseas since 1992, which is indeed a lot of experience.In this episode, I got to ask Lesley all about phonics, a bit of background about where it comes from, how long it's been around for. Then we also get into a lot of practical advice for teachers. If you've ever taught any students to learn to read, then I'm sure you'll find a lot of valuable information from Lesley.Where should teachers start in teaching reading?Ross: Hi, Lesley.Lesley White: Hi.Ross: Very simple question to get us started. Where should teachers start in teaching reading?Lesley: Well, within our system, we start by teaching the very young children all the prereading and prewriting skills before they even get as far as learning to read. We want them to have those very early stages because we're working with children around about the three‑age range.Before they start even thinking about reading, they need to have the tools to be able to read. For that, we introduce them to using the knowledge they have about the sounds. We want them to then blend them together to be able to read.If they only know a couple of sounds, they don't have very much in the way of background or the very many tools to help them to read much. Start small and then keep growing.Ross: You mentioned there are prereading skills. What exactly are prereading skills?Lesley: Babies learn by imitation. That's how they develop their native language skills. That should be the same way for other languages as well. The nearer we can replicate what they do naturally, the easier it is to give them the baseline, the starting.We try to give them the prereading and writing skills, the ability to spot odd ones out, learn about logic and how things go together, think about the sequences. All those what I call prereading and prewriting activities, then provide them with a basis. Without that, the actual skill of reading becomes far more difficult because English is not a purely phonic language.We need to introduce the children to a systematic and explicit way of learning so that they have the tools to then be able to decode the message that's carried within those shapes.Ross: When I was a teacher, phonics was just starting to become popular, at least, in China. Could you give us a bit of a sense of what the history is of phonics and, maybe, how it's been used in comparison to other approaches?Lesley: I remember when I was at school, which is long before you were a teacher, and long before you were at school. I remember I was taught to use those sounds and talk about the C‑A‑T, the cat, sat, S‑A‑T on the M‑A‑T. The phonics has always been around and about for very many, many years.It goes in cycles as to whether it's popular within the educational elite, but phonics came back into vogue towards the end of the last century. The beginning of this led, in part, by the UK government's desire for all children to be introduced to phonics early in their careers, so the letters and sound document.As far as phonics for a second language, that's slightly more difficult because if the children don't have a vocabulary, then they don't know the words they're trying to create.That's why I say those early stages, those prereading, prewriting stages, includes helping the children to begin to develop a vocabulary and have some understanding of the language. It's not just picking up a book and barking at print.It is actually being able to blend the sounds together, read the words, but read them with understanding because so often parents will say to me, "My child can read these words, but they don't know what they're reading." That's as useless as not being able to read, if you like.Ross: It sounds then ike children really need that foundation in listening, maybe speaking, and definitely having vocabulary knowledge before they start to learn to read then.Lesley: Without those skills, then the next stage can't be reached. When we get children walking, for instance, they don't just stand up and start to run, they start with falling down and bringing themselves up again.We have to look at reading in exactly the same way that they have to take those steps slowly, little by little, adding to their knowledge and their understanding. The more that they enjoy and are entertained by it, the better their knowledge acquisition becomes, and the more they enjoy the experience.There are different types of phonics. There's synthetic phonics. It's the buzzword in many educational circles. That's about blending the sounds together in order to read words. We also have linguistic and analytic phonics, as well.Now, how relevant is that for very young children? It's about enjoying books. It's whatever way that they can look at print and get meaning from it. It is about getting meaning from it, not just what I call, barking at print.Stages in Learning to ReadRoss: What are some of the different stages that students go through in learning to read? Presumably then, the first stage there is for students to start to link letters to sounds. What happens from there?Lesley: I'd say the first stage is speaking and listening. As far as the silence, I think it's vitally important that the children begin to have a feel about the rhythm of the language, about the knowledge that sounds. So getting to that stage before they get as far as putting those sounds together and being able to do anything more than that.The first stage, as far as I'm concerned, is speaking and listening. We then go on, as you very rightly say, to identifying the sounds. There are 44 sounds in our English language. It's not just learning about the 26 letters and the shapes of those letters, but it's then about the combinations.If we think about it, consonants, B, C, D, are never ever confused in reading, but the vowels confuse and complicate because they make a variety of different sounds. Somewhere without making it too unfactual for young children, we have to engage them and help them to make those connections and understandings.Ross: Is there an order that is best for teachers to teach the different sounds and letters and in others, SATPIN, which is a common one? There's also A, B, C, D, which is very common. What are some such things and considerations teachers might think about before choosing the order they're going to teach the letters in?Lesley: My answer to that is it depends on your objective. If you're wanting the children to learn A, B, C, D, E, F, G, that's fine. That's the order that you'll find in a dictionary, or an index, or anything else. Getting the children to sing A, B, C, D, E, F, G, etc., is part of learning a rote about the names of the letters.That's not going to help the children blend the sounds together to make words. The SATPIN teaching order, which is a sequence that has been suggested as recommended in various publications means that you can start making words after you've covered the first four letters.Simple words, but you've got S,A,T making S‑A‑T, sat, P‑A‑T, pat. Then we can turn that round and have T‑A‑P, tap. Already, even after four letters, we're able to blend those sounds together.That teaching order also makes sure the letters that are similar‑looking to young children like the B and the D...Some children are very confused by those two shapes, because they're very similar just turned round the other way, if you will.Teaching out of sequence means the children can become used to one of them as if you're teaching A, B, C order, the B and the D are very close together. The only word you can make out of those first four letters, you can make bad. You could make cad, but not very many young children are going to need that word.Now, other schools of thought would say that you want to be concentrating more on handwriting as opposed to the voice‑sight systems that will concentrate on getting the children to make a circle, an O. There are a variety of different strategies about which teaching order is most useful. I think you pay with your money and take your choice.At the end of the day, the children have got to know all 26 letter shapes, and the sounds associated with them. Once you've decided that your objective is to help your children to read, as well as to write and to spell, then you choose the order that works for you.My one piece of advice to all teachers though is follow a system because I've come across teachers who decide that they'll just do their own thing. They dart from one letter to the other because the weather was nice and we'll use this letter for some particular topic or something.I understand why, but in all honesty, letters like Q, X, Z, they get forgotten about. I would always suggest that teachers should use a systematic approach that captures children's imagination. Whatever that system happens to be, I can justify a variety of different systems.Ross: What about some of the more difficult sounds and letters then like "th" and "ck," etc.? When would you decide to teach those?Lesley: The order that has been put together by the letters and sounds document, which is the UK government's suggested order, make sure that the children are covering the S‑A‑T‑P‑I‑N to begin with. Then we keep going, we add all 26 letters.Then, sh, ch, th, are the digraphs, which will be introduced earlier, whereas some of the more complex spelling patterns, the E‑A‑R, all those sorts of things. Whatever program, whatever system one decides to adopt to cover all the sounds, eventually. There are 44 sounds in our English language. There are over 150 different spelling patterns.If you told me that on the first day I went to school, I'm sure I'd have said, "I don't know what on earth you're talking about." It is about trying to engage the children and add to their knowledge in time.Ross: Then what do teachers do about more difficult words? They are sometimes called sight words like, the, one, you, words that don't follow this typical phonetic rules in English.Lesley: Absolutely. You've got "the," even something that looks as if it would be very simple, a word like "no." When the letters are the other way around, and you have the O coming before the N, then it makes the O‑N sounds and the word is "on," and the children think this is fine.Then we put the letters in the opposite direction having the N coming before the O, and it doesn't make the sound stand. We don't say no, we say no. Why? Yes, those tricky words, high‑frequency words, sight words called variety of different things, depending on which expert is talking, are necessary to make reading have any sense.Ross: How can teachers teach those words?Lesley: To begin with ‑‑ I'm sorry ‑‑ It's a bit of rote learning. It is a bit of just stretching the word to hear what sounds you do know and identify the known sounds, but then also thinking, "Uh‑uh, that one's not making its normal sound. I've got to remember that for the future," so they remeber that tricky word.Ross: Once again, that was Lesley White. If you're interested in finding out more about Lesley and the program that she uses at Letterland, please go to www.letterland.com. Thanks for listening. See you again soon.

Jake Whiddon joins me to talk about using storybooks in class. So many schools have graded readers, but so few teachers use these in class. Graded readers can be used with students of any age group and any level. They’re a great alternative to the coursebook and a contextualized way of presenting new language. In this episode, you’ll hear a simple five step approach that you can use to use graded readers with your students.For a free standard account and access to a free premium account for one month on ClassIn, click here.Check out my book: Inside Online Language Teaching

A lot of us dread it. What if there was another way of managers helping teachers to improving their teaching without ever needing to sit in the classroom, an approach that means observing teachers actually makes if for supervisors to do their jobs? Mario Rinvolucri tells us more…For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

I talk with Kirsten Campbell about app-based learning for adults. We discuss best practices in app design, the forgetting curve, how much vocabulary students can learn at once and how some of these principles can be used by classroom teachers.Inside Online Language Teaching: Conversations About the Future That Became the PresentSupport the podcast by buying us a coffeeFor more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website: www.TEFLtraininginstitute.comSign up for our mailing listWatch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses

We speak with Edmund Dudley, John Hughes, Matt Courtois, Brian Tomlinson, Ben Beaumont, Dave Weller, Wendy Arnold, Debbie Hepplewhite, Ray Davila and Diederik Van Gorp and ask them all the same question: “What’s your favorite language teaching activity?”For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Dave Weller joins me to discuss making the best use of interaction patterns. We look at how shifting interaction patterns can create room for creativity, which students to pair with which and how many students should we put in a group.Essential Classroom ManagementInside Online Language Teaching: Conversations About the Future That Became the PresentSupport the podcast by buying us a coffeeFor more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website: www.TEFLtraininginstitute.comSign up for our mailing listWatch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Peter Sommerville and I discuss the online teaching quality: a strange mix of data and student satisfaction that determines how many classes online teachers get and even how much they are paid.Inside Online Language Teaching: Conversations About the Future That Became the PresentGet 10% off a 120 TESOL course with Train the Teacher. Use this link and the discount code: TTi10Visit TEFL ConsultantsFor more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

This week we look at coaching. Coaching is a common management and educational tool, but what exactly is coaching? Niamh Ryan joins me to talk about what coaches do and don’t do, the benefits of coaching, what questions can you ask during a coaching session and in what situations should we avoid coaching?For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Inside Online Language Teaching: Conversations About the Future That Became the PresentGet 10% off a 120 TESOL course with Train the Teacher. Use this link and the discount code: TTi10Sign up for our mailing list

Thom Kiddle from NILE joins me to talk about physical learning environments and the impact they can have on learning. As teachers, we spend so much time thinking about learning activities, materials and methods, but what if our students aren’t learning because they aren’t getting enough light or oxygen?Inside Online Language Teaching: Conversations About the Future That Became the PresentGet 10% off online teacher development courses at NILE. Use this link and the discount code: tefltraininginstitute10Support the podcast by buying us a coffeeAccess the NILE members area (for free!)For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website: www.TEFLtraininginstitute.comSign up for our mailing listWatch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Michael Epstein joins me to discuss motivating students online. How can teachers create a group dynamic in online classes? How can only classes reduce learner anxiety? And how can teachers form better relationships with their students online?Check out my book: Inside Online Language TeachingFor a free standard account at ClassIn, click here

Inside Online Language Teaching: Conversations About the Future That Became the PresentGet 10% off online teacher development courses at NILE. Use this link and the discount code: tefltraininginstitute10Support the podcast by buying us a coffeeFor more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website: www.TEFLtraininginstitute.comSign up for our mailing listWatch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses How to Get Your Students Talking to Each Other (with Matt Courtois) Ross Thorburn:  Matt Cuortois, welcome back.Matt Cuortois:  It's always a pleasure, Ross.Ross:  Great. Today we're talking about student interactions, getting students to talk to each other, basically. Why is this important?Matt:  Back when you and I started teaching, the way that my boss or trainer addressed this issue was to talk about teacher talk time. They set up this target where I, as the teacher, would only be able to talk 20 percent of the time. 80 percent of the time would then be left for students to talk to each other.That whole thing isn't a great paradigm because it is flawed in its logic. I've seen classes where when the teachers didn't talk, that didn't mean students were talking. It was just awkward silence a lot of the time.Ross: Right. The flip side of the teacher talk is the student talking time. Of course, it's the same thing. Just because the students are talking doesn't mean they're actually learning.You're going to think about the quality of student interactions. We're talking about students actually saying meaningful things to each other and, really crucially, the other student having reason to listen to what the other person's saying.Matt:  I do think still though that goal of having students talking 80 percent of the time is a good goal.Ross:  Yeah, absolutely. Once you get beyond being a complete beginner, where you can't really say anything, then that makes sense.Let's talk about some of these really simple ways of getting students talking to each other. One of the simplest things is an information gap. This is something you hear a lot about with adults.With kids, one of my favorite ways to do this is you get half the students facing the front of the room, half of them facing the back of the room, put some information on a screen at the front. The students who can see the whiteboard have to describe that information to the other students.Again, the most simple way I can think of doing this is, you have a coloring in sheet with some really, really simple vocabulary, like animals. The teacher version on the board, everything's already colored in. Hopefully the colors are weird.Let's say we've got a pink dog, and a green cat, and an orange zebra. The student facing the board has to describe that to the other student. That other student has this blank coloring sheet. They just need to listen to that other student and color it in.I think this works for a few ways. Obviously, you have this gap there, but one of the other key things is that the student doing the coloring in has a reason to listen to the first student. Also, really, really importantly, the first student can see if the second student has understood them or not.If you've colored one of those animals the wrong color, I can see and then I can say, "No, no, no. [laughs] Not this color. Color it in something different". That's when a lot of learning tends to happen is when those bits of communication break down because students have to focus on grammar, or form, or pronunciation to try and make that meaning clear, to resolve the misunderstanding.Matt:  There's also a really important point you made there about the students need a reason to listen. Whenever we talk about a communicative lesson, we think of students talking, talking, talking. Communication is not just talking. That's half of it. The other half needs to be filled with somebody who's listening.Ross:  This also makes me think of something else. In any activity like that...Let's say this is a coloring activity, very common with kids. You're also rarely likely to have enough pens or pencils or crayons for every kid in the class, to be able to have all the colors that they need.It's also a great opportunity for kids to use English to ask each other for these pens and pencils. You could say to the kids, "What do you say if you need to borrow this pain from someone? Blue, please. Yellow, please." That's another great way of building communication into classes is by not having enough resources for every individual student.Matt:  Now you're getting into students really being able to learn a lot of important values for their life. They need to learn, at this age, how to share. They need to learn how to listen to each other. Without that communication in class, without these kinds of activities where students need each other, they aren't going to learn that in your lessons.Ross:  Now we can get into things about teaching students the language, of, for example, when you don't understand what someone else had said in one of these activities. You can say, "I'm sorry. Can you say it again, please? I don't understand." Those are also things that you really need in real life a lot of the time.Matt:  That language that they're learning, by going through this process, is a lot more useful than, in your example, a pink elephant or a pink...What was it? A pink dog. They're learning those words. They're also learning these really useful phrases that they'll need throughout their English classes, throughout other classes, and then in their real life. You need to learn how to repair a conversation.Ross:  I know with a lot of language like this, teachers find it very difficult to present. There's no flash card for, "I'm sorry," or "I don't understand," or "Say that again, please." These things can be quite difficult for teachers to teach.If you do these activities regularly with your students, you can find, by monitoring, times when communication hasn't worked. Afterwards, you can say to the class, "What happened when you didn't understand?" You could do this in the student's first language, for example. "What did you say?"You might say, "I heard Johnny say to Mary, ' [non‑English speech] ,'" or whatever in their first language. You say, "How could we say that in English?" Then, get those things on the board. "All right. Fantastic. Now, swap roles. Do the activity again. This time when you don't understand, use these phrases on the board."Matt:  What's great about that is that you're teaching them words that they needed. They needed to know how to say that in English, but they didn't know how. You're not just teaching them words that the coursebook writer and Cambridge decided they needed.Ross:  A very typical thing in a coursebook is you might have a dialogue that's on the first couple of pages of one unit. The idea is that by the end of the lesson, the students will be able to use that dialogue. What you just said there, you're really getting away from that.Matt:  I've seen so many lessons where, basically, there's person A and person B. They're not necessarily directly reading off of the script from the book, but they have it memorized. That's not really a roleplay. It's not even really communication. They're not actually saying anything that the other person needs.Ross:  A quick tip for role‑plays is you can give students a little role card to say, "you're angry" or "you're happy" or "you just won the lottery." Then maybe afterwards, we say, "Can you guess how was the other person feeling?"Matt:  Yeah. You're listening to a lot of the...not just the words also. You're listening to how the person is saying the words.Ross:  I can't remember where I heard this. I remember an example of this for adults was some sort of boring shopping role‑play. They said, The shopper, you are the ex‑wife of the shop owner, and you didn't know this was his shop. Now, go and do the role‑play." That just makes it so much more interesting.Matt:  After they do that role‑play, it gives people a lot to think about. How did that affect the way the person spoke?Ross:  After doing any one of these things, it's always a jumping off point for summarizing the task. Let's say, to go back to the coloring in one earlier, you could just say to the students, "What color was the dog? What color was the elephant?" Then, you're getting a little bit of production from the students and checking.You can say, "I heard that you say...What color did you say this was? You said it was light blue? OK. What's the difference between light blue and blue?" Start to use that to teach a bit more language. The thing you said there with after our role‑play, "How do you think the other person was feeling? What things did they say that was different from the original role‑play?"Matt:  Not only can you do them, you need to do these things after a task. Ultimately, it's about communication, and it's about practicing language. What language did they use? How could they use that language better? Was there any language that they should have used that they didn't use?Ross:  A couple of tips for that. Maybe one is, let's say that we've just told the students a bunch of ways to give suggestions. After getting students to give each other suggestions, you could say, "Well, which of these phrases did you use? Which of them did you not use? Tell us why."Another tip for getting students would be to focus on some of these things or have more information to talk about afterwards. You can have a third role in any of these activities we've talked about, which is an observer. Write down what you hear the people saying.You could either say, "Write down any mistakes you hear afterwards. Write down any examples of the first language that you hear. How could we say those things in English?"All these are ways of doing what you said earlier, Matt, which is finding gaps in the students own knowledge and filling those in a very personalized way.Matt:  The way a lot of teachers naturally teach is that they want their students to be producing error‑free sentences. If you're teaching this way, where you're throwing students in and having them do this, they're going to make a lot of mistakes.You really need to put a lot of effort into creating an environment where students feel comfortable to make mistakes. Don't have them memorizing the entire script before they say it. You push them along that process of getting them to that point of being comfortable with actually communicating in a second language.Ross:  If you do that, and the students make those mistakes, that's good. That's when you can actually teach them these bits of language that are going to help them better next time.Matt:  You've identified whenever they make a mistake, language that they need. You've identified a teachable moment.Ross:  [laughs] Absolutely. Let's talk about actually doing some of these things in reality. For an information gap activity, like the one we mentioned earlier, where one student talks, and the other student listens and does something. A good way of introducing that is just for the teacher, the first time, to be the person giving the information.Matt:  If you're teaching in an environment where you have the same students every week, that doesn't need to happen in one lesson. In the first lesson, you, as the teacher can be describing these animals, and the students are coloring it in. They're receiving. They're working on their listening.A week later, in their next lesson, maybe you can have a couple students try it out. The next week you can have the other students trying it out.Ross:  I feel another loophole with some of these activities is that students can often use gestures to get a random or pointing. Just to go back to my example again earlier, you could just point to something and say, "Blue."Really important with these, just to say to, for example, the student whose describing you have to sit on your hands while you're describing. A tiny little difference, but all of a sudden, it means that you can't use gestures, or you have to try to do all of this in English.Again, how do you know students will do it? If you've got a big class, you might want to pick one or two students who were a little bit more outspoken. You ask them to be police and walk around, and then remind everyone to speak English, and catch them up if they're ever speaking any L1.Matt:  I've seen it a million times. Whenever teachers introduce that activity and they say, "No looking at the picture." Inevitably, the students find ways, especially if you're teaching young learners, they're going to find a way to cheat.Ross:  Let's talk about some other ways that you can hide that information. One way is simply yet people have got their backs to the board. The most foolproof way is you actually put the information outside the classroom. One student has to run outside the door, look at the thing, and then come back in and describe it.Matt:  Depending on what kind of information it is, you can just put it really far away. One student is mobile and can walk straight up to it and come back and give them that information.Ross:  Another one I've seen is if you have the students turn round in their chairs, but they don't turn the chair around. If you can imagine that the back of your chair is to your chest, you could stick the hidden information on that back of the chair. The person would really have to lean forward so far [laughs] they would topple over to be able to see the information.Matt:  I saw a cool one. This took a little bit of preparation from the teacher.She made these headbands out of paper. They go around and then I got a piece of paper sticking up in front and then she could just tack on different images to that piece of paper sticking up off of their head. Everyone else in the classroom could see what was on their head band, but that student couldn't see what was on his own head band.Ross:  I've done this before, as well, where maybe you get a word or something, and you stick it on the students' backs. Then, I have to ask you to give me clues about what one word is, and I have to try and get it.Matt:  You can also set up the classroom. You can have your students sitting back‑to‑back. One side can see it. You can keep an eye on the other students on the far side. Make sure they're not turning around and looking back at the information that you're showing to half of the class.Ross:  I feel the way it is easiest for students to cheat is if we are just holding two bits of paper. I feel they are right that the temptation is very, very high just to hold a bit of paper at an angle where the other person can see it. There's varying degrees there of how well you want to hide your information depending on the self‑control of the students.   Transcription by CastingWords   

Author Russ Mayne joins me to discuss evidence-based teaching. How can teachers find research to help them teach more effectively?Inside Online Language Teaching: Conversations About the Future That Became the PresentSupport the podcast by buying us a coffeeVisit our website: www.TEFLtraininginstitute.comGet 10% off a 120 TESOL course with Train the Teacher. Use this link and the discount code: TTi10An Introduction to Evidence-Based Teaching in the English Language Classroom

Young learner expert Annamaria Pinter of the University of Warwick joins me to discuss teaching vocabulary to children. What activities work best with young children? Which words should teachers teach first? And how should we present language to very young learners?Get 10% off all purchases from StudyCat. Use the discount code: RossInside Online Language Teaching: Conversations About the Future That Became the PresentSupport the podcast by buying us a coffeeVisit our website: www.TEFLtraininginstitute.com

This week I’m joined by Jeremy Harmer, writer, presenter, teacher and trainer. Jeremy and I discuss feedback and error correction. Why is correction so important? How much correction do learners want? What’s the best way to give it to them?Inside Online Language Teaching: Conversations About the Future That Became the PresentGet 10% off a 120 TESOL course with Train the Teacher. Use this link and the discount code: TTi10For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Jake Whiddon joins me to discuss using data in education. What data do teachers collect in face-to-face classes? What insights can apps offer teachers? And how can teachers use this to make their teaching more effective?Inside Online Language Teaching: Conversations About the Future That Became the PresentGet 10% off all purchases from StudyCat. Use the discount code: Ross

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Get your free standard account and access to a free premium account for one month on ClassInSupport the podcast, buy us a coffeeVisit our websiteCheck out my book: Inside Online Language Teaching

Author and positive discipline trainer, Dina Esmer, joins me to talk about tools for managing young learners’ behavior. What can teachers do to encourage long term positive behavior in class? How can teachers train learners to solve their own behavior problems? And what can teachers do when conflicts happen in their classes?Visit Dina’s websiteGet 10% all purchases at StudyCatSupport the podcast by buying us a coffeeVisit our website, TEFLtraininginstitute.com

George Pickering joins me to talk about managers. What do they do? How do they do it? What are the most important skills? And how easy is it for teachers to become managers?Learn more about Studycat and get a free accountSupport the podcast: buy me a coffeeTake a management training course with George

Debbie tells us about vocabulary enrichment, the importance of recycling, why English is so difficult to read, and much more. Debbie is also the author of the online Phonics International program for all ages (Phonics International Ltd), phonics consultant for the Oxford Reading Tree Floppy’s Phonics Sounds and Letters program, author of the No Nonsense Phonics Skills program (Raintree) and the Phonics and Talk Time series of two books for nursery.For a free standard account and access to a free premium account for one month on ClassIn, click here.Visit PhonicsInternational.comFor more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Nina Spada joins me to talk about form focused instruction. How much of a difference does teaching grammar make to students? Can students remember and use grammar rules? What rules should we teach?For a free standard account and access to a free premium account for one month on ClassIn, click here.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Matt Courtois and I discuss the dilemma of pushing students further and keeping students motivated. How important is motivation compared with progress? What do we do that might accidentally demotivate students? And how can we help students make progress and keep them motivated at the same time?Get 10% off the studycat app for your students by clicking here and using the promo code “Ross”Pre-order my book, “Inside Online Language Teaching: Conversations about the future that became the present”Support the podcast by buying us a coffeeVisit our website, www.tefltraininginstitute.com

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.Visit Jane’s website www.willis-elt.co.ukSupport the podcast, buy us a coffeeFor a free standard account and access to a free premium account for one month on ClassIn, click here.Subscribe to our YouTube channel

Jake Whiddon joins me to talk about what should go in a language learning app. Do language learning apps reflect educational theory? What are apps doing better than teachers? And what tricks are app designers missing? Jake Whiddon’s teacher training webinarsGet 10% off the studycat app for your students by clicking here and using the promo code “Ross”Ross Thorburn:  Welcome back to the "TEFL Training Institute Podcast" everyone. I'm Ross Thorburn. In this week's episode, we're looking at "What should be in a language learning app?"I think as apps are becoming more and more common, it's going to be more and more important that teachers can give students and parents informed advice about what app to choose to learn a language.In this week's episode, we have Jake Whiddon sharing insights from his research, which he's recently conducted as part of his master's program at the Norwich Institute of Language Education into apps and app‑based language learning. Now, on with the episode.Ross:  Jake, to begin with, what made you want to investigate apps for language learning?Jake Whiddon:  I currently work for an app company.Ross:  [laughs] That's a good reason.Jake:  That was the main reason. I also was interested in it because 2020 saw the rise of not just online teaching but a massive rise in the number of students and children having to use apps to continue learning while the schools were close. That's probably the other main reason why I was so focused on it.Ross:  I also get impressions not a huge amount of research already out there on what works in apps.Jake:  Up until 2015, no. By 2015, there were 80,000 educational apps in the App Store with practically none of them have had researched done on them.Ross:  Which is so interesting because I think in most countries, if you wanted to start a school, you probably need to go through a lot of government red tape to get that open. Interestingly, if you open an app and put it online, I guess no one really has to check that.Jake:  No, you just click a checkbox that says, "This is an education lab."Ross:  I presume another challenge with making an effective app is that maybe a lot of the time that people building the apps...I guess there's probably not many, many people who could do that, right?You'd either be a teacher, and you might understand the learning, but you wouldn't know much about the tech. [laughs] If you've got the tech skills, you probably wouldn't necessarily know much about that educational theory.Jake:  That's exactly right. There's a lot of app companies I've been looking at that are just people from the tech industry who've realized the education and edtech is going to be a big business. They have tried to do that, and they lack those things.Interestingly, [laughs] you see a lot of apps developed by educational PhDs, but they're not user‑friendly. They don't have that engagement. They don't have that gamey feeling about them. They lack there as well.You can imagine if you're a child, and you've been playing Minecraft all day, and then suddenly someone says, "Do use this app," and it's developed by an educator, they don't necessarily end up being as fun.Ross:  You're already now getting into this. What are some of the things that should be in an educational or language learning's app?Read the rest of the interview here

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.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channelRoss Thorburn: Today, we have with us Karin Xie. Hi, Karin.Karin Xie: Hi, everyone.Ross: Karin, do you want to tell us a little bit about what you do? You do teacher training. Tell us who you do teacher training for.Karin: I work with teachers who prepare students for [inaudible 0:13] exams. It's a graded speaking exam that focuses on communication skills.Ross: You were saying also for those teachers, a lot of them end up teaching in a way that they were taught before, right? Which is really quite different to what the exam measures.Karin: Yeah. In my experience with the teachers, I found a lot of them, they would still focus on teaching students the knowledge, like the grammar and the vocabulary, so that students have the knowledge for the exam but not really the skills. I wondered why. I found that relates to how they were taught when they were students. How they learned language and how they were trained.Ross: That got us into this conversation about all the different things that might affect how teachers teach to them, we just mentioned. One is how you were taught as a student backwash, and then how teachers are trained.Today, we're going to try and look at what affects how teachers teach. Let's start off by talking about backwash, you mentioned earlier. What's backwash?Karin: It's the impact an assessment has on classroom teaching. For example, for [inaudible 1:18] exams, it's a one‑to‑one, face‑to‑face conversation the candidate has with an examiner. There's no script, no question banks.To prepare students for that, the teacher has to mimic what's happening in the real exam and give the students a lot of chance to use the language at their own choice and express what they want to say, ask questions, etc.Ross: I guess a good example backwash, and maybe less good would be what? If your test is a multiple choice, pick the right tense of the verb exam, right?Karin: Yeah, exactly.Ross: In that situation, people end up just...Karin: Giving students lots of words to remember and do a lot of written exams that don't really prepare learners for real‑life languages.Ross: It's amazing how much of an effect that they can have on what happens in the classroom. IELTS, for example, the speaking part of that test, this is one of my bugbears is that the students don't have to ask any questions in the IELTS speaking exam.If you think of what effect is that going to have in the classroom? If you're preparing students for IELTS, why would you ever teach them to ask a question? Because you never need to do that.Of course, people usually take the IELTS so they can study abroad or so they can move to another country. I think we all agree that if you do move to another country, one of the main things you have to do is ask questions because a lot of the time you don't know what's going on.Karin: Yeah. Any kind of speaking exchange requires contribution from both people whereas in IELTS, the examiner is not allowed to contribute to the communication by say, giving comments or giving support.Ross: Absolutely.Karin: I think maybe we could add one point here...Ross: Sure, of course.Karin: ...about the materials teachers use, especially with new teachers. Very often you see the teachers fall into the flow, what it says, and just use it as it is.Ross: Materials can almost act as a source of teacher training if they're good materials, because teachers will get into the habit, maybe if they're new teachers, of following whatever structure there is in the coursebook.It's problematic though, isn't it, if the structure in the coursebook may be using ideal or if the coursebook has been written for first year teachers and you never move beyond that.Karin: Or if the book doesn't allow a lot of communicative activities, the teacher may not even think about designing any activities for students to talk to each other and work with each other.I remember you were really excited when you were designing materials. You were like, "If you do a teacher training workshop with the teachers, you are not so sure whether they're going to apply everything. But if you design good teaching materials, you are kind of sure that they're going to use it somehow." I don't know if that's...Ross: [laughs] I guess that must be before I'd seen the reality of how teachers use materials.[laughter]Ross: I guess those are both ways of influencing what teachers do, but all of it passes through some filter that the teachers personally have of this is work, does this is fit in with my views of teaching and learning.I remember in a previous job doing some research where we tried basically introducing different materials in this job. It was all one‑to‑one classes. Because it was online, every class was filmed. You could go back and you could watch and see the effect that the materials had on the teaching.We did a little bit of research and started including some personal questions in the materials because we noticed in general, teachers didn't ask for [inaudible 4:47] . I remember one word that was a tongue twister.It said like, "Can you change one word in the tongue twister and make a new tongue twister?" Pretty simple. Not an amazing activity, but some tiny bit of personalization. Afterwards, we watched 20 videos of teachers doing this. 18 of the 20 teachers didn't even ask the question.Karin: I found if you have that is often at the end of the unit or of the chapter. You find teachers either saying that we don't have time for that anymore or they go through it really quickly, whereas that's the most important part of the lesson. That's when the students really get to use it.Ross: I guess you think that's the most important part of the lesson but maybe the person using the book doesn't see it that way.Karin: That makes me think about why we make those different choices. We both have the same course book, but we use it so differently. That, I think, is the beliefs we have towards teaching.Ross: Absolutely. Another thing that maybe affects how teachers' beliefs are formed obviously is people's own experiences as a student. I can't remember what the numbers are, but it's something like by the time you graduate from university, you've been a student for something like 20,000 hours.If do a CELTA course or something, or an initial teaching course, if you're lucky you do like a 120 hours. You're at 120 hours versus 20,000 hours. One month versus 20 years of education. It's very, very difficult to break the beliefs that are formed and how teachers themselves have been taught as students.Karin: I always think about the teachers that taught me and the good things that they did that I think made me learn better and the things that I didn't really enjoy. I think that shaped my teaching beliefs.Ross: Which is interesting, but it reminds me of the George Bernard Shaw quote, "Don't do unto others as you would have them do unto you." It assumes people's preferences are the same. Obviously, it's worth thinking about what you liked or disliked about your teachers might be different to what the other people in the class liked and disliked about their teachers.Karin: I was thinking about the cultural environment behind our teaching beliefs. The one reason that my teachers used to do the lecture style teacher‑centric way of teaching is because the thousand‑year‑old teaching belief of the role of a teacher is to impart the knowledge to the students.If the teacher doesn't talk enough, you feel like you don't learn enough. Same with a lot of parents today. If they send their students to a class, if the students were doing things rather than the teacher doing all talking, then they have the feeling of they don't get good value for the money. I'm not learning enough.Ross: I like your point there about the it's maybe not the 18 years that your teacher was a student...Karin: Or 2,000 hours.Ross: Yeah, or 2,000 or 20,000 hours. It's actually maybe the last 1,000 years of the culture or something that's affecting how that person teaches. There's also something in there about the culture of the school that you're in, I think as well.There's a great chapter, I think it's at the end of Jack Richards book called "Beyond Training." He has students who did his [inaudible 7:54] course. All these teachers, after doing the [inaudible 7:58] course, are really brought into communicative language teaching, task‑based learning.Then they go into these public schools in Hong Kong. The reality in those schools is very different from the context often surrounding communicative language teaching where in those public schools in Hong Kong, there's 60 students in a class. You're next towards others classes, so you can't be too noisy. Your manager expects you to do X, Y and Z in the class.It's amazing how over the course of a year, you look at these teachers, some of them just go 180 degrees, and go from being like, "Oh, I want my students to communicate. I'm going to speak English in the class. I'm going to make sure students enjoy what they're doing," to being authoritarian, grammar‑based and doing everything in the students' first language.Karin: We need to raise teachers' awareness on their own teaching beliefs because that's how they make the choices in lesson planning and delivery, but we often miss out the step of how they can adapt all those methodologies into their own teaching context.I had a similar experience of training some public school teachers where we talked about communicative language teaching, group work, student feedback and things like that. They were like, "With our learning aims, and the class size and our schedule, it's really hard to do that. We literally don't have the time for that, or if we get the students do that, they won't be able to pass all the exams."Ross: Another point here is teachers' own experiences of learning a language. This is something that I personally find really interesting, because I've learned my second language without going to any classes and without studying.I think I have a very laissez‑faire attitude towards the teaching of grammar, really anything overly formal in the classroom, because I know that's not how I learned. Implicitly, I think that's not important, but I obviously that's not true for everyone.Karin: Personally, I like the language awareness approach because my experience with the language learning is that when I was learning English in high school, I never really enjoyed the grammar lessons where we learned the rules. I liked to engage myself with different sources of the language.In the last two years, suddenly, I just became aware of the rules and I see how it works. I was like, "This is amazing." Now I like to lead my students to be aware of how language or how English works rather than giving them the rules. For example, one day, they were asking me about a brand sly. Like, "How can I say this?"Instead of teaching them the pronunciation, I said, "Well, how do you say fly?" They were able to say that. Then I said, "Now take another look at this. How do you say this?" She was like, "Oh, sly. I know how to do it. Now I'm going to find more examples of that." I think that sense of achievement as a learner, and for me as a teacher, was really important.Ross: Obviously, this end up being very personal. One of the dangers with this is that there's always some learners that will learn regardless of what you do. You could have something which is definitely not the best method of teaching a language.Let's say audio linguicism or grammar translation. There will be still have been some people that learned like that. They can then use that to justify, "Well, it worked for me, so I'm going to use it for everyone else."Karin: Our teachers didn't talk about why they did the things with us. Now, we can get the students to have conversations with us on how we learned the language, how we teach the lessons, and why we did them and how they can discover the ways that work for them the best.Ross: The last one we had here was something that affects how teachers teach is their personalities. I'm sure you've heard this before. I definitely have. Saying teachers are born instead of made, or often there's people saying, "So and so, they're just a natural teacher."That's something that really used to annoy me a lot, because to me, it just seems as devalue all the professional development, qualifications, knowledge, and research. No one would ever say that about a doctor or a scientist. At the same time, I think there are a lot of personality traits...Karin: There are.Ross: Yeah.Karin: Yeah. For example, very often when you ask someone, "What makes a good teacher?" Instead of saying all those skills, people say they need to be patient, they need to care for their learners and things like that. Those were all personality traits.Ross: Absolutely. To me, it also reminds me of the nature/nurture debate in psychology. Are we who we are because of our genes, or are we who we are because of our upbringing? Just like that with teachers. Are teachers who they are because of their personality and who they are as a person, or is it their training and professional knowledge?Obviously, I guess it is both, but it's really interesting to think and reflect on what are your own personality traits that you bring into the classroom, and how do you use them. Overall, it's a wrap‑up. I think it's useful for us to think about who we are and how all these different factors affect how we teach and what our teaching decisions are and what our beliefs are.Karin: For me, I think it's the most important thing now as a teacher that we are constantly aware of why we're making the decisions we make.Ross: Good. Karin, thanks so much for joining us.Karin: Thanks for having me.Ross: Great. See you next time, everyone. Goodbye.Karin: Bye.

We interview world expert on teacher development, Professor Thomas Guskey, about how to evaluate professional development. What evidence should we use? How can we tell when it’s successful? What can go wrong in professional development? And how can teachers be at the center of the checking process?Visit Tom’s websiteFor more podcast, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Ross Thorburn: Professor Guskey, thank you so much for joining us. In one of your papers about evaluating professional development, at the end, you say a lot of good things are done in the name of professional development, but so are a lot of rotten things. What are some of the rotten things that get done in the name of teacher development?Professor Thomas Guskey: One of the things that we tend to do in education, all to our detriment, is we tend to be innovation oriented, without careful attention to the evidence that might support any particular innovation.Educators often go to large conferences where they hear very dynamic presenters who talk about these opinions they have about how education could be structured without a lot of evidence to confirm that that would really lead to greater student success.We invest in these different innovations without thinking carefully about what impact they will have, not caring so much about what evidence really supports them.Teachers try them. They use them for a period of time. They don't see the improvements in student learning that were promised, and so then they become very frustrated. As a result of that frustration, they tend to, one, withdraw, and be distrustful of school leaders who bring in these innovations, of the people who advocate for these innovations, and become rather skeptical overall, because they've been burned in their approaches to it.I think that is going to work against us. I think we're coming to recognize, at long last, that when people are suggesting that these new things should be implemented, we're asking important questions about, "What evidence do you have to support it? Has it been used in contexts similar to ours? Have they documented the impact on students in ways that we find meaningful?"We ask those critical questions, and it leads you in a very different direction.Ross Thorburn: You mentioned evidence there. Can you tell us what would count as evidence, or what does evidence look like?Professor Guskey: I think there are right resources of evidence of student learning. One of the dilemmas, particularly here in the United States that people encounter, is they want to look very narrowly at improvements in standardized test scores.Those standardized test scores may or may not be well aligned with the curriculum that students are taught. If it's poorly aligned with the curriculum that students are taught, we wouldn't see a lot of improvement there because they're testing students on things that they haven't been taught, weren't part of the instruction program.If we think more broadly about the variety of student learning outcomes, that it might be considered to include those overall major standardized assessments, but also to include teacher assessments, classroom assessments, other demonstrations of learning and performance, to even go beyond that to other kinds of affected things where students are confident of themselves in learning situations.Did they feel better about their abilities in school? Are they more engaged in learning activities both in school and out of school? Are they more purposeful in the way they're going about their learning?There's this wide range of student learning outcomes we know contributes to their success, but we often don't think of what we turn to evaluating the impact of professional learning programs.Ross Thorburn: Obviously, there's a lot of different types of evidence. For me, one of the problems I have with this concept is that for someone running a teacher training session, that the time it would take to do the follow‑up and gather evidence that it worked, or it didn't work, would just take so much longer than running the training itself.How can that be done in a manner that doesn't require an obscene amount of time?Professor Guskey: There's a balance must be sought here. Indeed, the kinds of evidence that we often use to evaluate programs is gathered on a very irregular basis. That tends to be pretty ineffective.The approach that I advocate is to actually ask teachers what evidence they trust, what evidence would they believe. If that's what's really working for them, how would they know it, what differences would they see in their students, and what evidence could they provide that could confirm that difference?Sometimes, that kind of evidence is not easy to gather. It might be something we have to obtain through classroom observations, or student interviews, or things like that, but we could certainly build that into the program.The second aspect of it is that information must be gained rather quickly.A few years ago, I was being interviewed by an educational journal. I was asked during the interview, "When teachers are trying a new innovation, a new approach, how soon should they see results?"Very good friends of mine at that time were saying, "Well, change is a slow process, and it might take us a while to get there. And you have to sustain efforts over significant periods of time." I said, "In two weeks."The interviewer was stunned. The reason that I suggested that is that all the evidence that we were gathering was showing that teachers need to see that what they're doing is making a difference.Because the stakes are high for teachers, they have this fear that if they persist in using these new strategies and techniques, there is the danger that there are students who might learn less well. They are unwilling to sacrifice their students for the sake of innovation.That means that you must build into any particular innovation, some strategy where teachers can get evidence pretty quickly, that is making a difference. That means you can't wait until the end of the year to give a standardized assessment.What you need to do is think about the evidence teachers gather on a very regular basis to find out if their students are learning things that's important for them to learn.Ross Thorburn: Does that mean that we are really looking at raising teachers' awareness of how to evaluate new technique and methods rather than, say, launching a big research project about how to evaluate how well something works overall in a school in terms of student outcomes?Professor Guskey: Absolutely. In fact, I advocate for that. These are your frontline warriors who are implementing these strategies. They need to see that it's making a tangible difference in the school lives of the students.We need to be helping teachers think about what evidence they would gather that would show this has made a difference. It could be engagement raised in class. It could be the kids asking more thoughtful questions. It could be them coming to class earlier and engaging more thoughtful discussions as a part of the class. All sorts of things that teachers look for to find out if what they're teaching is really coming across.Engaging teachers in those conversations about, "How would you know that this is making a difference?" is one of the most important ways we can start.Ross Thorburn: We're really then looking at helping teachers evaluate what works and what doesn't work in their own classrooms.Professor Guskey: Yeah, that is exactly right. In fact, I believe that that should be included in any professional learning experience. If this worked, how would you know it? How would you be able to tell from your students? What evidence would you gather to show that this was making a difference?To build that into any professional learning experience so that the teachers become more thoughtful and more evidence oriented in their approaches as well. All those could be very, very positive benefits in any professional learning experience.Ross Thorburn: That's really interesting. I think that's something that's often missing from teacher training, where normally it's, "Here's this great technique, use it." Here I guess, what we're saying is, "Here's this technique, use it. And when you use it, what evidence can you collect from your classes that would show if it was working or not?"Professor Guskey: I agree with you. Yes, it's not something that you would see as a common element in most professional learning programs at this time.Ross Thorburn: Another reason that you've written about why training and teacher development often fails is because of a lack of support from schools.If the school doesn't really support a particular professional development program, or a new practice for teachers, is it still worth trying?Professor Guskey: No. I think that the very best teachers are always looking for ways to get better. They are always open to ideas that might benefit their students. They are in an environment where they're willing to try those things out. They have some initial confidence that it might lead to improvement.Again, the critical element will be allowing them to gain some evidence in a relatively short period of time, that their extra effort and their extra work are paying off, that they see a benefit.Teachers are very, very hardworking individuals. They spend many hours in preparation outside of their regular class time. They are willing to commit even additional time and resources to that if they have some confidence that it is helping their students better.When I do studies on teachers, I'm always asking questions like, "What makes teaching meaningful to you? What are the benefits you derive from teaching? What makes it a good job? What makes you excited about what you're doing?"99 times out of 100, the teachers that I interview define that in terms of their students. What happens is when I see that these lessons are coming across, when I see they catch on to ideas, when I see that light come on.This is the power of professional learning, to give that to teachers in a very powerful way, to give teachers the joy of what brought them to teaching in the first place, and to let them have that positive influence on their students which they really, really want to have.Ross Thorburn: Finally then, as an argument against measurement and evaluation, what do you think of that Einstein quote, "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts"? Are there some important effects that just can't be measured when it comes to professional development and evidence‑based practice?Professor Guskey: I think that there is. There are certain things that are extremely difficult to measure. I also go back to the quote by another scientist, Lord Kelvin, who said that, "If it can't be measured, it can't be improved."That we really need to think about, if we want to make improvements, we have to find some way to determine whether those improvements have occurred or not. That implies the process of measurement.We might say we want students to be more joyful in approaching learning situations. Clearly, that's difficult to measure, but it doesn't mean it's impossible.We want students to have greater confidence in themselves in learning situations. We want them to have a higher level of aspiration, to have confidence that they can achieve lifelong goals and do well in their lives, and that what we're teaching can help them in that.Just because it's difficult to measure doesn't mean it's impossible. If we want to see improvement, then we need to be able to find some way to document those improvements, which does imply some sort of measurement, even though it could be quantitative, as well as qualitative.

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.For a free standard account and access to a free premium account for one month on ClassIn, click here.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

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)?TEFL Equity Advocates and AcademyFor more podcast, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Carol Read joins us to talk about managing behavior with young learners. Carol tells us about the use of different strategies to encourage positive behavior, the use of praise with different age groups and how teachers can help learners to become more responsible for their own behavior.Visit Carol’s WebsiteFor more podcast, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Why both writing a lesson aim? Are they not printed in the coursebook? Ross and regular guest Dave Weller discuss why it’s a good idea to write a lesson aim, what a good lesson aim looks like, and what are the drawbacks to lesson aims…For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Support the podcast by buying us a coffee!Visit our YouTube channel Our teacher training resourcesVisit The Fair ListTessa Woodward joins us to talk about her work with the Fair List, UK. We talk about discrimination towards women (as well as other groups), why it is important to have different groups represented by speakers at conferences and what listeners can do to find out more.

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?www.professorjackrichards.comFor more podcast, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

As artificial intelligence (AI) develops it's role in language assessment gets more and more important. We discuss this and the implications with testing expert Dan Elsworth.For more podcast, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

We talk with Vivian Cook, Professor Emeritus at Newcastle University about second language acquisition; how it has progressed in the twentieth century, how it gets used by language teachers and what the future holds for SLA.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Support the podcast by buying us a coffee!Visit our YouTube channelOur teacher training resourcesAmol’s Ambedkar University Delhi webpageAmol Padwad joins us to explain “decentering” in ELT. Amol tells us about the problem with language teaching having a “center” and how this can cause voices and ideas to be suppressed.De centering in English Language Teaching (with Amol Padwad) Ross Thorburn:  Hi everyone, welcome back to TEFL Training Institute podcast. I'm Ross Thorburn and this week we're talking about decentering in English language teaching. My guest for this week's episode is Amol Padwad. Amol is director at the Center for English Language Education at Ambedkar University in Delhi.In the episode, Amol tells us about first of all what decentering is, what counts as being the center of the language teaching world and what are some problems with that. We talk about some concepts and people that are unfairly on the peripheries of language teaching. Enjoy the episode.Ross:  Amol, thank you for joining us. To begin with, what is decentering? What does it mean and where does the concept come from?Amol Padwad:  Well, actually, the roots of this term may be traced back to post‑structuralism and even postmodernism.In simple words, it means removing something from a central position but it's a very complex notion as you will easily agree. As I understand, it refers to countering any hegemony tendency which comes in form of dominance or influence of a center.For the purpose of decentering, I would call a center to be any entity which claims to have exclusive ownership of roots or expertise or right solutions and then ends up dominating or suppressing alternative sources of expertise or knowledge or solutions.For example, a particular entity is saying that, "I know everything." Or "We have the final best possible solutions for any problem and if you want, you must use them. Other solutions are not good." Then, I would call that centering tendency.When I say this, I think I must also clarify that I am not suggesting a center as a problem per say. In fact, I believe that centers exist to offer some stability to any structure. The center is not a problem, centering is a problem. What is the difference?Center is an entity, but if that center behaves in a particular way, a way that disregards or disrespects alternatives or the others, that tries to create domination hegemony, that tries to claim exclusive ownership of a particular truth or knowledge or something, then that is a centering tendency.Any center harboring those tendencies will be a problem. Decentering is against the centering tendencies.Ross:  Great. Just to be clear, are we talking here about the center as in being the center of the English teaching world or we're talking more about the center of the English speaking world or are we talking about both?Amol:  Eventually both, but at the moment all the current decentering, thinking and initiative that is underway and it was initiated by the Hornby Trust in the UK. Hornby Trust was set up by A.S. Hornby especially with the purpose of spending all the money and the resources he has handed out to the trust.For the third weekend, I'm using a slightly loaded term here, but what he meant was he spent all his life working in those countries and learnt a lot from there. Even Oxford dictionary was an outcome of his work there.He argued in the trust document that whatever he earned working in those communities should go back to those communities and that's why Hornby Trust is supporting this initiative. At the moment, the focus is on English language teaching world, the ELT world.In this world, the most prominent, most visible, most easily identifiable center is the West or what Adrian Holiday call the BANA countries, Britain, Australia and North America. That is the most easily identifiable center. In the decentering initiative, we take a more complex and nuanced view.We assume that globally this may be the center but there are also lots of local centers. There are centers everywhere and decentering has to deal with all centers and all centering practices wherever they happen.Ross:  Do you want to give us some examples of this then Amol? I think the first thing that crossed my mind when I heard this was the idea of sending so‑called native speakers to different parts of the world as "experts" in inverted commas, as being one being symptom of centering, is that right? If it is right, then what are some other examples?Amol:  Absolutely. I think that was the most dominant and visible example of centering. We have hundreds of examples of this experts of native speakers all over the world. In many cases, their only qualification was being a native speaker.Even then, they ended up in the roles of expert teachers on English language teaching. Robert Philipson has written a lot in his linguistic imperialism on this whole phenomenon. That's one example. There are several other examples.When you find white peoples or people from the West as typically favored, preferred primary speakers or when they are typically preferred as consultants for any project in any country in the world or when they are typically invited as external evaluators, as research advisors, as curriculum material designers.Everywhere you find examples of this centering tendencies. Then there are similar parallel examples within the country also at the local level because I must remind that centering is not necessarily limited to the West. That's a prominent example, but we are concerned with centering anywhere.We are proceeding with the assumption that decentering must counter centering at any level, at the global or at the country level. I can quote one very interesting example.In 1990s in some states in India, there were massive teacher training project which aimed at training primary teachers for a new textbook and therefore load the typical favorite cascade model. There would be a small group of state trainers who we call master trainers.Those master trainers would train a handful of trainers and then those trainers would eventually train the primary teachers. The master trainers would be university professors and the trainers would be secondary teachers and the trainees would be primary teachers.Why this hierarchy? How do university professors having never entered a primary classroom, having absolutely no idea of what a primary textbook is, and what teaching young learners means, be the master trainers at the highest level in the hierarchy?Why they should not be brought down to the second level of hierarchy while the secondary teachers should come in? These are all very evident examples of centering at the local level.Ross:  I'm so glad that you brought up young learners there. I think young learners must be something like what, 90 percent of the people out there who are learning English as a second or as a foreign language.If that's the case, then it must also be true that the vast majority of teachers are teaching young learners and yet it definitely feels like the center of language teaching is adults as opposed to kids which I really still believe just makes very little sense at all.Amol:  That's true. There are of course lots of books specifically for pushing on young learners. I agree with you in the sense that especially when it comes to talking about teacher development and teacher training, it is usually assumed that we are addressing teachers who are teaching adults.Lots of theories and formulations and practices and strategies and techniques are suggested for teachers who would later go on and teach adults. In that sense, young learners become marginal, peripheral in this whole discourse on teacher development. If young learners are peripheral, their teachers are also marginalized.In most states in India, primary teachers anyway struggle for their identity when it comes to ELT because primary teachers are not teachers of English alone. If they are not teachers of English alone they teach all other subjects, it is often forgotten that they also teach English.They are not treated as English teachers whenever discussions around ELT happens. This struggle for identity and other important aspect of their marginalization in the ELT world I suppose.Ross:  Up until now, I guess we've been talking about the problems of centering, can you tell us about some initiatives to counter centering.Amol:  In my view, the first very essential and crucial stage is raising awareness about centering because a lot of centering might be happening subconsciously, unintentionally. Being subconscious or unintentional doesn't take away a possible harm that might result from centering.Being aware of that, the way gender sensitization was considered absolutely crucial for gender parity. In the same way I believe that awareness sensitization about centering possibility is absolutely crucial to reach a state where there would be no centering. That's first trend. There are lots of examples of that as well.Secondly, an important trend is being conscious of and promoting alternative expertise, especially local expertise and knowledge so that we are not led to believe that we have to depend on knowledge or resources coming from the center whether that center is the West or some high‑profile university professor.There are interesting practices which try to promote. Though I can say not with absolute confidence, but I strongly believe that those practices have been unintentional. The people who initiate those practices may not be aware that they are countering a centering trend.One example is of a journal in Argentina. The FAAPI association has a journal. One of the mandate for all possible submission is that the references must include a certain number of local research publications.The person submitting must show an awareness of what research is happening in Argentina. In my own state where I used to work previous in Maharashtra, one university has a mandatory provision for all of the PhD students to include a subsection on Indian research in the literature review as a mandate.I believe that these are small but important range which make people look at other sources, not depend on the Western sources. Thirdly, I think an important trend is to develop criticality about ideas and resources which come from the center.We should not fall into a trap of either blindly accepting them or straightforward complete dismissal. We should not fall for both the trend. We should critically evaluate them for their relevancy, for their appropriateness, for the utility to our own context, pick up whatever is useful for us and adopt it.In that sense, I think developing the capability to adopt is a very important skill and strategy to be developing teachers, especially in those context where things are imposed from above.If teachers can critically evaluate and if they can't escape from the textbook, they at least learn how to adopt that textbook. I think that would be a very powerful decentering trend.Ross:  Finally, Amol you mentioned the idea at the beginning of centering involving some people being suppressed, do you want to tell us a bit about that? Who are the people that you think get suppressed or whose voices get suppressed in language teaching?Amol:  I can give examples from some interesting research studies some of the teacher participants did in what we call teacher research initiative AINET association of English teachers of which I am the secretary. Our association runs a yearlong cycle of teacher research. We have teachers inside their classrooms.In the second and the third round of that cycle, teachers conducted studies on issues like why children cheat in the examination or why teachers help students cheat in the examination, why parents of most students do not help them in doing homework.Now the very fact that these came up as concerns of the teachers and the fact that these issues never appear in any so‑called standard research literature, is an indication that what so‑called established research considers worthwhile of exploration and validates it, legitimizes it, is a totally different from what teachers at the ground level find worthwhile exploring and wants to explore.I'm not negating the value of the academic research that happens in the established normative standardized form, but those kinds of studies which appear in Western journals and publication or which are validated even within the country by university PhD degrees.If that knowledge is only the acknowledged knowledge and what the teacher finds from one classroom study while teachers are helping students cheat in the examination, that knowledge, the practitioner knowledge is completely neglected, suppressed.That is what I am referring to when you asked me about some knowledge being alternative expertise or knowledge being suppressed. Practitioner expertise, local wisdom is suppressed in this kind of hegemony.Ross:  One more time everyone, that was Amol Padwad. For more from Amol, checkout the link to his University of Ambedkar website that's in the show notes and also on our website which is www.tefltraininginstitute.com.On there, you'll find podcasts, videos, a link to our YouTube channel which you should checkout, information about teacher training courses like the Trinity Diploma and TESOL and a link to help support the podcast by buying us a coffee. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you again next time. Goodbye.

I speak with Professor Anne Burns about teaching speaking. Why discuss why teaching speaking is so difficult, the differences between teaching speaking and just practicing it and look at an example of an activity of how to teach speaking.Support the podcast by buying us a coffee!Visit our YouTube channelOur teacher training resourcesAnne Burns | Arts & Social Sciences - UNSW Sydney

As teachers, we try to personalize our classes for our students. But as supervisors, trainers and mentors, how much do we personalize our feedback to teachers? We look at different models for giving feedback, as well as how and when to use each.Support the podcast by buying us a coffee!Visit our YouTube channel Our teacher training resources

Professor Tom Farrell joins me to talk about evidence-based reflection. Why bother with evidence? How might the reality of your classroom differ from your perceptions? And what evidence can teachers gather to find out more about the reality? Listen to find out.Visit Tom’s websiteMore on reflectionSupport the podcast by buying us a coffee!Our teacher training resourcesVisit our YouTube Channel

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.For more podcast, videos and blogs, visit our websiteSupport the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training coursesWatch as well as listen on our YouTube channelFind out more about ClassIn

I talk to regular guests Diedrick Van Gorp and Allan Crocker about the Zombies of language teaching: what are the ‘bad’ activities, ideas and practices in TEFL that just won’t die?Visit our website: www.tefltraininginstitute.comSupport the show - buy me a coffeeMore about studying the Trinity Diploma in TESOL with Ross

Going From Teacher To Business Owner (with Ed Dudley, Jake Whiddon & Peter Liu)Visit our website: www.tefltraininginstitute.comSupport the show - buy me a coffeeMore about studying the Trinity Diploma in TESOL with RossMore from Ed DudleyMore from Jake WhiddonPeter Liu from Owl ABC on starting a start-upRoss: Peter, you started your own business a year and a half ago. Before you tell us about what it is, what made you want to start your own company?Peter Liu: My current co‑founder and I, we've been good friends for several years. He's also in education. He's got 15 some odd years of experience. We saw this trend of thousands of Chinese kids going abroad to study.There was a study done several years back that showed 25 percent of Chinese students going to an Ivy League school fail, 25 percent. When I read that statistic, that blew my mind.There's a gap in skills that Chinese students have, who are attending school abroad. There are tons and tons of services that help kids in China improve their English. They can help with their test‑taking of the IELs and the TOEFL. It only ever seems to go as far as your first day of university so you can get into school.How do you actually stay in and succeed? I've been working at this education technology startup. We built a whole bunch of fancy tech. I worked very closely with the product and the engineering teams. I had a little bit of experience building an online product.Ross: This is almost like working in a startup prepared you to start your own startup?Peter: Yeah, you could say that.Ross: Did that take some of the fear out of it, as well?Peter: It's that and also our product is not technically that challenging. We're not building a technology company. We're building a services company.Ross: How has what your company does changed from what you originally visioned, compared with now?Peter: The biggest change was our business model. Originally, we were focused on a B2C model, basically, selling our services and our content directly to consumers. We quickly found that we don't have the local knowledge of how to message, how to create marketing channels to reach these consumers.We made the decision to shift our focus to B2B, licensing our content and our teaching to other education companies so that they could do the heavy lifting of marketing directly to their students. They already have students who are, perhaps, learning English from them, but who need to build their critical thinking skills. That's where we come in.Ross: Can I ask you a question about money and stuff? Let me give you an analogy here. I remember once climbing a mountain. When you're climbing a high mountain, it's a little bit dangerous. You have a turnaround time. If we don't get to the top by four o'clock, we're going to turn around. Because if we're walking down in the dark, it's really, really dangerous.Do you have that with the business where you're like, "If we're not starting to make money, or if we're not able to break even within 12 months or two years, then I'm going to quit this and go back to teaching English." How does that work?Peter: It depends what scale company you're doing, and also how disciplined you are with finances.[laughter]Peter: Basically, how much money do you have in the bank, and how long can that sustain you? What is your burn rate? How much money are you spending?Ross: Cool. Can I ask you then what would you say if there's one thing I really wish I knew or I paid more attention to when I first started this, I should have done this. What do you think that would be?Peter: I'm a big proponent of the lean startup methodology which is, basically, applying the scientific method to operating a business. You form a hypothesis. You run tests to either validate or invalidate that hypothesis. Then you either proceed if you validate your hypothesis or you change course.I wish we'd applied that methodology a little bit more rigorously to the early stages of our product development, because of the business environment that we're operating in. We were very cautious in marketing, and putting ourselves out there, and putting our product out there.Ross: In case someone stole the idea.Peter: Precisely.Jake Whiddon on starting your own schoolRoss: Hi, Jake.Jake Whiddon: Hi, Ross.Ross: You started your own kids' school recently. You've been involved in TOEFL for about 15 years. What made you want to open your own school now at this point in your career?Jake: Honestly, I felt that I had worked for long enough for big companies. I wanted to have some control over the output of what I was doing. I felt I reached, not a ceiling, but a point where there was nowhere else I could go with what I personally wanted to do with education. That's the reason.Ross: Jake, how did you choose the people to go into business with? There's so many people you know, but why did you choose the people who work with you now?Jake: It's really interesting. For a long time, I'd always wanted to start a business with another one of your ex‑guests called Dave Welleble. I realized that we were too similar. We were very similar. What I had to do was find someone who could complement my skills. I've got some skills that come up with creative ideas in trying to have operations experience.I needed someone who knew how to network, do finances, work with people, and communicate better, and then that person came along. It's someone I'd worked with 10 years ago, and they just came out of the blue and said, "Hey, by the way, I'm actually looking for someone who can work together."I think the best decision was finding someone who I knew well but can complement the way they work. That old adage of never work with your friends, I don't think that that's true. I think that you should work with your friends.A point a friend was making to me the other day was, I met this person through working with him, not through being a friend. I knew I could work with him. I think that's worked really, really well.Ross: How did you go about getting an investor then, because, obviously, opening a school requires a lot of funds?Jake: You don't find people to invest in your school, they find you. There's a lot of people in China with a lot of money that they don't know how to spend. They need to spend it on something, whether it's a gym or a hairdresser, or something they want to do. For us, it was someone who knew they wanted to do something in education, but they didn't know how to.They came to us and said, "Can you guys do something with education for us?" Which is what I find most people say. On saying that, though, people are still looking for investors.The way it happens in China is you're just constantly networking. You never know why the person that you're talking to might be the person who can invest money in you one day. That's something to remember.Ross: What skills do you think you've learned in other parts of your career that helped you the most in running your own school?Jake: Well, none. No, I want to say none. No, I say that as a joke. It's amazing how little I knew. I mean, I ran five, four different schools as a [inaudible 08:20. I ran 12 schools as a regional manager. I ran 40 schools as a national manager. I controlled budgets of two million dollars. You know what? A lot of those skills didn't help me at all.What they helped me with was operations. They helped me with efficiency. They helped me with things, like knowing that you're using classrooms at the right efficiency. You're using teachers at the right amount. You're utilizing people in the right way.It didn't teach me how to run a business. With all the experience in the world, I have learned more in the last eight months of how much I didn't know.Ross: What have you had to learn when your started your business? Is there anything that you've never experienced before, or something that you felt, "Oh, this is something brand new to me, and I have to start learning"?Jake: I'm learning that without a big budget for marketing, for example, we can't go and afford a math/science and blanket. You have to think everything we're thinking. We have to flip it over and think about it from the bottom up. That's probably the first one. The other one is people don't want to work for a company that no one's heard of.People want to work for big name companies. Who wants to work for a place that has only one school? Lastly is how much relationships matter. The relationship you have obviously with the customer but also mainly with everyone around you, everyone. The Fire Department, the Visa Office, everyone you have to have a relationship with.You're constantly having to deal with each of these people. We talk about bureaucracy, but bureaucracy might be a good thing because, at least, it means there's some bureaucratic process. Here, it all comes back to relationships.Ross: Finally, Jake. What advice do you have for teachers thinking about starting their own school?Jake: Remember, that's my last advice. The industry is never as caught up as you are. Whatever you're thinking, the market is probably two steps behind you. The market needs to be educated to get to where you are first.Ross: Thanks, Jake. Bye‑bye.Jake: Bye, Ross.Ed Dudley on going freelanceRoss: Ed, you obviously started off as a teacher teaching full‑time. Do you want to tell us about how did you go from teaching full‑time to becoming now a freelance teacher trainer and author?Ed Dudley: You're right. I began teaching full‑time. Then very gradually, I began to be invited to speak at local conferences and to do, perhaps, weekend events for teachers in the local area. Then gradually I was invited to do more work, which involved going to another country for a few days to do some teacher training. I would balance that with my school work.I would rearrange my classes, or I would get colleagues to cover my classes in my absence, which was, again, a difficult balancing act. There was no masterplan there for me. I simply did it slowly and incrementally over time. The amount of teaching that I was doing gradually reduced. The amount of training and materials writing that I was doing gradually increased.Ross: There are a lot of teachers considering becoming a freelancer. Are there any tips or recommendation for this group of people?Ed: It has the potential to cause sleepless nights if you're going to suddenly do it cold turkey. I was in a position where I could try out freelance work, freelance life with a safety net. I tend to have the philosophy that if you focus on doing a good job on what's in front of you, then that will lead to good things in the future.I've always remembered that it's important to be aware of what your strengths are. If I'm asked or invited to do something that I don't think is aligned with my strengths, then I say "no" to that. It can be tough when you're a freelancer to say "no" to something.There's a lot of pressure on us to take every opportunity that comes our way. It is important not to bite off more than we can chew as well, and to make sure we do a good job by saying "yes" to the things that we're confident we can do well, and "no" to the things that we don't think we can do well.Ross: What do you think are the advantages of the freelance life?Ed: The key advantages, that if you have the mentality or you have the personality that can deal with the uncertainties of the freelance life.In other words, if you're not too freaked out by the fact that you're not quite sure what's going to be happening 12 months from now, then that gives you an awful amount of freedom. It gives you a chance to focus on your own professional development.I find that I'm able to do a lot more reading. I'm able to find time to plan my work with much more freedom and less frazzledness than when I was balancing my training work with my full‑time job. It gives you a chance also to make last minute decisions as well.Very often, you'll find that an opportunity comes up at very short notice to travel somewhere and do some work. You have this really exciting opportunity to go somewhere you've never been before, to work with people you've never met before. That's an incredibly stimulating and enjoyable way to work.

Visit our website: www.tefltraininginstitute.comSupport the show - buy me a coffeeMore about studying the Trinity Diploma in TESOL with RossRoss Thorburn: Hi everyone. Welcome back to "TEFL Training Institute" podcast. I'm Ross Thorburn. This week we are talking about green issues in ELT. To help us do that we have Ceri Jones, one of the founding members of ELT Footprint. Ceri is also a teacher, a course‑book writer, a teacher trainer, and sometimes co‑host of the "TEFL Commute" podcast.In this episode, I ask Ceri about what does the environment basically have to do with language teaching? What can teachers do to bring environmental issues into the classroom and raise student awareness of issues with the environment? Finally, how can teachers help to make their classrooms more environmentally friendly? Enjoy the interview.Ross: Hi, Ceri, thanks for joining us. Can we just start off with, what does the environment have to do with language teaching?Ceri Jones: I think there are two ways coming at it. One is the individuals who are involved. The teachers themselves as people may be particularly interested in environmental issues. Really the last year, 2019 seemed to be this huge year of mass consciousness where global strikes led by Fridays For Future, for example, gave the issue a massively high profile.There's even things like from a language point of view into the word of the year last year for Oxford University Press's dictionary was climate emergency. The graph that shows the growth and frequency of the use of the term is amazing. It's this huge upward curve from a general educational point of view.We're not talking about English language teaching, particularly here but education on the whole. It's also coming into school curricula across the world. The inclusion of environmental studies and what you could call eco‑literacy. Italy has made it compulsory across primary and lower secondary school coming out in what the Italian Minister for Education called the Trojan‑horse approach.Not that they study it as a subject, but that it is across the curriculum. You can see it then in things like the PISA testing criteria have also included environmental awareness. In Australia, they have built a really interesting framework for further education and beyond. They have all these categories of eco‑literacy which echo the CFR for language for example.You'd have a level one, a level two, or level three awareness or, what they expect kids to be able to do. I think one of the things that chimes with ELT teachers is there's an emphasis on critical thinking, information literacy, being able to differentiate bias and fact and fact‑checking in general.Fact‑checking within the whole environmental issue is actually something that's a fantastic way of bringing the two things together in class and with teenagers, for example, by looking at what is a green issue.Ross: You mentioned, they're bringing this topic into class. What would you say to teachers who perhaps feel a bit unsure about imposing this topic on their students? Maybe for teachers who feel that this is a topic that's best left for science teachers or geography teachers to deal with?Ceri: Yes, and I think it is a very valid complaint about topic fatigue. "We're always doing this in school. We don't want to do this. It's boring." I would say the thing is that because it's in the curriculum, it's also in the exams. As teachers preparing our students for that, and also for an English speaking community beyond exams in the classroom, this is a big trending topic.We need to prepare them to be able to deal with it. From a point of view of lexis, for example, they need to be able to deal with texts on this topic. Otherwise, they're not going to be able to function maybe in an exam where one of the reading texts is on this topic.Just as you need to teach students the vocabulary or for example technology, because it's everywhere around us, you would not teach about technology. In the same way you would not teach about the environment. You're doing your students a disservice if you don't. That would be my call out to teachers who reject the idea as being maybe too political. That might be a fear that some teachers have.Ross: In terms of it being too political then, what can teachers do about that? I mean, I think you can picture almost like a graph of interesting topics along with how controversial they are. It's probably a straight diagonal line, isn't it? The more controversial the topic, the more interest it can create.Clearly teachers here need to walk a fine line where they don't want to either upset their students or their school management, or even more worryingly, maybe perhaps the governments in the countries that they're working in?Ceri: Absolutely, and as you say, it's like if there's no controversy, there's no interest at all, is that there has to be something which piques interest. Kind of like the motivation curve, you have to hit that perfect spot at the top of the curve where there's enough motivation, not too much. It's the same thing with interest. There's enough interest but not too much for it to become personal or heated or problematic.I was talking to a teacher who's working in Brazil. In one of his classes, he was working with adults who were older than him. They were climate‑deniers in his class. He wanted to talk about the environment with them. They found common ground that they could agree on, which was conservation.Even if they didn't believe the science of climate change, they were very interested in and felt strongly about the needs to conserve. At the time, there was an oil spill off the coast. They were very concerned there about the turtle population, for example. They had lots of ideas about how the government should be protecting the natural environment.He said, "Well, OK, I thought that was a way in. You can find a common ground or maybe a local issue, or something that people do feel positively about." I think that's quite an important thing. What we really need to emphasize as much as we can, the positive and the local and things that can be done. Bringing negativity into the classroom, it's a real downer educationally I think.There's a danger that we're just going to switch students off completely. That effective filter, it can inhibit people learning. All of the connections that you might be making with the language and the subject and that reacting, kind of emotively even to your learning, all of that will be switched off. That means that you're short‑circuiting the learning experience.I like to look at it from a point of view of narrative, of positive stories, of individual action, of change, that can be brought about by individuals, whilst at the same time obviously not ignoring the big picture, but trying to make it something which does have a positive and more optimistic side to it, I guess.Ross: Do you want to tell us more about those local topics? How teachers and schools can make them maybe a little bit experiential so hopefully students are involved in these rather than just reading about them?Ceri: One of the easy topics is recycling and consumption. On a school level, a school can choose to start their own internal recycling system, get these kids involved. A local school had the children actually building the recycling bins. Then there were recycling monitors, who every week would be the ones who would take the recycling from their bins and take them to the municipal bins.They were learning about the system, just waste management in general. Basically, they were learning about how much waste they were generating. At the same time, they were making suggestions for how to produce less. For example, plastic waste like, "OK, well, how else could you bring your sandwiches to school instead of wrapping them up in foil," which is a typical Spanish way of bringing a sandwich to school?You could just bring it in in a plastic Tupperware and reuse that. Plastic is fine if you're reusing it, looking after it. Beeswax wraps, but then there was this idea of, "Well, actually we're just going back to what we used to do." Then children interviewing their grandparents about what they used to do.At the same time in Spain, there was a campaign which was a week without plastic like this challenge, "Can you shop for a week without buying any plastic at all?" For example, with one of my classes, I just went to the supermarket and took loads of photos of stuff wrapped in plastic, loads of photos of stuff, not wrapped in plastic. We just talked about what was in plastic, what wasn't.Then the kids did the same thing. They went into local supermarkets with their phones and took photos and brought those into class. It just became a class project.Ross: Great examples there. I think the big advantage of talking about a local river or beach or park, is that it's generally quite a safe entry‑point into these topics. Obviously, as soon as you bring up what government should be doing on a national or international level, then that's when the topic becomes political and becomes a bit more dangerous, I suppose.Ceri: Yes, I think cleanup campaigns as well those as you say, like an apolitical or cross party or whatever you want to say, it's just local interest. It's looking after your local patch. Things like I live in a beach town, so the beach cleanups, those are perfect. It's that thing of chiming in with the students realities, which is what we do anyway.With any topic we always try and tie it in with our students experiences and their lives and their contexts. It's exactly the same with environmental issues.Ross: Ceri, I also wanted to ask you about teachers practices here. It seems to me really important that if a teacher is going to be getting their students to learn about the dangers of climate change, they don't want to do that by getting students to read information about climate change on one‑sided color photocopies...[laughs]Ross: ...because obviously, by doing that you are contributing to climate change. What can teachers do to make sure that they're practicing what they preach that as well as informing students about the dangers of climate change? They are making sure that the way that they teach and how they run their classroom is more environmentally friendly.Ceri: Photocopies are an obvious an easy target. Teachers are pretty good at cutting back on photocopies and have been doing so for quite some time. It's not only from a paper point of view, it's also from a financial point of view in a lot of schools. Also, as a teacher trainer, there's that idea of teaching our teachers to make the most of the activities they have are not to be so reliant on handouts and bits of paper.They're actually not necessary. Most of what you do, you can do without the photocopies, and things like reusing, having mini whiteboards if the material you want is something that's only going to be used in that moment. If it's something that you're going to use over and over and over. Then invest in even laminating. It's plastic, but it's plastic that's going to be reused over and over and over.If it's worth it, then you make it, you keep it and you reuse it. It can be very liberating for teachers to be told you don't have to make copies. I can remember years ago as a teacher being told, "Oh no, give them something to take home. They need a piece of paper in their hand. Otherwise, they won't feel they've done anything in the lesson."We can emphasize more helping our students to learn to take better notes, to be more responsible for chronicling their lessons. That's one side, is the photocopying. Having a little recycling corner in the classroom is another nice idea, just even if it's just for paper. Maybe even raising awareness of things, like chopping receipts, for example, can't be recycled, because they're heat‑treated, and they're full of chemicals.They have to be thrown into the general rubbish. That's you say what can do. We can only put paper into the recycling bin that can actually be recycled. If it's soiled from food, sorry, can't recycle it. There's little lessons that students can learn through a teacher just running a very simple recycling bin in the corner of the class.Again, with younger learners, swapping from pens to pencils, so that the writing material that's in the class is all pencils. They get the students to write their names on their pencil and see how long their pencil lasts. They have like a competition whose pencil lasts longest. Just little things like that, which are awakening and awareness of consumption.There's lots of ways that a teacher can very subtly influence their young learners, inducing them into this whole culture of awareness that a lot of stuff around us is single‑use and doesn't need to be.Ross: Ceri, thank you so much for joining us. Where would you like teachers to go to find more information?Ceri: Lovely, if you could give a little plug to the ELT footprint Facebook group, that would be fantastic. There's the blog, which has a section on materials which has lots of links and ideas and resources for teachers who want to start exploring using environment topics in the classroom. We're also on Twitter. We're also on LinkedIn. You need to look for ELT Footprints, and all of those should pop up.Ross: Brilliant, thank you very much for joining us, Ceri. Thank you all very much for listening. We'll see you again next time. Goodbye.

We speak with one of our favorite guests, __________ about _____________. An antidote to free talk activities, _____________ are a great way to get students to _______, listen to each other and ___________. ___________ activities can even be used in teacher training. Listen to fill in the _______.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Do teachers teach as they were taught? What role does our experience as students play in forming our attitudes about teaching? And how does our experience as language learners and users influence our behavior in the classroom?For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

David Nunan joins us to discuss the input we use in language lessons and what we do with it.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to "TEFL Training Institute" podcast. I'm Ross Thorburn and this week we're talking about authentic texts. It's a topic I've wanted to talk about for a long time.I can remember, even as a first year teacher, printing off news articles and bringing them to the classroom and, much more recently, using textbooks made for American primary schools with students, young learners, here in China.Obviously there's huge advantages to using authentic texts. You get all this real language which has been unfiltered and it's real and it's natural, and hopefully the texts can be very motivating for students.There's also lot of downsides as well to using authentic texts. It can be very difficult to understand. Sometimes I think they can be really off‑putting for students, if you get presented with something that's real and you can't understand any of it.I think as a student that can be a really demotivating experience. So, to help us with this topic today, we have David Nunan. David is, I think it's not an exaggeration to say, one of the most influential people in our field in the last 40 years. David, as well as writing numerous academic books for teachers and researchers, he's also author of the bestselling coursebook series "Go for It!" and David is currently based in Hong Kong.Enjoy the interview.Ross: David, thank you very much for joining us. To start off with, would you like to tell us a bit about your experiences of using authentic materials as a teacher?David Nunan: Yeah. I'm a dinosaur. I trained in the '60s, early '70s, and was trained in the audio‑lingual methods. "This is a pencil. Pen. This is a pen. Idiot. You're an idiot."Ross: [laughs]David: The funny thing was, in the mid '70s coming to the UK to do a couple of higher degrees including one in language teaching...Prior to that, the language institute I was working at at the university in Sydney with a number of highly enthusiastic teachers who were bored out of their brains with all this audio‑lingual stuff, we started doing things.I developed a listening course by actually lugging this reel‑to‑reel tape recorder out and interviewing native speakers, then using that as a resource in the classroom. One of my other co‑teachers, Jane Lockwood, she used to work with Mario Rinvolucri at Pilgrim School in the UK. Of course she had got all of the Mario, she had the Mario virus. She was great, she was great on using drama techniques and so on.We were kind of inventing communicative language teaching without actually knowing what we were doing. [laughs] In those days, the label was only just starting to come into currency. But using authentic materials and using simulations and getting the learners to do stuff out of the classroom and all those other things.Ross: I can image, David, quite a few listeners are going to be doing a Google Image search for a reel‑to‑reel tape recorder after that.Let's talk a bit more about this notion of authenticity, then. There's obviously this idea of authenticity in terms of the language. How real it is, is it something recorded specifically for a language class? Like your example earlier, something from a real conversation or from a TV show or radio show or maybe even a news article, something like that.The other bit of the puzzle there, I guess, is what you get students to do with that. If the idea of task authenticity, so our learners, for example, listening to something and then giving an opinion and discussing it, or using it to solve some kind of problem or maybe they are doing something more focused on the language like read this passage and then circle the verb.Suppose there are different possibilities there combining either authentic or inauthentic text with authentic or inauthentic tasks. Can you tell us a little bit more about those? What are the advantages and disadvantages there?David: Yeah. Well, the minute you take a piece of authentic language into the classroom you deal with authenticating it, in a sense.The authenticity of the input, the reading and the written‑spoken text that they're exposed to, but then there's the notion of task authenticity. I've seen teachers take ‑‑ no, I'm not necessarily criticizing it ‑‑ but I'll get a piece of authentic listening material. Then I'll get the student doing a close activity and listen to this weather forecast [inaudible 4:35] .The other aspect is learner authentication. You can have an authentic piece of listening material and you can have an authentic task. For example, listen, your teacher has left a message on your phone about an excursion you're going to tomorrow. She gives the information right, make a note of the essential information like where to meet, what to bring, what to wear, and so on.When you see the [inaudible 5:01] in the classroom doing that kind of thing, it does resemble something they might actually do in the world outside the classroom. That's not to say what I call pedagogical tasks are not reasonable to do in the classroom.A lot of the techniques that got developed quite a few years ago things like jigsaw listening or spot the difference where learners have got two different versions of the picture and they have to describe the picture, and then figure out where the differences are.I don't know about you, I've never seen anybody outside of the classroom [laughs] saying. We'll guess what the differences are in my picture. It's pedagogically defensible. It's good for practicing particularly with lower level learners. It's good news. It's quite easy to create picture challenges that get them practicing things like prepositions of place.That's a typical one where you've got a beach scene or a picture of a...although that's good for activities. He's running, she's sleeping, he's swimming, practicing prepositions in place [inaudible 6:00] . We have two versions of somebody's bedroom, and with dining room and you have to exchange information to decide where things are.Ross: Going back to authentic texts then, there are a lot of reasons why those might be too difficult for students to understand. I think a lot of teachers assume that in order to simplify text, you probably want to make it shorter and take out some of the more difficult words. But that's not always the case.Taking out words or taking out difficult words can end up making a text more difficult rather than more simple.David: Craig Shodron and his colleague Catherine Parker years ago, did a study where they were looking at simplified texts versus what they called elaborative modification or some fancy term on that. What that meant was that if you're using a listening text, might be a lecture or it could be a conversation, rather than dumbing it down.More or less keep it to the original, authentic picture, you add in a lot of redundancy. In other words, you say the same thing. I'm doing it now. Right? You add in a lot of [inaudible 7:16] . In other words, you say the same thing using slightly different words and you do comprehension checks and you know what I mean? You know what I mean Ross?[laughter]Ross: Yes, I do understand. That redundancy idea is really nice, isn't it? Because you just demonstrated, it's also very natural as well. Something I think that happens quite a lot in spoken conversation anyway.Let's talk about written texts for a moment. You are also [laughs] a very successful coursebook writer, David. How do you go about using texts when you write coursebooks?I guess there's two schools of thought on this. One of them is decide on the language that you want to teach and then create texts around those words or grammar points or whatever, or the other end of the spectrum is finding authentic texts and then teaching from those.David: What I've tried to do is to get texts that are engaging for the learners at a given level. For example, when I wrote the textbook for middle school to junior high kids who go for it, it was originally written for Latin America, but then the Ministry of Education in China decided that they wanted to adapt that one for use in schools in China.I actually took a sabbatical for about 10 months. I just spent the whole time running back and forth to Beijing. Working with a team up there. Because it was co‑published deal with PP. As you probably know, you can't fit if you're writing for the schools in China. They have to be co‑published and so PP with the co‑publishers.Anyway, so step number one was to find texts that would be engaging, Interesting, given subject matter, and so on for the kinds of learners that we were running the material for. Then make sure I was building in the appropriate vocabulary because when the text goes up for approval by the Ministry, they'll look through and I have long lists of pages and pages of vocabulary.A lot of those vocab lists really don't make any sense. At one stage, I pointed it out.Ross: Sorry, David. Those lists, are those coming from an exam board. Is that right?David: From the Ministry of Education in China, yeah. There were very interesting conversations. Another project I was working on, I had this graded vocab list, and that had to be built in, and I pointed out that, for a start, there were certain vocab items that I wouldn't even know. I'm Australian. I wouldn't teach kids in that situation. Like, kangaroo was on the list, but computer wasn't. [laughs]I know with corpus linguistics, that they have corporate now, that they don't have a lot more integrity, but a lot of them, the West's General Service List, that was written in about 1951, that was the most comprehensive fun.A lot of the vocab lists that subsequently got developed came from that. Paul Nation's obviously the last word on that and, as Paul points out, it's not just frequency of the occurrence, but it's also what equals, I think, potency, how potent a particular vocab item is for learning.Ross: So I suppose that sort of demonstrates the value of using authentic texts as the sort of building blocks of your coursebook, then you don't have those problems of inauthentic language. Authentic texts, I guess, almost by definition, are going to include more of the most frequent vocabulary in them and then that more frequent vocabulary, I guess, is going to be more useful to students?David: Yeah. But you also get a lot of low frequency words. One of the books that I used, when it came out years ago in the UK, was Michael Swan and Catherine Walter's "Cambridge English Course" and, particularly in the higher levels, they actually used authentic listening materials. I remember one of them.There was one lesson, I was prepping for, it must have been an interview, because they were working with CUP, it must have been an interview with somebody who worked in the CUP office.You know, "OK. You're employed, so you've got to come and sit down and be interviewed."This was pretty well‑unexpurgated. I was listening to it and whoever was interviewing said, "So, what do you do?" and the guy said, "I'm a printus reader." Well, what? I had a look at the tapescript. He was a printer's reader. He was a proofreader basically, for the publisher. [laughs]Extremely low frequency vocab item, and at normal speed, and I thought, "This is going to freak my kids out." So I actually gave them the vocab.Ross: I guess, there, David, you just hit on that authentic text can be really, really challenging for learners. Do you have any advice on how to use authentic text with, especially, very low level learners? How would you go about doing that?David: One of the techniques that I use is this progressively structured listening, where first, the low level learners...one of the big challenges getting them over the...you know how it completely freaks you out. When I first came here to Hong Kong, 25 years ago, when I decided to try and start learning Cantonese by myself, without taking regular classes or anything.It was just like this stream. I couldn't segment the stream of language in any way that made sense for a long time. Until I enlisted the help of some of my native‑speaking colleagues and so on. One of the techniques I used to use was to say, I'm going to play you five little forte conversations. Three of them are in English and two of them are not.You have to just listen and all you have to do is to be able to pick which ones are English, then of course, if the distractors are Hindi and Arabic, that's a lot easier to do than if the distractors are German or Dutch. I remember the first time I ever went to Amsterdam. I thought I could swear, sounded so English [laughs] but it wasn't.When they can do that, they realized that they can get some level of me even just identifying which conversations are English in which are and then maybe the next level, you might get them to identify how many speakers there are.Again, if there are three males or three females, that's how to do if there is a male or female and adult and a kid, then you get the missing four key words, you get them identifying whether the conversation is asking for directions to a hotel or asking directions to supermarket.As they start to get more relaxed then they're prepared to get the message. When you're listening to your first language, you don't listen to every big word. It depends on purpose for listening as well then you get the idea about listening just for gist or listening for specific information.Once they've listened to it, a text four or five times and they've done different things with the text through to some kind of information transfer, filling in a table or whatever, or the example I gave earlier about taking down key information from a mobile phone message, then they start to develop good listening skills in the target language.Ross: One more time, everyone that was David Nunan. If you enjoyed that and you'd like to find out more from David, check out his website, www.davidnunan.com. Thanks for listening and we'll see you again next time. Goodbye.

We interview three former teachers who are all still part of the TEFL industry but have experienced very different careers. Jessica Keller tells us about becoming a recruitment expert, Jason Anderson about becoming an author and Felicity Pyatt about becoming a teacher trainer.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Jake Whiddon guest hosts the podcast and interviews Ross about interactions in online classes with young learners. We discuss the interactions that commonly occur in online lessons, what stops experienced teachers from being more creative in online teaching and how teachers can spark better and more meaningful interactions in their online classes.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Jake Whiddon: Hi, everybody. My name is Jake Whiddon and I'm here as the surrogate host of the "TEFL Training Institute Podcast." We've got a very, very exciting guest today that some of you will know from previous episodes. His name is Ross Thorburn.Hi, Ross. Welcome to the podcast.Ross Thorburn: [laughs] Thanks, Jake.Jake: The reason we're interviewing Ross today is because he's just recently completed his dissertation research on online learning. As you all know, with the COVID‑19 school closures we've had students and teachers all around the world learning online ‑‑ probably one of the biggest changes in education in our lifetimes.We've had over a billion students learning online, I think, were the UNESCO numbers. Some recent surveys I have done and National Geographic have done have showed that 95 percent of teachers have now started teaching online and about 80 percent of them had never taught online before. It's a huge change.Welcome to the podcast, Ross.Ross: Thanks, Jake.Jake: Why would we be interviewing Ross about online learning is because Ross has actually ‑‑ some of you might not know ‑‑ has a background in teacher training but also in working with online teachers.This led to you doing your dissertation research. Can you just give us a brief outline of what the research was on?Ross: Basically, I picked four activities ‑‑ they were all communicative tasks ‑‑ observed 10 examples of each, transcribed what the interactions were between the teachers and the students for these 10 different activities and just looked at how much real, meaningful communication happened between the teachers and the students during these tasks.The reason being that a lot of people would say that one of the primary things you need to acquire language is to have meaningful communication.Jake: Just to get some perspective for the listeners, where are most of the students?Ross: The students were all based in China, but the teachers were pretty much all over the world.Jake: What would be the background for these teachers?Ross: Well, it depended a lot. You had some teachers who used to be, for example, primary school teachers, a lot of them were former ESL teachers or EFL teachers in a public school or a private school, and I think some people had just never done anything like that before.Jake: There's a range of experience and qualifications for the teachers.Ross: A huge range. Interestingly, the people that you maybe would expect to be the best, like the people with a primary school teaching background, actually didn't necessarily end up being the best teachers. A lot of the time, people with next to no experience actually sometimes did as well or better than people with long careers as teachers.Jake: Do you think there's a reason why teachers who had a lot of offline experience might not do as well as new...if I just started teaching and I started teaching online. My question was going to be, what did you notice were the biggest differences between offline and online teaching? It kind of relates there, right?Teachers who had offline experience, what issues do they have when they're coming online?Ross: You could almost think of this as a Venn Diagram. You've got a circle that represents all the things you can do offline and a circle that represents all the things you can do online.If you've previously taught offline, it's very easy to focus on the overlapping parts of those two circles, the things you previously did offline that you can also do online, and very easy to complain about all of the things you used to be able to do offline that no longer work online.Of course, there's this whole other part of the circle of great things that's possible to do online that you just never thought of before. A really, really quick example. A huge advantage of teaching online is the students, usually children, are in their own homes, so there's all these opportunities for personalization.If you open a course book and there's a unit on food, often the food in the course book will be generic things like pizzas and hamburger and toast, things the student might not like or even have eaten before.If you're online, there's this opportunity to say to the student, "Go to the kitchen, grab some of your favorite foods, bring them over, and we'll talk about what they are and you can practice describing them." That's something you could never do offline but it's really, really easy to do online.Jake: Yeah. Let's find out what you found out. Now, I found the most interesting part of your research was actually looking at the dialogues that you transcribed and looking at good examples and examples that could be improved upon.One of the dialogues that stood out for me as an example that could be improved on, was less effective, was the one about what students had to eat on certain days of the week. I'll just read this one."And the teacher says, 'What will you eat tomorrow? Tomorrow is Sunday. What will you eat?' The student says, 'Mushroom.' The teacher says, 'Mushrooms, good. And what will you eat on Tuesday? Tell me what you ate.' 'Pizza.' 'Oh, yum.'" It sounds so strange when you say it out loud.I've done a workshop with teachers using your research, Ross, and it seems so obvious. If a student just said, "Mushroom," would you then say, "Oh, you're just having mushroom for lunch?" or "Mushrooms and?" Has this child really understood or they're just saying one word to me because they know they have to say a food?There are so many things that happened in that one interaction.Ross: One of the issues there is, with that example, the students in China and the teachers in America or the UK or something, even if the student could describe the food that they were having, would the teacher even know what it was?I think food is something that changes so much with culture and country and what geographic region you're in. It's very difficult to be able to help students better express themselves if you don't have the cultural background to actually know what it is they're talking about.There's another one, hemp ball. "I had hemp ball yesterday." I mean, what's a hemp ball, right? The teacher goes, "Hemp ball, OK. Was it nice?" and then moves on rather than saying, "Was it sweet or was it salty? What color is it? Was it a dessert? Was it a main course?"Jake: Then there would be some really nice, meaningful interaction, learning about that child's food that they eat in their country and vice versa.Really interesting is, some recent research we've been conducting where I work is showing that the big shift used to be teachers who were teaching online were teaching the kids from another country. Now teachers are teaching the kids in their own country.That really stood out at me when I read your research on cultural relevance, that suddenly there's all this new cultural relevance now that I might be teaching kids who are just down the road but online.I can actually talk about the street and the building in my city and there will be some shared connection which will only add to the meaningful interactions between kids and teachers.Ross: Another really interesting thing that happened was another activity, that was actually the most effective one, was this nice collaborative activity. There was a blank plan of a shopping center on the screen, and the teacher had control of the pen, and the student just had to say to the teacher what shops they wanted the teacher to put in their shopping center.Generally, this prompted quite a lot of interesting and meaningful communication, but there was one example of one teacher and student. The student would say, "I want a pet shop on the third floor," and the teacher would say, "OK, great. What do you want your pet shop to be called?" The student would say, "I can buy dogs, cats, and birds."This happened again and again. The student almost seemed to have been brainwashed by previous questions of, "What can you buy in a pet shop? What can you buy in a food shop?" These very fake questions that no one in real life would ever end up asking, ended up tricking them into answering a wrong and really meaningless question in actually quite a communicative activity.Jake: Ross, can you give us another good example, another exemplar example?Ross: Sure. There was one of a student who basically didn't speak at all. I think she was the quietest student that I observed in any of these classes. This task was about filling in an invitation to a birthday party. The teacher says to the student, "When's your birthday?" because you have to write down the date of the birthday party. The student shrugs and says, "I don't know."The teacher says, "OK, well, just write down the 10th of October." The students goes, "No!" The teacher says, "OK, so when is your birthday? January? February? March?" and goes through all the months, and eventually gets to December and the student says, "Yes." She goes, "OK, we'll put December 1st." "No!" Then goes through all the days.It was brilliant because I think there's this assumption that communication really is always something that happens from the student for it to be meaningful. This was a great example of the student really listening very intensely to what the teacher was saying to try to come to this outcome of getting her birthday on this form.Even though she only said no and yes, there was a lot of meaning communicated there.Jake: What I love about that story is that it's a perfect example of learning‑centered teaching, as opposed to teacher‑centered or student‑centered. It's learning‑centered, not learner‑centered. The learning is at the center. It doesn't matter about all this stuff about student talk time, teacher talk time. No. If there's learning about to happen, let it happen. I think that's a great example.Ross, your research, I thought it was really nice how it came up with your top five findings. Do you want to give us an overview of your top five findings from your research?Ross: Sure. The most important one, maybe also the most simple one, is that the way lessons are usually structured is your communicative activities usually go at the end of a lesson. I've also noticed this interesting thing where...I have a Kindle, and I notice when I read a book on my Kindle, I tend to read it in order.But if I read a book ‑‑ especially sort of a reference book type thing ‑‑ a paper copy, I'll tend to flip back and forward through the book. I noticed teachers doing the same thing with online class materials, where they would go through the materials in order.That meant that most of the teachers most of the time would not get to the communicative tasks at the end of the lesson because they run out of time, because it's not so easy to skip activities. I think the top tip is just to put the task at the beginning of the lesson.Jake: A lot of online classes are following a linear progression. They have one PPT that goes from left to right and you click through. A really big tip from me is, if you're teaching online and you want to keep things meaningful, have a folder with a bunch of activities available. Don't have everything on one PPT. Maybe have three PPTs.You know, "OK, I've come in, and I'm meant to go this PPT first, but they're really good, so let me grab the community of tasks right now and whack it in." Or, "I've got a bunch of songs available and a bunch of photos." Sometimes you don't need anything. Just a photo on a screen is enough.Don't be so linear about your online classes. I think that people have the assumption that you should be linear because it's on a computer like it's a presentation, and that's not how it has to be, necessarily.Your other four points, Ross?Ross: Sure, so one of them was not putting sentence stems on the same page as a task. I found that if you had those, then what would happen would be the teachers would really tend to focus on accuracy a lot more than actual communication. It would really end up being something more like a drill in disguise than any use of meaningful communication.If you had something that was really much more like a task, like the thing I mentioned before, where we're going to make a shopping mall together. I'm going to draw it, you tell me what you want. The focus is much more on getting this task done and, therefore, the communication becomes the heart of it.That was also something ‑‑ and this is another point ‑‑ that really motivated the students to communicate.Without going into too much detail, a really common pattern of interactions in classes is this thing called IRS. The "I" part, the teacher initiates something, the student responds, and the teacher says, "Good," or something like that, "High five."When you had something different, where there was a tangible, meaningful task outcome, you get things like students interrupting the teacher, the teacher making suggestions to the students. For this make your shopping mall together, "Oh, why don't we add a cinema?" and the student saying, "No, I don't want a cinema, I want this other thing instead."Or the teacher saying, "Let's call your mall this." "No, I don't want that." These classroom interactions which you wouldn't normally get. Now, why is that really, really important? Because of the power dynamics of a classroom, the teacher is the person in control, so it's really unusual for students to challenge a teacher in class, because the teacher is the boss.But when you had this kind of activity, students were motivated to do that. Those are important things you need to learn to be able to do in any language.Jake: Yeah, I love that. With your point there about the sentence stems, I saw a teacher doing this with a group of eight students, they were all about ten. They just got them to write down the sentence stems and then said, "Stick them up on the other side of your bedroom."They were now doing the activity. If the kids wanted to use it as a nonverbal cue, they could look over. You know what the teacher noticed then? They knew where the child was looking. Then they could tell, this kid is using that as a cue. That's fine. It was almost like a personal scaffolding device.They would keep looking and eventually they would stop looking and get them focused on what the task was on the screen. While the child's online, they're in a room. There's so much you can be doing with that. They can be writing things down. They can be putting up cues around the classroom. Just remember to use all the space around as well.[background music]Jake: Ross, that was absolutely fascinating, and I really enjoyed reading your research and listening to these stories about the research. What I found was that a lot of your research related to offline teaching anyway is shifting some of my thinking about how I would teach in offline classes as well.Ross: There are so many principles that are really exactly the same between teaching online and teaching offline but just how you achieve them might end up being a little bit different.Jake: I'm sure all of you out there are now teaching online and you've all had experience with this. It was excellent to have such an experienced and well‑known guest on the podcast today. Looking forward to seeing you next time. Have a great day.Transcription by CastingWords

Author and teacher trainer Rod Bolitho joins me to talk about the relationships between teachers, students and materials, how materials relate to syllabi and how teachers should use teachers’ guides. Rod Bolitho is a freelance ELT trainer and consultant. He was previously Academic Director at Norwich Institute for Language Education and was also lead consultant on projects in Romania, Russia and Belarus where he trained teams of local teachers as authors of new series of textbooks for state schools. Rod has co-authored books, including Discover English (with Brian Tomlinson), Trainer Development (with Tony Wright), Continuing Professional Development (with Amol Padwad), The Internationalisation of Ukrainian Universities (with Richard West) and most recently Language Education in a Changing World: Challenges and Opportunities (with Richard Rossner).

Trinity CertTESOL trainers Allan Crocker and Rebecca Gary join me to discuss how we pick students to speak, how to stop students from speaking too much, how to know who is ready to speak before anyone opens their mouths and what to do when no one wants to talk.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

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.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Motivation and Meaning Through Stories (with Andrew Wright)Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the "TEFL Training Institute Podcast." This week our guest is Andrew Wright. Andrew's an author, illustrator, teacher, and storyteller.In this episode, I asked Andrew about some of the differences between getting students to study language and getting students to experience language, what it is that makes stories so appropriate for language learning. Then finally, Andrew shares with us some really practical ideas on how to use stories in language teaching. Enjoy the episode.Ross: Andrew, to start off, can you tell us a bit about the difference between students studying language and experiencing language?Andrew Wright: I'm just flabbergasted that this huge fact, which we all share, is that the word doesn't exist except through another medium. The other medium can represent that word neutrally, or represent it and add meaning. I can say, "add meaning" and here I'm emphasizing "add" by saying add meaning.We language teachers assume that language means words. It's absolutely bizarre this, because a word can only be manifested through another medium, so when I'm speaking, I'm vocalizing the word. Everybody knows if they think about it that the voice can make a word recognizable and the voice at exactly the same time can deny its meaning.Thank you. I love you. Which is the more powerful? The voice. Then you say, "Oh, but when it's written," of course when it's written, but what are we going to have? How are we going to have a Serif face or Sans‑serif face? Is it going to be handwriting? You add onto that the face and the hands when you are speaking.Whenever a word is spoken, it's part, at least, of a duet and very often part of a quintet. I can only think that the tradition of language teaching and language teacher training has been through that selection of the language which is studied. It's been studied.You know that the word study and student really means either listening to a teacher or reading a text and learning it, so you're studying it. Instead of saying learner and the learner might study at some point, but the learner might be experiencing.Ross: Tell us about stories then. What is it that makes stories so appropriate for language learning and how is it that stories usually get used in the language learning process?Andrew: The stories are central to being a human being, and so the traditional use of stories which is just to use them as a technique for teaching languages is fundamentally wrong. If you took the notion of love, for example, which to everybody must be precious in one way or another.If you were to say, "Let's use love as a technique for teaching foreign languages." Let's look at the words that we use with love and how do we emphasize love? I love you very much. All right, repeat everybody, I love you very...This is disgusting.That idea of stories is what you asked me and language teaching. Yes, because it's central to who we are. This is how we make sense of the world and this is how we share our sense of the world. It is just huge and it's not always words, but words play a big role. How can it not be a central highway in language teaching? How can it not be? It's bizarre to think that it could be anything else.Why would you leave out what is central to our lives? Remembering that stories are not just "Little Red Riding Hood," but the newsreaders in the English language say, "The top stories today are...They're all storytelling." They say, "The breaking story. The story I'm working on."That's the idea that, yes, stories are central to who we are as human beings and words play a major part, so how can they not be central to language teaching. That doesn't mean that you take stories and then crucify them.If you have a goose that lays golden eggs, be happy that it lays a golden egg every day. That stupid farmer that we always hear about and his wife decided that they wanted to analyze how the goose laid the eggs, so they killed the goose to open it up to see it was dead and never laid another egg.That's what happened, for example, with Tom, my son Tom. When my son Tom was 11, he's just started school seven years ahead of him of development. One evening, I went up to say goodnight, but he was already asleep.By his bed was his English book. I opened it. He'd just written a story called The End of the World in five lines. The teacher had written underneath two spelling mistakes, "Correct them."Breakfast time, I said to him, "Tom, you write very economically. You wrote a story called The End of the World in five lines." Then this little boy said, "There's something you learn at school. The less you do, the less mistakes you can make." He wasn't going to start giving himself as a human being through stories because he realized that his customer was obsessed by error.A lot of teachers these days have adopted this so‑called communicative approach. One of our teachers in our school here that I do like very much and I know he does a great job. He is a man who has built up his whole life in knowing English from top to bottom. His narrative about himself is that that is who he is.If you were to say to him, "What really matters is the relationship that you have with your students as a human being." That relationship has talking, writing, reading, and sharing is central to being able to have the relationship. Development in those skills is a byproduct of trying to share effectively.Being able to dribble the ball in football is a byproduct of wanting to do well on Saturday in the match. Now, this teacher we had, I sat in on his lesson, and he was asking the students, "What did you do last weekend?" Clearly, practicing past tenses. One of them said to him, "I swim across Lake Balaton doing butterfly." He said, "Swam."After the lesson, I said to him, I said, "That guy I told you, he swam across Lake Balaton doing butterfly. Lake Balaton is the biggest lake in Central Europe. Butterfly swimming is hard. He shared with you an incredible achievement and all you said was swam."He appeared to be somebody was sharing humanity because he'd taken the surface notion of that by asking people about their weekend, but he actually wasn't. He was just doing drill practice.Ross: That's a really powerful example that the teaching caring so much more about the grammar than the content. In a way there, that student was beginning to tell the teacher his story. The teacher was really only impressed in the surface level.Can you tell us more about the role that teachers should play in getting students to tell their own stories, Andrew? If that was an example of what not to do, what should teachers do?Andrew: The traditional role for the teacher who is using stories and writing stories is to get them to write stories to test their level. They write a story, like my son Tom, knows he's writing a story for the teacher to Mark to give back to him.My suggestion to teachers is that, it should be a totally different relationship. The teacher is acting as their helper to publish. Not every story that they write but, a lot of the stories they write should be not for the classroom, not for the teacher. They are for the world.You're saying to the students all the time, "This is going to be in a book." Or, "It's going to be on the school website." I always say at the beginning if I'm with a new class, "Don't think I'm going to be choosing the best story because that makes me sick the idea of choosing the best."Who am I to say it's the best story? Everybody's story will be published unless you come to me and say you don't want it to be because it's your property. It's your copyright. If you don't want to publish it, you don't publish it.With one school in Austria, I did this for two weeks every year for 21 years. Everyone was published as a book and the result was when I did those weeks with them, it was always not in the school, but we went away for a week to a hostel ‑‑ you could call it. Every evening meal, there would be a queue of students.While I was eating, wanting to show me their work because they wanted to get it right. They would be saying, "Can you help me to get the grammar right? Can you help me to do this sentence better?" I wasn't marking their things. I wasn't going through them with a red pen saying, "Three spelling mistakes. Correct them."They were coming to me, begging me, "Please help me." They weren't doing it for me. They were doing it because it was going to go into the school library. There was going to be an exhibition in the bookshop in Linz.In the main bookshop, I got them to agree to have an exhibition of all the stories in this book. They knew that. They knew that their parents and friends would be going to the bookshop to see it. I also reminded them that one day their grandchildren will be saying, "Which is your story granddad?"I said, "You want it to be good. Won't you for your grandchildren?" These were 12‑, 13‑year‑old boys and girls. It was a huge privilege to work with them. It was moving beyond description as there was all of them were desperate to try to do a good job.Ross: What about for teachers that don't maybe have the resources to publish students' stories in a book? What are some of the other options there?Andrew: Performances, videoing their stories, just giving them to the neighboring class, or inviting the school director to come into the class, and then we tell the school director our stories and he has to sit there.Ross: Finally, tell us more then about getting students to create their own stories. What are some experiences that you've had doing that? How can you really, as a teacher, encourage students to be creative?Andrew: In Denmark ‑‑ I can't remember which town it was ‑‑ we did a bookmaking session using rubbish in the school. They began the lesson with me going around all the dustbins and they found, for example, wood, paper plates. One of them cut this round paper plate, a dinner plate.On the dinner plate, they wrote in a diminishing circle a story, so they had to turn the plate round. They got a sharp knife and they cut between the lines so that it then fell down inside here like a spiral, and then it sat on the top.Then the story was about two boys in a classroom in Denmark when suddenly a hole appeared in the classroom floor and they fell through the Earth all the way through to Australia. To read it, they had to turn over and look in it like that, and turn it round.Another boy found a brick with holes in it. He got a very, very long paper. He wrote the story on a very long strip of paper and he threaded it through the brick. Then he made me sit down and he said, "This is a brick and a paper book." I had to thread the paper through.Another one, I got an ordinary piece of A4 paper and then he wrote his story in mirror writing. He got a mirror, put it on the table, put the paper into a cone, you look through the top of the cone and you could read the story in the mirror.Ross: One more time everyone, that was Andrew Wright. Look out for Andrew's books on stories for language learning. There are two, "Storytelling with Children" and "Creating Stories with Children."Also, check out Andrew's website, andrewarticlesandstories.WordPress.com. There are lots of other fantastic tips there about using stories to help students learn language as well as some examples of Andrew's own stories.Thanks for listening, check out our website, www.tefltraininginstitute.com. We'll see you again next time. Goodbye.

Does grammar have a public relations problem? Grammar gets a reputation for being boring, unnecessary and uncool but at the same time is also seen by many experts as the most fundamental part of language and language learning. We discuss this love/hate relationship with our friend, Matt CourtoisFor more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

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?For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

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.Setting Up Online English Courses (with Marek Kiczkowiak)Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to "TEFL Training Institute Podcast." I'm Ross Thorburn. This week, my guest is Marek Kiczkowiak. Marek is founder of TEFL Equity Advocates and TEFL Equity Academy. He's a materials writer at the moment in Belgium.In this episode, I ask Marek about putting English language courses online. For obvious reasons, recently a lot of people are having to create online language courses for the first time. Marek's got experience of doing this, both as a material's designer and also as a teacher trainer.In this episode, you'll hear Marek talking about some of the challenges of putting courses online, the different platforms to use, and of course very, [laughs] very importantly, how to get students to actually take your courses. Enjoy the episode.Ross: Hi, Marek. We're obviously talking about this because of COVID‑19. Before we go on, how has the pandemic changed where you're teaching?Marek Kiczkowiak: Yes. I think the classes shut down late March, early April. I don't know if they're going to resume from the new academic year. I doubt it. I think maybe some classes will, the absolute essential ones like work in the laboratory that you can't do online. This might resume. I think a lot of it will be done online, still.I haven't been teaching. I've been just developing academic writing courses on academicenglishnow.com. The reason I set them up was...For three years I was teaching academic writing basically to university students in Belgium. When I started my new job in Brussels, I wasn't teaching anymore. I was developing materials.I've been thinking at the back of my mind that I could do all of what I was doing in the classroom with students, I could just offer that online. Then I'm not limited. I can be anywhere in the world and deliver the same quality program. When the lockdown happened, I was like, "That's it. If I don't do it now, then I've missed the boat."Ross: The online courses that we're talking about today Marek, can you tell us about them? I feel that online learning covers so much. You could have synchronous online classes in real‑time with groups of students in a virtual classroom. You can have asynchronous where people interact with each other, but maybe they are in different time zones, and they comment in a forum throughout the day.You can even have completely self‑accessed courses where learners are working their way through things at their own pace. They don't interact with each other very much. Tell us about the courses that you've created and why did you design them that way.Marek: Most of it is completely asynchronous, and there are two reasons for that. The first reason is that at the moment, I have most of my PhD students in Bolivia. The time difference is big. Therefore, finding a suitable time for a live class ‑‑ even now when these 15 students come from exactly the same university ‑‑ proved completely impossible.Also, because people can work through it at their own pace, they can jump through the different lectures and focus first on the ones that they feel are the most important to them. I might start at a certain point, and I, as a teacher, feel that this is the best point to start with, but maybe for other students, they have a different problem they want to tackle first.These are some of the reasons and why it's better for students. For you, as an online teacher, it's also much better because I don't have to constantly give the same material online. Time is money as a freelancer. That's why in the online courses that I offer, the basic package just includes the online work.There is no input from me apart from answering students' comments. There is a forum. They can ask each other questions, and I come in and answer their questions. The second higher tier that you can add is feedback on assignments. If you pay more money, you can do the assignments that are on the course, and then I'll check them and give you personalized feedback on them.I'm now including my time, so that's got to be more expensive. Then even above that, we've got group live sessions where we meet live and discuss any problems students have. They can send in the questions before when we have a live session. Even higher than that has to be a one‑on‑one class.It doesn't cost €20. It doesn't cost €50. It costs much more than that. Ultimately, there'll be few people who will buy it, but that's good. You want to limit yourself to people who actually really, really want to work with you. A lot of people might not need that. They'll just need the online course.Ross: You mentioned lectures there. In my experience, online courses tend to involve a lot of reading. They also sometimes have quite a high dropout rate. I think it's quite difficult sometimes to stay motivated for a long period of time when studying at a distance.What input do you use on your courses, and how do you make sure that those courses will be able to stay interesting?Marek: Sure. I guess I refer to them as lectures because my market is in universities. Otherwise, I would refer to them as lessons or maybe videos or whatever you want to call them. You definitely can't have lessons, lectures, or videos that are much longer than five minutes. People's attention span nowadays, we can hardly even finish a five‑minute video on Facebook.Maybe if it's educational and we paid for it, we'll give it more effort. I really like to think of them as little how‑to steps. To give you an example, one module is, "How to Write an Introduction." Within that bigger task, you have a smaller task, which will be, "How to Identify the Research Gap." This smaller task will consist of even smaller tasks, and those smallest tasks are individual lectures.You might have four how‑to lectures in, "How to Identify the Research Gap." Each of them takes about five minutes ‑‑ each video ‑‑ and then there is a task below it. A task could be for students to write something. Sometimes it can be as simple as writing one sentence. Sometimes it will be a longer 100‑, 200‑word assignment. It could also be a quiz.Sometimes, for example, because things vary from discipline to discipline in academic writing, I often like to give students a task to now go off and read an academic paper from their discipline. Then tell me whether what I said applies to their discipline. For example, some disciplines like to have introduction and literature review together as one section. Others will separate it.I tell them that in the lecture about organizing this. Now they need to read the text and comments and let us know how it's organized in the field.Ross: I wish I'd known about your academic writing course before I started my heavy dissertation.Marek: Well, take it, Ross, if you want to.Ross: Sadly, it's too late now. [laughs] For these courses, you need to put them online on a platform. Can you tell us about how you made that decision, which platform to use?Marek: That's a very good question because I think that's one thing obviously that's got to be pedagogically sound. There's lots of different platforms, and it really depends what you want to do and what you want to have.To give you one example, my initial TEFL Equity Academy courses were on a platform called Teachable. Teachable is free to access at the beginning with some limitations, and then it has certain plans. The advantage of platforms like Teachable or Kajabi, for example ‑‑ that's another one K‑A‑J‑A‑B‑I, Kajabi ‑‑ is that they are all in platforms.They give you free video hosting ‑‑ free as long as you pay the platform. It's video hosting. It's a payment gateway. The websites are predesigned for you, basically. Kajabi has email funnels. When somebody buys your product, they get a sequence of emails. Kajabi has webinars, for example, built‑in. It's an all‑in solution.It's a good solution if you don't have time and you don't feel very techie, and you just want something quick. However, if you want to put in a little bit of effort ‑‑ and it's not that difficult because I was able to do it and have zero website building skills, literally zero, I just watched YouTube tutorials and did it ‑‑ is to host it on WordPress.That gives you incredible flexibility. Obviously, Teachable has its website layout, and you can't really change it that much. You cannot make it look as you want it to look. To really access all the features you want to have, you'd be looking at $100 a month with Teachable and $150 with Kajabi. This is only for people who have high volumes of sales. You might not have that.Now all my courses are on WordPress, and I don't personally think it's too difficult to set up. Just to break down the numbers, instead of paying $100 a month, you're probably looking at maybe $30 a month or less. It's just you need different pieces.You need your WordPress hosting, you need video hosting, and then you need your online course plug‑in like LearnDash or something like that.Ross: Let's talk about finding students. How do you go about marketing your courses and making sure that students actually want to buy them?Marek: Sure, yeah. Never create an online course just because you think it's a good idea. Don't create a whole course before getting the proof of concept and trying to see if it actually sells. You'll spend months creating this amazing online course, but nobody wants to buy it.The simplest idea is the sales funnel. You start with something free that's downloadable, so people give you their email address. It always has to be something valuable for your audience, so maybe even before that, you need to really define who your audience is. I help university students and researches write better academic papers and thesis.I'm not interested in people who want to learn Business English. When people download it, they need to give you their email address to be able to download it. Then usually there is a very cheap offer of something. This could be a 60‑minute training session on something. This could be a mini‑course.A hundred people opt‑in to download something, maybe 10 percent of them ‑‑ if you've got a very, very good funnel ‑‑ will decide to get the opt‑in offer. You already have some initial clients. Then a smaller percentage of those might get the upsell as well. Once people opt‑in and buy something from you, you can offer them a higher package or another product.Think about it as building a relationship with someone. First, they get to know you and then maybe then read a blog post that you've written. They kind of think, "Wow, that was really, really helpful." Then they see this PDF guide that further helps them, and they're like, "Oh, I might download that."Once they really like you and feel that you're knowledgeable, they will buy something from you. Never offer a course to people that don't know you. Don't go to a Facebook group and something and post, "Hey, I've got this amazing course. Do you want to buy it?" It's not appropriate. People need to get to know you. In marketing, it's kind of the same.Ross: Really, it sounds there that a lot of it is about making sure that your potential students trust you before you try and sell them something.Marek: Yeah, I think so. I think you need to establish trust and also show people that you genuinely want to help them. If you start with the idea that I'm in this to make money, people will easily see that. The reason why you're offering a certain product is because you can't just help people for free. You can do that in a blog post but in a very limited way.It probably means you need to know your target audience pretty well. That's why I started with the academic writing courses. That's something I've been doing for a long time now. I feel I really know what problems my target audience is suffering from, what questions students have asked me over the last 10 years.Ross: Obviously, the sales funnel though is after people get to your website. Another really important part of this is getting people on to your website in the first place. Tell us about that, Marek. How do you just attract people to come on to your website?Marek: Absolutely. There are two ways of getting to your target audience. You can buy your way in which is through Facebook ads. This has got the advantage that if you run them correctly, and if you've got this funnel that I described to you, you can basically break even.You're not really spending any money because, for every hundred dollars that you put in, people buy a hundred dollars of your courses. Much quicker, you are building an audience.The second way is not buying it but through hosting content, doing content marketing that is valuable to my audience, and that Google is going to start ranking highly on the search pages. This is really, really important because if Facebook changes their advertising policies, your whole business could go bankrupt if you just rely on Facebook ads.Another really important way is to do what we are doing here, for example. Do collaborations where you, for example, do a podcast, a video, or a blog post for somebody else who already has your target audience or has people who are very similar to your target audience. Both of us reach more people, but also, if other websites add hyperlinks to your website, that increases your ranking in SEO.If you do collaborations like this, you add a hyperlink to my website, I add one to yours, and hopefully, we're going higher in the search rankings as well.Ross: One more time, everyone, that was Marek Kiczkowiak. For more from Marek, please check out his website www.teflequityadvocates.com. You can also find the TEFL Equity Academy on there with some of the online courses that Marek has created before for teachers.If you enjoyed this podcast, please visit our website, www.tefltraininginstitute.com, for more. If you really enjoyed it, please give us a good rating on iTunes or wherever you listen. We'll see you again next time. Goodbye.

As Phil Collins once sang, “In teaching you will learn and in learning you will teach.” So, what can language teachers learn about language learning from learning a language? 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.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

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.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

We speak to three experts involved in the IELTS test prep industry in China and hear different points of view on getting students to memorize answers, schools finding test questions and what effect does it all have on the students when they take the testFor more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

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.Understanding Classroom Discourse (with Steve Walsh)Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to "TEFL Training Institute Podcast." This week, we are looking at interactions that happen in the classroom. We're talking about classroom discourse.To help us do that, we have Steve Walsh, Professor of Applied Linguistics at Newcastle University. Steve's written extensively several books and many, many articles about classroom discourse, how it affects student learning, and how teachers can use classroom discourse as a starting point for their professional development. I hope you enjoy today's episode.Ross: Hi, Steve. Thanks very much for joining us. To being with, Steve, what is classroom discourse?Professor Steve Walsh: Classroom discourse basically covers all the interactions which take place in any classroom. It's used interchangeably quite frequently in the literature. You'll see people talk about interaction. You'll see them talk about classroom discourse.Classroom discourse is the actual recording, the observation, the transcript. All of that constitutes classroom discourse. What we're really interested in ‑‑ certainly in my work, anyway ‑ are the interactions between teacher and students.The reason we're interested in it is because it shows us what's actually happening in a classroom. It gives us a clue as to whether anything is being taught or learned. You can't study learning by looking inside people's heads, but you can make a lot of influences, I suppose, by looking at what people do and what people say.That's the essence of classroom discourse and also, one of the reasons they're studying it.Ross: In terms of those interactions then, what do we know about what often happens? How do teachers typically interact with their students, and what are some of the common purposes that teacher talk for?Steve Walsh: We're interested in what you might call the teaching practices, which take place in the classroom, and all of these practices such as asking a question or correcting an error. These practices are encompassed in language. You can't do these things without using language.For example, in some of my work which I'll talk about later, we've identified a number of these practices, which are frequently occurring, which are found in any classroom anywhere in the world, which merit study. Let's take the most frequently occurring ones.This would be elicitation. Elicitation is about trying to get your students to say something by asking a question, for example, which is the most commonly used elicitation strategy.The second one would be repair, which would be the ways in which we correct errors. Something that teachers do all the time is error correction. There are huge debates, of course, around this as to whether we should correct every error or not.The third one, which is perhaps the most important one in many ways, is feedback. The feedback that we give to our students and that students give to us is hugely important because it tells us what's going on.Right now, for example in the current situation with COVID, we're all working online. We're teaching online, and we're not getting the feedback that we do depend on from our students.For example, if we don't get visual clues, if we don't get head nods, smiles, raised eyebrows, and these multi‑modal features, we don't know really whether they're actually understanding us or learning anything. Similarly, the feedback that we give to our students, the way is in which we acknowledge a contribution, for example.Typically, teachers say things like, "Yes. Good. Thank you. Excellent. Right." That kind of thing. These discourse markers. These simple single words. Although they're used to encourage and motivate, they can actually close the interaction down and signal the end of a turn.Although they are well‑meant in the work I'm doing, I'm suggesting that we need to push learners a little bit and say things like, "Oh. That's really interesting. Can you tell us a bit more about that?" We get what I'm calling pushed output using Merrill Swain's word ‑‑ output from our students.Finally, all the stuff that we do which is classed as management of learning, giving instructions, organizing, setting up pair work, bringing a task to a conclusion, all of these things are what we would call teaching practices, but they are absolutely interlinked with the language that we use.What's really important here is to understand that the language we use and the pedagogy goal that we're trying to achieve, the pedagogy goal of the moment, they have to work together. If my pedagogy goal is to promote fluency and I'm simply asking Yes/No questions, there's a mismatch between my language and my pedagogy goal.If my pedagogy goal is to give a grammatical explanation about a point of grammar, then it's absolutely fine to talk at length and have, what you might call, a high level of teacher talk. We're interested in the quality of teacher talk rather than the quantity. We're interested in the extent to which our language and our interaction promote learning.Ross: Maybe, we can drill down a bit deeper into some of those concepts then, Steve. Let's go back at questions for a second. Before, we've spoken on the podcast about how useful it is for teachers to ask questions to students that they don't know the answers to.Do you want to tell us a bit more about those kind of questions, and also display questions where teachers ask students questions that they already know the answers to? Are those sometimes useful or sometimes appropriate, or does it all really just depend?Steve Walsh: It depends. With regard to questions, we ask a lot of questions. There have been various studies on this to calculate the percentage time that teachers devote to asking questions. It's huge. It's enormous. One question for ourselves is perhaps, "Do we always need to ask a question? Are there other ways of eliciting a response?"When I first started teaching, we used to use flash cards to elicit responses. There are ways of doing this, but let's stay with questions for a minute. I would divide questions into two types ‑‑ display questions and referential questions.Display questions are questions that we use to get our students to display what they know. There are prompt. Display questions are questions that we, as teachers, know the answer to. They're not the kind of question you would ask your family or friends, because your family or friends would think you're crazy if you kept asking them question that you knew the answer to.In classrooms, it's OK to ask display questions because they prompt and they elicit. They try to encourage some kind of response. The problem is that we ask too many. In my work, we ask a lot of display questions where in fact, sometimes, we should and could be asking the other type of question, which are referential questions.Referential questions are simply genuine questions that we don't know the answer to. Questions, such as "What did you do over the weekend? How did you spend Saturday? Have you ever been to Paris?" These types of questions, which are genuine and real, are an essential part of human communication.What I'm suggesting is that we need to rebalance questioning, and perhaps try to incorporate more genuine questions of our students and fewer display questions. You'll hear people talk about these as open and closed as well.Some people, including my colleague at Newcastle, Paul Seedhouse, would suggest that every question in a classroom is some kind of display question because it's there for a purpose. It's designed to get a response from our students rather than the normal purpose of questions, which is to access information and find out about things.Some people would argue you can't actually ask a genuine question. I think you can and we should because it shows an interest in our students. It shows that we're listening to what they're saying, and we're interested. We're genuinely interested.Ross: You mentioned how your [laughs] friends and family would look at you very strangely if you ask them a display question. "What color is this pen? How many shoes are there?" That kind of thing. Obviously, that's true, but that suggests that there's a difference between how teachers interact with students inside the classroom, and how they interact with other people outside of the classroom.Can you tell us a bit more about that? Is it ever really possible for classroom interactions and classroom communication to be similar or to mirror what's going on in the real world?Steve Walsh: The simple answer is it can't. Interactions in the classroom are bound by rules. We're talking here to use a little bit of technical language. We're talking about an institutional discourse setting.An institutional discourse means any situation within an institution, which has got its own rules. For example, a visit to the doctor. You go into the doctor, it would be unusual for you to say to the doctor, "How are you today?" but it's absolutely fine for the doctor to say to you, "How are you?" and "What can I do for you?"These rules that apply restrict the interaction that we can have in the classroom. Some people say it's not genuine. The other way of looking at it is to say that the classroom is as much a social setting as any other. It's a place where people come. They have a goal.All institutional discourse is goal‑oriented. We have a purpose for being there. We have roles. In the roles that we have in the classroom, the roles are asymmetrical. They're not equal. The teacher is the authority figure, and they have control of the discourse, for example.These roles and rules, if you like, in the classroom, restrict the discourse that we're going to get. They limit us to certain patterns, but that's quite interesting because then we can say, "Well, what is an appropriate interaction in the classroom, and what is a less appropriate type of interaction?"Although on the one hand, classroom interaction/classroom discourse is not authentic and can never be genuine in the same way that an interaction with a friend can be. On the other hand, it's a social setting, which has certain norms and practices which can be studied. That's what makes it useful in terms of understanding teaching and learning better.Ross: You mentioned there the idea of rules and roles. Let's talk about the roles a little bit more. How set in stone are those teacher roles, Steve?They obviously must change a little bit depending on the culture, maybe the part of the world that you're teaching in. I wonder if they're also influenced by other things, like the expectations of students or even just influenced by what it is that the teachers are teaching.Steve Walsh: That's a good question. This is really very much about the socialization of learning that we're all socialized into behaving in certain ways in classrooms.Typically, we expect to answer questions rather than ask questions. We expect to sit quietly for much of the time. We expect to put our hands up when we want to say something or answer a question. These are the rules, if you like, the social rules of the classroom. Of course, these vary from one context to another.If you go to some parts of the world ‑‑ the Middle East, the Far East, possibly South America, places like that ‑ then the role of the teacher is very much seen as a traditional role in some people's eyes. In other words, they are there to impart knowledge.In other parts of the world, the role of the teacher might be seen in quite a different way as somebody who's there as a facilitator, as a catalyst, somebody who can help people learn but in a more possibly informal way. I don't think these two contexts that I've just described are mutually exclusive.In the work that I do, I talk about micro‑context, which vary as a lesson progresses. The teachers' role and the interactions that unfold have to vary according to what's going on in the classroom, according to the agenda, the teaching goals of the moment.At one point in the lesson, you might be dominating the interaction for 10 or 15 minutes while you've given explanation or give some instructions. At another moment in the lesson, you might be taking more of a backseat, letting the students get on with something, and interact together.But what's important for good teaching is to learn how to vary the role that you adopt and match the role according to what you're trying to achieve with the students at that point in time. Some people are good at this. I'm afraid some are not.Some people feel that they have to remain as the authority figure, what the literature would refer to as the sage on the stage, the one who has all the knowledge. Especially in language classrooms, it's probably a mistake to completely follow that rule.The other thing, of course, is that teachers are under pressure from outside the classroom. This perhaps influences their role very strongly as well. They're under pressure from parents, from head teachers, perhaps, the curriculum, assessment, and examinations. All these external, invisible or hidden factors have an important effect on how we behave in classrooms and the role that we adopt.Ross: One more time, everyone, that was Professor Steve Walsh. If you'd like to find out more from Steve, check out his books and articles. There's a list on Steve's University of Newcastle page, which I'll put a link to.If you'd like to find out more from us, please go to our website, www.tefltraininginstitute.com. Thanks for listening. We'll see you again next time. Goodbye.

I speak with Ekitzel Wood about online marketing and discrimination in teacher recruitment. Ekitzel tells us how our Facebook information change the job advertisements that we see. We also talk about racism in teacher recruitment and why many schools present a ‘white’ image of their teachers to their customers. Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the podcast. As you know, usually on the podcast, we speak to people with similar backgrounds to myself and Tracy, but today, we've got someone from a very different background. That person is Ekitzel Wood.She specializes in online branding and marketing. She's worked and consulted for many education companies in China about how to improve their brand and find more teachers.In our conversation, Ekitzel and I talk about marketing messages that work for different groups. On the second half of the podcast, we discuss some of the dangers of online marketing and how this can make discrimination easier.If you've ever searched for anything in Google, or you've liked a page on Facebook, this affects what job opportunities you see in the future. Even if you don't, this affects who your colleagues are and will be. Enjoy the podcast!Online Marketing in EducationRoss: Hi, Ekitzel Wood. Thanks so much for coming on.Ekitzel Wood: Thanks for having me. [laughs]Ross: Do you mind telling us just very quickly a bit about what you do? You're in education marketing, but you market staff to teachers, right?Ekitzel: Right. I got my start in social media working for a lot of different companies. I start to quickly specialize in Chinese companies that wanted to have a greater influence and to manage their brands better in North America. Eventually, that parlayed into a very fast‑growing education sector in regards to how to manage their digital brand, what they want to portray themselves as online.Ross: Maybe that's a good place to start. Like if you're a teacher and you've seen some online social media for school, how would you go about researching that school and finding out, is it legit?Ekitzel: Coming from the other end is I pose that a lot to schools when they approach me. What type of person do you want to attract? Specifically, one issue for a lot of Chinese English‑training centers is they want to attract more female talent.This is just a general issue in education globally is that within the domestic markets of any country, education is typically about 65/35 female‑skewed, but once you expatriate that, it flips.How do you attract or how do you appeal to female educators, or what type of messaging will most resonate with them, especially in terms of...There's a lot of messaging where you focus on having an adventure or trying something new, having access to different areas of the world, meeting new people.For women, it doesn't work as well unless they're between the ages of 22 and 26. That's the sweet spot for women. For men, that can work up until the age of 39 typically, actually. They're very different, the way they behave.Ross: What marketing then works for women, say then, over the age of 26 in education or some marketing things that resonate with that group?Ekitzel: There's two different types of tracks that you can take based on the research that I've done with a few different places.One is a new‑beginning style track where it's like, "Are you feeling all right?" or "Have you been teaching the same lesson plans for 10 years now? Is it getting tiresome? Do you want to take those skills and then adapt them for new culture, learn about a new place?"It's about self‑enrichment and about taking your experience and moving it on to something that will challenge you in a new way but won't be too challenging, if that makes sense. So making sure that you apply the side career advancement opportunities that they might have.If your English training center focus on the fact that you might give them the opportunity to write books or develop curriculum or learn about administration, mentoring, especially, is something that really resonates with a lot of...I know North American long‑term professional teachers that are over the age...They're in their like 20s.It's a difficult time even to our trained teachers in North America because the attrition rate is quite high. Most teachers in the United States, they leave a teaching profession within five years of starting. The late 20s is a very good time to attract those teachers, to give them an opportunity...Ross: This is because that a lot of them are thinking they've had it with education at that point. They're already thinking about doing something different, anyway. In some ways, that problem in the domestic market creates an opportunity, that does it?Ekitzel: Exactly. Not to sound traditional about it, but it is something that, in terms of market research, has proven true, that at that age, if that person is already married, it's very unlikely that they're going to relocate. If that person isn't married, they want to be or they're thinking about it.It's about 50/50, actually. That's a group that wants...I've tried marketing too with a couple other places, and it's proven not very profitable.Ross: What are some groups that are maybe the easiest ones to attract, the ones with the highest return on investment for ads?Ekitzel: Highest return on investment are definitely 23 to 26, male, college educated, one and a half years of spotty experience. They haven't had a solid job after graduating from college. That was a lot easier to do in 2010 to 2012 when the economy wasn't so good in North America. Now, it's not as big of an issue. It's getting harder to recruit that type of talent.Discrimination in online EducationRoss: A lot of what we talked about so far that has been marketing to specific groups. I want to ask you, if I was a language school owner and I believed that my customers really liked white, blonde teachers aged 28 to 34, is it now impossible for me to engineer something like that where I can deliberately try to attract those people?Ekitzel: Unfortunately, yes.Ross: Wow!Ekitzel: With Facebook, the way it works when you make an ad is you select an audience. That audience is divided by psychographics, which are preferences like pages you follow, interests you see list on Facebook.This is information you volunteer yourself. You volunteer that information also by liking certain types of content and sharing certain items. That's who you're going to target, so cannot be done by race. It's difficult, but there are ways obviously to do that. Not many white people follow BET, for instance.Ross: I've done, before, research into hiring practices. It turns out in my research, at least in China, if you have a white photo at the top of your resume, you're 50 percent more likely to get a job than if you have black photo at the top.That's almost somehow even scarier, that now, it's possible to almost cut out the people that you don't want based on age, ethnicity, interest, and everything. They don't even see the advert in the first place. Of course, like you say, you would hope that language schools eventually would discover that that's not what makes a successful school.But equally, if the only people that you're going to hire are white, blonde, Aryan people, maybe you never actually find out, because you never have those people from other age groups and ethnicities. You never find out that those people could be equally successful.Ekitzel: Yes, I know. Not just the companies I've worked for but the entire industry is guilty of this, where they over‑recruit online teachers and especially highly‑qualified teachers from urban areas who are not white. They will keep them active just to the point that they won't leave, but they do deprioritize them in terms of their marketplace.They have backend ways of tagging them that aren't obvious to the outside observer or to them even as a teacher in their platform. If you say, "I want a teacher who has a specialty in math because I need to improve my English master, engineering vocabulary," they'll search these two terms. Then the first page or two of options will only be these idealized profile.Ross: I never understand why that happens. I always thought that the great thing about online teaching was that...Ekitzel: Is the equalizer?Ross: Yeah, right? It gives students the opportunity to...You can choose whoever you want. If you are racist, or sexist, or whatever, fine.Ekitzel: That's your choice.Ross: You can go and choose the Aryan teacher if you want, but if you want to choose the person with the highest star rating based on feedback or the best qualifications, you can search for it however you like.Ekitzel: The market, especially, in China is highly competitive. The acquisition cost for students is very high. They're doing anything and everything they can to...The thing is, even for them, they do lots of market research where they have quality and experience are the two main drivers for student acquisition. That's what they really care about.However, unfortunately, behavioral data says something else. I don't know if that's a catch‑22, because a lot of these platforms prioritize towards this idealized image. Are they only selecting those because that's what they're being shown first, like in the first search page, or is that because that's really what they, themselves, prefer?Ross: It could be a self‑fulfilling prophecy where you choose what you show.Ekitzel: Right. Because the market is so fierce, no one that I worked with or consulted with has been willing to take that risk.Ross: If you are a teacher and you maybe already worked on one of these platforms or you're just an employee of one of them, what's a way that you can find out and investigate to what extent your company is promoting an idealized ethnic...?Ekitzel: Discriminatory...?Ross: Yes, discriminative and profile for teachers.Ekitzel: If you work inside of an online teaching platform and you have access to the students' site, how students use the portal or parents use the portal, do some testing. I think you'll find pretty quickly that even when you search very generalized terms, you'll see very little diversity in the first 20 results.Every company I worked for, that's one of the first concerns I bring up. You can be very successful recruiting teachers. That's your main goal, is quantity of teachers and quality of teachers.However, I refuse to help you with that unless you start marketing domestically, that you provide teachers that are of non‑white backgrounds, that your billboards, that your online advertising doesn't just have a white face on it, and that has a variety of faces.Once people start searching for your company and your information, they're not just going to see what's available in United States. They're going to see what's also being promoted in China. They're going to see pictures of subway adverts.If they see only white people in those subway adverts, they're going to say, "Well, you're only selling white people to Chinese people, so what's you're saying you're a diverse welcoming country?" That's hypocritical.Ross: I wonder what the reason is, what's the underlying thing that causes this racism. On discrimination, I've read before about how people of color were discriminated against in customer‑facing jobs, but in management‑facing jobs basically suffered almost no discrimination.The background to that seem to be that companies were worried that their customers were racist. They prefer to have a white person or beautiful person or whatever, but it was like the recruiters, themselves, didn't actually have a preference.What I wonder is here, is it people in these companies actually feel that way, or they just worry that this is how our customers feel? Do they think like, "I really believe white teachers are better," or is it like, "I really think that our customers are kind of racist. I'm going to discriminate on their behalf"?Ekitzel: I think it's a little bit of both. I'm a big follower of Brené Brown. [laughs] She's a social worker, just had talks and things like that. She tells the story about her own experience where she was waiting on the line at a bank. There's a teller. He was black.There's an older white lady in front of her. She was getting really upset. Something was wrong, and she's like, "I want to speak to your manager." Brené was behind of this awful lady. He's like, "OK," so he brings the manager who also happens to be a black woman. She's like "No, I need another manager."Ross: Wow.Ekitzel: She was so angry. She got upset. She's just like, "That lady was crazy." The teller was beyond professional. He's just like, "She's just worried about her money, and she's afraid. When people are afraid, they don't make the best choices."I think, especially in terms of business development, in a hypercompetitive market of English education in China, they know that it doesn't really matter, but they're afraid because they might lose one or two families. That, to them, could be a big difference in their profit margin.Everyone's trying to sell to the lowest common denominator. They think that if this will change five percent of the people's minds if they see a black person there because it spooks them or it scares them, then they'll make this safer "choice."Ross: It's better to do something that's going to appease the racist five percent, because for the other 95 percent, they don't care.Ekitzel: They don't care. Unless they are the ones not being represented, they'll just become more complacent what the imagery they're seeing.Ross: Thanks so much for coming along.Ekitzel: Oh, thank you.Ross: Do you have a blog, or a Twitter handle, or something that you'd recommend people to go to?Ekitzel: I don't have a lot of professional social media for myself.Ross: That's ironic.Ekitzel: You're welcome to follow me on Twitter. It's @ekitzel. That's my Twitter handle.Ross: Awesome. Thanks again.Ekitzel: Thank you.Ross: Cool.

David Crystal 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.Ross Thorburn: Hi everyone. Welcome back to "TEFL Training Institute Podcast." I'm Ross Thorburn.This week we are going to take about differentiation. To help us with that, we have Chris Roland.Chris is a young learner teacher. He's based in Spain. He's also a tutor on the Trinity Diploma in TESOL course. He's also an author. He has got a couple of books out about teaching young learners, and he's also published a few articles about differentiation in the classroom.I always found as a teacher trainer, that one of the things that teachers have one of the hardest times with is just having students of different levels in the same class. So if that's a challenge that you have wherever you work, then listen on. Chris has got lots of interesting and practical ideas. Enjoy the interview.Ross: Hi, Chris. To start off with, what is differentiation? Which students are we aiming to help when we differentiate?Chris Roland: We've got the classic Carol Anne Tomlinson definition. We're helping the weaker students, we're helping the stronger students, and everybody in between get to a common goal.In a nutshell, everybody, and it is sometimes quite easy to overlook the middle ground because our attention is often drawn to the people who are struggling and the people who have completed a task easily. Not necessarily most quickly, but easily, and our attention is, in terms of behavior, easily drawn to the students who are not doing what we want, to the students that are doing exactly what we want.Against this middle ground which we often just ignore. Also, when we talk about differentiation. I think people immediately hear it and sort of inwardly cringe and think, "Oh no! Is that talking about preparing seven different worksheets of all slightly different capabilities?"I like to reduce differentiation down to helping the kids who are stuck get unstuck, and pushing anyone who finds the material too easy, pushing them so that they learn something as well. You can do those things in your lesson with very little preparation. Just maybe a little bit of thought that you don't have to produce your seven different worksheets.Ross: You mention there on‑the‑spot differentiation. Can you tell us a bit more about that kind of differentiation that doesn't involve making seven versions of the same worksheet?Chris: I wrote an article with Daniel Barber. In fact, we wrote a couple for "Modern English Teacher" a few years back, and we came up with two ideas. One was structured differentiation, which would be where we're planning in different levels of an activity.The other one, we called it differentiated support, and that, basically, is the differentiation I do now for an activity, but you can also plan for it. You're planning exercises. What am I going to do for the people that don't get it?So many times in a lesson when I'm observing, I'll see a student say, "Teacher, I don't understand," and the teacher will just repeat the explanation they've previously given. In that sort of situation, I think the best thing we can do is actually just shut up and ask the student why don't you get it? Then for a few seconds, enter into that student's world.We'll probably realize that they're coming at it from a place where something that they've learned previously is blocking what we're explaining. If we don't stop and listen and let them explain, then we can't enter into that world.The problem is, as a profession ‑‑ I say this being somebody who's ranting into a microphone ‑‑ teacher's can't shut up. It seems like when you give the student talking time in a class, especially to explain something, it seems like forever. Especially because, on an event management level, everybody else has to be quiet and suppressing themselves in order for that student to explain themselves.So, on the spot differentiation, and we can do that for the advanced learners. The class starts an exercise, and we see that two students are completing an exercise quickly, but more importantly, easily, and it's not stretching them.One of my examples that I use regularly is a vocabulary exercise where they have to match pictures from [inaudible 4:27] picture to a list of words. If we've got students who can do that and they complete that very easily, we don't have to wait until they've done it in order to complete the task.Say, "You two guys, I know you know these words already, so have a quick look. Then I want you to close your books, and I want one of you to do a spelling dictation to the other, from those words."Immediately we've moved it from just recognizing to being able to spell the words, or work your way down the words and mark up the stress on each word if it isn't already marked in the book. We're moving from just recognizing the words to knowing how they'll sound.Or if the others are still matching the words together, "You two guys, I want you to write five questions including five of those words." Then they can do something with those questions at a later point. We don't have to wait until everybody is finished to give people extra challenge to push them, to give them something that will take their learning forward.Ross: That was pushing the stronger students further. Do you want to tell us about helping the students who are maybe finding the material the hardest?Chris: Yeah, if they run a speaking test, for example, and they're going to be asking each other questions from the book, if you've got...At the end of each double‑page spread, you'll often have two, three, four questions, or those questions might appear as the lead‑in.Teachers complain to students, "You're not speaking in English," but if they don't actually have the language to formulate the answer, then it's very difficult for them to do so.If we know some students are going to struggle, we could provide four or five, I call them sentence stems, just the start of how to answer the question, or we could get them to practice writing the answers. Then we correct them.Finally, when they've got the full answers correct, we say, "Now you're going to ask the questions as they appear in the book. You're going to read your answers," and so you've layered up that speaking activity for them, but we've put them in a place where they can take part in the dialogue successfully.Last time I was doing passive, I was going to do passive voice, it came up in our curriculum, and I knew that my students didn't know the vocabulary for the exercises we were going to be doing. This was a low‑level class. It was at variance with the level of material I was giving them.It was all about inventions and where rice is grown. Where various products and different types of clothes are worn. I thought they're not going to get this. They're not going to get this because they don't have the vocabulary.It is like layers, as you say. I thought OK, and I started stripping it away like the layers of an onion. First they need the vocab. Then they don't know the verbs. They don't know all those words, and they definitely don't know them in the past participles.Then I looked at the different verbs in the exercise, so we started the lesson playing about with the verbs, all the verbs that were going to come up later. Then we moved to actually making the passive sentences.It is stripping away, looking at the end task and asking ourselves, "What would a student need in order to be able to do this task?" And ordering those skills in order of complexity.Some of them are not going to know the verbs. Some of them are not going to know the basic vocabulary, and then some of them are not going to know any of it. For those students who don't know any of it, I'm just going to give them sentences to read that are actually in the passive, and I'll explain what they mean, and they can familiarize themselves.With students who don't know the words, but they might be able to cope with the rest, you know, some of the more complicated vocabulary, we'll teach them the vocabulary and cover that, and then move forward with them.Ross: Chris, I know that you're also a teacher on the Trinity Diploma in TESOL. Something I find sometimes happens on that course is that teachers will write a different aim for either every student in the class or for groups of different students in the class.Do you think that's an effective way of planning? Or do you think that's introducing too much complexity into the process?Chris: The idea of having different aims for different students is very sweet, but I can imagine how it would translate into a cognitive nightmare for a diploma or a delta candidate. Because you start that lesson, that observed or evaluated lesson, for instance, you're only at 90 percent of yourself anyway because 10 percent is being diverted away, to watching yourself through the observer's eyes.You say something, and you think, "Oh no, how will that look?" Immediately, you're operating 90 percent efficiency to start with. Then we add in the nerves, and the unfamiliarity, and the fact that you've done a lesson plan probably for the tutor, but you've also got a lesson plan for yourself, which I recommend not doing actually.You're oscillating between the two, but then you remember you have to do some monitoring, and you've probably not made your learners aware of their progress, or some of the many things that need to be ticked on the boxes. Having different aims for different students, that's great in your day‑to‑day teaching, but in an observation situation that could be adding to the stress.There is a counter‑argument that you should risk. You should try and teach as you would teach, and the observation becomes second. But, on a diploma or a delta, to go with your conviction to do something regardless of the evaluation criteria would probably be...I'm not sure that would be advisable.In terms of aims, I would say one aim for the class, but getting there in different degrees.An example that I often use is if our aim for the class is to have students using regular verbs in past simple to talk about last weekend, then some of the students, they'll get there. Some of the students will be able to go beyond and use irregular verbs in the past about their weekend.Then some students won't get there at all because they're lacking the basic vocabulary, so we can help them. We can give them the few verbs; five verbs in the past simple, and say, "Can you make sentences about these to talk about last week? Try putting these in a sentence."By the end of the lesson, they've also used the past simple of regular verbs to talk about the past. To a lesser degree, but the way was always open for them to go further.If you've got that one aim, you can travel at different degrees, varying degrees. Remember we've got different aims for different students. We're sort of closing the door, maybe.Ross: I think of the most common practices I've seen for teachers trying to differentiate is pairing stronger students with weaker students. Can you tell us a bit about that?It feels almost like a default way of teachers differentiating. What do you think some of the disadvantages and advantages of pairing say, strong students with weak students?Chris: Doing that, I think, is a valid differentiation measure, but often teachers are doing it without really knowing why they're doing it. What pairing weak and strong students does is it makes life easy for the teacher because the strong students will help do some of the teacher's job, and it homogenizes the class.Yes, you can set up a situation where a weaker student is learning from a stronger student, but when you do that, it's much more difficult to do it in a way where the stronger student also benefits. It can be done. I'll try and give you an example.Let's say we have a weaker student and two stronger students in a three, and we've got conversation questions, and we want them all to practice.What we can do is we can give the weaker student the stop‑watch or the timer. "You are the examiner and you're going to ask Stronger Student A the questions. You're going to stop them when they've been speaking for a minute on each question."What they're doing is they're benefiting because they are getting to listen to the stronger student's answers, and they're getting to familiarize themselves with the questions and actually figure out what the questions mean because they're hearing the stronger students' answers.Stronger Student B can be the marker. They can be listening and then writing down any words that they think that the other stronger student gets wrong, and then they feed back.Then we reverse the roles, so we have the weaker student asking Stronger Student B. Stronger Student A is the examiner, so again the weaker student is getting to hear the answers. At this point, they've not done any speaking themselves apart from reading the questions, but they're getting practice reading the questions.Finally, then we get one of the stronger students to question, the weaker student gets to answer. The other stronger student, they're not writing down the errors, they're acting as a helper so they're helping the weaker student.Within that dynamic, it's quite a complex one, but you've actually got stronger students benefiting by having the weaker student working with them. The weaker student is fulfilling a useful role, but you've also got the weaker student benefiting from the examples and the guidance.If you compare that to just putting a weaker student and a strong student together to do an exercise, you've probably just got the stronger student done quickly and showing the answers to the weaker students, who just writes down a,b,a,b,b,b,a,b,c.We need to know what the rationale is, and it's a complicated thing, having mixed groupings but it can work.Ross: One more time, everyone. That was Chris Roland. If you're interested in finding out more about Chris, check out his book, "Understanding Teenagers in the ELT Classroom."Thanks for listening. If you're interested in listening to more podcasts, check out our website www.tefltraininginstitute.com.Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time. Goodbye.

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.Tracy Yu: Hello, everyone. Welcome to our podcast and today we have our guest, Fifi.Felicity Pyatt: Hello, it's me.Ross Thorburn: Welcome back.Felicity: Thank you.Ross: So Fifi, what are we talking about? [laughs]Felicity: Today, I thought it would be cool to talk about the best way to fail people. I've run CertTESOL courses in DipTESOL courses, and failure is something that we have to negotiate very carefully. A really delicate thing to manage when teachers don't pass their classes.Ross. Yeah, right. I think there's something that we don't talk about very much, right? Like how to deal with failure? I googled it, on the way here, in preparation [laughs] and couldn't find anything on how to fail a trainee. You had a story, right?Felicity: Yeah, this was very early on when I just started working on DipTESOL observations, which is a bit more challenging. The thing about the Dip is that there are four mass parts criteria, I think you talked about this with Dedrick a little bit, a few podcasts ago.I had a teacher on there who had lots of experience teaching in public school, back in her home country, and she had a lot of ideas about what worked very well. She had a masters, and she had a lot of research to back up her idea that contexts have no place in a classroom.Ross: Right. Because setting a realistic context is one of the things that you have to do in order to pass those classes, right?Felicity: Yeah, it's a really important part of the class. To have a trainee who...not that she couldn't do it, but she just refused to accept that she had to do it. I started to really dread having to observe her because I knew that it was going to be a borderline pass or failure, and I would have to give her that feedback and have that fight with her about the whole situation.But she ended up passing, overall, so that's good.Ross: You didn't want to tell her if she failed?Felicity: [laughs] No, I was scared. I think I managed to approach it from the point of view of being like an assessor, so it wasn't my opinion. It was talking about the Trinity qualification guideline so this is something you must pass to get a Trinity DipTESOL.It's not the only way to teach. They're not saying that it's the perfect thing to do. They're just saying that that's what they want a Trinity qualified teacher to be able to do.Ross: My worst example of this was more management‑related, but it was me sitting in with a colleague on firing someone, basically in their first week, and that went disastrously wrong. This person basically trashing a classroom in a school full of students, in peak time. It was an absolute disaster.I think before that, I never put too much thought into that like how do you handle that process and realizing when it goes wrong it goes spectacularly.Felicity: Yeah, absolutely.Ross: OK, so Fifi's got some top tips on how to fail people and hopefully, we can also talk about, not just from the trainer's perspective on how to fail people, but maybe also from trainee teacher's perspective. What do you do when that happens? Did you want to talk? Why do we fail people?Felicity. Yeah, well, I think as I mentioned before, we fail people because they're not meeting the standards. It would be nice to be able to pass everybody but that's the thing to remember, is that there are guidelines, it's not just...Ross: Yeah, I remember being at a presentation by Jason Anderson a few years ago and him saying that for trainees that find it difficult to accept feedback taking the approach of not saying "I'm doing this to make you a better teacher," or "You must do this to improve your teaching," but just saying like, "I want to help you pass the course.""In order to pass the course, you need to change this thing and then after the course you can go back to doing whatever you were doing previously if you want." I think that's really important, isn't it? Because whatever course it is, there are these certain criteria. Someone's chosen all those criteria, obviously not completely arbitrarily, but there are values behind whatever criteria they are.Sometimes even as an examiner you start to go, "Why do people have to do this?" It can obviously be difficult for trainees to accept, right?Felicity: Absolutely. I don't know if you should put this into the podcast, maybe you can consider it. [laughs]Ross: I think that's a great way to start a story...Felicity: [laughs] One way that I certainly use failure in my courses is to give people a very strong notch in the right direction. So teachers who are not understanding or reacting to feedback, for whatever reason, maybe they don't understand what we said to them, or they don't think that they need to make changes.If they continue to make the same errors, then sometimes failing one class will push them to get out of that groove and start teaching in the methodology that we're looking for.Tracy: I think usually, when we heard this word "failure," the opposite should be success, so you can see we forget about the process in between. How I help you from failure to success or we need to highlight, I think, that this course is not just the final result, pass or fail, because the process is help you for future more success in your career.We have to maybe change the definition of fail. You probably failed a criteria but it doesn't means you fail. Experimenting new techniques in the classroom.Ross: One of those points there is that maybe it's not you failed but it's like the lesson failed. I think that's a useful distinction to make. I think it can also seem very unfair on courses where you don't really get so much credit for your improvement, right? The courses are about learning, but the things that we measure on the courses isn't how much you learn, it's where you get to.Felicity: It's your performance, yeah.Ross: I wanted to ask you about this. What was your second bit of advice, it was idealism versus pragmatism?Felicity: Oh, so this is maybe you see a class that is borderline, you could choose to pass it, you could choose to fail it. In those kinds of situations you have to look at the wider context so, "Is it their first teaching practice?" If it is, maybe you want to pass it. Because if you fail on your first class, often it's so de‑motivating.Another thing you want to consider is, "How would the other trainees react if this class passes?" Another thing to consider as well is, "Is this person in their behavior potentially driving away students?" Because anyone who runs a cert or a Dip would know it's sometimes a struggle to get students.Ross: You mean trainees or do you mean actual students in the classes?Felicity: Actual students for the classes. If you have a trainee who taught a fairly methodologically sound class but then they maybe intimidated the students somehow, then what is a borderline might well become a fail because you want to really strongly push them away from discouraging students.Ross: You can't do your job anymore, right, if there are no students.Felicity. Yeah, exactly.Ross: It's really interesting, isn't it? There's also an issue with this, are they driving away other trainees as well on...not courses I've worked on but I think a lot of other courses when...It's a very awkward position when someone's paying you to take this course, but then you also have this option to fail the person.I think that puts the trainer in a very awkward situation because you don't want to get this reputation, I guess, of if you take the course there then you're much more likely to fail. Obviously you can have standards to uphold the things as well, right?Felicity: Yeah, absolutely.Ross: Should we talk about how to break the news if that was like you're deciding if this person is going to fail or not, or if they're borderline. When would you tell someone?Felicity: I've got a couple of strong rules. The first one is it's not you failed, it's the class failed. Because it's a high‑stress performance, that's not an indicator of who they are as a whole person. The second thing is to reduce dread as much as you can. The moment you get the chance to tell them gently and then it takes the stakes out of the rest of the conversation.Ross: I think as well if you do that to the middle or the end of the conversation. The only thing the person is going to be thinking about in between is did I pass?Felicity: Yeah. Actually quite recently I had a teacher who had passed but she wasn't very confident. We were having feedback and I thought that it would be self‑evident that she had passed the class, but I could see her getting more and more fidgety. Eventually I was just like, "Look, you've passed," and she immediately burst into tears because it was that incredible tension.Tracy: I remember clearly I had a trainee. There were two classes in a row, failed. The first time, of course, burst into tears and couldn't continue the conversation. Even though, I leave it for a while and then came back and still couldn't still talk about it. So I have to write down a lot of feedback to her, and she read it.I think that also helped. If you realize this person is already, cannot accept it, or feel really negative about it, maybe leave it or turn it into some written feedback instead. It probably the easiest way for people to accept because it's just a paper and words, no emotion. I'm going to read it when I need it or when I'm ready.Ross: I think as well, you're helping that person learn on giving them feedback about them helping other people learning. As a teacher, if you're just bombarding your students with feedback until they cry, that wouldn't be very good. So it seems important that, as a trainer, you demonstrate the same skill with seeing, "Is this person ready for the feedback? Do we need to wait?"A lot we are saying is leading into giving people feedback so what are some tips for people who failed and are saying, "What next?"Felicity: One thing that you can remind your trainees of is that hopefully, their failure will be an aberration from the pattern. So the norm is passing classes and if it's their second class and say, "Look, you've passed your first class, you definitely got the ability. Here are all the areas where you did pass but this area and this area."Ross: It sounds cheesy, but I think it is important to find some positive things to focus on. If it's a course where there are lots of criteria just talking through, "Hey, here are the things that you passed, that you did well on." Making those specific both so the person keeps doing them and to give them better confidence.One thing to definitely avoid doing in these situations is eliciting. That usually goes wrong. If someone's failed they just want to be told, "Here's why you failed and here's how to make sure that doesn't happen again." So strongly recommend not saying, "So you failed on this and this, how do you think you could do this better?"My example from the beginning, the person going berserk after they've been fired it was partially because the person doing the firing said, "Oh, this went wrong, this went wrong. What do you think we should do about it?" and the other person saying, "Oh, like I work harder," and then being "Well, I'm actually sorry, you're fired."Felicity: So by the time you get to observing a trainee, you're probably going to know them enough to know how they're going to react. If you have a trainee who you feel might get aggressive with you, or be very, very resistant then this might be a good opportunity to avoid this cognitive bias called reactive evaluation, which is where an idea that comes from an enemy is automatically less valuable.In situations where a person is likely to get aggressive, it's because they see you as the enemy. This is going to sound really weird, but what we want to maybe try and do in that situation is twist it around so that it's not you that's the enemy, it's the criteria and you are on their side and trying to get them to meet the criteria.So you're more of going back into a trainer role, rather than an assessor role. You're just saying like, "Look, I know this criterion is really tough but I'm here to help you understand and meet them. Here are some things that you can do to get yourself to that point."Tracy: I really like this quote this person said. "Failure is not a bag of learning, it's the feature. It's not something that should be locked out of the learning experience."Ross: My final top tip is sit in the seats closest to the door if these things go really badly wrong and bring some tissues.[laughter]Ross: I have definitely been in situations several times where I regret not doing one of those two things.[laughter]Ross: So Fifi, thanks for coming on. Where can people go to find out more about you?Felicity: I have a blog, it's classed the ELT Elf. I'll send you the link because...Ross: It's already on the website.Felicity: Oh. [laughs]Ross: It's on links page, and I'll also put it on this page.Felicity: Thank you.Ross: Great. Fifi, thanks so much for coming up. A pleasure.Tracy: Thank you and see you next time, everybody. Bye.Felicity: Bye.Ross: Bye.

Former online teacher training manager Matt Courtois and I meet to talk about online teacher development and evaluation. What opportunities does online teaching create for teacher development?Opportunities in Online Teacher Development (with Matt Courtois)Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to "TEFL Training Institute Podcast." I'm Ross Thorburn. This week, once again, we have Matt Courtois.Matt Courtois: Hey, long time no see.Ross: Last time, Matt, you and I talked about the effects of coronavirus and teaching online to serve things that teachers can do in class with students.Today, I thought it'd be interesting for us to talk about the effect that teaching online, and teachers just not being in the same physical space as either their managers, or their trainers, or their peers is having on teacher development.Matt: I think this whole teaching online thing, it's so lonely. Before all this happened, you're in here, your teacher's office, with 10 colleagues who are bouncing ideas. Here, you're sitting in possibly in an empty apartment, lonely experience.Ross: Absolutely. Before, when I at least worked in a school, sometimes you have a thing of a teacher would come in on a break and just be like, "Oh my God, that was a disaster," and you would have the chance to go like, "What's up? Can I help? What was the issue here?"As soon as you're online, those interactions in the staff room or by the water cooler, those don't happen anymore. It made the importance of formal teacher education stuff even more important than it was before.Matt: A lot of the feedback you get from your peers doesn't necessarily happen in a formal avenue, but a lot of times you're just sitting here talking about your lesson.Ross: It's like what we were talking about last time with teaching, that online is not necessarily better or worse. It's just different. There's some advantages to doing teacher education online, but taking the offline stuff and putting it online, it's not going to work.You have to think of some other potential advantages of online that maybe don't exist offline, and try to take advantage of those.Matt: There some things that you can do that are completely different from face‑to‑face feedback or coaching or training that online can be a lot more effective.Ross: One obvious place is that if you are teaching online, it's highly likely that every lesson you teach is going to be recorded. There are huge opportunities for doing self‑observation and peer observation, that in face‑to‑face settings are really difficult to set up.Matt: In a previous company that we worked at together that had face‑to‑face lessons, it's something we encourage lots of teachers to do. Video your lesson, then afterwards, you can watch it. I really think, over the two or three years that I was advocating this idea, I don't think a single teacher actually did it.Ross: Even doing the thing of peer observation. I might want to observe you teaching such and such a class, but when you're teaching that class, I also have a class. It's really difficult to ever actually make that work.Obviously, all of these problems just disappear immediately since we started talking about online teaching, where everything's recorded.Matt: One of the best things you can do is watch yourself teaching. I know the way I am. If I have that video there, and it's already done, I'm going to watch myself teaching.I know if somebody is giving feedback, you do want to be specific because it is helpful. If you, as the observer, think something didn't go well, you can refer them back to minute 5, 12 seconds, and say, watch this and watch how you interact with the student or that student.Ross: Or, let's watch it together. There's no more of this, "Oh, I didn't think this went very well. Well, actually, I thought it went fine."I think it's powerful to be able to say like, "Which part of the lesson do you want to talk about?" "This part." "OK, let's move the video forward to that part and we can watch it together. We can we can talk about it."The videos could be used in at least one of three ways that immediately spring to mind. One is that, as a teacher, you could proactively go watch this yourself and reflect on it or transcribe bits of it or whatever.Another potential use is that you could make a video available to your peers to watch, for example. Or, another bit is that your supervisor or trainer or whatever could come and watch you teach.Having things online, there's a real issue around privacy and access that is going to be really interesting.For example, at the moment, if we were in a school together, and you were the manager and I'm the teacher, and you want to come and observe me teach, you could just barge into the classroom and watch me, if you really wanted to.I might be upset about it, but I would know you were there. As soon as it's online, there's all of a sudden this thing of like, well, maybe everything's probably being recorded by the school or at least by someone.Potentially, you can observe anything that I've taught without me knowing about it. There's a flip side to this, though, of course, which does mean that when you're observing people, they're automatically going to be more nervous than they would be if there was no one in the room, the whole observer's paradox thing.Often, you'd find that a lot of the feedback I'd end up giving trainee teachers would be about teacher talk and talking too much. I sometimes wonder, are these people just talking too much because they're nervous because I'm in the room? If I wasn't here, they wouldn't be nervous.Therefore, I'm giving them feedback on this aspect of the teaching that really is not an issue for 99 percent of the time. It's only an issue when they're being observed.This is another advantage to this covert observation that, as a teacher, you can be observed, and as a manager, you can observe teachers. There's no longer this problem of people being nervous and changing their behavior because there's an observer in the room.Matt: Ideally, it's going to be a much less intimidating and less distracting experience for the teachers and the students. By having this avenue for observations online, your presence isn't going to be known at all by students and the teacher. Maybe it's less intimidating.Ross: At the moment, in terms of teacher observations, there's also different ways of doing it. You could have the manager just walks in completely unannounced, so the teacher has no control over when they're observed.You could have the manager tells the teacher in advance, I'm going to observe this class, and you spent all this time preparing. You could have the manager gives the teacher some options, so the teacher has a bit more ownership over when they're observed.Or, the teacher even could say to the manager, "I would like you to come and observe this class before I teach it." Of course, with online, it moves, it almost adds an extra part on that graph, on that continuum.You're the manager, I could say, "Not that I would like you to observe this class that I will be teaching next Tuesday." I can say, "I want you to observe this class yesterday that I had this problem with and tell me, what should I had done in the situation or what tips you could give." It could give teachers more autonomy.Matt: I know a lot of teachers who would want to impress their observer. Most teachers are going to choose one of their stronger lessons, which I actually think is a good thing. As an observer, I would like to see you at your best.You were talking about teacher talk earlier. I don't want to see some mistakes and coach you about something that doesn't really occur to you very often.I want to see you at your best and see if we can find some areas of that that we can move forward a little bit, and the teacher coming to that decision about, "This is my best lesson," and they're showing that to you.Hopefully, through that process, they watched that lesson. They're thinking about a lot of really good reflection that's going to happen automatically by trying to show their manager their best lesson.Ross: The potential there is for the teacher to choose something that they actually want the manager or the supervisor or trainer to see.Matt: Odds are, at this point, if teachers are choosing their best lessons, there's probably a lot of things that we can find in their online teaching to help push them forward a little bit.Who was your guest a couple of weeks ago? I don't remember, but he was saying most of the online lessons.Ross: This was Russell Stannard. He was saying there were a lot of terrible online lessons, which is true. The opposite of that could also be true. The other advantage of having everything filmed is to take us to peer observations for a moment.If we all, you and me and we've got five other people, who work in the same school, we could make our professional development with something. Like, you can choose one of your classes this week or an activity that you did in the last week that you thought was particularly good and show it to everyone.Normally, if you do that, it's going to be you standing up in front of everyone describing what you did. It's you actually showing everyone, "Here's a video of this activity I did. It worked really, really well." I think that's a lot more useful. A lot more potential benefits for everyone else in the school.Matt: Especially now, I talk about Bloom's taxonomy a little bit. A lot of teachers with online teaching are at the very first stage. When they see something that works, they're going to try to replicate it.They're not higher up on this taxonomy where they're trying to invent their own things. They're just trying to see what works and copy it. Showing these video examples is so useful for where they're at right now.Ross: Another interesting thing about this is that if you make a video of an offline lesson, you must’ve had this before, you video the class and afterwards, you put the headphones on and you watch it.It's like, "I can't really hear what the students are saying." I wish the board work was clearer. I feel like offline, the video is not as good as actually being in the room.Online, of course, watching the video after the class is just as good as watching the class live or even better, because you have 100 percent accurate representation of what actually happened there.Matt: You're seeing exactly what the student sees from their perspective when you're looking at a recording of an online lesson.Whereas offline, I don't know, whenever you have a mingle activity with 20 people talking at the same time, you don't feel the excitement of those people talking. You don't get to hear what they're saying. You just hear a bunch of noise. [laughs]I feel the very nature of these online lessons, that you can observe the whole thing, what's happening with every single student at every single point, and exactly what the teacher is doing, and how they're using their board exactly, how it ties into everything together to get an overall picture of this experience that students are having.Ross: That's a lot about the actual process of the observation. Observing or having classes online, observing and giving feedback or having a discussion afterwards, also opens the door to different ways of giving feedback or at least discussing lessons that wouldn't really be possible offline.Those conversations, when they do happen face‑to‑face, can often be very emotionally‑charged because the observer might be defensive. It's called hot cognition, when you're still affected by the emotion of event itself.There's also this potential by doing an observation on line of an online class. You then open up all these possibilities for it to be a much more cold cognition and for people to be more objective about the whole process.Matt: I think online, with email as well, a lot of your tone gets lost.Ross: You've observed my class. Emailing me about it afterwards is probably not ideal. What are some of the ways of trainers and trainees or supervisors and teachers actually talking about a lesson after it's happened?Matt: I can go on Skype, or Microsoft Teams, or whatever messaging device. A lot of these, there's a function to leave a video message. With video messages, you don't miss out on some of the body language and stuff that you would in an email.Your tone and maybe supportive nature as an observer can show up whenever you're sending a video message rather than an email. The observee doesn't misconstrue what you're saying. That's the benefit of writing an email.The benefit I find over face‑to‑face feedback. When you're giving face‑to‑face feedback, it's almost a confrontation. If you, as the observer, are maybe talking about an area for improvement, it's almost like an argument, or it can be, if it gets out of hand.Whereas, by giving video messages, you can, first of all, use the observer. You can try to record it a couple times. You can make sure that you're saying it in a way that the teacher can accept it.As the observer, you can say like, "Before you respond, can you look up this article? Here's a link to an article that you can read, then I want you to compare that to what we're talking about in your lesson."Also, the teacher has the chance to watch this video, with your body language and all the benefits of video. They can sit back and think about that message for a while. They don't have to respond immediately like they would in a face‑to‑face conversation.Once they've come up with what they want to say back to you, they can send the video message back to you. You'll find that the level of conversation is actually much higher.That way, it's not such a hot debate. It's a little bit cooler. You can take more time. You can actually prepare people to come up with a better response to what it is that you're saying.Ross: Matt, thanks for joining us.Matt: My pleasure, as always.Ross: All right. We'll see you again next time, everyone. Goodbye.Matt: See you.

Many coursebooks and teaching materials are made for a global market. Ross Thorburn and Tracy Yu discuss how you can make a coursebook written for students all over the world relevant to your class, how to adapt EFL teaching materials and when it might be better to just stick with the book.

I speak with Morag McIntosh about the reality of teaching online during the Covid-19 lockdown.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to "TEFL Training Institute Podcast." I'm Ross Thorburn, and before we get into this week, I wanted to play you a quote from Yuval Noah Harari, author of "Sapiens." This is him on Sam Harris' "Making Sense" podcast talking about all things online teaching.Yuval Noah Harari: This shift to online teaching. This can lead to all kinds of dangerous directions. A lot of the experience of going to college doesn't happen in class, it happens during the break time. With teaching classes online on Zoom, of course there are break times, but you're alone in your home. You don't meet the other students, for a chance in the cafeteria.I think that whatever happens to education, we should always remember the very central rule of the community and of social interaction...Ross: I wanted to play you this for two reasons. First, to me, it's amazing that people like Yuval Noah Harari and Sam Harris are now talking about online teaching. Second, that what you just heard him say about the importance of what happens outside of the classroom.I think it's so easy to forget with online teaching, and I think this is true of the podcast that we've done recently here on this topic, that we tend to focus on the changes that have happened inside the classroom.For so many of our students and obviously for so many of you that are listening, the coronavirus has really changed for millions and millions of people what's going on for them outside of the classroom. Obviously in language teaching, so much of what we do inside the classroom is based on what's going on in our students' lives.We always try to personalize lessons based on students interests, jobs, hobbies, vacations, whatever. If you're part of the world where students are also in self‑isolation, that's going to have a huge impact on what you can get students to talk about inside the classroom.I want to bring this up at the beginning because that's one of the themes I think that came up in this week's interview with Morag MacIntosh. Morag works for Live Language in Glasgow, mainly teaching Academic English and helping students there prepare for IELTS, and Morag's also currently studying for her diploma in TESOL.For the last few weeks, Morag's been teaching online, and really is an inspiration in this area in finding resources that I would have never thought to use in a classroom but using them to great effect. In this interview, Morag and I talk about the reality of teaching online, not just teaching online but teaching online during this period of self‑isolation due to the coronavirus. Enjoy the interview.Ross: Morag, thanks so much for coming on. I really wanted to talk to you about this, because to be honest, a lot of what I read on online in terms of teaching tips at the moment seems to come from people who have never actually taught online and they certainly aren't doing it now.Morag MacIntosh: No, and there's things like say to your students, "What was the best thing you did yesterday? What was the most exciting thing?" Right now, that is being published to say to your students. They haven't been out of their house, you're not allowed to go out. You can't say what's the best thing. There's no good thing about it at all. A lot of the stuff you read is not suitable.Ross: [laughs] I think that just shows how out of touch some people really are at the moment with the reality of what's going on. This is the other thing with online teaching. Simply taking what happens offline and trying to put it in an online classroom, it just doesn't work.Morag: I think it's just so intensive when you're online. Students get very tired. It's very concentrated. You can't just replicate the classroom in any way at all, that just wouldn't work out. There definitely needs to be a different approach.Why would you use pictures in a course book when you can have your own pictures that you've taken? You can share a screen of something from your country, you can show the real thing in your house.Ross: Absolutely. Let's talk, then, about some of the activities that maybe are more suitable for online teaching, especially at the moment. I presume a lot of the activities that you're doing in class now, you've just discovered through trial and error. Is that right?Morag: Yeah, I think that because we didn't have any training, we had to rely on our own resources more. We didn't have a lot of course books. We've got a lot now, because they've been produced for us, and we've been given access to them, but at first we just had to think outside the box. Use the resources that we had to. Use the environment. Just work with what we had on the spot.Ross: That environment, that you've mentioned there, Morag, is that just the students and the apartments that they're in? Where they literally physically are right now?Morag: Yes. I'm talking about their physical environment because you're in their living room or some other room, and it's their personal space. It's ready‑made, authentic materials, isn't it? You don't have to think, "Is this authentic?" or "How can I make it communicative?" or "How can I make this realistic?" It's realistic already, we don't need to have that problem.We use things, they bring things to show us. We'll go around and look at their rooms, we'll look at their furniture, ask questions about that. One day, we had somebody who had a flat type TV delivered, and we helped him. The instructions were in every language but of course, the one that we couldn't understand any of them.We needed some help with that and what tools to use. We had a lesson in that kind of vocabulary about tools like spanner, hammer. All of these things that people wouldn't normally... [laughs] Then we could see the physical things as well.Ross: I love that example. That's brilliant. I can remember teaching a unit on household tools before. It certainly wasn't very contextualized like that. Again, a great example on how actually teaching the students from home can be better for some topics. Is that something that you planned there? Or was that something that was just improvised?Morag: It sort of evolved. He was saying that he kept getting deliveries every few minutes. There would be his bell ringing in the background. Eventually I said, "What is that noise? What is happening?" and he said, "Oh, it's another delivery."I said, "What are you getting delivered?" That's what led to that. The next day, it was still lying there. We just looked at what he was doing with his package there and then there was the instructions. He was trying to read it out, and we would instruct him. It was like asking questions and directing him. What would you use?We didn't do the whole thing. Obviously he made it up after the class, most of it, but it was preparation. It was like describing a process as well, so it was helpful for their IELTS and writing. That's one of the tasks ‑‑ describing a process. I'm always thinking, how can this tie into their four skills.All the times so we had all the four skills were definitely covered. The next day, he actually took us to see the finished item. [laughs] That kind of rounded it up and it was quite good.Ross: Such a good point. It's so important in this situation that you link whatever is happening in class back either to the course book or the test that the students are studying for so that students can see the point of what they're doing in class.Obviously in the situation where course books haven't been designed for the current situation, I think it's very easy to deviate from that, and for students to feel that whatever they're learning really isn't going anywhere.Morag: Definitely. You've got to make sure that everything you do is going to be tied into that. You can just have a good time looking around peoples' houses, and it's not so productive. You need to remember that they're actually paying for a service.Ross: Do you want to tell us about how you do that in class? How do you relate the class content back to the learning goals?Morag: A lot of it's in the structure. They know the structure that my lesson's going to be. First, I would have them doing something in the chat box when they're all waiting because people arrive just at random times. It's very difficult to motivate yourself to get out of bed when you don't actually have to go out physically.I have that problem, so, when they arrive, they can do something like an activity in the chat box. Like write a sentence about something or post a comment for somebody else. Or a letter, and find an animal or a vegetable. All these kinds of things. Then after that, we usually use the flipped lesson approach.I think that's the best. They've done a lot of the work at home, maybe the fun stuff. They've looked at the video, they've run a podcast, something like that or a blog. They've sent a file and they're speaking, Vocaroo. They'll go into the chat room, and then they'll do a task connected to that. Once we come back, we'll do a fun thing.We'll maybe look out the window and see what we can see. Describe that. Or we'll show videos of what we've been doing on our walks outside. From there, I kind of evolve it from what happens, but I've got a structure in my head. I really take what they produce, and we work with that.Ross: You mentioned videos there, from students' walks outside.Morag: Yeah.Ross: Do you want to tell us a little more about those? What are they, and how do you use them?Morag: What I've done before is, because we're only allowed to go out here for an hour on our isolation walks. When they're outside, I've asked them if they could maybe take a video of where they go. That kind of motivates other people. It's quite boring to be in your house for 23 hours a day.Somebody showed the cherry blossom, and he was holding it in his hand, describing that. When we came back and we're listening to that, we're looking at what he did, then making up questions and things from that as well. Then they can follow that through with writing summaries to practice their vocabulary, and obviously focus on a grammatical point as well that's come up.Ross: Again, that's really great. Really making lessons highly personalized. With sharing those videos, again, you're doing something online that I think would be more challenging to do offline. Another thing I know that you've done before that I thought sounded fantastic was taking students on virtual tours of tourist attractions.Morag: Yes, we either do these at home, or I quite like to do them in the class so that the students are interacting with each other as well. We'll maybe share the videos as well, because they can get a lot more communication out of that.Some of the things that I've done are...When I was looking on the Internet, because we're on lockdown and it's a bit boring, a lot of things have been put online free for people to use just now. For example, Google Arts & Culture, they've made over 2,000 things free like cultural attractions and people can go and they can take a virtual tour.I thought, "I wonder if I could use this," adapt these into the lessons in any way. We can do things with going into museums. There's the British Museum. All the famous museums, [inaudible 10:57] the Louvre. For all these and you can take a virtual tour and walk around it. You can click on different artifacts and find out information about these.I can write a quiz for the students, as if they were actually going around the museum physically. Practices writing, practices speaking, and listening as well. Everything. We also had Edinburgh Zoo as well. You can look at live webcams of different animals there. They were able to choose one animal, for example, the panda.They could look and see what they were doing, and then you can go to the page on the website all about the giant panda and all the information about that as well. They were finding out information about different animals, the habitats, and the history of the animals. All that kind of vocabulary as well.Another good one that I've just done, I was doing it yesterday and today, we took a virtual tour of Buckingham Palace. I shared the screen with them, so we took the virtual tour together.We could speak about it like we were going around there in a group, rather than just looking at it. I wanted them to be interacting with each other and describing what we saw, like the materials. There was gold and plaster and all the different fabrics and the colors and all the objects.We could look in the throne room, and we could hear the queen speaking, so we can listen and making up a WebQuest for them to go around and find out different things. After that, going into the breakout rooms. They chose artifacts or a painting or the throne, something like that, and they could click on it, find out the information and they were going to write a summary. So, paired writing.Ross: Again, I think that's something that's useful on two levels, isn't it? It's great language practice, but it's also plugging a gap that students can't do these things outside a classroom.Morag: Yes, because we're missing out on all of that. They signed up to come for a cultural experience here, and they're not getting it. I'm trying to give them some of that as well that they're missing out on.Ross: Now, those breakout rooms that you mentioned there, they must be a huge help in keeping students engaged and involved.Morag: Especially if you have a large class, and especially if they're sitting with their videos turned off. People can get lost in the class. Sometimes, you don't know if they've fallen asleep, or if you've forgotten about them if you're going around asking people and someone's quiet, and you just see a blank screen, it's very easy to forget about somebody like that.Breakout rooms, they can work in twos or threes. Small groups, and you can choose the rooms. You can do it randomly, or you can manipulate it to have stronger and weaker students together. Just like in a classroom.It's good because then they have a chance to interact just with one or two other people. It really replicates the classroom situation, and the teacher can just pop out and in of each room. The only thing is you really need to set it up very, very carefully beforehand, because you can't be in two places at one time.If somebody's gone off on the wrong track, they might be the last room that you arrive at, and they're sitting there and they haven't done a thing.Ross: Yeah, I think some of those aspects of classroom management like group work are obviously so different to teaching offline. Especially when students turn off their webcams, that's the equivalent of students coming to class with a paper bag over their head.Morag: We can't enforce it, though I say to them, "It's your choice." I understand, if they've maybe just got up or something. Really, you've just got to work with that because you're going into their home. They might not want you to see their personal possessions. There's lots of reasons why they wouldn't have that video on.I feel like I understand that, but it does make it pretty difficult to gauge how they're working, if they're working quietly. That's why I don't have a lot of individual work.Ross: That was Morag MacIntosh, everyone. Thanks, Morag, for joining us. Thanks everyone for listening, and we'll see you again next time. Goodbye.

For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Tracy Yu: Welcome to the "TEFL Training Institute Podcast." The bite‑size TEFL podcast for teachers, trainers and managers.Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone.Tracy: Hi, welcome to our podcast.Ross: A lot of the time when we're hanging out and we speak Chinese to each other, I often ask you to correct my Chinese if I make any mistakes. When you do, it's really annoying.[laughter]Tracy: Why is that?Ross: I don't know. It's like there's something about being corrected. You always feel that you're making a comment about how bad my Chinese is and it really annoys me. I don't know, it's funny. I always say, "Can you please correct me more?" but when you do, it's really annoying.Tracy: Do you think that helps you?Ross: Yes, but it's bad for your motivation because you feel annoyed by it.Tracy: What's the point? [laughs]Ross: The point is that today our podcast is about error correction and helping students and trainees and stuff learn from their mistakes.Tracy: As usual, we got three main questions or areas that we're going to discuss.Ross: First one is, why do students make errors?Tracy: The second one, should we correct errors?Ross: Finally, what principles are there in correcting students' errors?Why do students make errors?Ross: Why do students make errors?Tracy: One reason is, is an evidence of learning and is a part of the learning process. We learn how to drive and we learn how to...Ross: Swim. [laughs]Tracy: ...cook, how to swim and new skills. We usually make some mistakes and then from the mistakes, we can learn how to do it better.Ross: Yeah, no one does anything perfectly the first time.Tracy: The first time, yeah.Ross: That's impossible. Something I found really interesting about developmental errors is this thing called...we're not going to go too much into the weeds here with Second Language Acquisition, but I just wanted to mention this because I thought it was so cool.This is an example of U‑shaped acquisition from Rod Ellis' book, "Second Language Acquisition." Instead of me reading them out, Tracy, can you just make a sentence with each of them and I'll do a commentary?Tracy: Sure.Ross: This is for students acquiring ate, as in the past tense of eat.Tracy: I eat pizza last night.Ross: This is when you've not been able to mark the past tense, that's all, which is the first stage, and then...?Tracy: I ate pizza last night.Ross: Really interesting, right? The first type of past tense verbs that students acquire are irregular ones, which Tracy just learned. Next?Tracy: I eated pizza last night.Ross: This is after you've started to learn the past tense rule of adding ‑ed onto the end of things, but you've overused it. You've overgeneralized it.Tracy: I ated pizza last night.Ross: Here you've made some hybrid between the two, and the final one?Tracy: I ate pizza last night.Ross: Great.Tracy: Which is correct.Ross: Which is, yeah, you've now acquired it. Congratulations.Tracy: [laughs] Thank you, but the second and the fifth stage, I used the words correctly, but it doesn't mean I was at the same stage of acquiring the language.Ross: Yeah, which is so interesting. This is such a great example, because it shows how making errors is evidence that you're developing.Anyway, that was the developmental kind. What's the other main reason that students make errors?Tracy: Maybe they directly translate from their first language to the language they study?Ross: It's not always a direct translation, but yeah, call it L1 transfer.Tracy: Transfer, yeah.Ross: A long time ago, people thought that all the errors came from that. Gradually, they came to realize that that's not the case and a lot of the errors that students make are the same regardless of their first language. Part of the transfer errors, they're actually harder to get rid of than the developmental errors.Should teachers correct students’ errors in ESL classes?Ross: Let's talk about the next one. Should we correct errors? What do you tell teachers on teacher training courses?Tracy: I think it really depends. Sometime, I tell them to ignore that.Ross: Wow, OK. When do you say to ignore errors?Tracy: Two main scenarios. Number one, if it's not really in a learning setting. For example, you haven't seen the students for a while and saw the students, have a chat, and then students really talkative and very motivated and probably make some mistakes and then have errors in their sentences. Really, to be honest, I don't think that's a great context for us to correct their errors.Their motivation was not to learn much, they want to communicate with you. It's probably going to demotivate the students. The second scenario is if the error is really not impeding the communication that much, you probably want to ignore it.Ross: Yeah, right. Actually, I'm going to play you a little Jeremy Harmer quote about what you were talking about there, this process of deciding if you should correct an error or not.[pre‑recorded audio starts]Jeremy Harmer: Every time a student makes a mistake in class, you have to make a judgment. That's actually not true, you have to make about four or five judgments. The first judgment you have to make is, "Was it wrong?" The second judgment is, "Actually, what was wrong?" because sometimes it's not that easy to work out what was wrong.The third judgment you have to make is, "Should I correct it or should I just let it go?" The fourth judgment you have to make is, "Should I correct it or should somebody else correct it?" Suddenly in that one moment when students just make a mistake, you have to work out what to do.[pre‑recorded audio ends]Tracy: There are four main things that we need to consider immediately when the student make mistake. They are who, when, what, and how.Ross: What was the error? Yeah, because this is sometimes difficult to tell. Is it a pronunciation mistake or is it lexical or is it grammatical or...?Tracy: Who's going to correct it?Ross: It could be the teacher. You could try and do peer correction, you could try and get the person to correct themselves, I suppose.Tracy: Yeah, or even small groups some times. When? Should you correct the error immediately, or you're waiting? We always say delayed.Ross: The last one was?Tracy: How. What kind of techniques you are going to use?Ross: Good, hang on to that thought, because we'll talk about that in the next segment. I actually wanted to play another quote. This one's from Stephen Krashen. This is what Stephen Krashen thinks about error correction.[pre‑recorded audio starts]Stephen Krashen: Output plus correction. You say something, you make a mistake, someone corrects it. You change your idea of what the rule is. The six‑year‑old ESL child comes into the class and says to the teacher, "I comes to school every day."Teacher says, "No, no, I come to school every day." The child is supposed to think, "Oh yeah, that s doesn't go on the first person singular, it goes on the third person singular."I think that's utter fantasy, but that's the idea.[pre‑recorded audio ends]Ross: It's quite interesting. He thinks error correction is a complete waste of time. Dave Willis, the task‑based learning guru, pardon, he's someone else, just thinks error correction doesn't work.Tracy: Oh really?Ross: Not everyone says that but I just wanted to give an example of both.Tracy: That's quite confusing though. Should we correct or...?Ross: There's other research that says that you should and it does make a difference in some situations, but not in other ones. I think there's the research, not quite conclusive.Tracy: Definite law students haven't read about this research.[laughter]Tracy: They have really high demand in classroom from teachers to correct their errors, because otherwise, you don't think they learn anything.Ross: For me, that's true. That at least some of the value in coming to a language class is you get your errors corrected, because input, you can buy a book or you can watch TV. There's lots of ways you could get input, maybe not always great for practice. A lot of people in a lot countries do have opportunities to practice English.Here in Beijing, you could just go to a Starbucks and try and find a foreigner or some people might have to speak English for work. The big advantage of going to a language class is that you get correction.Tracy: This makes me think of the students actually, in my class which I just taught this afternoon. Is about some phonological aspects and she told me at the end of the class, she said, "Oh no, I've finally realized I have no knowledge, no idea and no awareness of the features of connected speech, because I study English for so long, but I always have trouble to understand people in the listening."If I didn't have that correction in my lesson, I think she'd probably not be able to aware of the features for a long time.Ross: Yeah, absolutely. Good, you should send that to Stephen Krashen.How should teachers correct students’ ESL errors?Ross: Let's talk about some principles for error correction. We'll just pretend that we've ignored Stephen Krashen, we've decided that when students actually made an error. What do you think are some good ideas or best practices or advice on correcting errors?Tracy: I will say, the first one is, don't correct all the errors.Ross: Yeah, it'd be way too many, right?Tracy: Yeah.Ross: That'd be really annoying.Tracy: [laughs] Yeah. They won't have much time to really practice.Ross: I think as well, we know from Second Language Acquisition that not all of the errors that you correct are actually going to help the students.Tracy: Just try to prioritize errors. Of course, again, the fundamental stuff. Was your lesson aims are and then what kind of language or skills that you are trying to focus on in your class. Stick to those. That should be prioritized.Ross: Another thing to add is correct errors that effect more students instead of fewer students. I agree, if it's in your plan, then correct it, but I also think if it's a problem all the students are having or most of the students are having, then it's probably worth correcting.That's a bit about what to correct, how about some how to correct? Actually, can I play you another quote? I want to make a record for the number of quotes, someone talked, it's number three.Tracy: OK, go on.Ross: This is Herbert Puchta, I think his name is, talking about an error correction technique.Herbert Puchta: Imagine a class where lots of students have problems getting the famous third person "S" right. Take a piece of paper and write an "S" on it. Stick it somewhere on the wall. When a student makes that mistake, point to the paper, wait and smile. Most probably, the student who's just made the error will notice what you want them to do and correct themselves.Ross: I thought that was interesting, he also chose the third persons "S" as his example. I think what he's trying to say there is that's a really in‑obtrusive way of correcting a student. You can correct someone as their speaking, by pointing at something, but you don't have to interrupt them.Another one for how, this may be also related to who, is to try and get the students involved in their correction.Tracy: Yeah, I get it, but sorry, I just feel like sometimes...We talk about who and we always want to encourage students themselves to correct themselves. The techniques in how teacher try to raise their awareness of their error is repeating the error.Ross: It's interesting that you bring that up because...or the other one is called a recast when the students said something wrong and you repeat it back to them, but they say it right. There's research that shows that when you do that, a lot of students don't realize that you are correcting an error. They just think you're repeating something.Tracy: Exactly.Ross: What are some ways of raising students' awareness that they've made an error?Tracy: What I experimented today was WeChat. Of course, I think there is...Ross: For those of you know in China, WeChat's an instant messenger type thing.Tracy: I ask the students to join the group.Ross: A group chat.Tracy: Yeah, group chat. Yeah, before the lesson started. Almost at the end of the class, I listen to what they said, I posted on four or five sentences into the group chat so everybody can see it.Ross: What's in these sentences? Mistakes the students have made?Tracy: Mistakes and also correct sentences together. Of course, I changed some of the words they are using or the pronouns or places. Yeah, I just, talk to your partners and then tell each other which one you think correct and which one is not correct and the then you think the one is not correct and then you can type the correct ones and then send to the group.Ross: I think you also hit on another thing there, that's something to get students involved, but another thing is that, the anonymity. Not singling someone out.Tracy: Another thing, I always tell teachers. There should be a correction circle. You raise their awareness, usually we stop and they move on, but not, there should be another step to complete the circle which is, give students another chance to use the language correctly by themselves. For example, the pizza mistakes.Ross: I ated pizza yesterday.Tracy: I mmm pizza yesterday.Ross: I ate pizza yesterday.Tracy: What did you have for breakfast today?Ross: I ate cereal for breakfast today.Tracy: Really? Do you really? [laughs]Ross: No, I actually drank coffee today, but...[laughter]Ross: ...this is a different verb. I didn't think it would fit your point.Tracy: You know what I mean, just...Ross: Yeah, give the students a chance.Tracy: It's something can be really simple. Just ask a similar question and they can answer.Errors Wrap upTracy: We talk a lot about correcting errors, but the examples we were using really focus on the language itself, but don't forget about error correction also related to performance or behavior in class.Ross: What does that mean?Tracy: For example, teaching young learners and if the student wasn't well behaved, I think we also need to...Ross: Give feedback.Tracy: ...give feedback on that.Ross: Yeah, good point. Bye everyone, thanks for listening.Tracy: Bye.

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?Ross Thorburn: Hi everyone. Welcome back to the TEFL Training Institute Podcast. I'm Ross Thorburn and this episode again, we're doing something about teaching online. I know this is a huge issue for so many of you at the moment.We really have someone top‑notch to help us with issues about teaching from home and that's Russell Stannard. Russell's founder of teachertrainingvideos.com which is a great resource with so much information on how to use different technological tools and education.Russell in 2008 was awarded the Times Higher Outstanding Initiative in ICT for his work on that website and trusting that he beat the University of Oxford who came runners up to him there, which is quite amazing. Russell also won in 2010 the British Council ELTons Award for technology.He's also worked at University of Warwick, University of Westminster, at the moment he's a tutor at NILE, Norwich Institute for Language Education, where he's MA tutor and in fact he's a Miami tutor.Russell's going to talk to us today about some different platforms that teachers can use, what teachers can be getting students to do outside of online classes and really just gives us some top tips for teachers using platforms like Zoom, Skype, Google Hangouts, etc. Enjoy the interview.Ross: Hi, Russell. Thanks for joining us. Russell, someone who's an educational technologist, what do you think are some of the advantages to what we're seeing now, which is so many teachers using technology to teach online?Russell Stannard: I'm not sure at the moment there are that many positives in all honesty. I think there will be, but I think at the moment is just too much for most teachers to deal with. They're really scrambling to. I've been watching quite a few classes and some of them are just a disaster.Where the positives will come eventually is that it will kind of open up a lot of people's eyes to the options that are available as people begin to move beyond just thinking about the live session and start to think about how they can combine, for example, working with a live session and working with a platform.Whether that be mood law rep model, because they'll need to understand that really there are two paths to teach an online. There's the live session in some sort of platform. People are beginning to see that. I think that will be one good thing that's going to have a big impact in the future if they go back to blended learning.Number two that could be really interesting is if it begins to change the role of the teacher in terms of their relationship with the student. We've really now got to bring to reality this whole idea of students becoming more autonomous.Because when you work online, the students do have to do a lot more work. In the live session as well because they need to learn to technically screen‑share and to technically be able to work themselves with the technology, they can't just be a passive consumer of a live lesson. They've got to get involved in it and that requires some skills from their part.Also what they're expected to do outside of the class and how really they've got to take much more responsibility now for their own learning. That the contents are there, the technologies are there, the platforms are there, but really up until this moment, that hasn't happened.Now, one of the things that we start to talk about in that area about autonomy is that it's a vast exaggeration to say, "There's masses of material that students can do everything." That's not actually how you learn the language. There are routines that you always do. For example, you might study some vocabulary every day and use Quizlet.You might listen to some videos on YouTube with the subtitles and study those. You might go onto a platform and do some exercises or do some listening activities. It's not as if this world of technology outside of the classroom means that there are 101 different things that you can do or possibly there are but they're very small things.What we really want to concentrate on these continuous routines that you need to do to develop learning a language.Ross: Russell, you mentioned there the different platforms that teachers can use, and you mentioned the two halves of that equation. If Zoom and Skype are teaching synchronously, teaching students in real time as one half of the picture, what's the other half?Russell: There's two types of platforms. There's the platforms that are developed by the publishing companies. Now you've got the advantage that the students can log in to that platform and the teachers can give them assignments to do and track what they're doing and see their scores, etc.They aren't so good on the communication side because they are really more platforms for content but you normally can email the student through the platform. We know why a teacher's almost got a choice.Do they go for a publisher platform where they've got loads and loads of content but maybe they can't do so many communicative collaborative type activities or do they go for a platform like Edmodo or Moodle, which does offer lots of opportunities for collaboration and working together but of course there's no content on there.My feeling is for people in ELT, the best direction to go if you can is to work with the platforms that the publishers have because that is going to save you a lot of time. It's going to allow you to set up activities for the students to do at home and it's going to allow you to track and see what they've done in and allow you to connect that to the lesson.The other thing that's happening at the moment is that people are just thinking about the Zoom class. There's no relationship to any content outside of the just doing a lesson. I've been watching, Ross, some of the lessons would give you a heart attack. Absolutely. It was a complete waste of time for the students to be on.The teacher just rambled on, played a few videos, ask the questions. The students said yes, the students said no, a couple of them, most of them didn't do anything, and then that was the end of the lesson.Ross: Yeah, I'm afraid I've also seen my fair share of bad online classes, but why do you think these teachers are, are so ineffective at teaching online? Why do you think all of a sudden from teaching online these classes end up becoming so teacher centered?Russell: I was really interested in that. That's a really good question. I do think that when you work with technology, the whole kind of thing of it making you very nervous at the beginning and you don't really know how the technologies work until you've really got control of the technology.It's sometimes very difficult to become creative and to start to think about how you can get the students engaged in an activity. I think that does happen because it's even happens to me. I see technologies in a very narrow way at the beginning when I've learned in them. It's only when I really follow fade with the technology, then I start to think I could do this or I could do that with it.That's been my experience even working with Zoom and if I look back how I used to work with Zoom and Adobe connect and say how I might be using them now as I've got more confident with them. I've passed more control over to the students. I've done the same thing with screen capture technology.There might be something almost psychological about this need to feel secure about the technology you're using before you feel you can start to get creative with it. I think that thing, that's quite a lot of truth in that. I think that that's true of almost anything we try and learn.Ross: Yeah, that's interesting. It's almost like a Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs for using technology or something, isn't it? That first you have to become comfortable with using it yourself before you can maybe hand over control to some of the students.Russell: Yeah.Ross: In terms of that passing ownership over to the students, can you tell us a bit more about how teachers can do that in live online classes?Russell: First of all, if you actually look at a live session, there are four or five things that the students simply need to know how to do. They need to know how to screen share. They need to know how to minimize their screens so that they can open up content and get it ready for screen‑sharing.They need to know when they're in a screen‑sharing situation that they've got everything prepared before that so they can go into their breakout rooms and share their content. There's certain things that the students need to do. Then there's other things that they might need to do to make sure that the Zoom session works well.For example, if we're looking at almost like a flip classroom where the students do the lower order thinking skills at home, they're maybe watching a video in preparation for lesson, taking some notes, preparing a presentation.Let's say, for example, we teach them to use Google Earth and we say, "Go home, go onto Google Earth, choose a famous location that you want to talk about. Get a basic presentation together because tomorrow in the lesson I'm going to get you to open up Google Earth and show a monument and talk about it."All of those things require way more work on the part of the student to make sure the lesson works. If they don't do that preparation it won't work. There's a whole thing about responsibility and I'm in a bit of a dilemma myself. It's the fault the teacher in it was always wanting to control the lesson.If you give more responsibilities to students, they will actually adapt and take it up and make use of it. Or is there a problem with just controlling students? If you do that and then the whole lesson is going to fall apart. I'm not really sure.Is going to be a case now of inculcating into students this understanding that if you want to progress, you've got to learn to study on your own, which is a general theme. It's coming out of the 21st century anyway.Then the other thing is about starting routines, because I really think that that whole thing about autonomy is a bit exaggerated. We ended up giving out the wrong message sometimes because they're like, "Oh yeah, there's so much on the Internet."Well, tell me, where is it? What is it? How are we going to use it? That's not true. I see that with students even up to master's degree, in their papers and telling me about how they're going to encourage the students to be more autonomous, but they don't actually give them specific things to latch onto. I think we've got to do that.Ross: In terms of learner autonomy online, one of the first steps in that would be getting students to use breakout rooms. Can you tell us a bit more about how teachers can use those breakout rooms and how can they help students to use them?Russell: Ross, you're absolutely right, mate. Unless you train the students in what they need to do in a breakout room and what task you've set up and how they should approach it. They've got screen share because if you put students into a breakout room, they're the ones that have got our open up whatever it is that you want them to discuss.Let's say you've set up some discussion questions in a PowerPoint, you need to make sure that the students have already got that PowerPoint open on their computer so that when they go into a breakout room they can it open it up and then discuss it.When you're working in breakout rooms is you need to make the task a little bit longer sometimes because you need to structure the tasks much more. If you're in a class and you've got your students working in groups, you can quickly see if an activity is not working. You can stop it very quickly and then reorganize it or if they've not understood exactly what you want them to do.When you've got students working in breakout rooms, you can't do that so easy because you have to jump in and out of one room and you might come to the fourth room and realize they're sitting there in silence and no one's doing anything.Working in a breakout room takes a lot more preparation. That means more training for the students. That means setting up the actual activity a lot better. You have to do the activities as a group first with the teacher may be screen‑sharing and then one of the students screen‑sharing into the whole class.I'm making the activity clear before you then put them into breakout rooms and get them to do the activity and breakout rooms.Everything has to be rehearsed much more. Everything takes a lot longer when you're doing the Zoom's lesson as well, which is another reason that we have to put more responsibility on the students to work at home because simply not going to be able to cover the amount of content that you would in a normal lesson.Ross: Russell, one of the things that I'm quite passionate about is helping teachers really take advantage of things that they can do online that they can't do elsewhere. Can you tell us from your experience, what are some features ‑‑ you mentioned for example screen‑share earlier ‑‑ that teachers can use with online platforms that maybe you don't see them using very often at the moment?Russell: I'll tell you where I think you could have a lot of power with these breakout rooms. For example, if you sub some type of collaborative activity. Let's say you've got the students to have a discussion and brainstorm some ideas in a Padlet. They go into their breakout rooms that open up a Padlet, they work together.They put their ideas up onto that Padlet. Then they come out of their breakout rooms and individuals could then open up the Padlet on the screen for the whole class to see.That can be really quite powerful way of working with a technology or even to a degree interacting with a coursebook because if the students have the PDF version or the interactive version of the coursebook, when the students go into groups, they can open up the coursebook onto the screen. The whole group can see it in the breakout room.They could even interact with it by writing on it or marking things on it. There are actually quite a lot of activities that in a way are almost easier to do in a breakout room than they would be, for example, if the students were sitting down with their books open simply because of the visual element of the book itself or even say for example, sharing video content.When you put students into breakout rooms, you haven't got that problem that you might have if they're all trying to bundle around of computer screen to watch the video there is sitting in front of you. The students move into a breakout room, one of them plays the video, and it's all completely clear to everybody.One other thing I'd say about kind of the live sessions is you've got to take a break. At the moment, one thing is the teacher thinks that they've got to be on task all the time. Why not tell your students, "Open up your book, read this text and come back in a couple of minutes and we're going to then do a brainstorming activity around the vocabulary."You've just come across all the words that you don't understand or something like that. That might be jumping off and going on and completing a Google form. I did in some contents of the strategic and say, "Right, OK, I've got this Google form here. I'm going to share it with you and you can answer the questions and then we're going to come back in about five minutes."You can do activities like that as well.Ross: I think that thing was silence is so interesting because in a classroom it would be pretty normal to just have a period of silence where the students are just sitting reading. If for example, if we had a minute of silence on this phone conversation now it would be awkward. I can see why teachers would be quite hesitant just to have no talking for a period in the class.Russell: I wonder whether or not, for example, the student, teachers might have to learn to be able to do things like putting a bit of music in the backgrounds or thing while the students are doing a reading activity.Use something to mark the time. "I'm going to go off and do a reading now." I'll even put a timer onto the screen and, "You've got three minutes to read this passage. Now come back into the lesson." Teachers have got to get used to that to accept that there might be silence in their Zoom session.Ross: Russell, thank you so much for joining us. What's the best place for listeners to go to find out more about you and to access some of the great resources that you've got to help teachers teach with technology?Russell: Just go to teachertrainingvideos.com. It got lots of free videos that basically show teachers how to incorporate technology into their teaching and learning, and obviously at the moment it's very relevant and very popular.Ross: Great. Russell, thanks one more time. Everyone else, thank you for listening and we'll see you again next time. Goodbye.

For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel 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.Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to "TEFL Training Institute Podcast." I'm Ross Thorburn. This week, my guest, returning once again, is Matt Courtois.Matt Courtois: Hey, it's good be back.Ross: It's good to have you back. Matt, you and I used to work together in the same company. A large part of what you were doing was training teachers to teach online lessons of groups of students.Obviously, lots of teachers now all over the world are teaching groups of students online, so pretty cool to get your ideas and experience of doing that.Matt: Also, where I'm working now, we're doing the same thing that I think a lot of people are going through, and then we're transitioning our face‑to‑face classes to online.Ross: In your experience of doing this, both now and in the past, what do you think are some of the biggest challenges for teachers?Matt: One thing that every teacher...Actually, it was my first instinct as well, whenever I move to an online company, was thinking about, what do we do in a "real" classroom? Basically, figure out, right now, let's do that online, which is all good.It limits you because there are things that you can do online that you can't do in your regular classroom. First of all, teaching online is a real classroom. Secondly, there's a lot of advantages that teaching online has that you wouldn't even know how to do in a real classroom.Ross: I'm imagining here like a Venn diagram. It's like, what teachers tend to do online is just the stuff that overlaps often with teaching offline.Matt: One of the challenges that I still struggle with in training teachers online is trying to consider how can you get students to interact more. You've run Skype meetings, I've run Skype meetings, or zoom meetings, or whatever platform you're using.It ends up being a lecture. You don't get the participation you would in a normal training. It's just the nature of the way those platforms work. You can't get 10 people talking at the same time when working on a project.Ross: You can't do that thing of turnaround to speak to your partner now and discuss this if it's 10 people all sharing the same online space. What do you think are some ways that teachers can get students to interact with each other online in those group classes?Matt: I think the nicest way that a lot of platforms use, the most logical way to get all your students interacting at the same time is if you have six students, break them up into three different breakout rooms. They can talk for five minutes. Then you gather back together at the end, and you can debrief what they came up with in those five minutes in their breakout rooms.Ross: I can imagine there being a lot of trepidation from teachers in using them. It really is like a complete blind spot. If you're setting up group work in a class, you can kind of hear what everyone's doing at the same time, but as soon as they're in different, literally different rooms, it's absolutely impossible to hear what's going on.I guess maybe some tips for teachers in setting those up would be to be really clear about what you expect students to be able to come back at the end of the five minutes and be able to do or present and be super specific in the instructions.Matt: That goes with something I recommend telling teachers during class. Tell your students, go and get something from your house. You're talking about food, like tell students go to your refrigerator and find some food that you can present or show off.Again, you do have to consider, if you don't set a time limit, you might have some students that are gone for 15, 20 minutes. Because going on the refrigerator can be a point of distraction with some people.[laughter]Ross: Yeah, that's such a good point. I feel that's the other side of that Venn diagram. It's something that's possible to do online but not offline, is get real stuff from your house and from the students' houses, and bring them together and show them and compare them.Matt: Some obvious sets of stuff that everyone has in their house. You've got your furniture, different rooms. I had a teacher who's doing a demo with me. I was the fake student. She was doing the different rooms in the house. She basically would say, instead of take your computer to the bathroom or the bedroom ‑‑ it's too difficult; it's an invasion, almost.Instead, what she said, "Go to your bathroom and find a toothbrush. Bring your toothbrush back here and then go to your bedroom and find your pillow." It's vocabulary within the room. You can practice some of that.Different rooms, food, family members, presumably you're in your house with your family. For little children, especially, you can say, bring your parents here and introduced them to the class.Ross: You could do some cool translation activities with that as well. Like, get grandma, and you ask the question in English, the other student has to translate it into grandma's first language, then you do that back the way.Matt: Another huge way ‑‑ this is probably the best way you can get all your students talking in the same time with that breakout rooms ‑‑ is have them do the role play with their parents.It's great for parents too, because I think a lot of parents want to see that their children are learning and there's evidence of them being able to produce language in English, and they are interested. They are wanting to participate in their student's learning.Ross: They'll participate regardless. If the teacher just lets them be passive, you're really rolling the dice there in terms of what participation you're going to get. We've seen just about everything, from just shouting out the answers to telling the students that they're stupid for getting it wrong, to giving the wrong answers.If you're able to set roles for what you actually want the parents to do, then you can involve them in a way that you know is going to be productive.Another big difference for teaching kids online compared to offline, I think that's a potential advantage, is the classroom management language is really different for online to offline.If you think about just any decent coursebook, the first chapter is usually going to be things like what's your name, because you need to know your students' names, and things like stand up, sit down, pencil, eraser, pen, boom, blah, blah, blah, because students need to know and need to be able to use that language in order to actually participate in the class.I feel that most coursebooks will not have the language that you need to participate in an online class, which is all these other things. It's [inaudible 7:00] not stand up and sit down. It's like click, circle.Matt: It's an interesting thing, with teaching Lexus. I remember, a few years ago I went to a talk, and somebody was saying what are the first words that you teach to students? You teach the highest frequency words first because those are the ones that students use most.Ross: Again, it's so context specific, isn't it? I guess if you were teaching a group of students from different countries and different backgrounds, you would want your coursebook at the beginning to have things like, where did you come from?If you're teaching a group of students that are all in their home country from the same time, that language is not meaningful at all. It's even not meaningful, like if the students already know each other's names because they're in the same primary school class and have been for three years. That's not useful language.One of the things for teaching online is you really have to start assessing like, why do we teach some of the things that we teach?Matt: Along with that, here's the flip side of it that's positive is that a lot of my teachers, in the beginning of a lot of classes, they want to do something that students notice.They always ask students, "How's the weather today?" Something I point out is you and I sitting here in the same room would never ever ask that question because you're fully aware and I'm fully aware of how the weather is today, and we know that each other knows.It's not a real interaction. There's no exchange of ideas happening. It's purely a fake interaction that we create for the classroom.Whereas, all of a sudden, online, you do have some people being in different places. When I'm on the phone with you, if you're in Shanghai and I'm in Shenzhen, let's say, we would say, "How's the weather today?" I think online, now that becomes a genuine interaction. We can actually do it and have some different language appear as well.Ross: Even very simple things, like very, very low level students, like, "What colors can you see?" It's a sort of thing you'd maybe do in the classroom with real beginners. When everyone's in their own living rooms, all of a sudden, that's a genuine question. What colors can you see? Because I can't see your living room.I can just see wall behind you. You can see all these different things. All this communication that before used to be fake, or these questions, at least, that used to be display questions are now referential questions. Real communication is happening.Matt: I remember a story from our old company where one lesson, the teacher was asking students questions like that. They were looking at this PowerPoint together, and he said, "What's on this page?" The kid would say, "This is on the page, this, this, this." He just named all the items. "All right, next slide, what's on this page?" "This is on it. This is on."It's all this fake interaction because the teacher knows what's on those pages. Then all of a sudden, there was a technical difficulty. They started looking at two different pages.All of a sudden, the teacher said, "Can you tell me which page you're on? What are you seeing?" The student starts describing the page, and he's like, "Oh, so you got three pages ahead of me." You realize, it was by mistake, by a glitch in the system.Finally, we had a real interaction when they were looking at different things and trying to communicate and solve the problem together, so they could end up on the same page together. For the first time in their lesson, they're having a meaningful exchange.Ross: The teacher has a reason to actually listen to the student's answer as well. The communication is happening both ways.Matt: How many times am I going to ask you like, "What do you see?" He'd tell me, and I'd say, "Good job." That's not a real interaction. It's only for the classroom.Ross: That's a fascinating example, doesn't it? It was like, sometimes online, when things go wrong, it can be a positive thing. I've definitely seen this as well in terms of the audio quality, and then the teacher and students are not being able to hear each other.It doesn't mean you get more sort of negotiation and meaning of like, "What was that? What do you mean? Can you explain? Is there another word for that? How do you spell it?"Again, I'm not asking how do you spell it because I'm checking your spelling. It's because I'm genuinely trying to understand.Matt: Trying to understand. I remember something you used to complain about. In another previous, previous job, there's a lot of times to get that gap between students, to get that meaningful exchange in a real classroom.To get one student looking at something the other student doesn't, you end up blindfolding the student. You end up blindfolding student B, so student A can describe what to do. How many times have you been blindfolded in real life? No, don't answer that. I don't want to know.[laughter]Matt: You can understand why teachers are doing that, why they're putting the blindfold on their students ‑‑ so they can create that gap and that need for real communication, but it's just so inauthentic. Whereas online, you do have some people with camera problems and some people that don't. You can really use those to make your lessons better.Ross: Absolutely. I feel so much of this, it's really just taking the same principles as you're teaching off...I think there's so much of what is bad teaching offline. Teachers holding up flashcards and getting students to name them. That's also bad teaching online.Matt: It's a bit more obvious online as bad teaching. A teacher, when they have those flashcard activities, they can have 10 activities where they get the students up and running around.In essence, all they're doing is getting students to memorize these words on the flashcard. It is a very interactive thing where students are moving around. It can feel pretty fun.Online, if you're doing just that list of words or looking at the picture and treating it like that focus on the six vocabulary items again, and again, and again, you can't really fall back on that fun flashcard activity.Ross: Something you hit on there is the importance of doing something to get the students to move.I think half an hour, if you're six years old, to sit in the one place, that's a big ask. Trying to do those activities of whatever it is, like miming something or finding something in the room and bringing it back. Just doing something to get the students to just move away from this sitting, staring at the screen is a bit of a must.Matt: One rule I make for teachers is get your students up and moving in every class.Ross: That's obviously really easy to do offline, but I think that's something that requires a lot more thought online. Or, maybe it's not necessarily easier offline. It's just everyone has been doing it for longer.People have developed all these strategies for getting students to switch seats or look at something outside the class or do a rolling dictation. If it's online, you need to think of a new way, a new reason for the students to stand up and do something.Matt: I said in the beginning that this is something that all teachers around the world are doing, this transition from offline to online. I'm excited about it. In my profession and education, it is a pretty conservative thing.It hasn't evolved that much since I've taught. We're at a time now, right now, that we are doing something very different, and everybody's doing it. I'm excited to see what comes out of this.Ross: Good. I think that's a great place to wrap up. Matt, thanks for joining us.Matt: A pleasure, as always.Ross: All right. We'll see you again next time, everyone. Goodbye.Matt: See you.

For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel 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.Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone, welcome back to "TEFL Training Institute Podcast." This week, we're talking about using literature to teach language. We've talked on the podcast before about using graded readers to help students learn.In this episode, we'll go into a bit more detail about how to actually use a graded reader with a class, almost in a way like you'd use a course book. To do that, we have Anne Carmichael.Anne started off as a teacher in the 1960s. She's taught multiple languages. Since 2008, she has run TESOL Training Scotland, running Trinity diploma and TESOL courses around the world. Anne is based in Aberdeen in Scotland.In this episode, Anne tells us about her experiences, basically throwing out her course book and replacing it with graded readers with her students. Lots of great ideas in this one for activities, for using graded readers to teach language. Enjoy the interview.Ross: Hi, Anne. Tell us about using literature in language classes. We're not talking here about just passing out the original copies of Jane Eyre to the student, are we?Anne Carmichael: No, but they got the B1 version of it, which is still in print, I've checked. It now has ‑‑ which you didn't then ‑‑ an audio version. At the time, these were classes for more casual English learners.Aberdeen had so many incomers with the oil business. Mostly, they were the oil lives, but they were really keen to improve their English, most of them to integrate into the community. I had the idea that our lessons were residing in a course book too much. One day, I'd said to them, "How about we actually read a proper classic English novel, say by Jane Austen?"Now, many of them had heard of Jane Austen. Many of them had perhaps read her in French translation. They all agreed that they would buy a copy. I got the bookstore to make sure they had enough copies.I thought, "Well, each week we can take a different chapter and we can deal with it in a different way." For example, picking out, initially, ideas and reactions to chapter one and feelings. I felt, "Well, what these ladies most need is to somehow relate to feelings, emotions, even the literature, even the writing itself and relate to the characters and so on."We would deal with that. It would be a little bit like a bond tie because one emotion would spark off vocab or more and more experiences. They could describe a time when they had felt overwhelmed. That would be perhaps one response to a chapter.Another chapter, we might look at in terms of narrative and using the past tenses, anecdotes about moving house because Jane had to move from her aunt's rather luxury house to a horrible school, or going to school, things like that, so first impressions of school. We could relate it to that and also enjoy the literature.We could do a little bit of prediction, so predictive stuff. We could also do role play. For the first time, Jane encounters Rochester. We could get the ladies up acting it out, perhaps making up a little bit more of the dialog themselves and learning it.They would write it all down and script it, and then learn it and then come out to the front and perform it. We could then say imagine you were looking at this in a film. I don't think there was a film of Jane Eyre at that point. I'm going back a bit but who would you choose to act in it? Who would be the heroine? Who would be the hero in that film?We would discuss who the best actors at that time were and so on. Perhaps do a mock film review, or disagree or agree with one another, "No, I don't think Meryl Streep would be the best person to act Jane. I think you need somebody thinner and more sad‑looking," or something like that.That again developed. If you were to set it in a film, what background music would you use? If you were looking at old paintings, for example, what paintings would most reflect that particular chapter or scene that you were reading about? They would think about that. They would come with ideas.It was actually developing it in far wider than just the story itself, but including the language and enabling the ladies to express their feelings, emotions, opinions about literature, film, life in general, moving to Aberdeen. How it was different from living in their home countries, for example.Ross: For me, one of the challenges of using semi‑authentic materials like that is finding some language to focus on. Unlike in a course book, obviously in a graded reader, you won't have 30 examples of the past continuous in chapter one and then a dozen examples of the present perfect in chapter two.It's not always so easy to find something to focus on. Do you want to tell us a bit more about how you can use graded readers and really focusing on some language point?Anne: Obviously, it's particularly good for narrative. For the narrative tenses, it's very, very good. For the writing, that spills over into written reviews or written summaries of a chapter.You can also do it written as predictive. I think, next week, [laughs] Charlotte will etc., etc., or I think the strange person in the attic will. [laughs] It's completely possible. Nothing is impossible. That's my philosophy anyway.It can be made relevant and interesting, and yet follow a theme and instructional because they're dealing with English literature. You could do it with Emma. You could do it with Joseph Conrad. There are so many of these lovely really well‑adapted readers that you can use for that.Ross: How then did you deal with new and unfamiliar words when you were teaching then? I think there's those rules that say that students need to know about 98 percent of the words in the text if they're going to be able to understand what they read. How did you make sure that students didn't get lost without too much new vocabulary?Anne: I might have perhaps pre‑taught some of the vocabulary before we went on to a new chapter. In those days, it wasn't so much getting the students to work it out for themselves. In those days, pre‑teaching was quite the fashion.It would have been based on what had gone before, so predicting, and then providing vocab lexis, perhaps expressions that I knew would be coming up in the next chapter.Pre‑teaching is great but not in a sort of table ‑‑ here are 10 words, here are 10 definitions, match them up. Not cold quite like that but as some kind of warmer and elucidation where possible.I also think it needs to be done in some kind of context, so you might be able to elicit some of the vocab through a well‑judged warmer. It can be very useful because if the students are being exposed to that within the last three or four minutes, then they're probably going to remember it when they actually hear it.All that needs to be recycled and elicited at the end so that the grasp can be assessed, that they've actually got it and also that they can pronounce it properly. Obviously, it'd be on the board, it would be transcribed probably, and that it can be personalized.Ross: Those were obviously slightly higher, maybe intermediate students. Do you want to tell us about using literature with lower level learners?Anne: I had another group, also in the '70s, of Vietnamese refugees. Now, they should be in the boat people and for them, I chose Grace Darling. Many of them were near beginners, certainly elementary by the time we had them.It was very personalized. It was very effective and I suppose to some degree with these beginners elementary, quite integrated in a way. I didn't expect them to read or write. It was purely listening and speaking.A lot of them were in a family, so some of their ages range from probably 15 or 16 to about in their 70s. They came as a family and that was security for them. I thought, well, Grace Darling.It's not too threatening about a disaster at sea but it is about a ship wreck, and some of them had been shipwrecked. It is again about feelings and emotions and responses and rescue, and I wanted them to be able to use that when they were talking to their social workers and so on.They couldn't all read. I would sometimes read aloud, and they would simply listen. It was really a facilitating device, again, to compare and contrast their lives at home with their new lives here, which were very difficult, for some of them at the start, adapting.You could barely imagine...You can imagine, you can but many people couldn't. The social workers, I didn't think could. It was important for them to have that resource if you like to draw on and to be able to express.Some of them had been so abused as well during their boat journeys, some of the girls especially. It was hard but they seemed to be happy to talk about it. It was a very protective, very closed little group. That was also very rewarding, and they liked the story. They like the bravery of the rescuers, which again they could relate to.That went on for quite a number of weeks. We ran that maybe 10 weeks for a term. We ran that story and developed it. They could tell the story back, and then they could tell their own stories.Ross: What I found really interesting there, Anne, is that I've heard from teachers who also teach vulnerable people like refugees that usually take great care to avoid any sensitive topics with their students.For example, even just things like talking about family, which is really common topic in the course book. You might want to avoid with groups like that because it's very likely that maybe someone in their family has died.With your example, it sounds like you did the opposite. You really chose the book because it did involve talking about something that was sensitive but also relevant to the students.Anne: They need to speak about it. What I would be very sensitive of, because this happened to me once in a formal Cambridge interview. When I was actually doing the interview, there was a pair of candidates, and I showed them a picture.It was a picture of a beautiful little wooded glade, a beautiful little scene with kind of Greek pillars in it. They were asked to comment on it and reflect what they feel. One of the candidates simply got up and ran out of the room in terrible distress.I paused the interview and told the supervisor, and then went on with the next candidates. Towards the end of the day, I found out that one of the candidates had been in a dreadful situation where she had seen an atrocity take place in a glade very similar to that.That's always stayed in my mind, always, when dealing with traumatized students that you cannot predict what will trigger a response.Ross: Something I noticed whenever I read anything aloud to students is that I tense is a grade whatever I'm reading as I'm reading it. Did you do anything like that when you were reading? How did you go about reading out the text out loud? Any tips there for teachers?Anne: When I was reading aloud, I didn't do gapping or anything like that, especially with beginners. It was sentence by sentence and pausing. Ross, this is something I'm so keen on, is pausing.This is coming from Silent Way but I was doing it before [laughs] I'd read about Silent Way ‑‑ to let the language sink in. People need time to process. I discovered that pretty early on in my teaching. I would always be quite measured and allow time. Just count to three in between sentences for that to sink in.I might even just say "Everybody OK" or give a look or gesture, "Everybody OK with that?" before I would move on. If it's a live listening or an audio, especially audiotape, it's so difficult being deaf. One of the things I so need is to lip read as well. Students can benefit from that as well.Ross: That's so interesting what you say about reading people's lips there, Anne. I found recently with going to meetings at work in Chinese that happened over the phone, I found those so much more difficult to understand than if it's a meeting that I'm in face to face.It also must be the same for students and probably find listening to audio more difficult compared to a live reading or something.Anne: You've hit the nail on the head, Ross. Absolutely. Knowing that this was one of the drawbacks of the audio lingual, that they couldn't see the speakers, they could only hear them.I've even had deaf students in the class and I'm always very careful to face them or anybody who's maybe a wee bit slower to process language. It's a good thing to actually turn round to face them, maybe slow down, just a fraction, keeping it natural but slow down a fraction, and repeat, and check. Again, just that little nod, "Is that OK?" to check.Ross: One more time, that was Anne Carmichael. For more about Anne, check out her website, tesoltrainingscotland.co.uk. Thank you again to Anne for joining us. If you'd like to find more of our podcast, please go to our website www.tefltraininginstitute.com. We'll see you again next time. Bye‑bye.

Games are part of most teachers’ lesson plans, but what makes a good game? We discuss our criteria for great games and talk about our all time favorite games for young learners and adults.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Schools and ministries of education buy new coursebooks, but how much do these change the way students learn and teachers teach?For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Ross and online teacher trainer Alex Li talk about some of the biggest differences between teaching offline and online, common mistakes teachers make teaching online and their favorite online teaching activities.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the TEFL Training Institute Podcast. I'm Ross Thorburn. Again, this week, we are doing something coronavirus‑related. We're talking about teaching language online. We've got dos and don'ts for those of you who are now making the transition from teaching offline to teaching online.To help us with that this week we have my friend and former colleague, Alex Li. Alex, for the last year‑and‑a‑half or so, has been a trainer, training teachers to teach online.In this episode, Alex and I will go through some of the differences between teaching English online compared to offline, some of the opportunities and a lot of common mistakes that teachers tend to make.More and more schools, it seems like, across the world are switching their classes to online for the time being. If that's you, listen on. We've got some great tips for you. Enjoy the interview.Ross: All right, let's start. Alex, thanks for joining us and doing this.Alex Li: Yeah.Ross: This is also the first podcast I've ever done while wearing a face mask.Alex: [laughs]Ross: We're obviously doing this because lots of teachers now are making the transition, we don't know for how long, from teaching offline to online. You did that yourself, obviously. You used to be a teacher offline, and then you started working in an online company.Maybe we can start off by talking about some of the differences. What first struck you as being some of the differences between teaching online and teaching offline?Alex: That would be personalization. Personally, I didn't do that when I was an offline teacher for young learners. Frankly, I don't know 80 percent of my students that much, while the rest of 20 percent I've probably talked to them after class. For one‑on‑one class, that gives teachers those opportunities to know their students more.Ross: When we are teaching kids offline, you're right. Usually, as a teacher, you don't learn that much about them. As soon as you're teaching students in their own homes, the setting gives you the opportunity to talk about so much more, doesn't it?Alex: Yeah. As you said, in a brick‑and‑mortar classroom where everybody's in the same place and the same city, if you ask how's the weather that would be pretty dull, because everybody knows that. After five students, they will be like, "Oh teacher, I know..."Ross: [laughs]Alex: ..."it's sunny."Ross: Or you have to pretend and make up like it's snowing...Alex: You show your flash cards.Ross: ...maybe when you're living in Africa and it snows. Online, there's all these natural information gaps. The teacher and the student are always going to be in different places...Alex: That's true.Ross: ...often in different cities or different countries, there's so many opportunities there to contrast and compare what's going on in the two locations.Alex: That can happen throughout the class. You can do it at the beginning as we talk about weather. You can also talk about certain target language.Ross: I remember when I was an offline teacher, and I used to teach kids. I remember sometimes trying to get kids to bring in something into the class, to do a show‑and‑tell type thing.One time it was like, "Bring in a photo of somewhere that you've been on holiday." Always, like two students would remember and the other 14 wouldn't. It would never work very well.I feel this is one of the other huge opportunities for teaching online. Students have all this stuff around them, especially for low levels. For example, if you're teaching clothes, the student can open their wardrobe and, for example, bring out their favorite clothes.You can show the students your favorite clothes as well. There's so many opportunities for personalization that you would never get if you were doing it offline.Alex: Yeah. I think you mentioned one good thing or one good model, is that the teacher gets to show the student if we are talking about clothes, his or her clothes first if it's a lower level. That's something I noticed some teachers are not doing online.Teachers have got to keep in mind that you're teaching one‑on‑one. You're still teaching, and giving appropriate model is important and essential.Ross: Offline, if you've got a class of 15 students, you might pick the strongest student to come to the front and demo that for the rest of the class. If you've only got one student, there's no opportunity to do that. What do you have to do instead? As the teacher, you have to model both parts.That's one of the biggest differences maybe, between teaching groups offline and teaching one‑to‑one online. The teacher has to take on so many different roles compared to teaching offline. For example, if you're doing group work or pair work or something offline.You put the students in pairs, and the students are conversation partners to each other. The teacher, you're still kind of in this teachery role where you're going around and monitoring. As soon as you go online, you've got to switch into a different role of being this...Alex: [laughs]Ross: ...conversation partner. That's quite difficult to actually do.Alex: Yeah, that's true. Some teachers ignore that part. There's no other kids in this classroom, so they ask their student to read both parts if we are having a dialogue.Ross: I wonder why that happens if the teacher just thinks like, "Oh, I'm going to get my student to talk as much as possible?"Alex: Or they just think that those students need to read before anything.Ross: Another thing that teachers are influenced by is increasing the amount of student's talking time in the class. That's one way to do that, is to get students to play both parts of a dialogue. I feel you're losing so much in terms of it being a natural or authentic conversation. It's much better for the teacher to assume one of the roles in the dialogue.Alex: Exactly. As a teacher, if you're talking about a lower‑level student, you can select the part that is easier for him or her to read. After he or she turns into an intermediate student, you can have him or her pick the role he or she wants. That's the way personalization occurs.Ross: You could do the same role‑play twice. You guys could just switch roles halfway through. Like if it's someone asking for directions first of all, the teacher provides the answers. Then you can switch it around and give the student in the more challenging role after they've seen a model.Those are all things that teachers would do naturally offline, giving a stronger student the more challenging role in a role play. I guess you have to be the strong student if you're the teacher during those activities. [laughs]Another common problem we see a lot online is teachers getting students to read whatever is on the screen out loud. Often, it's just a page of a course book, or something. I've seen teachers that even ask the students to read the title of the page. [laughs]Alex: And the instructions.Ross: And the instructions, right. What are some of the problems with that?Alex: It's not effective. The instruction is not the target language. I get it why they would do that. They probably think that they read it. They probably can't understand the instructions. The more they read it, the more they will get to know what's going on, but actually no.Ross: It doesn't work like that. If I'm asked to read something out loud, I always find I don't know what I've just read. I'm so focused on getting the science right that I don't actually process the meaning. With those, it's better to get the student to read it silently, which is also just much more natural.You don't see people [laughs] walking around with their phones or reading things out loud. We read in our heads most of the time. Or the teacher reads it out loud for their student to listen, and they can follow along.We started talking about the materials. Another issue with teaching online that doesn't happen so much offline is that teachers will tend to use every page, if we can call it that, of a lesson of the course book. We often online call it the "courseware." They'll go through it in order rather than jump around.It's interesting, because I noticed myself doing this with having the same book on my Kindle versus having the paper copy. I find that on the paper copy, it's so much easier to flick through and read chapters out of order. On a Kindle, I find I don't do that as much. I go through it in order.Teachers teaching online will tend to do the same thing of follow every page rather than what you might do in a course book, which is skip some activities or you might do the last activity first, that kind of thing.Alex: I don't know. Maybe somebody told them that, "You've got to finish the courseware." They just feel like, "Oh, by finish, you probably mean I need to complete each page."I once had a survey with some teachers, some call‑ins. They were like, "I didn't finish those activities. I didn't finish all those pages. Is that OK?"Ross: [laughs]Alex: I actually observed this teacher's class. She was doing fine. You can see that she's got some preparation. First and foremost, she identified what to teach, what the teaching objectives are. She did that, but she didn't complete the pages. Some teachers who are listening might not notice that.Ross: It's like offline teaching where the main thing is, "Teach the students. Don't teach the plan." You're totally right. A lot of teachers feel like, "My job here is to get to the end of these pages on this PowerPoint," rather than to help the students learn something or achieve something.Up until now we've mainly been talking about speaking, but I wanted to touch on writing for a moment. This is definitely one of my pet hates online, is teachers asking students to write something using the mouse. It's not a useful skill to practice.Alex: [laughs]Ross: Writing using a mouse and writing using a pen ‑‑ I mean, just try it ‑‑ they're very, very different. I can write quite well with a pen. I cannot write well with a mouse.Alex: I really show my respect for those teachers who can write perfectly with a mouse.Ross: [laughs] Perfectly with a mouse.Alex: If your student has this learning need which is to practice their handwriting, you can ask them to prepare a notepad. They can write there, and they can show you.Ross: Something else that I rarely see online is teachers or students actually moving the camera. Most people, when they're teaching online, they're using a laptop.Usually, the screen, it's on a hinge. It's pretty easy for the teacher or the student move the screen down. You could write, and the other person would be able to see what you're doing. I feel for teaching writing online, it's pretty challenging.Alex: We can agree that the priority of teaching online would be speaking and listening.Ross: Maybe we could talk about some activities that we think work particularly well. I can start out. One of the activities I've seen that works really well is a creative activity where you get the student to make something. The teacher has to do the typing, and the student has to do the telling.You've almost got the student describing the creative thing that they want, and the teacher drawing and filling things in. One of the examples I've seen work quite well is a shopping mall. Here's a floor plan of a shopping mall. The teacher asks the student, "What shops do you want in the shopping mall? What do you want them to be called?"The student has to say them, and the teacher types them in. You got a lot of communication happening in that activity, but also the student ends up being quite motivated.Alex: You're creating something.Ross: Absolutely. The teacher has to understand what the student is saying. If the teacher doesn't and makes a mistake with writing something, often the student's very quick to correct their teacher...Alex: [laughs]Ross: ...which is great because you're getting a lot of real communication happening there.Alex: I have two personal favorites kind of related to teaching texts. After you go through all those comprehension questions the courseware offers you, if you still have time, if we're talking about Bloom's Taxonomy, higher audio thinking skills at the level of evaluation, you can ask your student what are their perspective of the character?How do they think of this character? Ask why afterwards. You don't want to sound so much like what the courseware would offer. You can start with your own model. There is a stereotype going on, which is Chinese students, they are reluctant to express their opinions. This can be something to model.You can have different views on something, on somebody. It's OK. We're not judging somebody.Ross: [laughs]Alex: We're just expressing our opinions. Another one is for those classes there are texts about different cultures. Some students might be unfamiliar with those. After going through the text, say the setting is in Brazil and it's about carnival, then you can change it to the setting of Chinese New Year.That would be something that they can relate to. Back to Bloom's Taxonomy, you're creating something different with your student.Ross: With that second example there you're also taking advantage of that real information gap. If you're a teacher and you've not been to the same country as your student, you're probably not going to know very much about the culture. It's a real motivation for the teacher to be genuinely listening to what the student's saying and for the student to genuinely communicate with the teacher.Again there, we've got that thing of the teacher taking on another role, being the conversation partner and not just prompting the student to try out some target language but actually communicate something that the teacher wants to listen to.Alex: A suggestion for teachers would be to ask questions that they don't have answers to.Ross: Again everyone, that was Alex Li. If you enjoyed that, go to our website, www.tefltraininginstitute.com for more podcasts. If you really enjoyed it, please give us a good rating on iTunes. Thanks for listening. We'll see you again next time. Goodbye.

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As the coronavirus causes more and more schools, more students and teachers are turning to apps to fill the gap. Ross and Jake Whiddon talk about the potential of apps for language learning, the limitations of current software and how apps will influence classrooms in the future.Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. I'm Ross Thorburn. Welcome back to "TEFL Training Institute Podcast." This week, I'm talking with my friend Jake Whiddon. Jake's a diploma in TESOL qualified teacher. Over the last year or so, Jake has been working for a company that develops language learning apps.As the coronavirus is causing more and more schools to close, and more and more learning switching from offline to online, we'll find that language learning apps are going to be playing a bigger part in teachers' and students' lives than they were before.In this conversation, Jake and I discuss some of the advantages of language learning apps. How they affect the classroom? Where they will be going in the future? Enjoy the conversation.Ross: Welcome back, Jake.Jake Whiddon: Thanks, Ross. Good to be here.Ross: Jake, you are now working for a company that does language learning app. Let me just start off talking about what are some of the potential benefits of using an app to learn language.Jake: Probably, the biggest benefit is the idea of learner autonomy and motivation. If you hand over the power for them, and the control that says, "You can now take control of your learning." You have an app. You can open it. You can play some games. You can see some feedback. You can see how well you're going.It's, sometimes, a little bit more motivating, than if you have to be in a class. All your peers are around you. The teacher's telling what you're doing wrong or right. This is a very personal thing. That's one of the biggest benefits of having an app or online learning does.Ross: I was thinking about this recently with work, and with Katrina was doing in Chinese in front of a group of about 30 people on a conference call is still pretty nerve wracking. Comparing that to standing up in front of 30 people, and speaking my second language, it's much less scary.That's one of the things that people don't talk enough is how much that takes away that the fear within you. You don't have all these eyes on.Jake: Exactly. We should make the very distinct difference. Online learning is still engaging with someone. App based learning is you and the app learning together. Getting feedback, trying things.Ross: Let's talk about that. You mentioned their feedback. Answering a question and getting immediate feedback. If you're in a class, I feel the normal way that would happen, would be the teacher gives instructions for an activity in the course book. The students spend the next 10 or 15 minutes doing the activity. Then, the teacher goes through the answers with them and...Jake: Exactly, It could be the next day. It could be, "Here's your homework, go home and do it." I've got to hand it to the teacher. I have no attachment to what I was doing, once I get my feedback.In an app, if you get something wrong, it tells you instantly I got it wrong. Usually, might give you the right answer. It's very meaningful instant feedback, which is more valuable. It's not like, I'm going to get a high score in my test. It's right now, I want to get this right. It's a very personal thing.Ross: There is a huge difference in ownership there. One of them, I'm passive and I'm waiting for someone else to tell me whether I got it right or wrong.Jake: Which is crazy. Naturally, in your daily life as a child, I'm going to go try something. Climb a tree, I fall off. [laughs] I try again. I'm on my bike, I fall off. What do I do? I jump back on the bike. It's only once, we get with language learning or with classrooms, where we seem to say there's a separation between, I've done something and I'm going to find out whether I did well at it.Really what technology is doing, and software is doing, is it's enabling kids to get back into that really pure way of learning. I got it wrong. I'll try again.Ross: Another benefit here potentially, is that with the classroom version of it. The 10 questions that you have to ask, all the kids in the class are getting the same 10 questions. They might be too easy for some students in the class. They might be too difficult for others. That can become demotivating for everyone except the kids in the middle, right?Jake: It can. Where are you trying to get to here, Ross?Ross: Presently, the thing with the app, or the software or whatever, is able to push questions just at the right level of the students where they're able to get most of them right. But no...Jake: From my experience, I've been lucky enough to meet a lot of developers. Everyone says that they have some sort of algorithm that feeds back and allows kids to see what they got wrong. In reality though, Ross, I don't think that that's exactly what everyone is doing.The simplest form of it is that, "I got this wrong" and the algorithm would know, you got that wrong, and it will feed it back to you. Apps like Duolingo do that.I don't know if that completely is what we're talking about when it's this magic formula of AI, that everyone talks about when they're marketing their products. That's where it should be going. It will go eventually, that each child will be on a personalized learning journey.Ross: Kids are already on a personalized learning journey anyway, in a class. It's just the teaching doesn't match the learning...Jake: Exactly, exactly. What's happened now is that, we can have kids learning on an app and have data on every single interaction. You can get data on, if there's different games in that app, you can find out which games that they were more motivated by. If there's a quiz in the app, they can see the results on the quiz and which games were more likely to lead to a higher score in the quiz.We can see which language points lead to a higher score. If you kept on playing, which games motivated you to play more games later. All these different granular pieces of data that help with the educator ‑‑ it could be the teacher or the facilitator or the company ‑‑ to make sure those kids are actually moving forward their language learning, which then leads to efficacy, which we've never known before.Anyone who's listening has been a teacher in a classroom, they all leave, and they think, "I don't know what my kids really learned today. I know what they said in class. I know what they appear to understand. I know what they got in their test. But I don't know what they've acquired. I really don't know."Ross: Taking a couple steps back, you mentioned the different types of games, different types of interactions that might happen. You have some example? Obviously, a lot of this is based on a lot of multiple choice questions, right? But presenting those in different ways.Jake: Yeah, it's really fascinating. Something that I've learned from the coding is one fascinating thing. All the coding is the same, it's multiple choice. You get an app like Duolingo or any of the apps and it's usually, here's four choices, A, B, C, D. Tap the right button, right or wrong.What I've discovered from where I'm working now is that you can have those same four choices in a variety of ways, which I never realized. Rather than having four colors, just statically on the screen, those could be bubbles floating around the screen. Then, someone has to actually think about it, I can try to touch it and find it. There's more cognitive process happening.It's still an A, B, C, D test. The gameplay is more engaging than just seeing four things on a screen.Ross: This obviously feeds back into the motivation of the students. It's just like being in a language class where if you're doing interesting activities, that's going to keep you motivated and engaged, minute by minute. It's the same on an app. If you're doing the same multiple choice questions, it's going to get pretty boring.Jake: Often now, apps break into two types of learning games. They'll call them accuracy games or experience games. An accuracy game means there is a right or wrong answer. If you get this wrong, it's going to affect the accuracy of your score. There are other types of activities, which might be a song playing, and you just have to hit the words, but that's an experience game.That's input and seeing what happens. But, you're focusing on the input, being not wrong or right. If the word comes up, you hit it. If you don't hit it, it doesn't mean you're wrong. Some learners do better when they're doing experience games a lot. Some do better from accuracy games.What you could have is a different path. Some kids might like to see a song, a dialogue and this type of game. What will happen is, we can actually personalize journeys on the language they're learning and on the game type.Ross: Obviously, teachers in classes will be able to relate to this. You can see different students engaging more with different activities in every class.Jake: Some apps allow you to send out homework. The kids will do something on the app. Then, the teacher can see a whole class aggregate score. They'll know, how well they're doing with a certain lexical set. Say, it's colors. There's a 90 percent on blue, green, red, yellow, but orange, it's a 40 percent. What am I going to focus on in the next class?Ross: Focus on orange.Jake: I'm going to focus on orange, right? Now, the teachers are empowered by the data to be better teachers. They can focus on exactly what the kids need to know and not what they should know.Ross: Find out where the learners are and teach them accordingly. If the app's giving you all this data on where the learners are, that's going to let you do a better job.Presumably also, there's another layer to that. You're talking about the app giving data to the teachers to help the teachers teach the students accordingly. But also, the app's going to use that data to teach the student to...Jake: Exactly, right. Number one, the app already will feedback and ensure that the child, the learner, keeps getting better at that one particular language point. Parents have more information now.Parents used to drop their kids off at offline schools. Two hours sit outside. Come out and they have any idea how well they're going. Everyone's had a parent‑teacher night. Parents meet the teacher. They discuss how well they're going and the teachers feel uncomfortable. They don't really know every detail.Ross: They have 16 kids in the class. You've taught them for four hours. You're really giving feedback on the kid at the back who doesn't talk much, it's impossible.Jake: How exciting is it, that parent‑teacher night, now can happen every day. Not just every day, every hour. Anytime the child interacts with learning, the parent can see exactly how well they're going.The exciting part will be once those apps link parents and teachers up to social media. They'll say, OK, my child is struggling with, this sentence or the past sentence all orange. They'll be able to click on it and find out what all the other parents done who've had that same problem? What do the teachers recommend?The solution for the problem will be instant. They won't need to drop their kid off at school anymore because that learning was become part of daily life.Ross: You hit on one of the things that probably makes a lot of teachers nervous. The idea that apps could replace teachers completely. What's the role of the teacher?Jake: The role of the teacher would change. We already have seen this in STEM. We used to have science lectures, no one does science lectures anymore. That was a thing of the past, that's died. Now what you have is, everyone sends out what you have to learn. You watch a video and when you come to class, guess what you do? An experiment with the teacher.That's all that will happen in language learning. It will catch up to the rest of the world. You'll learn all the stuff. You'll get all your feedback. When you come into class, the teacher will have an activity for you to do. Really push you in the class to use that language.How can I help you interact better with people or communicate better or use your creativity or it's not just the language anymore? It's all that stuff that surrounds it.Ross: This reminds me a lot of an ex‑colleague talking to me about the community aspect of learning a language and that being the thing that keeps learners coming back. If you don't have that sort of interaction with real people, it's really easy to give up. That's the case with apps. If there's not that community aspect, then people tend give up pretty easily.Jake: Think about it, no one learns a language to speak to themselves.Ross: [laughs]Jake: Like in the classroom, no one learns a language to speak to a teacher, you learn language to speak to other people. Offline schools will develop into places where kids and adults can go in, use the language to interact in the community, but the learning will happen with technology.Ross: I feel here it's useful to unpack the word "learning." When we think about the word "learning," we assume that memorizing the words, which is a lot of what we're talking about can happen on the app. Whereas, there's a deeper level that needs to happen. That's the thing that happens in the classroom communicating with real people.Jake: I don't think we'll use the word "class" anymore. The idea of class needs to go because of class implies learning and the teacher. The relationship shouldn't be teacher‑student. It will become, "I've already learned this stuff, I need places to use it and keep developing it."Language doesn't exist in a vacuum without all the other experiences around it. Teachers' roles would expand into making experiences around the language.Ross: Those are the most interesting parts of teaching. Designing the interesting communicative activities and tasks. Talking about culture, facilitating discussions, that's a lot more interesting than holding up the blue flashcard. Getting students to turn it back to you.[crosstalk]Jake: Can I add the point that what's exciting is, as data and coders and language learning have become best friends. What's the code? It's a language, right? Due to social media and Internet and all these connections, all those barriers have been broken down. Now we have computer scientists talking to linguists talking to psychologists.What will happen to teachers is, they won't be thinking about, "This is the grammar point I need to teach today."They'll be talking to psychologists, they'll be talking to other discourses and making that class a more valuable experience for the kids.Ross: You mentioned, psychologists and language teaching and programming. One of the bits where that comes together is, finding the sweet spot of challenge and using gamification. That's a bit of a controversial issue.Jake: The word "gamification" is controversial because gamification can be along the lines of gambling. That's what they base it on. Challenge level and finding the challenge level is what motivates people to keep coming back. If something's too easy, you get demotivated. If it's too hard, you don't come back. You need to find that sweet spot of where's the challenge level?Essentially, that's gamification. Gamification is finding the spot where it's not too hard. It's not too easy. It's just at the point where I want to keep going. There's so many advantages.If you can find the spot where kids or people are motivated to keep learning, isn't that a good thing? But, then they become addicted to the platform that you're using to teach them to do that, that could be unethical, especially when money's involved.Ross: One more time, that was Jake Whiddon. Thank you very much for listening. For more podcasts, please go to the website, www.tefltraininginstitute.com. We'll see you next time. Goodbye.

Do lessons have a plot? Should classes have a story line? How do lesson plans resemble movie scripts? We speak with teacher trainer extraordinaire Diederik Van Gorp, about story arcs in lessons and how these affect our transitions form one activity to the next.Tracy: Hello, everyone. Welcome to our podcast today. Let me introduce our special guest, Diederik.Diederik Van Gorp: Hello.Tracy: Welcome.Diederik: Thank you very much.Ross Thorburn: Just to check because I don’t think we said last time, it’s Diederik Van Gorp, right?Diederik: Yes.Ross: Just in case there's many other Diederiks out there. [laughs]Diederik: I haven't met them yet.[laughter][crosstalk]Diederik: The dutch pronunciation would be Diederik Van Gorp. But I anglicized it slightly, I think automatically. When I was teaching children in China, it very quickly just became D.Ross: I remember you saying that to me, "Just call me D."[laughter]Diederik: The first class, you introduce yourself and I just write a letter D. They thought it was hilarious because this person just has one letter as a name.[laughter]Diederik: They're very cute.Ross: Diederik, you wanted to talk about transitions, which I think is really interesting. One, because there's not very much about it online, just as you pointed out. Two, actually when I started preparing for this, I also got to this point where I was like, "What does he mean?"Diederik: I wondered as well. At one point, I was talking to a colleague, he's like, "The transitions were very smooth in this lesson, from one stage to the next." It was very hard for me to pinpoint exactly what that was, trying to find an article, you go online, or go to your books. There's almost nothing there. I guess now, they're creating the...[crosstalk]Diederik: One of the big things in the lesson is context. There's one stage of the lesson, you're going to the next stage. It can be very abrupt, means that the learners have no idea where did this come from. Good transition is, you either refer back, for example to the context, or you point to something that's going to happen later.If you go from a nice lexis activity to a reading task and then all of a sudden there's this seven, eight words, students are matching them, you ask concept‑check questions, you drill it maybe, all of a sudden you say, "Read the text. Answer the questions." Where did this come from? It's a very clear instruction, there's no confusion possible but it's very mechanical.Linking that activity to...these words were actually in the text. By quickly pointing that out or a listing, or, "Do you remember earlier on?" "Ah, yeah, yeah, we're going to read something about your friend Bob." It gives it coherence. There's something else that I quite like, if a lesson is a narrative, if a lesson is a story, then it becomes very coherent. I like it when it comes full circle.I wrote for a while, writing dialogues for short movie clips to learn English. Basically, one of the things I learned there was, it's not just the movie that needs a beginning, middle, end. Even a dialogue needs a beginning, middle, end and there needs to be some kind of conflict.If you look at a lesson, because they argue that the human mind is a bit wired for beginning, middle, end. For a lesson, it seems to be similar. You need a beginning, set it up well. You need to the meat, the most important part of the movie, most important part of the lesson. Then, some kind of closure at the end.Very often, lessons fall flat because teachers are great at setting it up but it falls flat at the end because they run out of time and becomes very abrupt the end. That's why, watching a movie ‑‑ the bad guy got killed and that's the end of the movie ‑‑ we don't see them being happily ever after, getting married and all those things.Ross: Interesting. I remember watching Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo" a while ago. It does end like that. I think the woman jumps off this tower and dies. Sorry, if you've not seen it.[laughter]Diederik: Spoiler alert.[crosstalk]Ross: ...and dies. Literally, the credits come on and you're still in this shock. You're like, "Oh, that's it?" Like you say, movies always, nowadays, we have this scene.Diederik: Somehow, it links back to the beginning but there will be the change. With a lesson, that could be a nice idea to approach a lesson. If you fit your stages in there, finish on the high somehow.Tracy: Do you know there is an activity, at least we played it in Chinese a lot when I was a kid. This kind of my understanding of transition in the class. You say Chinese [Chinese] .Ross: Idiom.Diederik: Idiom?Tracy: Yeah.Diederik: The four‑character idiom?Tracy: Yeah, the four‑character idiom. The next person would have to use the last words from the last idiom and then next, the beginning of the next idiom. That's hard picture like a lesson transition.Diederik: That's interesting. The last thing you do needs to be the first thing of the next stage. Something like that?Tracy: Yes, something like that.Ross: Your example earlier, Diederik, of that read‑this‑answer‑the‑questions, it's almost so abrupt you can imagine people going, "Did I hear that right?" Whereas if you say you have that who could remember these eight words? Can you see these words anywhere here? Oh, one of them's in the title. Where do you think the other set will be? Great. Now, read this and answer the questions."Tracy: Another thing ‑‑ it might be related to transition ‑‑ is about the difficulty level. If you look at a lesson, it's a flow. Maybe at the very beginning something a little bit easier or less challenging. Then it's getting maybe a little bit more challenging. At the end, they can see how much they have improved.Diederik: Then you release the pressure again a little bit at the end test, what have you learned or something?Tracy: Yeah.Diederik: When you introduce the language in a traditionally staged lesson, maybe in a movie where the conflict is introduced, we have an obstacle to overcome, it's this language point.Ross: Is it Joseph Campbell? Is that the person? This idea of there's a story arc, there's only one story that basically people ever had...[crosstalk]Diederik: Yeah, or just a variation on the theme.[crosstalk]Ross: One great story but a lot of it. Certainly my favorite lessons that I've taught to start off with some...We're doing one like an activity. I think it's on my diploma at the beginning asking people, "Oh, I'm doing this. Are you interested in coming to this thing tonight?"People turning down this invitation and at the end of the class, you go back and do the same thing again but, like the story, the characters have changed. Except in this, the language the students are using have changed. That's the difference, that's the development that's happened which is like a story.I'm just so into this movie analogy now. You got me thinking of this great Chinese movie I love called "Shower" or Xǐ zǎo in Chinese. At some point in the movie ‑‑ it's some people who are in a bath house in Beijing ‑‑ it cuts to 50 years ago in this desert area of China. After five minutes, you start thinking, "Is this a mistake? Is there a problem with the DVD?"It creates this expectation. Eventually, it cuts back. It's like the back story. The main character says, "That was your mother." This reminded me of doing teacher training years ago, doing an activity for writing lesson, getting them to do something stupid like, "Give them a dart board but no darts. Then ask them who's the best darts player."I remember one of the trainees say, "Why are we doing this? What's the point?" One of the other ones goes, "There will be a point. You'll find out in a minute."I think it's almost that same thing, isn't it? Like with the movies, it's creating this expectation. Sometimes, I don't know what's going on here but if I have belief in this teacher, this trainer, I know there's going to be a point.Diederik: It must be there for a reason, but they must have been disappointed so many times.[laughter][music]Diederik: Just thinking of something related to transitions is, one of the main scales that a teacher needs is working with published materials, either course book or whatever that has been given to them. That teaching is going from one exercise to the next. "Are you finished?" "Yes." "Now, do exercise three. Do exercise four."The teacher actually can see the flow of that lesson and just verbalizes it almost, "Yes, now we're going to put that into practice." Maybe transition are a bit more important than you think, to bring something that's dead on the page, bring it alive, give it purpose.Tracy: When we're doing research about this topic before, not really much about it, do you think it's because transition in class, it doesn't affect the lesson a lot?Diederik: Maybe for the feeling, for motivation of the students, maybe it does a little bit more than we think it does.Ross: I think this also comes down to this idea that if your classes feel like a succession of unrelated activities, it's going to be very easy to give up as a learner. It's going to be very challenging to maintain motivation for a long period, isn't it? Like, "Why are we doing this? What's the point?"Diederik: Another gap filled.[laughter]Diederik: There's another one. I just remembered this. When I started out as a teacher trainer, I was explaining to new students, if one stage does not go well, no problem. Every stage is like a new spring, you can start anew.A stage that feels flat, the energy is drained, it was boring, whatever went on. Every stage is a new opportunity to re‑energize the students, project your voice. Transitions can actually spike the energy again.[music]Ross: I want to talk about what I actually thought you meant by transitions, which is completely different. What I think we spoke about there was teaching for adults or maybe teenagers but probably not like six‑year‑olds.What I actually ended up writing about, taking notes on, was going from one activity to another with some very young learners, almost like this classroom management idea for kindergarten students. As an example, the chaos of some six‑year‑olds with bags coming in to a classroom...Diederik: Almost a routine, in this part of the room, this happens, this is the storytelling corner, here we do the book work.Ross: This is obviously potential, "All right. Everyone, move to the front of the room!" Then there's this, you can just imagine a car leaving a cloud of dust, things are flying out.Diederik: The transition then would be sometimes counting, maybe sometimes a song.Ross: Exactly. The idea that if you have those in place and you trained your students on them then all those moving from this part of the room to that part of the room or from a writing or a coloring activity, to another, are smoother and safer.Diederik: Different cues, basically. That's similar to teaching adults. Some of the automatic things you do ‑‑ like they worked on their own and you let them compare around as in pairs ‑‑ there's this moment they do it automatically. They're also transitions, I guess.Ross: The commonality between the two of those is that if you do a good job of them, they should become so natural that the longer you work with the students, almost the less instructions you need to give.Diederik: I've seen a beautiful thing once where the student was so used to the techniques, because this person just came every month to every class of every training teacher, that if the teacher was about to give the handouts, while giving the instructions, she would give an act...[laughter]Diederik: It was like, "Oh, instruction before handout." She wouldn't say it. It's like she knew it.Ross: Did you go by that point about it being logical and making sense? It reminds me of...Tracy, when you and I were in India a few years ago, we booked these cinema tickets. It was some beautiful old cinema in Jaipur. We bought these tickets. I think we assumed it was in English or at least it would have English subtitles, but it didn't. It was all in Hindi and had Hindi subtitles.Because of the genre of the film, which was like Arnold Schwarzenegger‑esque action film, we were able to follow and understand the whole thing. It made complete sense even though we couldn't really understand a word in the whole movie. I think that's similar, isn't it?Diederik: Yes, it's very similar. I remember watching Disney movies on the small screen in a long‑distance bus in Turkey. It was all in Turkish. I could understand everything, I think "Kung Fu Panda" and I'm indeed [inaudible 12:56] . It's like, yeah, this is the moment that the obstacle is introduced.Ross: It's almost like that you think of the brain being hardwired, the stories are hardwired for a language classes, something, right? They will know the beginning, middle, end.Diederik: When people really hate a movie, very often, it's an art‑type movie that they accidentally watched. A lot of people do like it but they're not the mainstream.Ross: Or it doesn't wrap up at the end, there's no ending to it.Diederik: Like the Coen Brothers movies, [inaudible 13:20] at the end.Ross: That almost reminds me of another point. I think Donald Freeman had an article. It was called "From Teacher to Teacher Trainer." He talks about, how can you tell if your training was successful?He said, people smiling, high‑fiving each other at the classroom doesn't mean they learned anything. People leaving confused and disappointed doesn't mean they didn't learn anything. That's almost like the Coen Brothers just because at the end of the movie, "What on earth was that about?" It doesn't mean it was a bad movie.Diederik: It makes you think maybe.Ross: Those are movies that I love where you're still thinking about what could the ending mean weeks or months after.Diederik: Let's say an action movie, the immediate response is satisfaction but you want to remember it, you want to talk about it more.[music]Tracy: Thanks very much for listening. Thank you so much, Diederik, for coming to our podcast.Diederik: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.Tracy: All right. See you next time.Diederik: See you.

We speak with Study Cat CEO Mark Pemberton about language learning outside of the classroom. As the corona virus causes schools around China to temporarily close, we consider the possibilities and limits of using apps and technology for language learning. For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to "TEFL Training Institute Podcast." I'm Ross Thorburn. Here, we usually bring you one episode every couple of weeks focusing on a topic.We usually don't do anything related to current events, but at the moment, the coronavirus, as you may have read in the news, is having a huge effect on a lot of students. A lot of listeners are also, like I am, in China. Today, we're going to do a special episode about learning English at home.To help us do that, we have Mark Pemberton. He's CEO of Studycat. Studycat's a company that makes fun and effective language learning apps for kids in English, Chinese, French, Spanish, and German. Before starting Studycat, Mark was also a teacher.In this episode, I asked Mark about how students can use technology to help them learn the language at home. Enjoy the interview.Ross: Hi, Mark. Thanks for doing this at such short notice. Obviously, over here in Shanghai, a lot of the schools are shut and a huge amount of the population's working from home. It's a really strange time, with the coronavirus, both for business and for education.Mark Pemberton: I was reading today Bloomberg saying that this is going to be the largest work‑at‑home experiment in the history of mankind. From our perspective, it's going to probably be the tipping point for home education.Realistically, people might not be back at school until after Easter. In the meantime, there is no way that people can't turn towards online education to fill that void. It will be very interesting times.Ross: Right. I guess a lot of studying from home is going to happen over the next few weeks and months. That's obviously not necessarily a bad thing. What are some of the advantages of getting students to study at home in general?Mark: To me, it is obvious that if you want to learn a language, the more touch points you have with that language, the quicker you're going to achieve fluency. The gold standard for language learning is to drop yourself, immerse into a new culture, and have to speak the language, which is exactly what happened to me when I moved to Thailand.If you don't speak the language, you can't order food. It's sink or swim. Therefore, take that assumption and build immersion around the learner. When the kids go home, you put the cartoons on in English. You put the radio on in English. Put music on in English. Surround the kid with English, and the kid will do the rest.A lot of parents would say, "I don't know how to do this." Or, "I don't speak English." That's OK. It doesn't matter if you can't speak English. You can create the environment around your child where they will acquire the language very naturally and very quickly.If watching cartoons is a part of that, if playing interactive games is a part of that, then even better, because there's not a lot of research or data about this.To me, it's obvious that when a kid is in a puzzle or doing some kind of brain‑teasing activity, where they're using all of their focus and concentration, then they're learning quicker than they would be if they were just passively watching a cartoon.Ross: I suppose as well as the motivation aspect of needing to learn a language with immersion. I guess you're also just getting fewer opportunities to forget what you've learned because everything will be recycled all the time. That seems to be a big advantage of learning on an app.For example, for a few minutes every day, compared with going to a class once a week for a couple of hours at a time. Anyway, learning at home also allows parents to get a lot more involved in their kid's learning. What are some advantages of getting parents involved in the language learning process?Mark: Our brand is connected learning. What we mean by connected learning is connecting the home and the school to get the best learning outcomes. There's a couple of layers to our connected learning.The first one is connecting the home and the school. The second one is connecting parents, teachers, and kids. The kids are at the center of the learning process. If the parents are involved and the teachers are involved, and they triangulate, that is very, very powerful.I've got pictures of me teaching back in 2001 in my school. I had this hardcore cohort of parents that came to every class, which was great because they helped me manage the class. They helped me translate sometimes.Those parents would go home and they would walk with the kids. They play the tapes with the kids. They do the homework with the kids. Those kids just excelled because they were recycling. They were doing more work than the kids that weren't able to stay home work to...What we're able to say is, put the CD on, put the tape on, sing the song. There's nothing else you could set them at that time. Whereas now, you can assign them homework on their favorite devices.You can track whether they've done it or not. You could see what they did or didn't understand. It's a brave new world of language learning. I wish I had all these tools when I was teaching.Ross: Do you want to tell us a bit about how parents can best be involved? Imagine that parents being involved can either have a huge positive effect or definitely also seeing have a negative effect sometimes on kids as well.Mark: The kids like it as long as the parents handle it well and don't do that overpowering, "You must do this, you must do that." If the parents play a role of like, "Let's do this together," the kids learn so much faster, and they're so much more fluent.The parents who got such clunky pronunciation, that the kids get this, "I'm doing this better than mom or dad." You get this nice dynamic going if the parents play it right.Ross: The teachers listening to this might not fit into this category, but there's definitely a lot of teachers out there who are less enthusiastic about integrating technology into the student's language learning. How do you think apps can make teachers' lives easier?Mark: When we started doing EdTech early 2000s, I thought that there would be technology in every classroom by 2007, 2008. Then I thought, "OK, well, this is going a bit slow. It's education, maybe it's because teachers are fearful of technology, or maybe it's because the ministers of education are too slow."Now, it's 2020, I would say, with the exception of China, education and the adoption of technology in classrooms have really hasn't progressed at all. Obviously, not all teachers, but why aren't most teachers embracing technology?I don't understand. I've heard people say that they find it cumbersome. Maybe it's the technology's fault. Maybe they find it's a distraction in the classroom.Maybe they find that it's hard to manage a class and manage a technology at the same time. When we were building [inaudible 6:23] schools, we were very, very aware of these issues.We never assumed that the teachers wanted their lives made easier. We assumed that the teachers wanted to be more effective teachers. They didn't want to do monotonous report writing.We don't want to waste time prepping for all these lessons. We don't want to waste time marking all these lessons. We want to walk into a classroom with the kids [inaudible 6:51] knowing the vocabulary. We can actually use their vocabulary in scenarios, in sentence building, in dialogues, and in fun stories.EdTech, I've always believed, has massive potential to level the playing field. Children can go home and learn at their own pace, at their own speed. They can do it again, and again, and again until they're comfortable with the language. Then they can bring that into the classroom and practice the vocabulary learned. I think that's a wonderful outcome.Ross: You mentioned leveling the playing field there, Mark. How can technology do that? What do you mean exactly by leveling the playing field?Mark: There's two layers for that. The first layer is, in a specific classroom, no two kids learn the same way. No two kids have the same personality. It always struck me that the silent kids that would sit in class, they would not speak for the first year, a year and a half.We're always trained how to deal with these kids. The way I dealt with them, I just let them be. They were never making any trouble. They're just very shy. They're only five years old.I remember one of the silent kids, after a year, a year and a half, put a hand up, walked over to me, and said, "Teacher, may I go to the bathroom, please? I'd like to use the toilet." This kid had never spoken one word ever but she had understood all the language. She can speak complete sentences when she was ready to do so.If you're shy and don't want to speak, how nice it would be at home, in your bedroom with the device, rather than being told to stand up and repeat this sentence, or make a sentence, or it's your turn to do this, your turn to do that. When I said level the playing field there, I was also alluding to profit on purpose.EdTech can reach parts of the world that other education solution haven't had the ability to do. You're seeing really progressive governments in Colombia, Uruguay, that are shipping devices out to rural areas, where kids can just start learning where they can't build schools.EdTech will be able to deliver education to the 1.5 billion kids that, right now, don't have access to education. Of course, they need devices to be able to do that. I believe that there will be a day where companies like ours will work with companies like Huawei and other major device manufacturers, and then major charities with big footprints like Room to Read.Then we can deliver these devices with loads of educational software uploaded, and then deliver these devices to the communities.Ross: I love that example of the quiet student just absorbing all that language. I also heard Stephen Krashen give an example of talking about, at a conference giving a presentation, and walking up to someone in the front row with a microphone and seeing the look of fear in their faces.He was saying that, as teachers, we hate being asked questions at conferences. That's something that we do with our students all the time.Anyway, your app, I believe gets used by a lot of teachers in their classes. You must have seen lots of examples of teachers in schools encouraging students to use technology at home and to help in the language learning. Can you give us an example of how that actually works in practice?Mark: We did a big launch a year ago in Shiyan with a group of 40 kindergartens. It went really well. The teachers complained that they didn't know what to do because the kids knew all the vocabulary when they came into the classroom, which always made me laugh.They did some really cool stuff. They would ask the parents to record the kids at home doing their app activities. We got all these videos of kids singing, dancing around the living room, really got lit up by the songs. They started getting the kids to sing the songs every afternoon at the end of class outside the kindergarten.When the parents arrive to pick them up, the kids are all there singing the songs and doing all these different motions and actions. The feedback from the principals of those schools was that the parents had stopped having to send their kids to after school to learn English because they were learning so much English in the school.The blended learning, the flipped learning was working. That, to me, is a success because you're saving the kid's time. The kids in China are not having much of a childhood. The pressure is on from when you're two, three years old. It's the same in Japan. It's the same in Korea.The pressure on kids to do a 7:30 start all the way through to 9:00 or 10:00 at night, when they're only four years old, I just don't think that's right. I don't think there's enough time for them to play. I don't think there's enough time for them to sleep.I would hope that by using their time more efficiently, they could get more rest, more sleep, and more playtime, which is what children need when they're growing up, especially their age.Ross: You mentioned that by using that flipped classroom approach, students learn more effectively and didn't actually need to go to after school English programs anymore. Can you imagine that time in the future when apps or other technology will eventually just replace teachers completely?Mark: Technology would never replace teachers. There will be books in classrooms for the next 50 years. There will be teachers in classrooms for the next 50 years.The notion that AI and robots and technology are going to replace education systems is a fallacy. Everyone should embrace technology as a tool to enhance your ability to teach. That's what it is.Human beings are very unique in the sense that we have this urge to teach. We have this urge to pass knowledge down. It's in our DNA, like it is in no other animals to pass on and to teach, the love to teach.We love teaching and we love being taught. The way that society is being built and developed with kids going to schools, I just don't see that changing in the next 50, 100 years.I've gone full circle as well. I've built systems in 2007. My mindset was, replace the teachers, replace the classroom, build systems that don't need teachers or classrooms. Now, I've come around to a much easier state of mind. If there is a classroom, there is a teacher.That's much easier to build and design technology because you all work together to get the outcome that you want. I'm not saying that the way we educate or the way we use education right now is optimal. I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying that it's not going to change.Ross: One other opportunity I wanted to ask you about, Mark, was with AI. A lot gets written and said about AI. Can you tell us about what you think the potential is for AI in helping language learning in the future?Mark: AI, I'm not so sure about this. So much hype about what AI is going to do in education. It's a lot of VC hype about that right now. I wouldn't be putting my money to have into AI. We use very simple AI in our systems for adaptive learning. We are able to see whether a child has issues with certain words.Then we simply use a very simple machine algorithm method to keep reintroducing the words in reward games. We pull trouble words out and we keep re‑displaying them to the kids so that they learn them. I think that's very powerful.I don't think that the brave new world that a lot of people are investing in in terms of AI is going to be as big as people are hoping it will be.Ross: Mark, thanks so much again for coming on. I also know that because of the Coronavirus, you've open up your app for teachers and students to use for free for the time being. Can you tell us how can teacher's listening get access to that?Mark: We've just released a campaign today, Ross, that we are opening up all of our language learning apps to all communities affected by school closure for free usage until this crisis has passed. If you go to studycat.com, you will see all of our apps available there to be downloaded.In China, we have a WeChat platform. If you search for Studycat, you'll find our WeChat platform. Fun English is available there on all Android devices, all iOS devices for the next month, for free. We've survived these things before with SARS. In the meantime, Studycat will do what we can to help you entertain your kids.Ross: Great. Thanks again so much for joining us, Mark.Mark: Cheers.Ross: For everyone listening, please stay safe. We'll see you again next episode. Goodbye.

Ian McGrath joins us to discuss how coursebooks can be used, what affect they have on teacher autonomy and how teachers can make themselves the masters rather than servants. As Alan Cuningsworth says, “Coursebooks make good servants, but poor masters.” But who is usually the master in the language classroom? The teacher or the coursebook? Ross Thorburn: Hi Ian, and thanks for joining us. I wanted to start off by asking you about the effect that materials can have on teachers' teaching skills.You've got a section near the beginning of your book based around an argument from Jack Richards. I'll just quote to you from the bit from the book, "It's been argued that if teaching decisions are largely based on the textbook and the teacher's book, this has the effect of deskilling teachers." How much do you agree with that argument?Ian McGrath: Well, I suppose it's a theoretical possibility, but I think that rests on two assumptions. That, for example, the teacher has certain skills to begin with which can be lost, and secondly, he or she loses them because they're not required in order to teach with this particular book.I haven't seen any evidence to support this notion of skill loss, but I do think there's a real danger that teachers, let's say, who use the same book year in, year out do lose interest in the material. As a consequence, this loss of interest is communicated to the students.I've observed a lot of teachers. It's fairly obvious that enthusiastic teachers can energize and motivate students, whereas bored teachers are likely to bore their students. Once teachers have been teaching the materials for so long that they've lost interest in them, there is a danger that they start to become boring.Ross: I guess the thing that Jack Richards doesn't really mention there is teachers who maybe just never developed those skills in the first place.Ian: That's a very good point.Ross: Anyway, you've got another nice quote in the book from Cunningsworth, I think, which says, "Coursebooks make good servants but poor masters." In your experience, who usually is the master or the servant in the classroom, and why?Ian: This takes us to teacher autonomy. It depends on the mindset and the professionalism of the teacher. The teacher has to see the coursebook as a servant, although actually I prefer tool, resource, one of the resources that can be used to bring about successful learning.Ross: Going back to the Jack Richards' quote, "Coursebooks might deskill teachers or stop them from developing certain skills," can the coursebook also disempower teachers?Ian: Going back to the Cunningsworth quote, if you accept the book as your master, then you disempower yourself. As a teacher, we have to remember that we also have relevant knowledge and experience that we can pass on to students, and students, themselves, have knowledge that they can share.Why should we hand power over to the writer of a book who knows nothing about our students and their particular interests and needs?Ross: I completely agree. As a teacher, you know your students, whereas the writers probably never set foot in the school and possibly never even been to the country that you're teaching in.Does this also relate to the management of the school? I think, in some contexts, the power isn't given away by the teachers so much. It's maybe given away by the management, where managers maybe have placed a lot of faith -- probably too much faith -- in the writers of the coursebook. Have you seen that sort of thing before?Ian: Yes, I have seen that situation. That reduces the motivation of the teachers, because they aren't free to do what they feel they should be doing. If teachers feel free to be responsive and creative, then that makes every class different.Even if you're teaching the same 'teaching' -- I'm using this in inverted commas, as it were -- teaching the same material or, let's say, using the same material, you don't necessarily have to use it in exactly the same way with each class, because the class, itself, will be different.Ross: Sometimes, nowadays, we see coursebooks that just have a huge amount of detail in the teacher's notes. I can personally remember using a teacher's book that virtually told you to stand up, walk across the room, pick up a pen before writing something on the whiteboard.Do you think that going into a lot of detail in those teaching notes, is that useful help for novice teachers, or is it something that's more constricting for experienced teachers? How, as a coursebook writer, can you balance giving help to those different groups of teachers?Ian: I don't blame teachers' books or publishers for this. They're obviously try to sell as many books as they can. There's a commercial motive, but I think the writers of these books are also trying to be helpful.Teachers have very different levels of professional awareness. When you start out as a teacher, it's reassuring to be given a range of ready-made materials and suggestions for how to use them.I started teaching without having had any training. For me, one of the teacher's books that I used was, in a sense, my trainer. By following the suggestions in the book, I felt more secure about what I was doing. Over time, I felt free to vary what I was doing.It's a lot to do with experience. When you feel confident enough to select from what's being suggested, I think you will. I don't see the mass of detail procedures as an impediment to autonomy. For me, the suggestions are there to be used or not, depending on the teacher's own level of experience and confidence.Ross: It's almost like the opposite of deskilling the teachers like we mentioned at the beginning, where if it's a good coursebook, then hopefully, it can act as a good example and almost like a teacher trainer for novice teachers.That also means that, just as in teachers have to teach mixed ability classes and make the same materials work for both higher and lower-level students, the materials writers also have to write for mixed abilities of teachers.Ian: I think so. With coursebooks, I'm thinking of, this is the core material, and then there are these possible branches off from this that you may choose to follow according to the needs, interests, capabilities of the class you're teaching.It's clear to everyone what has to be done, in a sense, but not necessarily how it has to be done. Also, there are these branching possibilities which one may be able to follow, depending also on the amount of time available.Coursebooks are also written with a certain number of teaching hours in mind. There's often an expectation, on the part of learners, as well as management, that you will get through the book, so teachers inevitably have to make decisions about what they can include and what they can't include.Ross: Something else I wanted to ask you about was another nice quote about teachers finding that activities don't quite match their teaching style. You said in that situation, the teachers have a choice either to adapt the book or to adapt to the book. Do you want to tell us a bit about those options?Ian: I think it was Rod Bolitho and Tony Wright who, at one point, used the term "teaching against the grain." The metaphor here is to the difficulty of cutting wood against the grain.What they were trying to say is that, sometimes, we feel some discomfort with a particular coursebook text or an activity. That discomfort may be due to either the fact that we don't see ourselves teaching comfortably in that way, or in the case of a text, there are things in this text which don't suit culturally, let's say, the kind of group that we're working with.Basically, we have a choice to adapt the materials or to teach them as they are. You can probably guess what my advice would be.[laughter]Ian: It would be to adapt the materials, but, at the same time, try to ensure that we don't lose sight of the intended learning outcome. We're trying to achieve the same, let's say, linguistic objective if it is a linguistic objective, but doing so using other materials or other means.Ross: There is also a flip side to this though, where sometimes it's only by trying something that we think isn't going to work -- maybe from a coursebook, for example -- that we end up getting out of our routine, getting out of our comfort zone, and actually putting ourselves in a position to learn.Ian: There may be a time and place for this. [laughs] If you're on a teacher training course, you may feel more comfortable experimenting with something than in your own class, where you're a bit concerned, if something should go wrong, about the consequences of that.Again, going back to observation, it's good to encourage people to try out things in an observation that they haven't necessarily done before, because then, they have somebody present who can talk them through that experience and say, "Well, it was great. It was fantastic. You did it perfectly."Encouraging them to do it again, or if it didn't work that well, to analyze why that was and how they might modify the approach to make it more effective the next time around.Ross: Finally, as someone who's both a teacher, teacher trainer, coursebook writer, how do you go about using a coursebook?Ian: My starting point is not the materials, themselves, but what I think, how was the course planned? I've set, possibly in negotiation with the students, what I think would be appropriate learning outcomes within the time available. Then I've chosen a coursebook or a set of materials that I feel will help me to accomplish those objectives.Let's say I have just one coursebook. The first process is to select from those bits of the coursebook that will be directly helpful and useful, and to decide what I'm not going to use. Even where I have selected things, I might feel the need to adapt them in certain ways. One possibility, obviously, is to exploit the material to get more out of it.If one takes the example of a text in the book, the text may be accompanied by a series of questions -- usually the case -- but I don't think one has to rely on the questions in the book.One can get learners to talk about the topic of the text and their own experience in relation to it. If there are pictures, again, they can comment on those pictures, so that you're not necessarily using the material in the way that it's laid down. You are developing it in certain ways. You're exploiting it.Sometimes, one might need to replace material in a book with one's own material because one feels that that's more relevant to students' needs, or even get learners to bring in materials, themselves. One almost always has to supplement what's provided because, as we said earlier, no textbook is going to be perfect for the particular group you're teaching.You're likely to have to add certain things to it. It may be that more practice is needed of a particular point, or you feel the need to include more communicative activities in your course, and so on.

Ross and favorite guest Dave Weller talk about ethics in English education. What problems are caused by charging for teaching? What are the ethics of observing teachers? Is it fair to expect teachers to prepare for classes in their own time?Ross Thorburn: [laughs] Hurrah. Welcome to Dave Weller.Dave Weller: You just stole my thunder.Ross: [laughs] I know. What can I say? Regular listeners will understand the joke.Dave: Hello everybody.Ross: Welcome back, Dave.Dave: Thank you.Ross: Today, I thought we could talk about something that is much needed and often much lacking, which is ethics in English education.[laughter]Dave: A deep topic.Ross: Isn't it? I don't know about you, but I've definitely found that most of the schools that I've worked in, not always, but in some ways, been ethically lacking.It's something that we don't often talk about, maybe. Certainly, we've not talked about in this podcast before. It's something that teachers often talk about in teachers' rooms, right? With problems about the ethics of schools. I thought it would be interesting of us to debate here.Dave: Absolutely. People listening, it depends which context you're teaching in, but every teacher I've ever spoken to has a story or several stories to tell about unfairness, discrimination, prejudice. Definitely, there's issues in the industry with ethical behavior.Ross: Maybe, it's more important in teaching, for a lot of teachers that get into teaching, because it should be a net-positive profession. It might be different to some other higher-paying jobs that are more financially motivated, whereas teaching, very few people will get into it to make money, right?Dave: Oh, def.[laughter]Ross: Too late now.Dave: You can't.[laughter]Dave: Is it too late to change my...Ross: I think it is at this point, Dave. We want to play a little quote from David Brooks -- who's got a great book on this topic -- talking to Sam Harris.Sam Harris: What are the resume virtues and the eulogy virtues?David Brooks: The eulogy virtues and the resume virtues are things I, more or less, took from a guy named Joseph Soloveitchik, who was a rabbi in the mid-20th century. He said we have two sides of our nature.One side, which is about conquering the world and being majestic in it. Those are the resume virtues, the things that make us good at our job. Then the eulogy virtues are the internal side of ourselves, the things they say about us after we're dead, whether it's being courageous or honest, or capable of great love.We live in a culture that knows the eulogy virtues are more important. We all would rather be remembered for our character traits rather than our career, but we live in a culture that emphasizes the career parts. We're a lot more articulate about how to build a good career than how to build a good person.Our universities, in particular, are much more confident in talking about professional rise than a moral or spiritual rise.Ross: I would say that's probably also true in our industry, at least, in all the training courses I've worked on. I don't ever remember ethics or the ethics of education ever coming up on them. Obviously, we spend a lot of time talking about how to become a better teacher, but not better in terms of character, better in terms of ethics teacher.Dave: I would agree. It's interesting. I remember the old Greeks used to do several subjects like the triumvirate of rhetoric, logic, and ethics, because they saw it as inseparable from being able to lead a good life.Actually teaching ethics to the young citizens of the time was imperative. They would have thought it very strange not to do so. Yet, it's something missing. Well, I never got taught ethics. Probably why I am why I am now.[laughter]Ross: I thought we could start off with what are the ethics of charging people for education. Obviously, both you and I, pretty much our entire careers, we've worked a little bit in government schools at some point, but mainly it's been paying customers.What would you think are some of the ethical issues or problems there?Dave: Any ethical question, you have to look at all the variables behind it. You have to look at people's income, their wealth, what they are currently studying, government schools, their need, the company that's providing the education, its standards for their own teachers.I think that the context is inseparable. To say in general terms, it's quite tough.Ross: At least, I can see there being some advantages of having education in the private sphere rather than the public sphere. In theory at least, there should be more...In general, there should be more pressure on providers to deliver a better service, because you're getting all this pressure from your competitors.Dave: If government schools and services were perfect, there wouldn't be any need to have private education in the first place.Ross: I can see, maybe, the difficulty there. It's like who do you decide to sell to, or when do you decide not to sell things to people?I've had friends and colleagues who've worked especially with adults. People who they know can't afford an English course, or maybe they're working in a job where English is not going to benefit them very much, or they know that this person doesn't have the study skills. Most people are, maybe, encouraged to take out a large bank loan to pay for something.Dave: Even if the school or institution that's selling the courses, it depends if they do so ethically. If they have a different payment plan so you can pay monthly rather than in a yearly lump sum, which makes it more affordable. If they are offering to people who they think won't be able to complete it in time, or they have other pressures.Even how good their teaching is, which methodology do they follow? Is it up-to-date and evidence-based? If they follow an outdated system because it's easy to market, they'll definitely get more sales.Also, you need to look at the school's retention. What are their results? Can they show that they've helped learners to learn?Ross: You touched on something there, this idea of rewarding teachers for, for example, students signing on, re-signing contracts in private language schools, or demo conversions. Students come to a trial class and they've paid, or they've not paid.That, I think, is an interesting ethical question, of whether that is something that should be rewarded, obviously something that should be punished. Is that a good way of judging people?There is one side of that in that if your students have signed a year contract and they've stayed with you for a year, and they want to re-sign again. That probably does, in aggregate with a lot of people, say some positive things about you. Maybe, if they don't, it says some negative things about you.There's obviously another side to that as well. You're starting to judge teachers by how much money they're generating rather than how much learning they're generating.Dave: Precisely, because learning is such a long process. If a teacher is purely entertaining, they're going to get a very high re-sign rate. That doesn't mean learning happened.Learning is hard. You have to really think. You're perhaps frowning as you grasp a new concept. That is leading to a teacher not getting as high re-sign rate because the students don't want to think in class.The teacher could be technically brilliant and really adept at helping the students to learn. If that teacher is disincentivized from that behavior and think, "Well, actually I earn a decent salary. I enjoy where I'm living, and I want to stay." They could well change their behavior to increase whatever rate they might be being judged on, especially if it's a financial one.Ross: Then you can imagine that being a vicious circle as well, where you would promote the people that get those metrics rather than the metrics of learning, which are harder to measure. That reinforces that whole paradigm, doesn't it? That what we want is re-signs and money rather than learning.Dave: Precisely. This is a problem that I had years ago when I first became a DoS. Before all the technology that we're talking about, I was struggling with the idea of how to measure academic quality. It's really hard to do, because the only way you can do it, as far as I can see, is to directly observe it.We don't have any standard algorithm of what makes good teaching or what makes good learning, because it varies so much depending on the variables of the teacher and the students involved, that is only by direct observation you can see.It affects so many other business metrics within a school. It can affect sales. If you're doing class, you get referrals. It can affect your retention, your service department. You can measure it through the effect it has on other things, but that is a very tricky process and needs a lot of data.If you have a manager that's very business-focused, and you're an academic head, then trying to prove that becomes a real battle. I see that getting worse if the right things aren't measured. With online, with all the extra data coming in, people could well take the easy solution and make those simple correlations.Ross: It's like the old management saying, "What gets measured gets managed." It's a lot easier to measure re-signs or conversions than to measure learning, which is still a bit of an abstract idea and very, very difficult to actually assess.Dave: That's actually a Peter Drucker quote, and he has an extension to it which most people don't say, which is, "...but make sure you measure the right things."Ross: Ah.[laughter]Ross: Oh wow, there we go. Moving on, let's talk a bit about teachers. I know this is something that you wanted to talk about. Schools in general often ask teachers to do a lot of work, and preparation, and marking classes in their own time, right?Dave: If a school is upfront with how they pitch the job to teachers, then I think it's fine. I think a lot of schools don't mention what their expectations are of work upfront.They might say, "The job is this many hours per week for this salary." Then when the teacher starts work, they find out, "Oh, there are also office hours you have to attend. There are extracurricular activities you also have to be present for. There are team building activities which are compulsory." The list goes on. I'm sure [chuckles] our listeners can add a lot more to that.Suddenly, what was thought to be a 40-hour a week job turns into 60 or 70, when, as you say, you add in preparation, marking, and even the horrible situation where teachers are buying supplies from their own pocket as well.Ross: It's almost like schools are taking advantage of the good nature of teachers, of wanting to do good things for their students.I remember my dad, growing up, in my childhood, I remember him. So often the living room floor would be strewn with these cut-out bits of old exam papers which he was copying and pasting to turn into new tests for students that they hadn't had before.Maybe, teaching is different from other professions. Whereas if you're in sales or something and you're putting in many extra hours, you're probably doing that, partially at least, in the expectation that you're going to get more money. Whereas teaching doesn't have that.It's almost that the more you care about the students, the more time you're putting in, but you're not necessarily going to get any financial reward for that.Dave: There's a saying in England, in the NHS, they say it runs on goodwill. They do take advantage of the empathy that staff have. I do think that is very similar in the teaching profession as well.Ross: I also wanted to ask you about the idea of more and more surveillance in classrooms. When both you and I started teaching, there was very little oversight. Maybe, your DoS would come in and observe you. I don't know, for me once a year if I was lucky. Maybe, it could last.[laughter]Dave: That explains a lot, Ross.Ross: It does, doesn't it? Now in offline teaching you often have cameras in classrooms. Even more interestingly, in online teaching, you have not just cameras -- because obviously everything is on camera.Everything that you do in every single class can be watched back both by parents and the people measuring the quality of classes, and more and more companies investing in AI to monitor teacher behavior.Generally in public life, at least, people have a real aversion to facial recognition, whatever authority's using technology to track their behavior, their movements, and everything. I've not really heard anyone talking about this with teaching.I'm not sure if I was a teacher now, full-time, especially an online teacher, and I knew that everything I said was being recorded and monitored with AI. I'm not sure how comfortable I would be with that.Dave: First of all, the first thing that popped into my head there is the idea of privacy and intention. Privacy concerns from the students, and I'm assuming they would all sign waivers so that their recordings could be used and reused for training purposes, and shown to other people. That's where the intention comes in.If all this data is used with ethically-sound principles in mind, I can't see too much of an issue with it. If you're using it to improve their learning, to personalize resources, materials, and lessons, so they're better able to learn, then that is the positive side.Ross: It'll be interesting to see how that changes as the technology moves on and we get to a point when technology knows every single word you've said in every single class to every single student. There's a record of that. There's even a record of every single facial expression that you might have made in every single class. I think all that's coming.Dave: The immediate problem with that, though, is assuming good intentions. You could still run into pitfalls.If you have, say, the ability for AI to recognize engagement through facial expression --Will it be leaning forward in the chair, smiling, eye contact with the camera, however you judge those metrics? That's equated with a good class because they're engaged and more likely to re-sign. That's a business metric rather than a learning metric.A teacher's rewarded for that, then you could go back to the idea of edutainment. The teacher is encouraged to be entertaining rather than help the student to learn. Interestingly, that data could also be used in aggregate to see what really works and what really doesn't in teaching.That is very exciting, but it has this dark side which I think we need to be very careful of. I've not really heard any discussions or anywhere else about the potential pitfalls of this. It's really nice that you're raising people's awareness now.Ross: You heard it here first, folks. [laughs]Ross: Thanks for coming on again, Dave. Do you want to give the blog a quick plug?Dave: Sure. If you want to read more about these topics, then please visit www.barefootteflteacher.com.Ross: Great. Dave, thanks again for coming on.Dave: You're very welcome.

We speak with Mario Rinvolucri, author of “Vocabulary” and “Humanizing Your Coursebook”, how teachers can humanize vocabulary teaching. “Most of the vocabulary teaching that gets done is based on texts, written, audio, or video. The problem with this kind of text-based teaching is that everything is external to the learner: the text hits him or her from outside. It makes much better motivational sense to have the new words rise from a situation that is internal to the students, where they create the situation that ushers in the need for new words” - Mario RinvolucriRoss Thorburn: Hi, everyone. This week our guest is Mario Rinvolucri. We're going to be asking Mario about humanistic vocabulary teaching. All this comes from an article that Mario wrote, I think way back in the early 1980s about some of the problems in vocabulary teaching.Here's a little quote. Mario says, "In my experience, most of the vocabulary teaching that gets done is based on texts, be they written, audio, or video. The problem with this kind of text‑based teaching is that everything is external to the learner. The text hits him or her from the outside."He goes on to say, "It makes much better motivational sense to have new words rise from a situation that is internal to the students, where they create a situation that ushers in the need for new words." In this episode, I ask Mario about how to do that in class, how to make vocabulary teaching internal to the student.Mario, if you're not familiar with him, is a teacher and a teacher trainer at Pilgrims in Canterbury in the UK. He's also an author of dozens and dozens of wonderful teachers' books like "Grammar Games Once Upon a Time, Using Stories in the Language Classroom," "Humanising Your Course Book and Vocabulary." I can think of few people better placed to talk about this subject than Mario. I hope you enjoy the interview.Mario Rinvolucri: Hello, Ross.Ross: Hi, Mario. Thanks for joining us.Mario: OK.Ross: Mario, how do you want to start today?Mario: I'd like to start off with a little exercise which I would do if I was working with a group and do it with you. Can you see these utensils?Ross: Yes, I can.Mario: Spoon and a fork. Which would you prefer to be?Ross: I'll be the spoon, please, Mario. [laughs]Mario: You prefer to be a spoon. OK.Ross: Yeah.Mario: In a group, of course, different people would make their different decisions and then would pair off with other people. We're a forced pair. I'm going to be a fork. Yes, as a fork, I think of you as a bit passive. I actually hold the meat in place, which my owner can use his left hand holding. Then he can cut, and cut, and cut, etc., etc.Ross: I suppose this is true but I think as a spoon we're more flexible than forks, aren't we, in that you can use us with soup.Mario: That's true. I do think of myself as being overly choleric and aggressive as a fork. I realize that that can be a good thing, as I suggested at the beginning. It can also be a defect. You are inevitably condemned to a fairly aggressive, angry role, while a spoon is quite different. The other thing I think about you guys is that you spoons are completely universal.Ross: I wouldn't say completely universal. We definitely exist, at least in my experience, in Asia, as well as Europe, and in North America. Don't beat yourself up too bad about being aggressive. At least you're not a knife, are you? That would be the most aggressive role, wouldn't it?Mario: Yes, of course. I didn't choose a knife for that reason. It's automatically aggressive. Therefore, there's no such choice for people to do the role‑play. I wanted to start off with that exercise which comes from the work of Bernard Dufeu, the creator of "Linguistic Psychodramaturgy." I'm sorry for that horrible, long title that he gives it in French.It uses drama methods but with the aim of teaching language and not with the aim of making you a better personal or less lunatic. This exercise, if it works reasonably well and takes off, ought to allow you sitting in the middle of a room of which there will be maybe 10, to reach five or six different interlocutors and see yourself and the other people from different angles.What I wanted to do is to introduce at the very beginning the idea of imaginative role‑play. Hopefully, it may be something which is new to you. It has freshness. One of the problems of second‑language teaching is that we have to do again what we've already mastered brilliantly in one language, our mother tongue.Ross: You're saying there, Mario, that you don't always want what students do in the L2 to be what they can already do in their L1.Mario: Absolutely not. Also, to do what they already do in their first language but also to have a fresh aspect to the learning, fresh in terms of content and feeling.Ross: As I mentioned at the beginning of the show, obviously, one of the points of an exercise like this is that the students have a need for vocabulary. As a teacher, then, what are you doing while the students are doing this activity? Are you going around and correcting errors? Are you writing useful words on the board? How are you using this as an opportunity to help the students develop their vocabulary?Mario: Obviously, they need all sorts of vocabulary they don't have. This is a marvelous time for trying to teach them that. What I do do in those situations is I ask them to put a little piece of paper on the table in front of them. It either says, "Piss off," or it says, "Come when I call you," or it says, "You are free to look over my shoulder."It's very interesting when you do that with a class you would teach on a permanent basis. It's not always the same people who say, "Piss off." It depends on mood. It depends on the task.It's saying, especially, to teenage students, "Listen, guys, you know what you need. I'm not God. I can't see into your head and whether you want to be helped this morning or not. So, just tell me." If they, halfway through, decide to change what's on the label, that's fine too.Ross: Mario, that previous exercise you mentioned was from Bernard Dufeu. Do you have any other examples in a similar vein that you think help with students' vocabulary development?Mario: An exercise that he does a lot at the beginning of, especially, working with a big group, is what he calls a group mirroring exercise. I can try to do this with you. Est‑ce‑que vous parlez français?Ross: Je ne comprends pas.Mario: Je vais vous parler d'une rose. I'm going to talk to you about a rose. You, all the big group of you who are sitting there at the other side of the world, I would like you to simply follow my voice and say the same things.Ross: OK. If you're listening, you can join in.Mario: Une rose.Ross: Une rose.Mario: Une rose.Ross: Une rose.Mario: Oh, une belle rose.Ross: Oh, une belle rose.Mario: Ah, cette rose est merveilleuse.Ross: Ah, cette rose une belveilleuse.Mario: [indecipherable 07:00] épatante.Ross: Epatante.Mario: Ah, quelle belle rose.Ross: Quelle belle rose.Mario: Quelle belle rose.Ross: Quelle belle rose.Mario: Je veux la cueillir. Cueillir means to pick. Je veux la cueillir.Ross: Je veux la cueillir.Mario: Ay!Ross: Ay! [laughs]Mario: Ça me fait mal!Ross: Je me fais mal!Mario: Ça me fait mal! It's hurting me. Ça me fait très mal!Ross: Très mal.Mario: Du sang!Ross: Du sang.Mario: Du sang.Ross: Du sang.Mario: Etc., OK?Ross: [laughs]Mario: We could go on. It's a bit artificial with just one very bright human being. It's much easier to do with a whole group. What I'm doing here is difficult. I'm concentrating on you and the difficulties you have or don't have. I'm also concentrating on the rose.Ross: For people who can't see you, you're demonstrating the meaning through the actions here, aren't you?Mario: Of course. Through the action, I want you to know what you're doing. I want you to feel my pain in my finger. Otherwise, it doesn't work linguistically. It has to work imaginatively before it works linguistically.If it had been fully convincing to you, you would have disappeared into that dream of getting it pretty right. You already were getting it pretty right. Had you had people around you getting it righter, you know which people in your group have good pronunciation as a student.Ross: I guess the students are learning from each other as well as from the monologue the teacher's giving.Mario: Absolutely, yes. You can make a monologue into a dialogue if you so want. You can go one side and then the other.Ross: Mario, I wanted to ask you, how do you think teachers can combine some of these humanistic ideas for teaching vocabulary with using a coursebook, where a lot of the language is already set for the teachers by the person that wrote the book?Mario: I thought I might need to refresh my own memory of things. I brought along a book which is called "Humanizing Your Course Book." The concept came to me when I was wandering through a northern Italian town with a colleague, an Italian teacher. She said, "Mario, I've got a problem. I'm teaching the [indecipherable 09:16] book and I know that the listenings are good for my students.I know that sometimes, they're not making mistakes I make because of listening to proper English. So, I'm totally in favor of the coursebook I'm using. But, listen, I've been through this book four times now and I know the teacher's book better probably than the authors and I'm bored. What can I do?"I said, "Well, I don't know what you can do because you obviously respect the texts. You respect the presentation of grammar. You respect the phonological part. You're happy when it's for them but for them, it's first time except for the ones who have to do the year again, who are a minority."I then said, "Well, would it help if a methodology person had a look at what the authors of the coursebook have presented to you and offered alternative ways of working that course material?" She said, "That would be really helpful."Backed by her enthusiasm, I went to [indecipherable 10:26] and said, "Would you like me to write an alternative teacher's guide being very careful to acknowledge that you must use this book as the authors proposed first?" If you come to the third time through, how about looking at [indecipherable 10:43] your coursebook, which is what then was the substantiation of that idea. [indecipherable 10:49] told me to piss off in definite terms.I then was asked to do exactly that by a German publisher called Klett. There, I had Green Line, which is their coursebook. I simply went through and thought, "Well, what humanistic ideas could be floated through without being too shocking for teachers?"As [indecipherable 11:11] in Germany are pretty conservative. If you're not very careful, exercises like Spoon and Fork will be dismissed as [non‑English] , which means utter rubbish. Can I look through to the section on reading and simply read you...?Ross: Of course.Mario: They're very short these rubrics. This is called "Collective Picture." "Preparation, select a set of concrete nouns and verbs from the first three units of the coursebook." Going back to revise, not last week's work but six month ago's work, because a revision can't only be of yesterday's stuff. "Write about 30 of these words on slips of paper. Hand out one slip of paper to each student."I'm thinking a class of 30 here, OK? "Explain that you are going to ask the class to draw a collective picture on the board. Ask each student to come to the board and draw the word from their slip of paper. The idea is to get all the items into a coherent picture. The picture for a verb will be the picture for the verb happening. Do the exercise without speaking.Don't intervene. Let the students produce the collective picture they want. Then ask the class to name all the things in the picture and their parts." So, roots, for example, or leaves, or whatever. "Get students to write the words in. Individually, the students copy the drawing and the words."Ross: So good to hear of an exercise that lets students review what they've already done but not just maybe from last week but maybe from the last two or three units of the book. I guess, also, you could do the opposite, as well and look forward to things that are going to happen in future chapters of the book.So often we get obsessed with meeting the aim of this lesson rather than helping students consolidate and move things into their long‑term memory that they've already covered in class.Mario: You want to visit a country. The coursebook is the country. If it's six weeks ago you went to Edinburgh, then it's quite reasonable to ask you to go back to Edinburgh in your head and be in that area of the country.A lot of teachers think about now in the coursebook work, tomorrow in the coursebook work, and yesterday in the coursebook work. No, why don't you do an exercise which foresees something which will come up later? Who told you you have to use them in order?

Marek talks with us about the discrimination non-native English teachers face in finding jobs, being promoted and being respected in general.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

We ask Mark Hancock (author of Pronunciation Games, English Pronunciation in Use and Pron Pack) what makes authentic English listening so difficult for students and what teachers can do to help learners understand connected speechFor more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Ross Thorburn: Hi, Mark. Thanks for joining us. To start off with, what is connected speech? What makes it difficult for students? Is there ever a time when we speak English where we're not using connected speech?Mark Hancock: Well, if you imagine an old fashioned robot saying, "Salt and pepper, salt and pepper, I want the salt and pepper." That's English with no connected speech about it. Each word is separate, as if it were the dictionary version of the word.Salt and pepper, actually used that as an example. Salt and pepper, we've got the t of salt appears to join the and, salt and pepper, t and pepper, t and pepper, salt and pepper. That's called linking. You've got the a of the and is reduced to a weak vowel. Salt and pepper. So that's called a weak form.Then you've got the d of and disappears, that's called elision. Instead of ‘and’ you've got ‘n’. Then finally, the ‘n’ of and changes into something like a ‘m’. Because if the ‘p’ in pepper involves the lips being closed together. In preparation for that when the mouth is saying ‘n’, it tends to want to say ‘m’, so that it's ready for the pepper that comes later.That's called assimilation. Those are all examples of connected speech. As you can probably tell that they are features for the benefit of the mouth, like the n changing to m is not so that I'm going to be more intelligible to you, so it's easier for me to say it. These features of connected speech are about streamlining the articulation.Ross: Obviously, there's lots of things there that are really hard for students in terms of listening to connected speech. I think often when we do listening activities in class, the way we run them, maybe doesn't actually help students very much, right?Mark Hancock: Yeah. It's interesting that in teaching listening, teachers often assume that the problem is going to be with difficult vocabulary or difficult grammar, and they pre‑teach the new vocabulary in the listening. Then they focus on listening comprehension questions.If the students get them wrong, just play their audio again and say, "No, no, no, listen again. Do you hear it now?" If a student goes, "No, I don't hear it still." It's nothing to be done about it. What the teacher is missing here is that the problem wasn't with the long words.The problem was with the short words or the common words that the student is not familiar with, in the connected speech form. For example, in connected speech, there are five words which may be reduced to homophones, like the word a, the. I can't say it right now, but there's a lot of different words end up sounding exactly the same.If this student is expecting them to sound the way that they sound in the dictionary or said separately, then they're not going to be ready for that, what they're not ready for is the way that the words blend together.What we can do I think is, devote some class time to focusing specifically on the way that words blend together in connected speech for the purpose of making the students better equipped as listeners.Ross: As part of the problem there, Mark, that when we teach new words or phrases, we tend to drill them in a way that sounds a bit more like Robby the robot saying salt and pepper, rather than saying salt‑and pepper.Mark Hancock: I think your student is probably going to store it in their memory in something like a dictionary citation form. You're saying that that might be a problem because when they hear it in the flow of speech, it might not have that form.I think you could probably do it in two stages. In the first stage, they would learn it as a separate form in the case of a word like salt. Then in separate stage, learn how it sounds in a joined up way, think it might be a bit much to do it all at once. However, with other words, which are typically reduced, like, and.I probably wouldn't teach the word and in a citation form because it's never cited on its own. It's always in the flow of speech. It depends on the word really. Another example for a longer word would be actually. Actually is rarely, if ever, pronounced the way I just did it then.It's something like a discourse marker and it can be heavily reduced to things like act‑ly, or in the flow of speech. That was actually very easy. It's actually quite a good idea.Some words are more reduced than others, and actually is one of them because it's not used in its literal meaning necessarily. It's used something more like a discourse marker. You would need to make students aware of the way that words like that tend to be severely reduced.Ross: I guess also it's difficult for teachers to know how these words are actually pronounced in connected speech because dictionaries don't actually have this information in them. There's also no pronunciation equivalent of a corpus to see how language is actually pronounced in real speech.Mark Hancock: It's difficult to find out. In fact, it's not really been dealt with systematically before, until now we have the work of Richard Caldwell. He has started to work trying to systematically focus on the way in which words are eroded in connected speech. They're much more eroded than following the rules that I just mentioned before about linking, weak forms, assimilation, illusion.Those are relatively minor compared to some of the forms of the words that are reduced in natural, fast speech. He has started to work on systematizing our understanding of the ways that these words are reduced. Yeah, you're right. This material is not easily available. In fact, it hasn't been seen as a need, anything that was needed before.People haven't really been aware of it. I guess the people who speak the language aren't really aware of it because we don't hear objectively. We hear what we expect to here. When people hear something like, act‑ly, the mind fills in the gap, so it sounds like they're hearing actually. They're not aware that it could be problematic for the non‑native listener.It is problematic for the non‑native listener of course, because what the evidence they're getting through their ears is much reduced. They probably think it's their own fault for not having good hearing, whereas in fact, it's the speaker who is reducing it that way.Ross: What can teachers do then, Mark, to help raise students' awareness of connected speech, so that they can understand more when they're listening to authentic audio?Mark Hancock: Although the purpose of this is for listening as I've said, I do think the best way of raising awareness of these features for listening purposes, is through getting students to try to say them, to say articulate them that way themselves.I use various kinds of drilling, coral drilling or individual drilling to get the students saying these pieces of connected speech, so that they become hyper aware of the way that they sound, because there's nothing more awareness‑raising than attempting to do it yourself. You could take a short phrase like salt and pepper again, salt and pepper, salt and pepper.If you run repeat Multiple times that very short section or even shorter sections. Let's try it. I'll go, tmpepper, tmpepper, tmpepper, tmpepper, tmpepper, tmpepper, tmpepper, tmpepper, tmpepper, tmpepper, tmpepper, tmpepper, tmpepper, tmpepper. I've taken a part of that phrase, not necessarily complete word.I've taken the t out of salt and added it to the rest of the and pepper. I put it on a loop, repeating it. If you do that, put it on a loop. It makes it sound weird, because it stopped sounding like the meaning of it and starts just sounding like a piece of sound. It helps I think, the listener to perceive the way it sounds rather than the way they expect it to sound.I use quite a lot, this kind of micro loop with multiple repetitions of a very short segment, getting students to try saying it that way themselves, and it's quite good fun. It really raises their awareness of connected speech as well. That's a technique, micro drilling.Ross: You've obviously written a whole books on activities for students to practice pronunciation. What are some other activities that you like to do to help students become more aware of connected speech?Mark Hancock: An activity that I use for drilling to focus the students' attention on features of connected speech, is something I call bricks and mortar. That's a metaphor. The bricks are the content words, and the mortar are the grammar or functional words that go between the bricks and tend to be crushed and misshapen.In order to take the attention off the content words, I have just replaced the content words with numbers. I say the one, two, three, four with the different segments of connected speech you stuff in between and get the students to listen and then try to produce. For example, one or a two or a three or a four, one and a two and a three and a four, one and a two and a three and a four.That's the easier level getting more difficult. Things like, one has been two has been three has been four, one must be two must be three must be four. One could be two could be three could be four.Then students would have to notice things like the t in must, tends to be inaudible or elated, cut dropped, or the d in could, will sound like a b, coulb, could be one could be two. That kind of thing.That's a very simple activity. Easy to invent your own version of it. Just have one, two, three, four and any segment between that you think might be tricky for the students listening. You can drill it and that way you saying the phrase and then repeating. That's a simple activity, to focus these students' attention, not on the content words, but on the function words that go between them.Ross: Finally, Mark, when do you integrate pronunciation activities into a class? Like for you, where do you put them in a lesson plan or in your stages of a lesson?Mark Hancock: That's interesting because I just finished a intensive month at the school here in Chester, where I live doing a full‑time summer program. We have to go through the course books. The course books tend to have very little space left over for our pronunciation, as you may have noticed.What I found was really interesting, was to flip the presentation phase of the lesson. Let's say that your main point of the lesson was some grammar construction. Then afterwards, there'll be some example sentences pulled out and they might be listening repeat the pronunciation right at the end.I have took them out at the beginning and wrote them on the board these example sentences before we even analyze the grammar or anything.I did some of this pronunciation work, like doing these looped repetitions and this drilling work, focusing on the pronunciation of those three or four example sentences very thoroughly, and getting the students completely familiar with them before they studied the grammar.Then when you kick into the lesson, there is already three dimensional pieces of language. They've already got a mental trace of how it sounds. When they come to study the grammar in it, as in the course book, they're already old friends. It seems so natural to do it that way around.Yeah, flipping the presentation, instead of leaving the pronunciation to an afterthought, put it right at the beginning and bring the language alive. Make it three dimensional for the student before you go into the more cerebral grammar exploitation of the language.

We talk about why performance reviews get a bad reputation, why they’re not all bad and what teachers and managers can do to get the most out of them.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Tracy Yu: Hello, everybody. Welcome to our podcast today. We've got our guest, Matt Courtois. Hey, Matt.Matt Courtois: Hey, guys. How's it going?Tracy: Good. Today what we're going to talk about, Ross?Ross Thorburn: What's one of my pet peeves? I think it's one of the things that's most commonly done badly ‑‑ performance reviews and performance appraisals.Tracy: OK. I think that's maybe two sides, right? One is for the manager who are going to do the performance appraisal with the employee, and they may feel nervous or are probably not doing the right way. Also, the employee feel nervous about how they are going to be told.Ross: Yeah, it's kind of like that thing, isn't it? It's like everyone's dreading it more than everyone else.Matt: I don't know. You gave me performance appraisals. I don't know if you felt this or not, but I was always...I don't want to say nervous, but I am.Ross: You had good reasons to be.[laughter]Matt: I was always close to getting angry, I think, at a performance appraisal. I was in a defensive state of mind when going into the performance appraisal always. It's not just you. It happened before you as well.Ross: Thanks. I was feeling really guilty.[laughter]Tracy: OK. There are three questions and the first one ‑‑ what is performance review and why do we do it? Second?Ross: How can managers make performance reviews worthwhile?Matt: How can employees make performance reviews worthwhile?[music]Tracy: OK. Why do we need to do performance reviews? It seems a rule and yet a lot of companies, especially for the annual performance review. Then the manager and employee sit together and discuss how much salary is going to be increased for next year.Ross: Not necessarily. I think that's one thing that can happen, but I think it is most basic. It's just a thing where you can give someone feedback every year or every six months. Companies have built into their program that everyone's going to get feedback once a year. Even if you've got the worse manager ever that never gives you feedback, that's going to happen at least once a year.Matt: Performance appraisals have always been one of my pet peeves. You mentioned earlier that it's one of your pet peeves, but the way you just described it sounds like a decent thing. What is it that you have against performance appraisals?Ross: I think if you're a good manager, they're completely pointless. You should just be giving people feedback all the time. I think that's one thing. I think the second thing is what Tracy meant is it's like your performance gets tied to your salary.There's a quote, I think it's from this guy called Peter Schultz, and he says that...and I'm paraphrasing here, "We use tools to measure people's performance that are so rough, we wouldn't use them to weigh out vegetables in a supermarket."There's one more thing I wanted to mention why I dislike performance reviews. One common thing that happens is the employee or the teacher in this case. You have to rate yourself. How good do you think you did on these points?The manager also has to rate the same person, and it always results in conflict, because people always think that they are better than they are. Here's a little clip from Sam Harris's podcast. This is him discussing this same cognitive bias.Sam Harris: People assume that they are reliably doing what even the best of the experts are doing.Tristan Harris: This is kind of related to the Dunning Kruger effect, and some variation of that everyone is more. What was it like 90 percent of people think they're better than average drivers?Sam Harris: Yeah. I think the stat that reveals that this moves into a fairly high level of education, at least, is I think it is 95 percent of college professors think that they're above average professors.Tristan Harris: It's just the universal ways that will overestimate something or that we would assume that we have the moral or cognitive moves that everybody else has.Ross: You can hear from that that everyone's sort of like pre‑programmed to think that they're better than they are. Which probably has some advantages day‑to‑day that probably makes people feel more confident, but when you get into this kind of rating thing and performance reviews, then it's going to cause a conflict.Matt: I remember in one of my first performance appraisals in my last company, one of the categories was attendance. It was on a spectrum from terrible to excellent, and I was marked as average. I hadn't missed a single day of work. I've never been late. I've never left early. I was always there for the entire shift, and I was marked as average.I mentioned this to my manager, and she was like, "Yeah, that's what we expect of you. So you're in the middle."[laughter]Ross: You're outstanding.Matt: Yeah. How can you have...? There's this conflict that didn't...If I missed a class, you would think the manager would come to me right then and there and say, "You've got to get to work. Come to class. Don't miss class again."Ross: You don't need to wait six months to tell someone.Matt: Yeah. Even if you did deal with it at that point, what's the value in six months later, revisiting all your tenants, "Remember that one time six months ago?" There's no value in that. It's just beating a dead horse.Tracy: I think that's a very important thing for performance review, remember it's not just happened once a year, and it should be constant. Like you mentioned early on, if you give the feedback in six months' time, and it's not meaningful anymore, random people probably already forgot or changed the behavior during this period of time.Usually, for a middle‑sized company, there should be four times feedback or review with employee ‑‑ at least twice about job planning and then twice about feedback, before the annual performance review.Matt: I have seen value in having a performance appraisal because you set your goals for the next six months. It gives you some longer‑term direction on what you want to do beyond what are you doing this week. I do see some value in that.Ross: Absolutely. I think there are some things that can be good in this. I think you pointed at one, right? That you can clarify the expectations like, "These are the things that we expect you to do." Another useful thing about it is that people expect them to happen. It's almost like a sign of professionalism.If you're in a company that doesn't do performance reviews, most people would interpret that as being, "This is not very professional at fit."Matt: I do think it would be awkward for your manager to come out of the blue and, for no reason, talk about your career aspirations. I do think having some formality, and some process to this conversation is really helpful.Tracy: It's always useful for the managers to find out what kind of support you can give to the employee. Because for different reasons, maybe you are not very clear about what the needs of the employee. During the conversation, you can find out and give specific support to this person.Matt: Every performance review I did within my last round, I had this spiel that I said at the beginning of everyone that is kind of like this where I was saying, "Day to day as a manager, you know what I expect of you." We talked about it every day.If you mess up, or if there's some mistake, we deal with it then, but we don't ever have the conversation about what your expectations are of me and of the company. This is a good opportunity where you're saying what you value here. "Do you feel undervalued? What don't you enjoy?" Stuff like that. I think it's cool to give them that platform to talk about their aspirations and stuff.[music]Ross: Let's talk about what managers can do to give good performances. Maybe I can start with an example of something cool that my ex‑boss did was when I was a manager at the time. He would email all the people that reported to me and ask them about 5 or 10 questions about how easy is it to communicate with Ross. Do you feel you get enough support from him?Then we just got through face to face with the answers. It was really interesting getting that feedback because people don't often tell you that what you're doing that's annoying them. If someone asks, then they maybe will tell you, and then the opposite's also true that you do it's nice to hear, "Oh, this thing that you do for these people, they really, really appreciate that."Matt: I bet the entire time that you're going through that performance review, you were thinking, "Did Matt say this about me? Was that Tracy?" That's how I would be reacting. [laughs]Ross: You just say, "Oh, this person said this about you. This person said this about you." I think what he would do in that situation is he would say, "Let me know if you want any of your comments to be anonymous." In my experience doing this as well, because most people were quite happy.Tracy: I think for that situation, it's just like the people who are asked the questions were pretty honest and transparent. They respect this value of passing on the feedback to that person. I'm sure in a lot of environments, probably people still kind of worry about if they're probably going to be punished or losing their job and everything.Ross: I do know someone that happened to. They gave feedback on their manager, and it was meant to be anonymous. The manager found out, and the person got fired.Matt: No. [laughs] Really? That's awful.Ross: I think you obviously need to tempo what you're saying to a certain extent.Tracy: I think my experience I want to share something that could be improved is during the performance review. There were a lot of things seems very surprising for me. For example, I wasn't very clear about what the company or my manager expect from me, and I was, "Oh, OK. I really didn't know that." Clearly, at the very beginning, the goal or expectations wasn't set very clearly.Maybe what I was doing, I try to spend a lot of time and efforts my manager or company didn't recognize at the end.Ross: I think that comes down to the setting up of the review. That should be the beginning of the process. You talk about here is what we expect from you. This is what you're going to get reviewed on, at the very beginning.I think so often, that doesn't happen. I have even been asked to write what I'm going to get reviewed on the day before the review.[laughter]Matt: That's the goal‑setting we were talking about before, right? That can be useful to have you write your own. What are you going to be reviewed on six months and then for the next six months? You're working on these things, and it comes from you.Tracy: It's like planning of the lesson. Find the learning gap. You know what the students they've already know, and they're good at and then what is the lesson objective. Find out the learning moments, and then these are the achievable goals or target language for the students. I think for employee, probably something similar, right?Ross: I like that analogy, isn't it? It's almost like if you sign up for an English course, and then there's certain things that you probably have to learn or decided on by the coursebook, but there's still kind of room to negotiate, isn't there? To suit the students' individual preferences and I think it's the same with the employees.[music]Ross: We talked a bit about what managers can do there, but not everyone's blessed with having a great manager. If you're a teacher, what can you do to make sure that you get the most out of your annual review with your boss?Tracy: I think the first thing is when you started the job and probably good to talk to your manager. How many times or how frequently you want to get feedback from him or her. At least then they have an idea, "Oh, actually, this person won't want me to give feedback."Ross: I did that the last time I started a new job at the halfway point of my probation. It was at three months, I said, "Hi, can we sit down and talk about how my probation is going? I want just you to go through what you think's going well, what you think is not going well, and any other tips you think that are going to help me meet your expectations."Matt: Like I said before, I'm one of those employees who does get defensive going into a performance review. I try not to react strongly in that meeting room. I just note stuff down and let it sit for a day or two. Then I think, coming at it from a less defensive perspective, I think I can let some of that feedback get a little bit better.A couple of days later, reevaluate again. You can get a lot out of it.Tracy: The reflection ‑‑ it's probably the most important and useful stage after the conversation between the employee and manager. You really need to take some time to sit down and how could you learn from this experience, and what you'd do to make it better.Ross: To play devil's advocate to that, though, it depends on your goal. If your goal is to get some information that's going to help you develop, then great, maybe it is a good idea to sit back and take notes and everything.But if you really want to go in and you want to negotiate, to get a pay rise, then maybe it is best to be defensive and go, "Hey, I can actually show you 10 other situations when that's not the case."Matt: I think also, if you're an employee who is receiving feedback on their performance review and you feel blindsided by it, you clearly don't have good communication with your manager. I think sitting down in that room, that once every six months is in some ways, you can establish that back and forth.I wouldn't get defensive, but I think you can say whenever people are criticizing you. You can say well, like, "What's the way that we can avoid this in the future." I'd appreciate it if when that happens if we can deal with it then and there, rather than six months later. Then maybe you can look at repairing a relationship with your manager.[music]Tracy: OK. Thanks, everybody, and see you next time. Thanks, Matt.Matt: Cheers.

What is reflection? How does it benefit teachers? And how can trainers encourage effective reflection? We discuss with Ben Beaumont to find out...For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. This week our guest is Ben Beaumont, TESOL qualifications manager at Trinity College, London. If you've done a qualification before, like the Trinity CertTESOL or the Trinity Diploma in TESOL, those qualifications are managed by Ben.Ben in the past has also worked as a CELTA trainer and he's currently studying his doctorate into the effect of English medium of instruction on lecturers in higher education.I spoke with Ben when he was in Shanghai recently, and we talked about teacher qualifications and reflection, reflective practice, reflexive practice, and how trainers can encourage those skills in their trainees.Ross: I thought I could start off by asking about teacher qualifications, because...Ben Beaumont: What I do think?Ross: Yeah. What's been your personal experience with doing teacher qualifications?Ben: They've helped me a lot. My undergraduate degree was in English Language and Linguistics, so I learned about phonetics and phonology, and that led me to having an interest in teaching.I went out to Japan for two years. I was an unqualified teacher working as an assistant English language teacher at a senior high school in Japan.I didn't have any qualifications, but I did have subject knowledge, and I noticed I was lacking in a skill. Then, when I went back to the UK and did my CertTESOL, I learned what I was missing.There were skills that a teacher has that someone who isn't a teacher doesn't have. The course enabled me to learn those skills. I then thought I was a good teacher. I had some skills, and I had some subject knowledge.I taught for a couple of years. I then went on to do my Delta. I thought I was a good teacher. That showed me that I wasn't actually a good teacher.By doing the qualification, I learned more about what I should be doing. I know "should" is a difficult word, but it enabled me to analyze mine and others' teaching, which had a cyclical effect of just making me better and better and better as a teacher.It was a case of "You're teaching like this. Think about it. How does it work with the class you're teaching?" It made me be quite evaluative and reflective on my teaching, which then in turn made me better.Ross: Do you want to talk a bit more about those skills to reflect? What are they, and how does a trainer help a teacher getting those skills? Because it does seem to be almost more like a personality characteristic, isn't it?You're a reflective person, rather than maybe a specific skill that you might think people can learn.Ben: Some might say if you're more introverted or extroverted, as to whether or not you think more about yourself or other people, and so on. Some people have more of a natural aptitude at it than others, but I think it is something that can be learnt, because I wasn't very good at it. Now I am, I would like to think, fairly good at it.There's definitely a piece about self-awareness, and I think there's a piece about maturity there as well. The more self-aware you are in relation to your context and your fellow human beings, I think that helps.There are of course loads of different models that you can follow to be reflective. Kolb's reflective cycle. It's a very concrete experience. What went wrong? Why did it go wrong? Change it for next time. Gibbs, he talks about adding in an emotional element.There's Brookfield's four lenses, where you look at yourself from your own point of view, from a colleague's point of view, from your students' point of view, and from a theoretical literature point of view. Think, "If my colleague was watching this lesson, what would they think?"Or, "If I was that student, student X, how would they look at my lesson?" Or, "If I was Bruner or Vygotsky watching this, how would they look at my lesson through a constructivist lens?" Doing those activities, it helps you become more aware of how different people will see doing different things.I think raises that self-awareness which makes you think, "Actually, I thought that was a really good lesson, but then X student probably thought it was a rubbish lesson. Then somebody else probably thought it was an even better lesson and the best lesson they ever saw."It's all very subjective, and you start to appreciate the subjectivity. I think yes, some people are like that naturally, but it can be encouraged through using different models of reflection or simply by Socratic method. Just by asking questions.At a CertTESOL CELTA level, that's what happens on the reflection form at the end of a teaching session. What went wrong? What went well? What didn't go well? What do you plan to do next time? Those questions. Those questions are mirroring the Kolb or Gibbs level of reflection.The TESOL delta level, hopefully you're going through something a bit more, bringing in emotional elements. You're bringing in theoretical elements. It's up to the trainer very much to guide the trainee, the course participant.Just as you can't expect anyone to know something they haven't been taught, it's imperative and inherent in the role of the trainer to be able to ask the types of questions which follow the kind of models of Brookfield or whoever to guide the course participant, the teacher to make that reflection.Ross: Is that kind of Vygotsky type thing, where the trainees can't quite get there themselves, but the trainer is asking these questions and pushing the person a bit beyond that.Ben: Absolutely. You've mentioned Vygotsky, you got the ZPD, the Zone of Proximal Development, and where the teacher is, or the learner, whoever it is, and you need to help them move on. Or you might, you're on this scaffolding.What questions do we ask to scaffold that learning, to make it move to this, where you are now, plus one? If you ask a question which is too high, then of course, let's say a plus two type question, intelligence plus two, then whoever it is -- the teacher, the learner -- isn't going to get there.Ross: You're moving them beyond the zone of proximal [inaudible 6:38]. It's too far.Ben: Exactly, and it's a really important skill for a trainer to be able to develop. You said in another conversation we had earlier, if you could have one sentence about teaching, it would be...actually, tell me what it was.Ross: [laughs] I think it was like ascertain where the learner is and teach them accordingly, something like that.Ben: Exactly, and it's the same thing for the trainer. Find out where the teacher is, and train them accordingly. For some, they'll be at a basic level of Kolb or Gibbs reflective cycle, and some might be at a much deeper level and able to understand reflexive practice instead of reflective practice, and that's why you can push them that far.[music]Ross: Did you want to talk about that, and a bit about going through that reflection, how does that then impact maybe the teachers' thought processes when they're in the class?Ben: I think teachers know, when they're teaching, and I think you were alluding a bit to Schon, I guess, reflection in action and reflection on action. When you're in a class and you know that something is going well or not going well and you have that horrible feeling inside when a class or an activity isn't going well, and you just want it to stop.Or you just want to change it, but you don't know how to change it. If you can change it and make an intervention, brilliant, why we call it reflection in action. You think, "OK, this has gone wrong. I'm going to do it now and change it."Whereas after the class, it might take a bit of time to think about it, discuss it, under a Socratic dialogue model, talk about it with a colleague, with a peer, with a knowing other. Then reflect on what happened and think about, "Well, next time, how can I change that?"Ross: How do those two interact? Is it a case of you ideally want people to be the reflecting in action, where they're able to solve the problems in real time, and the reflection on action is, "Well, how did I not manage to make that happen?" Or is it more complex than that?Ben: It's probably more complex. I know that the thinking about Schon's reflection in action and on action, there's some debate about exactly what is "in action," and what is "on action."It's perhaps saying that in action is when it happens, and on action is afterwards, is perhaps a little simplistic. For the purposes of discussion, I think it's OK to talk about it like that.Yes, we do want teachers to be able to reflect in action, but there are some times there's just not the cognitive processing ability of the teacher to be able to do that.To give an example, when a student asks you a tricky question and says, "Teacher, why do we say X, Y, Z?" First thing you say as a teacher is, "Good question."Ross: [laughs] Ask me after class.Ben: "Ask me after class." One technique. The other one is, "Good question," and you pause. "Let's just get some examples on the board." You say good question. Why do you say good question? Why do you say let's get some examples on the board?You turn to the board, and you start to write some examples. The students give you examples, you write them on the board. When I'm at the board, I'm no longer looking at the students. I no longer have 10 pairs of eyes staring at me, waiting for an answer.I'm at the board and I'm just writing. Whereas my mind is furiously processing something and coming up with the answer to answer the student's question. I just need that time to think. When you're in a classroom, sometimes you don't have that time to think.You're standing in front of a group of 10, 20, 30 people. They're all looking at you wanting an answer, and you're trying to arrange a class, arrange your activities, think about what's next, think about what happened, how to respond. There isn't that cognitive ability to process it all.Sometimes we need to make the cognitive space. Cognitive breathing room, we might say, in order to reflect in action. Sometimes it's just not possible. Where it's not possible, then we might do it afterwards. It might be reflection on action, when you have that space to think about it.Ross: In terms of getting teachers to reflect in action, I've sometimes heard about trainers doing things in the class, while the teacher is teaching, to prompt the teacher maybe to do something.You're echoing, or look at the student in the back row, their clothes are on fire, or whatever it is. What do you think about that? Is that something in action? Is that something that trainers can prompt teachers to do, or is it...?Ben: I think that depends very much on what the trainer believes is an effective training method. Some trainers like to have a fourth wall, to borrow from the theater stage expression, where you go to the theater, action takes place on the stage, you pretend the audiences isn't there.Similar kind of thing. In a classroom, you're teaching the class, but then behind, off the stage, you've got the trainer watching. You pretend they're not there, but actually they are there, so this pretend situation. Is it a pretend situation that the observer, the assessor, whatever, is at the back, not interacting, or do they...How much do they lend a hand?I've heard of classes where a trainer will get up, tell the teacher to re-instruct, in a live class. There are problems with that. I have big issues with that, because I think that removes the autonomy, the power of the teacher. But it depends on the needs of the teacher or the trainee.I've had a situation where a trainee has just frozen in front of a class and I've had to take over for them while they recover and just get their stuff back together, and then they can carry on.Except in those serious situations, I'd probably say try not to be overly interventionalist. You've got to respect the teacher's role in front of the class. You don't want them to lose the trust of the students. However, saying that, you also don't want them to do rubbish stuff. It's a balancing act.Ross: You have two sets of learners, don't you? There's the students. You don't want them to have an awful experience, which means that you want the teaching to be good. But also, the teacher's a learner. You don't want to impact on their learning experience.Ben: Indeed. Just as we might say with a student, if there's some kind of discussion and the student makes an error, do you stop them straightaway mid-discussion and say, "You've made an error. Fix this." Or, "You've made the error, what's the right thing?" You've interrupted that natural flow of dialogue.Then, they start again. You say, "Oh no, you've made another error. You've made another error." Slowly, what you're doing is preventing that learner from being fluent. They stop and they hesitate, and they look at you, "Am I doing it right? Am I not doing it right?" They lose the fluency, the confidence in being able to speak.I believe that's very much the same way for the teacher. You keep interrupting the teacher and saying that, "You've done it wrong, do it this way. You've done it wrong, do it this way." The teacher is always going to be trying to second-guess the trainer at the back of the room. They're going to lose their fluency of teaching. They're not going to have that confidence.Teaching, like speaking, requires a great deal of confidence to carry it through and help the students. Of course, it does depend on the role of that person, that trainer or assessor at the back of the room. Is the person there for evaluation? Are they there for guidance or support?The role of the trainer at the back of the room will very much depend on the type of interventions they have with the teacher, if any.If there is going to be some intervention, that should be made absolutely clear with the teacher, beforehand, so the teacher knows, "OK, this trainer is going to interrupt if they think there's something bad." Then they know it's not going to be a problem.Ross: Once again, that was Ben Beaumont, TESOL qualifications manager at Trinity College, London. Hope you enjoyed the show, and see you again next time.

How do our experiences as students affect our attitudes about teaching? What's missing from teacher training courses? What would a training course including attitude and awareness look like?For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Ross Thorburn: Alan, I've heard you say before that teacher training, too often, maybe focuses on skills and knowledge at the expense of attitude and awareness. Why is it that attitude and awareness tend to get neglected in teacher training?Alan Maley: Why are they neglected? Well, because they're more difficult, I think. I say easy, it's not easy. It's relatively easy to concentrate on knowledge, because knowledge is knowledge, and you can transmit it in some senses.It's relatively easy to develop basic pedagogical skills. When you come to the area of attitudes, and things like that, then it is obviously much more nebulous, if you like. People veer away from it because it's not so easy. That's one reason, anyway.One of your questions here is, why are experiences a good starting point for personal and professional growth?My answer to that is, where else would you start? If I can just digress a moment. At the moment, I'm editing a new book for the British Council, which should come out later this year. It's called, "Developing Expertise Through Experience."It's based on Phabhu's idea of the teacher's sense of plausibility. In other words, whatever you do, however you train a teacher, whatever training they undergo, they make of it what they make of it.In other words, they don't just replicate it, they incorporate it somehow into their own existing frameworks of beliefs and values, and so on. According to Prabhu, this is not something you do once, you go on doing it.You're constantly, in a way, mediating whatever comes in through the lens of your own values, presuppositions, and experience. Would this work with my law in my class? If so, how would it work? Then modifying whatever input in the light of that.This book that I'm doing has got 20 people worldwide. Most of them, quite well‑known, reflecting on their own career paths, and the people who have influenced them, the ideas that have influenced them, the experiences that have influenced them.There's a very interesting texture of stuff there. One of the interesting things to come out of this is how important early experiences were even before going into a classroom, or becoming a teacher.Early experiences with language, for example. People who've grown up in a household where three or four languages are used or, at least two. People who have had interesting learning experiences. People who have had disappointments, as well, and what kind of disappointments.If I can give you an example from my own experience. Well before I ever knew that I was going to be a language teacher, I was in a primary school in England. We had, at that time, a test, which was called the 11‑plus, taken around about the age of 11. This was one of these psychometric tests, multiple choice, and all the rest of it.This was an important test because it decided whether you would go on into the stream of education that would take you eventually to higher education, or you went into the other one, which meant you went into the rubbish bin. I failed this exam, this test. I had no idea what it was even. The test failed me. I didn't fail the test.That affected my view of testing, quite profoundly, and still does. Because after being failed, I went on to get a scholarship to Cambridge. Now, either there's something wrong with the test or there's something wrong with me, and I don't think there's anything wrong with me.These are profound influences that happen to us and affect the way that we view things. There are others. There are many positive things, as well. When I was learning French at school, I had a genius as a teacher, and he arranged to me to go on an exchange when I was only 12 years old.The place that I went to in France, nobody spoke a single word of English. For a month, I had to either sink or swim, and I swam. That was a profoundly influential moment for me because it was opening a window on the world I had no conception of before.A lot of these people who are writing in the book that I was talking about are also telling stories about their earlier times before they even became teachers.What I'm getting at, I suppose, is that our sense of plausibility is based on a whole series of experiences that we've undergone. We mediate whatever comes to us later in the light of this.Ross: I suppose that no teacher starts their career as a blank slate, do they? Because everyone has this experience of being a student.Alan: I think we need to pay more heed, perhaps, to previous experience and to validate it. People, as you say, they're not coming into teacher training as blank slates. They have already got a lot of experience, of one kind or another. Discussing that can be very helpful.Ross: To go back to the teacher's sense of plausibility that you mentioned earlier, is there a similar thing there with teaching? Maybe, students don't always learn what the teacher teaches. Is this teacher's sense of plausibility a similar idea in that the trainee teachers don't necessarily learn what their trainer trains?Alan: Yeah, I suppose so. It goes for any learning experience, doesn't it? Whether it's in the classroom directly, or whether it's in the training setup. There are fundamentally two kind of views on this, which is perhaps oversimplifying.On the one hand, we have the kind of algorithmic view of education. Which is, here it is, if you do this, and you do this, and you do this, then you will...The result will be that, A plus C plus B equals 0. That's how it will be.Then on the other hand, you have a view of education, which is the plausibility one, if you like, where that's not the case. It's much more of a heuristic.You go in. You deal with what there is in front of you, and you deal with it the best way you can in the light of your experience and whatever training you've had. There are no guaranteed outcomes at all, then. The idea that you can train people and that they will all come out pretty much the same, is ridiculous and it's sad, really.Ross: To pull all that together and go back to the start, what would a teacher training course based more around teachers experiences look like?Alan: Please don't misunderstand. I'm not saying that you should throw away all the stuff on...People need knowledge, and they need skills. I think more space could be made in training programs for discussion of experience, and reflection.I would put a much more emphasis, for example, on training teachers in presentation skills. For instance, in use and maintenance of the voice, something that I've banged on a lot about. Also, then looking at improvisational theater games, for instance, which is a way of getting people to react in the moment to what's going on.I don't know if you've ever experienced clowning. I don't mean circus clowns. I mean, clowning, theater clowns, people like Mike Leacock, for example, in Paris, and people like that. What happens in clowning is very, very interesting, because in order to be a proper clown, you must not have a plan.A plan will kill the clowning, so you must have no plan. What you have to do and what a clown does is to simply wait until there is something to react to in the audience. Then they begin to react to things. They deal with things as they come along. They don't have a preset plan.Now, I know this sounds all very wimbly‑wombly. There is a very interesting account of this in a book by a man called Peter Leutscher. He conducted an experiment in Germany. He's not German, he's American. Where a group of teachers ‑‑ these were in Steiner schools, the Waldorfschule ‑‑ they underwent a complete course in clowning.Then, he followed them up a couple of times after that. The results were very interesting that in terms of the way that the people who undertook the clowning got to understand themselves a lot better, and the effect that it had on their teaching.Interestingly, he also asked the students what they thought. He asked the student's parents what they thought about the changes in their teaching style after they'd done this course. Things like clowning would be an excellent way of preparing people for the unexpected.That's what happens in classrooms. The unexpected thing that you cannot simply deal with, but that you can turn to your own advantage.I often quote this, so excuse me, if you've heard it before. There is a very interesting book called "Teacher Man," by a guy called Frank McCourt. He was teaching in a pretty rough school in New York. He'd been to Columbia. He'd just emerged from the Teachers College.It was his first job, and his first class. In his first class, the first thing that happened was that one boy threw a sandwich. They were a pretty unruly lot. This boy threw a sandwich, and he didn't know what to do.He said professors at Columbia University didn't talk about that kind of thing. They talked about theories of education and child‑centeredness, and whatever. They didn't talk about sandwiches being thrown. "What do I do?" he said. "This was my first pedagogical act."What did he do? I picked up the sandwich, and I ate it. This changed the whole ecology of the classroom, because all of a sudden, the other kids in the class found this hugely interesting and amusing. Whereas, the boy who had thrown the sandwich was absolutely outraged. The class was, all of a sudden, on the side of the teacher.After that, he could do almost anything with them. You get these incidents, these moments where something happens, and you must deal with it. It's being in a state of readiness for what you cannot expect that matters.Of course, it's very, very difficult to train people in this. To some extent, you can't, but I do believe that things like training and theater games and improvisation activities.There's a very good book I'm just reaching for now, by a man called Robert Poynton, which is called, "Do Improvise ‑‑ Less Push. More Pause. Better Results. A New Approach to Work (and Life)." He has some very simple activities there which help to develop this kind of improvisational capacity.

We challenged each other to fit everything we could about language learning onto a single page of A4 paper, then compare our notes over a marathon 59 minutes. For maximum effect, prepare your own notes on “What’s the Best Way to Learn a Language” before you listen.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

We talk about what gets neglected instead of technology (where did the budget for those interactive whiteboards come from anyway?!), the effects on how teachers are assessed and evaluated and if technology might eliminate the need to learn a language altogether in the near future…For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Tracy Yu: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to our podcast. Today, we have the second part of our conversation "Technology in Classroom: Fact or Future in Education." We have Ray...Ross Thorburn: Davila. [laughs]Tracy: Hi, Ross. Welcome back.Ray Davila: Good to be back, guys. [laughs]Ross Thorburn: If you hadn't listened to the first part, go back and check out last week's episode where we talked about the advantages of technology in education. This episode, we're going to talk about the disadvantages.Ross: I'm going to kick things off and say that one of the biggest problems with technology is just overuse and over‑reliance on it. Just to pick a really simple example is what we called interactive whiteboards.There's so many things you cannot do on them, you can just do with a traditional whiteboard, and companies that I've worked for, that will remain nameless, invested far more in putting interactive whiteboards in the classroom than putting qualified teachers in the classroom.Ray: I'm going to agree with you on this one. It's an over‑reliance on education institutions as well of using technology as a gimmick. There is this lack of this human aspect that I can't miss. One of the things that I remember in the school was there was these moments where you could have technology not working.The Internet is not working or the printer is not working.Ray: I liked to look at those as opportunities. Opportunities where teachers are going into a class, somewhat unplugged, and just trying to find alternatives. A lot of times, I remember a lot of teachers giving feedback and saying that class actually went really well.Ross: To go back to what you're saying earlier, Ray, it's almost like some companies try to use technology to teacher‑proof education. It's like, it doesn't matter if you had a good teacher or rubbish teacher, we've got technology, computers, and algorithms. We're going to make sure everyone's going to learn, so we don't really have to worry so much about recruiting good teachers.Tracy: If you're talking about your best teacher, everybody have different choices, have a different reason why chose that teacher, and they have their own characteristics.Ray: That was something that I had an issue with last week's discussion about the advantages of technology in how you had mentioned the facial recognition. Facial recognition being used in a manner that where you can use it to detect things like the student talking time, even things like their participation in the class, or correct usage of vocabulary or grammar or pronunciation.Even to the point of as a way of detecting the student's mood and their level of attention. One thing we need to be careful of, making sure that we're not reducing that human element in the learning process to something that's just a mere algorithm. I think that there are other elements to a student than just points on their face to measure their mood.Tracy: I totally agree.Ross: That's the other danger with that is that if that's what you can measure, then that's the thing that people will pay attention to. It's like the old saying, what gets measured gets managed. Make sure you measure the right thing. Therefore, you can do these measures, student talking time and how often the student smiled, then guess what? The teachers are going to be encouraged to do in class.Tracy: These are something supplementary that maybe can help you to find out more information about the learning process, but it shouldn't be the tool to determine if that's a good teacher or that's a bad class. Something like that. That's really dangerous to judge something based on that.Ross: Another issue with this is that, with not just facial recognition but with so much stuff being on camera now, I think they're truly going to put people off experimenting in the class and trying things that, maybe this is going to work, maybe this is going to be disaster but hey, who cares? I'll try it.If everything you do is on camera and can be watched back by parents or students, and used as evidence that you're incompetent, I'm probably just going to stick more to what I've been told to do, or play it safe, rather than try things that would challenge their status quo.Ross: What do you guys think about this idea that maybe within a few years' time language learning will be pointless? At the moment, we have pretty good translation stuff. Google, YouTube can do it fairly accurately for free. Subtitles, automatically, you can go from speech to text. You can go from text of another language to text of another language.For quite a long time, maybe for about 20 years, we've been able to get computers that read stuff out loud. It doesn't seem to be a huge leap from where we are now, to me being able to speak on the phone, just like in "Star Trek," and it comes out in a different language. Can you see that changing language learning?Just being like, "Why would I spend 10, or 15 years, or 20 years, or just the rest of my life working and learning another language when I can just download an app?"Ray: Now, just from the press of a button, we can get everything done, rather than us actually having to put in a lot of work. The work, it's the trial and error. It's the process that really helps with the learning process. If we are eliminating that for convenience' sake, then technology could very well make ESL obsolete.Tracy: There are people, probably, difficult for them to learn new language. I'm thinking from my mom's age. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's going to be very challenging for them, and they will say, "What's the point for me? I'm Asian trying so hard learning a new language, but I only use it occasionally."On the other hand, I'm not sure the accuracy in everything is it really, especially that's something you would like to express? I'm thinking how can the translator 100 percent interpret your feeling, your emotion, and how you'd like to say that in what kind of tone of voice. It's always going to be so different.For example, English, if you say something, was the tone going up or going down, that's probably means different things in particular context. That's something that would be quite interesting to see if it's going to bring a lot of convenience or a lot of trouble [laughs] for people.Ross: What my personal prediction for this is it is going to affect language learning for adults, but I don't think it's going to affect language learning for kids so much. I was thinking about this. Most of the subjects that we learn in school are not very useful, right?Biology, or physics, or history. You could just google any of those things that you spend all that time at school studying. I think that whatever the point of education at school is, it's often not really that we memorize all this knowledge and we use it in our later lives.The same is probably true of language learning. It will stay in state schools because for the same reason everything else is there. It's just that it's always been there.I can see for adults if thinking about I'm not going to spend all this money on a language course to help me in this particular situation? Maybe if I could just download an app. Maybe it's not actually worth it because there is an easier way out.Ray: I think for sure that one of the things that happens with new things in innovations in this course of it being developed, this is the new fad. Everyone is talking about tech and how we can utilize it in a bunch of different things.The problem is, that sometimes we need to sit back and just reflect, analyze its impact overall on the industry, on the students themselves. I think that, again, it goes back into things that are also important in the learning process like social skills, learning how to be a team player. These things are we considering how we're going to implement and teach these soft skills in the process?Or are we just focusing a lot on how students can win and how we can entertain them? A lot of times we are trying to create new experiences of creating a new reality, a digital reality. I wonder the long‑term effects it might have on how people associate with each other in reality. If we are focusing so much on a digital world, what happens to the real world?Ross: The big issue here with technology is not that it's bad but just that where it fits in this so‑called ladder of love. How important is it compared to other things, like human connection, or teacher training, or teaching the right syllabus, or making sure that your syllabus has authentic language or any of those other things?The danger with all of the things that we've been talking about or we're talking about the previous episode is yeah, overuse, over prioritization. More money and time gets invested in the technology than in any number of other things that we might prioritize over technology.Ray: The thing that we haven't really touched about, either in this podcast or in the one before, was is technology and its use with teacher training itself. I wondered, again, especially with older teachers, is some of them are just not as comfortable and confident with technology, and how that's going to play a role in the future.Will, we just have to sift out all of the teachers who aren't computer literate and competent with technology, or is it going to be something where knowledge in technology is more important than language knowledge?Ross: That's an interesting point. I remember watching, when I was a Director of Studies, watching a new teacher. This guy, he must have been 15 years older than me. Watching him with a class of 16 seven‑year‑olds. This guy was trying to turn on and calibrate an interactive live port. It's pandemonium breaking out behind him.There was one little boy who was trying to tell him what to do. He was like, "Shut up. Sit in your seat." That added nothing to that person's class.When it comes to any kind of materials, a key principle is to make sure that you're always adding something to everyone's class, and you're never really taking things away. With those things that are difficult to use, you're really just creating more of a burden, some sort of cognitive overload, perhaps, for some, if not a lot of teachers.Teaching is already multi‑tasking where you're thinking about, "Oh, do I have enough time? Should I end this activity in a few moments? Have I met the aims of this lesson?" All those things.As soon as you add in some of the clunky technology, perhaps, you're just making the teacher's job even more complicated. Obviously, as soon as you do that, you're distracting the teacher from the other things that they could be doing where it should be helping the students even more.Ray: I know a few teachers, then other people who have confessed that they have failed their practical blocks because of technology going awry and it's just...Ross: Can I just say, as a former diploma assessor,. I don't think I ever saw anyone fail a class because technology went wrong.[laughter]Ray: I think it's not the technology went wrong, but because they invested so much of their lesson to that, and because it didn't work.Ross: That's almost a nice micro cause, isn't it?[laughter]Ross: It's all conversation, Ray, right? Those people made the mistake of investing all of their effort into technology and it didn't do what they expected it to do. Maybe that's the overall danger with the industry. We're in danger of investing too much time and resources into something that might work, but maybe it might not work as well.Ray: I think it was Voltaire who once said something that stuck with me. It was, "If you do not accept the changes of your time, perhaps you will miss the greatest part."I think that, to a certain extent, one of the things that we should be aware of is that technology is happening, whether we like it or not. That development is a part of culture. It's part of society at this point. We might as well just start seeing how we can utilize it and take the advantages, and try to make the best of it.Tracy: Thanks very much for listening to these two podcasts. Thanks very much, Ross, on our podcast.Ray: Of course. It was my pleasure. [laughs]Tracy: See you guys. Bye.Ross: Thanks, everyone. Bye‑bye.

In the first of two parts, we discuss all that is good about technology, before being as cynical as possible in part two.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the podcast. This week we have our friend on again.Tracy: Ray.Ross: Davila.Tracy: Davila.dRay Davila: Hi, guys.Ross: Ray, you've switched jobs since last time. Do you want to tell us what you're doing now?Ray: Oh yeah! I'm currently a development editor working in product development. I look at the academic quality of lesson plans, educational books, songs, movies, and seeing how they can be implemented as materials in lesson plans.Ross: If I'm not incorrect the name of the department you work for is called Ed Tech. Is it?Ray: Yes, yes.Ross: I thought that was so interesting. An education company. That's the name for the team that makes the teaching materials.Ray: We're trying to focus a little bit more on how we can use technology in the learning process.Ross: This week we're going to try something that I don't think...I remember we've only did it once before which is to do like a two‑parter. The first half, we're going to talk about some of the advantages of technology in English language education. Then in the second part of the podcast, next episode, we'll talk about some of the disadvantages.Ray, you had a catchy name for this that you've thought of, right?Ray: Oh yeah. It's something like, technology in the classroom, fad or future in education?Ross: Well done. That's...Tracy: That's a great name.Ross: You make [inaudible: 1:46] .[laughter][music]Ross: I guess all of us use technology quite a bit. Tracy and I have worked, at least, for the last year in online teaching, mainly and used technology. What are some of the benefits you guys think of technology in education?Tracy: The first thing I would say is fascinating actually you have a lot of class recordings, and you can definitely go back and watch those lessons. Either you are doing material development, you are focusing on like a teacher training or even just the teacher themselves. They can go back and see which area really what tallies in my class and which one didn't.It's definitely big advantage for having the technology in the classroom because either really in the traditional offline classes, I think it's quite difficult for people to do that.Ross: I presume it's the same. Maybe it's also true for the students, that students might be able to use that technology. Not quite now, I'm not sure if we're on that stage yet. In future, presumably, soon have the ability to literally listen back to what you were saying in class three months ago or six months ago and compare that with what you are doing now.It seem to be very objective way of helping students visualize or see what their progress has been.Ray: Using or having those recordings are also a great opportunity for us to take a step back and look at things that we would never have realized it could be a potential issue in our teaching or in just the students learning and just having that as a tool to reflect on. Or even I think that for teachers of young learners, it's also something they can use when they're sitting down with the parents.Tracy: I also wanted to mention something, at least in China, I think a lot of public schools from what I heard, like my university classmates and they're teaching in public school how they assign homework. They don't really use the way that when we were in school anymore. I think they also having like an app.You can log in, then you can see the homework, you can do that, and you can submit it. The teacher can check your homework or provide you the answers or suggested answers to compare with. Everything will be tracked in the app or maybe some other programs.I think that's a massive change because when I was a teacher in public school, you really have to check every single student's homework book. I needed to take them back home sometimes, and it's really heavy, but now...[laughter]Tracy: ...it's really light, you just need a phone or you need a pad, and you can just do all of this work.Ross: I think here we're getting into the idea as well of personalizing things very easily that if you have technology you can personalize things a little more easily for your students. That you could give, for example, quite easily every student individual homework, individual exercises. You can have algorithms to make sure that you figure out where people are struggling, and what they're advantages and disadvantages are.I think really it has that opportunity to individualize learning and get everything just to the right level where you're helping everyone learn because I think ultimately that's one of the most important things in education, is figuring out where your students are, and then teaching them accordingly. I think technology can help with both sides of that equation.Tracy: Yeah.Ray: Personalization, is a huge thing. You were mentioning one of the main things with algorithms. How you can, example, giving a test or giving homework, and then that can for you, instead of the teacher doing it, it can assess what a student is having difficulty with.Then from there, it could suggest other alternatives, more activities for them to do in a particular grammar points or them being able to do this.I think that one of the things about how this benefits education is that, yes, we have personalization, but then at the same time we have a lack at the moment of educational professionals currently at the disposal of helping students to get to where they need to be.Maybe either because there's just a lack of resources, there are not as many instructors as there were before. Also, there are not as many instructors with as much experience or as much passion as there were before. I think that now, we're turning toward technology where it's picking up the slack. I think that we, on the human end, we've fallen a little bit short.Ross: Not just that. Also, it can help you get resources to places where those resources are lacking. For example, if you're in a highly developed western country it is easy to get access to probably a good education. If you're not, then it's more difficult. It really depends on where you are in the world.Technology, I think, at least, all online classes and things you can now have probably a class with just about a teacher anywhere in the world, that's one thing. The other thing that it does is there's so much access to...If we're talking about English, English now, like any students can go on to YouTube or to read newspapers or whatever.I remember even as a new teacher back in 2006, how difficult it was just to get a newspaper clipping or something and photocopy that for your students, but just think now there's so much English out there.[music]Tracy: Recent years we're talking about 21st century skills. I think technology is great platform to provide people these chances to explore the culture differences and that also the soft skills is not just about critical thinking, but also being more tolerant, to understand other people, beliefs, religion.That's a great way actually to make sure our students or people, they have the opportunity to have a chance to open their mind.Ross: I definitely feel that about online classes. It's amazing that you can pull a lot of people in America, Britain, wherever, they actually know people in China, right? When they see China in the news, whatever, they're not just immediately thinking something negative about it. They have some understanding and some relationship with some students here.It's the same for children here with teachers abroad and obviously, that cause across in a hundred different countries to probably hundreds of thousands of different people that there's all this extra understanding. In this current era that we're in of nationalism, it's developed maybe over the last decade or so but that's a really wonderful thing.Ray: I think that's just it. That language learning, big language learning classroom, is not just about communication. It's about also cultural awareness. We can have a platform where a student in one country, in South America being in the same classroom virtually with a student from Asia. It's part of that age of globalization.Tracy: We've been talking about this in this podcast for a film, and it's ready, but I still think not really many people, for example, like the parents, they are aware of this. It's not just a way for your kid to learn a language is just like...Yeah, changing their mindset, their beliefs and also how they view the world, view people.These are a lot of soft skills where it's quite difficult to evaluate from the parents who are maybe these teachers or schools. It's very difficult for them to evaluate, to see the result because that's the long‑term goal or long‑term results.I also think that technology for teaching lately, the massive topic is about AI or AR. Having an AI teacher, there are a lot of debate and discussion about it. Do you think that AI teachers is going to replace a real teacher? There's something really interesting about AI because they definitely can track or catch the student's behavior sometimes.I remember I went to a conference, and they were actually showing on the screen there were maybe 40 students, and each student, AI technology can catch everyone's facial expression, and it also gives a report about the student's talk time in this class. It probably can help you see the student interaction.Also, I don't know, based on the temperature or something, and see how much they are mentally evolving in this learning process. These things are so difficult to see from the surface level and just judging from how they look like. I think that AI, all this technology they can help us to analyze this.Ray: It's funny that you've mentioned AR. I recently came back from Macau where I participated in a little VR thing.[laughter]Ray: I don't even know what to call it. Pretty much we have these harnesses on with headphones, helmet with goggles and stuff. We were put into a room. That was not very big. It was very, very bare. There was nothing in it. It was just like a concrete floor, concert wall. There was nothing inside except for a handful of us. There were like eight of us.Then we were told to put on our goggles, put on our headphones, and then we have like this gun. Out of nowhere, we were in an entirely new world. We had to walk around in this world. We were walking around, we had to shoot robots, and things like that.I just remember my heart pounding when we were doing certain things like having to cross this crosswalk which obviously your brain knows that we know that we're in a concrete room. For some reason, my mind was playing tricks with me. Out of nowhere, I was refusing to go over this crosswalk because I was looking down, it was stories up and my actual legs were shaking.It's this amazing...It was the first time I ever realized that our minds can have such an impact on the way our body reacts, the way that we think in general. Most people know what VR is but AR, I don't know if many people are quite familiar with AR.Ross: Can we pause you there for a second?Ray: Oh sorry, yes.Ross: That's an amazing story. This is huge potential there, isn't there? In a class of like, "Yeah, you pretend to be the shopkeeper. You pretend to be this person." Stick on your goggles. No, let's pretend we're in a restaurant. It's like boom! You're in a restaurant or something much more interesting than being in a restaurant.Tracy: One of my favorite activity actually using the AR technology it's quite similar to the selfie app. The students, they can really try to be another character. Like if now I'm just having a conversation asking for directions in a foreign country, and then they probably can change how they look. Now, I try to be an old person, and that's how they look.Also, on the flight, I try to be the passenger, and the flight attendant having a conversation. It's just so interesting. You can see their face it's actually replacing on the screen. The student's face is actually there. They can feel they're in that context.Ross: You think about how much of language learning is role plays and pretending to be people in certain situations? Obviously, the more I think we do in general in class to help students understand those situation through setting context, moving the seats around, and bringing in props, the better. Obviously, what we're talking about just takes that to another level entirely.[music]Ross: Tune in again next time, and we will talk about the disadvantages of technology.Tracy: Thank you for listening.Ross: Thanks, Ray. We'll see you next week.[laughter]Tracy: See you soon.Ray: See you, guys.Tracy: Bye.

Hugh Dellar talks to us about the principals behind vocabulary teaching, the dangers of teaching lexical sets and why we might be better off teaching more words and fewer meanings.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the podcast. Today we're going to talk about vocabulary. Tracy, was this a useful topic?Tracy Yu: David Wilkins, long time ago, he said something like, "Without grammar very little can be conveyed. And without vocabulary, nothing can be conveyed." I really like that because for grammar I think, of course ‑‑ in the grammar for meaning, grammar for accuracy and better vocabulary ‑‑ I would say is the foundation for other skills.Also vocabulary change often. When new things came out, for example, like a new technology or Internet and then there will be more vocabulary added onto. Of course, and there will be words dropped out if it's not being used very frequently.Ross: Today we have Hugh Dellar on the podcast. He's a teacher, trainer, co‑founder of Lexical Lab, and author of the course books, "Outcomes and Innovations" and I asked you about teaching vocabulary.I'm here with Hugh Dellar. Hugh, thank you very much for coming on. Hugh, just start off with, not why is vocabulary important, but what's important in vocabulary teaching.Hugh Dellar: It's first and foremost being aware of the context in which language is being used. I read this book recently called "Lexical Analysis" by Patrick Hanks, who's a lexicographer. One thing that really struck me in there was, how even professional lexicographers recognize that basically, words don't have fixed denotation or meanings. None of them do, even a word like fire.You might think a fire is something that happens when things burn, but even then, if you change call occasions like if you have a raging fire and a cozy fire, those are two very different kinds of fires. But one is a kind of out of control thing that requires the fire brigade to come and try and put it out and one is something in a pub on a cold day that you sit in front of and warm your hands by.Yes, they both involve things burning, but they're different measures or qualities of things. You can only determine that by looking at the context in which you're using things. I guess for me, first and foremost, it's thinking about not trying to teach everything at once.Very much the same as with grammar, actually. Not making the mistake of trying to do everything at once and accepting that what students and all of us, in a sense, know about words is always going to be provisional, but always going to be developing and working on little bits at a time.Maybe you think you know the word "problem", but then you learn it's "a perennial problem'' or maybe you learn a different verb that goes with the word "problem". It's just thinking about layering your knowledge of how words work with other words and with grammar over time.It's also in terms of teaching particularly, and I guess I also think about this as a writer. It's thinking about what vocabulary do you need in order to perform particular communicative tasks. When I was a younger teacher, I made the mistake of teaching things because they were easy to teach rather than because they lead to anywhere particularly useful.I would do naming 50 things in the house because it's easy to match them to pictures and you can do info gaps where you can say, "Have you got a sofa?" "No, I haven't." "Have you got an armchair?" "Yes, I have." You can do all that kind of stuff.On one level, it looks like they're easy to sort of deal with the meaning of and to practice in the classroom, but I later came to realize that this didn't really lead to any particularly interesting or useful outcomes.Often when you're thinking about what you want students to be able to talk about better, you have to think about vocabulary beyond the single word level. You have to think about it in terms of things people might say. Once you start thinking about things people might say, that involves thinking about the grammar and the other words together.In a way, it's how I learned my Indonesian as well, so I guess this is also a wash back effects on all of that, where, I learned, first and foremost, how to say things that I wanted to say. I learned to kind of deploy the vocabulary in a particular communicative context and then later to do more with the vocabulary, as I started reading a bit more and listening respectively a bit more to things.Initially, it was all just, rather than being able to walk around your kitchen and say kettle, microwave, excellent. I was basically learning how to say, "I'll put the kettle on. Stick it in the microwave." Because I didn't have any needs to say anything else about kettles or microwaves apart from those things.I think about vocab teaching very much in terms of, "Yes, he needs to know what a kettle or a microwave is, but what are you going to do with those words?"Ross: That's such a common thing to do, isn't it? To teach a set of vocabulary around a theme, rather than actually thinking about what the student is going to do with the words in that theme or in that lexical set?Hugh: Yeah, rather than just training students to be human naming machines, which seems rather perverse.Ross: That's one principle that in vocabulary teaching. Do you want to tell us what are some others that you think teachers might need to think about before teaching vocabulary or when they're teaching vocabulary?Hugh: The main thing is thinking about what potential communicative outcome or what students are either going to need to do or might hear done with the words they're learning. Beyond that, it's not trying to tackle every meaning of a word at once. It's dealing with the language and context.Part of the other problems ‑‑ course books can exacerbate this problem sometimes ‑‑ is moving beyond traditional lexical sets. Traditional lexical sets exist because of ease of teaching and familiarity from a teacher's point of view, but they lead to treating frequent and infrequent items as equally useful, and they lead to dubious communicative outcomes.You get those kind of lessons on, I don't know, adjectives for describing people, and you get things like "curly hair", and you end up describing people in your family, "My brother has curly hair." You can, of course, create speaking around all of those kinds of tasks.Actually, a word like "curly" is highly infrequent, when you look at it in terms of how often the word is used. The whole act of describing someone's appearance is a really bizarre thing to do, and not something you often do in the real world. I know that those words are all put together in a course book because there's an expectation that, at pre intermediate, you will have a lexical set called describing people.If you start by thinking about, what is it you wanted to do or what is it people normally do with the language? It has these extra kind of backwash effects. One of those is, it's probably better to focus more on frequent language.Again, I think when I was a younger teacher, I probably spent much more time on the most infrequent items in the text. Whereas now, I'm always looking at trying to help students do a bit more with the more frequent bits of language in a text or in an exercise because you know, frequent words are frequent, because they're the words that people use most.They're the words that students are going to hear most and read most, and presumably needs to use themselves most. It's prioritizing frequency where possible. It's thinking about how words interact with other words and with grammar. It's thinking about utility and what's done with the language that you're looking at.Then on top of all of that, I think it's thinking about ensuring re‑exposure, further encounters with the language, repeated experience of those particular items. Again, it's a problem with course books a lot of the time, which is, we've done the lexical set on describing people. Next unit is about transport where we'll do the lexical set on vehicles. Therefore the world curly will not reappear for the rest of this book.When you've had that experience of learning language, outside the classroom, the things you pick up most of the things you hear the most and you hear them the most because they're frequent, and they get recycled in different conversations.For me, as a writer, and as a teacher, it's always thinking about ways of trying to make sure students get repeated encounters with things that they kind of met already.A lot of students make the mistake of thinking that vocabulary development has to do with learning words they've never seen before, rather than learning how to do more with words they have seen before, and so it's trying to capture that a bit as well.Ross: I can definitely remember as a new teacher giving students, for example, a news article and then asking them to underline or talk about words that they don't know, but it would have been just as useful to get them to underline the words they do know or even just not focus on words at all, but look at some longer and more interesting set phrases in there where the students might even know all the words, but they might not really be familiar with the phrase.Hugh: Yeah. Meanwhile, there may be a little chunk there like, "I wanted to make the most of my time." We don't spend time on that kind of thing because it doesn't contain new words.Ross: I wanted to ask you a bit about space practice and space repetition. I know that's something you're passionate about this idea of not cramming lots of practice of, say, one lexical set into one class, but rather spreading it out throughout a course. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to get used very much in language teaching or coursebook writing, I think, in general though.Hugh: No, it doesn't and part of the problem is this kind of tick box thing where it happens in many different ways. It happens in terms of, "We've done the present perfect simple. We've done talking about food. We've done lexical set for talking about work. We've done that topic and that vocabulary."Actually a lot of the things you talk about, I'm sure you find the same when you're speaking foreign languages yourself, you talk about certain things over and over and over again. Living in Indonesia, being married to an Indonesian, 60 percent of the conversations we ever have are about food. It's just like a never ending ongoing circular conversation about food.In the same way, I think we jump too quickly. We kind of say, "We've done work." You've done a conversation about work. Your students can now say, "What do you do? I'm a teacher." "Do you like it?" "Yes. I love it." That's great. That's a really good conversation to have. Build on that. How does that conversation develop? What else might you say? What might the responses be?Often we don't repeat conversations enough in class because we have this idea of having done things. It's like learning an instrument and you play a song one successfully, and you say you've done it and then you move on to the next song. A math person was trying to learn an instrument like this.This is often what we force students to do in the language classroom. I think all the research shows that with both grammar and vocabulary, you learn better when you encounter the items, whatever they are ‑‑ whether they're structural or lexical or whatever ‑‑ you encounter them frequently over an extended period of time.That kind of spacing out of exposure and experience to things leads to better uptake of language than massed practice, which is generally what we do because of the present practice produce paradigm and the way in which the PPP paradigm has sort of imposed itself on vocabulary as well.That we kind of expect that will present a little lexical set and students will practice it and produce it. Then we'll move on and not return to that again. You know that the research doesn't back this up. There is no research to suggest that massing the practice of things leads to better uptake or better results of the items of using in terms of using the items that you're looking at.It's then thinking about as a teacher, or as a writer, or both, how you integrate an awareness of that into your teaching, particularly if the course book you're using doesn't do that for you. It may be that you're using a more traditional kind of course book or because you have to, wherever you are.Then in that case, it's thinking about what kind of revision activities you can build into each class, how you can use teacher talk, how you can use board work, as a way of revisiting and recycling things that have already been presented to students.

We discuss what we can apply to the language classroom from Daniel Willingham’s book “Why Don't Students Like School?”, with friend of the podcast (and Daniel Willingham fan), Dave WellerFor more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Tracy Yu: Welcome back to our podcast, everybody. We've got our favorite guest. Can you guess who he is?Dave Weller: Hurrah!Tracy: [laughs] Let's welcome Dave Weller. Hey, Dave.Dave: Hi.Ross Thorburn: What are we talking about today?Dave: I think we decided to do something almost akin to a book review on Daniel Willingham's book on cognitive psychology and neuroscience, "Why Students Don't Like School."Ross: We're going to try and apply what we read and what we remembered. We're going to go further outside taxonomy...Dave: Oh, no.[laughter]Ross: ...and try and apply it to language teaching.Dave: The book is about neuroscientific principles. The blurb is, "A cognitive scientist answers questions about how the mind works and what it means for the classroom." He's picked nine very robust findings from the field of psychology. Now, I hope you've done your homework, and you've read the book as I have.Ross: I think it says a lot about us. Dave, for this, read the book twice. I read it once. Tracy read it...Tracy: The last 10 minutes.[laughter]Dave: All it means is Tracy is a very fast reader.Ross: [laughs]Dave: What we decided when we set ourselves this challenge was that it'd be really interesting to take a book that was designed with general education in mind and see how well we could transfer the principles across to language teaching.Ross: Absolutely. We often comment that there's not enough taken from general education and applied to the field of language learning.Dave: Hopefully is we'll find out that a lot of the principles can equally apply in the language classroom as in normal classrooms.Ross: Great.Dave: Ross, one of the things I liked from his introduction was talking about why teachers are naturally skeptical of theory. There is a big gap between theory and practice. Even mental processes aren't isolated in the classroom, whereas they are in research.A classic example he uses is that about drilling. In the lab where you isolate drilling and see the effect that it has on learning is wonderful. [laughs] The more you drill, the more you repeat, the more you learn.However, any teacher that steps into a classroom knows if you drill your learners for an hour straight, the drop in motivation is not going to make up for the effectiveness of that technique in learning. This is why that he's taken a very teacher‑centered view of research and only picked principles he thinks can be used effectively in the classroom.Ross: Whatever you do read in a book, you're passing it through your own filter of what you think is going to be personally useful for you. A lot is going to get filtered out. How about for this podcast, we pick out some of the main principles?He's got nine cognitive principles. They relate to things that happen in the classroom. How about we pick some of the most interesting ones? We can talk about how we feel language teachers might be able to apply those in their classes. Should we get started?Tracy: Yeah.Dave: With this one, the principle of that people are naturally curious, but they aren't naturally good thinkers. For me, when I read this, what struck me was how similar it is to the zone of proximal development, scaffolding, Lev Vygotsky idea.He talks about oftentimes we think about what the answers are that we want our students to get. If we're trying to say, "What's the answer to this grammar question? There's a word that means this. What's the word?" We should be trying to engage them with the questions and leading them to the answer.Ross: He says, "It's the question that peaks people's interest. Being told the answer, it doesn't do anything for you." Have you seen "The Prestige" before?Dave: I've downloaded it. You asked me that the other night, but I haven't watched it yet.Ross: In The Prestige, they talk about this. As a magician, if you do a magic trick, people are amazed by it. As soon as you show them how to do the trick, people are completely unimpressed by it.Dave: Maybe, that's one of the reasons that task‑based learning or test‑teach‑test lessons can work well, is because you put this question at the beginning. You put the hardest part first, putting students into a position where it is difficult for them. It gets them to think about it.It's the question that's interesting. Then it leads to the answer later on, whereas something like PBP, which we know gets a lot of bad press, doesn't put the question at the beginning.Tracy: That's something related to the teacher's role in the classroom. They're not just to spoon‑feeding the students. They have to make sure what kind of questions they can ask the students. They facilitate the learning.You don't want to mix the prompting questions which scaffold student learning with guessing what's in my mind.Dave: Totally agree. Yes, it's a good example from real life, Tracy. One of the things to be careful with this one though is to be careful the questions you pose aren't too hard as well as grading your language, grading your instructions.If you ask students a question and it's very specific, there's only one possible right answer, it's really difficult. They're beginner students, A1 level maybe, and you ask them, "So the past perfect continuous, when would you use this?" They immediately look up and go, "I don't know. There's no way I can know," and they immediately check out.Daniel Willingham says, "Respect students' cognitive limits. Don't overload them with information. Don't make the instructions or grade your language too much," is how I would interpret that for TEFL. Also, "Make sure the questions you ask them are within their ability to answer."Ross: How about we move on to another principle, then? My personal favorite, and probably yours as well, Dave, is, "Memory is the residue of thoughts."Dave: No, I hate that one. Leave that one out.[laughter]Tracy: Can you guys explain this a little bit?Dave: Yeah. From "Memory is a Residue of Thought," I think what Daniel Willingham is saying is that students remember what they think about. In your class, if they're thinking about your flashy warm‑up where you jumped up and down and screamed around like a monkey, then they're going to remember, "Hey, teacher screamed like a monkey today. That was really funny."That's what they'll tell their parents. Whereas if they do a task where they have to figure something out and talk to their friend about the best way to negotiate with somebody or the best way to get to the train station, and they're using English to do that, then that's what they'll remember.One of my biggest takeaways from the book is that he suggests that to review your lesson plan in terms of what the students will think about. Every task you have, every activity, every stage, put yourself in your learners' shoes, and imagine what they're going to think about as they're completing that.My suggestion on top of that would be, "Do the same thing for the language use." Look at your lesson plan, or imagine it. Think about it from your learner's point of view. What language would you use to complete that task?Ross: Something else I found interesting, it was a quote from him. He said, "Fold practice into more advanced skills," which got me thinking. The way I would apply that to the language classroom is when your students advance a little bit...Say they've moved up from present simple, and now they're doing past simple, just a cliched example. Instead of practicing just that skill of past simple, make sure they get a chance to use prior practice.Make sure they get a chance to use the skills and recycle a language from previous classes. When they're practicing past simple, they're also integrating present simple and the other things and the other vocabulary that they have learned.You don't just focus only on the target language for that particular lesson, but you bring in the other language that you used previously. I find a lot of teachers don't do that. They're so focused on the target language for that one lesson, they forget the previous lessons.Ross: That might be one of the reasons why extensive reading works so well, is because all of the forms and grammar that you might have learned previously are all going to be recycled in natural stories.That's maybe why also genuine tasks where you don't prescribe the language for the students to use in some sort of prior practice can also be beneficial because students will get to bring in language that they've used from previous lessons.For teachers, if you're using a great textbook that automatically recycles or has in it recycled language from previous units, that's great. Even if you don't, you can just pause in lessons and say, "What is there from previous lessons that we've learned that you could also use in this task or in this activity that could help you," and think about that when you're planning as well.Before we finish, I wanted to talk about the very last chapter of the book which is about helping teachers improve. He makes this nice distinction between experience and practicing. Teaching, like any other complex skill, must be practiced to be improved.It reminds me, I think the same author Rubinstein, the pianist, says something like, "I play the piano for nine hours a day, but I only practice for one." There's a nice difference there between what you're actually doing and then when you're making a deliberate effort to get better.One of the things is that teachers are very busy. It's very easy for all of your classes to just go by in a whirlwind, but if you can find the occasional class or the occasional thing to work on for an hour a week, in the long term, that can improve your teaching.Dave: Actually, he suggests a good method, which I'm very eager to adopt. To find another teacher he wants to improve, he says, "Perhaps watch a video of another teacher teach and comment together jointly on that so you gain each other's kind of levels and things you talk about."After you've done that almost bonding experience, then film yourself and swap it with the other person so then they comment on yours. Of course, be nice.Ross: A couple of other points on that. He says, "When you video yourself, spend time observing. Don't start by critiquing."Dave: I remember the first time I videoed myself or saw myself teaching. I was amazed at how many unconscious habits I had. I presented myself entirely differently than the way I thought I did. It's almost like watching a stranger teach.It was that difference in my expectation. The image I had in my head of myself teaching was clearly very different to that. You can only see that if you have that visceral experience, when you see yourself teach.Ross: The purpose of watching your partner teach is to help them reflect on their practice. Often, when people do peer observations, it's so easy to just say, "Oh, you did this wrong. You need to change this. This didn't work," but the purpose of it isn't to just throw out a few quick fixes. It's to get the person to engage in their own teaching and reflect.Tracy: Sometimes, I don't blame the teachers. Their experience is like that because they have been criticized from day one. Even if they did something nicely, still their trainer or their manager will just pick the area that they didn't do very well.Also, for a positive reinforcement, people are more likely to change their behavior if you tell them what they did really well. Then they could keep working on it rather than just starting from the negative aspects, and then you didn't do it very well.I don't blame the teacher sometimes because that's what they were told. That's how they train. That's how they experience. That requires the trainers to understand how to balance it and how you demonstrate this to your teachers from day one.Dave: Totally correct. I think you've hit the nail on the head there, Trace, by saying what would change the behavior of the teacher, because they can't. You need to take the tack if the teaching is very directed feedback and that will work, then do that.If they're unconfident, nervous, anxious, you need to tell them what they've been doing right as well. Don't change everything. Keep what good they have been doing and then tweak a little bit.Ross: If you've been convinced at all by the last 14 minutes that this book would be useful, it's by Daniel T. Willingham. It's called Why Students Don't Like School. It's subtitled "A cognitive scientist answers questions about how the mind works and what it means to the classroom." I highly recommend it.Also, since we're on the topic of books and you're about to plan a lesson, I highly recommend...[laughter]Tracy: Wow, good. Nice segue.Ross: ..."Lesson Planning for Language Teachers ‑‑ Evidence‑Based Techniques for Busy Teachers" by...Tracy: By Dave Weller. Congratulations, Dave.Dave: Thank you.Tracy: Hope you guys enjoyed the podcast. See you next time.Transcription by CastingWords

Why Homework gets ForgottenRoss Thorburn: Hi, Penny. Thank you for joining us. I saw you give a talk about homework at IATEFL in Glasgow back in 2017. You mentioned that the reason that you talked about homework or that you did a presentation on homework is that no one else talks about it, really. Why don't teachers and teacher trainers talk more about homework?Penny Ur: Why does nobody talk about it? It's one of these topics like classroom management, and teaching mixed ability classes, and dealing with slow learners, the kinds of topics which are not directly and specifically concerned with language teaching but with teaching in general.I gave a talk recently to teachers. I gave all sorts of topics, things which are problematic in the classroom. I asked them to say which of them were the most important, things like teaching grammar or teaching heterogeneous classes, or classroom management, or homework and so on and so on.The topics they chose were all ‑‑ they chose as their top two or three ‑‑ linked to general teaching pedagogical issues, ones which teachers all over the world teaching all the subjects encounter and worry about.In conferences in the ELT or language teaching literature in general, on the whole, the underlying research and thinking is very much oriented towards applied linguistics, towards language acquisition, specifically.People just don't deal with the general topics like homework, but it is one which very much concerns teachers, which is why, very often, the topics I tackle at other conferences have to do with these things. I think they are neglected. Teachers need them and want them as well as the purely applied linguistics topics.Ross: That's why people don't talk about it. Just how important is homework in terms of helping students to learn a language?Penny Ur: It is extremely important, particularly for language teaching because the amount of language that people learn and the rate at which they progress is very, very much linked to the amount of exposure of the language they get, the sheer number of hours they're exposed to and engaging with the target language.There's no way you can give them the amount of time they need of exposure to and engagement with the target language if you only have classroom time. You need the homework time. You need that time to accelerate their progress.Otherwise, you'll hold them back. This is more important, perhaps, for language learning than for almost any other subject I can think of.Best Homework Activities for Language TeachersRoss: Given then how important homework is, what kind of homework activities do you think are most useful? Is it write out the verb 20 times like I probably had in French class at school?Penny Ur: Did it help you?Ross: Well, I can still conjugate the verb "to be" in French, but I'm not sure how useful that actually is.Penny Ur: Conjugating French verbs comes into its own once you've got the fluency. It is quite useful.Ross: Maybe, if I had the fluency to go along with it, maybe it is useful to practice verbs. Do you think things like preparing for the next class as in flipped classroom or...?Penny Ur: Yes, by all means, anything which has them engaging with a language, basically, and doing things with a language on condition that it's something they can do successfully without a teacher at their elbow.In other words, homework assignments need to be slightly easier than the kind of assignments you're giving them in the classroom. In the classroom, you're there to help. When they're doing homework, you're not there.They need, therefore, to be doing things which are slightly easier, which are what I call success‑oriented. They're likely to be able to complete them and which have them engaging with a language.Reading certainly, extensive reading, writing assignments, preparing, you say, flipped classroom, preparing vocabulary or a text for the next lesson, vocabulary assignments. All these things, I think, are valid.Ross: The standard thing that tends to happen with homework is it gets given out as the bell's ringing, and the students are walking out the door. What do you think's a better way of assigning homework? When is a good time to do it? How is a good way to do it?Penny Ur: A year or two ago, I published a book called, "Penny Ur's Teaching Tips." One of the tips I had there is don't give homework at the end of the lesson. Again, like everything else, never say never. There are sometimes when you do, but in principle, it's not a good idea to give it at the end of the lesson.Not only because giving it at the end of the lesson implies that it's not so important as a sort of afterthought but also because at the end of the lesson, the bell's about to ring or has already rung, and the students are beginning to pack up. Their attention is at a low level. You really want them to pay attention to what you want to tell them.In principle, give the homework immediately after the classroom activity that it is related to. If it's doing comprehension, work on reading text immediately after you've done the reading text or even before.The advantage of giving the homework in the middle of the lesson rather than at the end is not only that you're saying, "Right, this is important. I'm going to spend class time on it," but also you have time to answer questions. You have time to explain things more clearly, time to write it up on the board.Then all you need to do at the end of the lesson is say, "OK, students, it's been a good lesson. Well done. Just remember there's a homework that you have to do. I've already written it up on the board. I've already explained it to you."They're more likely then to remember to do it, although your next question is going to be, how do you get them to remember to do it, right?Ross: Exactly. How do you do that?Penny Ur: The question is, how do I get students to do their homework? You hear teachers complaining all the time, "My students simply do not do the homework. Do you have any tips on how to get the students actually to do their homework?" There's no perfect way to do this. It's really difficult.I was teaching a seminar recently to master's students in a university. They don't do their homework either, at least not as much as you would like them to, so let alone kids in school. Probably, it's very difficult to solve this completely, but things that can help would be fine.Firstly, make sure it is doable in the time that they have. Doable, success‑oriented. I've already said, easy to do. One very useful tip is to tell them, not, "You have to do exercises two, three, and four," but, "Of the exercises two, three, and four, do as much as you can in half an hour."It helps to agree with them in advance that homework will take so much time, half an hour, an hour, whatever the particular framework you're working within sees as reasonable. It's going to take you so long.You do as much as you can in the time and then stop. Your success is according to the amount of time you've spent rather than doing a certain amount of work. Success orientation is one really important thing, easy enough to do in the time allotted without your assistance.Two other things. One is that they clearly see it as relevant to what they're learning. They understand why it's important to do. You may need to spend a few minutes explaining, "I'm asking you to do this because this is what it's going to do for you. This is how it's going to contribute."Lastly, that it's interesting and fun to do, things which they all enjoy doing and find motivating and stimulating to do on their own.Ross: That's how to get students, maybe, to do the homework. After they've done it, is it important to go over it in class, or to mark it, or to do something with it?Penny Ur: Yes. You've reminded me of something I didn't say in response to the previous question, making sure students give homework. That is, it's so, so important to give feedback on the homework.I remember students telling me when I asked them about homework they remember doing as children in school. They said, "When the teacher didn't bother to look at our homework, we just stopped doing it."It's important if the students are going to do their homework that the teacher relates to it, gives feedback on it. Another useful tip about this incidentally, which also I forgot to say in response to the previous question, is that it's healthy. Doing homework is part of their final grade.In other words, 15 percent, say, of the final grade goes on, "Did you do your homework, or didn't you do your homework?" which, of course, obliges the teacher to keep careful records who has and has not done it.Your question was how to check it in class afterwards. What do I do about going over or giving feedback on the homework? One thing I've also seen from observing teachers is that in more than one case, I see half the lesson being wasted or being spent on going over yesterday's homework before the teacher has even got to what they planned to do in today's lesson.We've got to think about ways to check students' homework without taking up too much lesson time which I want to use for proactive teaching. One tip is try to avoid the ping‑pong teacher‑student interaction which consists of, "Who can do number one? Raise your hand. Yes, Jack, what's the answer? Yes, no," and then so on.One has to run through the questions because that takes up an awful lot of time and does not produce very much learning. Alternatives to that are just dictate the answers and tell the students to self‑check. Ask students to check each other. Ask if there are any which they had problems with and relate to the ones they had problems with. Otherwise, just move on.The best possible way of checking homework from the point of view of good learning by the students is to take in their notebooks and check them at home. The problem with this, of course, is it's very time consuming.If you have large classes and lots of lessons during the week, there's no way you can do it every time. Do it as much as possible because there's no substitute for it. It gives the personalized feedback. It's the caring, and it ensures learning. It ensures that students do do their homework better than any other strategy I know.Homework in Teacher EducationRoss: We've mainly been talking about how to make homework successful with students up to this point, but what about getting this more into teacher training and teacher education? What do you think we need to do to make teachers more aware of the importance of homework?I was a teacher trainer for a long time. I don't think I ever saw this being part of any teacher training course. Certainly none of the practicums that I worked on was homework, maybe part of any assess lessons.I've never seen it be part of any continual professional development anywhere I've worked. What do you think we can do to make teachers more aware of the importance of homework?Penny Ur: Not much I can add to what you said. I agree with what you said. It's a topic which is unjustifiably neglected in teacher training courses all over the place and something we need to devote time to.There's also not that much research on it. There is research, but not as much as I would have expected and hoped. It is so important, as I said before, so important for language learning.Ross: Presumably, homework should be something that's part of the planning process just as much as planning tasks, activities, and anything else in your lesson. I guess it shouldn't be something that you think about as you're walking into the classroom, should it?Penny Ur: Absolutely. It's part of your lesson plan. Also, as I hinted before, part of assessment. It should be part of the way you assess students, how they've done their homework and how much of their homework they've done.

For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Tracy Yu: Hi, everyone.Ross Thorburn: Welcome to the podcast. This, as you probably noticed, is our third‑anniversary episode. To celebrate, we're doing a special long podcast, the longest one we've ever done. We've got six special guests for you, and all of them are going to answer the same question. That question is, "What have you changed your mind about?"Tracy: First, we've got Dave Weller and Simon Galloway. Dave currently works as an online diploma and TESOL tutor and blogs at barefootteflteacher.com. Simon runs his distance learning courses for teachers and managers. Both of them have been on our podcast multiple times before.Ross: The second up is Paul Nation, emeritus professor in the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Paul's one of the most influential writers and researchers in vocabulary acquisition in the world. You'll have heard him before in our second‑anniversary episode about reading last year.Tracy: The third is Matt Courtois, who currently works as an academic director in a young learner language school, and Karin Xie, who works as an academic manager at Trinity College London in China. You might remember Karin from our previous episode about applying learning, and Matt from episodes about observations, minimalism, and also teaching writing.Ross: In the fourth segment, we'll hear from Carol Lethaby, who's a teacher, a teacher trainer, and materials writer based in the US and Mexico. You might remember Carol from our episode about neuroscience. You can learn more from her on her website, www.clethaby.com.Tracy: Finally, Ross and myself will talk about what we have changed our minds about over the years.Ross: Great. Enjoy the podcast, the longest one ever.David Weller & Simon GallowayRoss: Dave Weller, Simon Galloway, you've both been involved in English education for what, 12, 15 years?Dave Weller: It's 15 years for me.Simon Galloway: Same, pretty much.Ross: What have you changed your mind about? There must be one thing, Dave.[laughter]Dave: You're talking about since the beginning of my teaching?Ross: It could be at any point at all.Dave: The biggest thing I've changed my mind about since I began ‑‑ for myself, and for students, trainees, and everything ‑‑ is I used to think in quite a fixed mindset. I used to think, "Well, some teachers are good, some teachers aren't. And some students are smart and some students are not."The more I do this the more I realize what it's really about. Attitude and effort are going to be the things that make the difference. It's a bit of a cliché because I know everyone starts to think that way these days. Is it a bit of a...Ross: I don't know. I think that's still true to an extent, isn't it? I'm not sure. I ultimately do think in those terms that, for trainees for example. You find some at the beginning of the course, and you probably think these guys are the stars, the A‑People, the B‑People, and the C‑People.I almost think that fixed mindset, growth mindset is one of those things that I know as a fact but I'm not sure the extent to which I'd genuinely apply it or really believe in it deep down. Have you seen courses where people who you thought they were the weakest people at the beginning, ended up becoming the strongest at the end?Dave: I don't think the courses long enough for that, but there are definitely teachers that start at about that level and end about that level because they're not really trying to grow. There are other people that actually use the effort.I can see that through my distance learning courses, too. There are some people that start with a pretty bad first assignment and by the end, they're way up here. There are other people that just...Ross: I think of people on diplomas that we run. We, for example, observe them at the beginning before they got on the course. Some people that we thought, "They're not good enough to get on the course." There was a big kerfuffle. Eventually, they got on the course and they did really well.I've also seen the opposite of people that we said, "Yep you'll have no problems on this course," and the people go on to fail.Dave: Yeah, and I wonder if actually what we're saying to them is even affecting that. If we tell them, "You're going to do great," then that actually fosters a fixed mindset in them.Simon: It goes back to what we were saying earlier about praising the effort. If you tell someone, "You'll have no problem in this course" you, in a way, set them up to fail. Maybe they won't put the effort in as much because they think they're intrinsically or naturally intelligent enough or they're already at that skill level ‑‑ they won't need to put as much effort ‑‑ and they struggle.Dave: It certainly happens with some people.Ross: It's almost like there's an unspoken assumption that these people are going to put in X amount of effort. That's the bit that doesn't get said. "You'll be fine. You're going to do really well in this course."Dave: Assuming that you spend 10 hours a week?Ross: Yeah, but a lot of people don't know. Dave, let me guess. You didn't used to believe in learning styles but now you do?[laughter]Dave: No, actually. I think that when I was a new teacher, perhaps one year or two years in, I was always so certain of everything. On my original course, I took everything as gospel. I held my opinions so strongly, and I was so sure about everything. I knew I had a lot to learn, but what I did already know, I was certain that this is just the way things are.Since then, I've changed my mind and been exposed to new ideas, new evidence. I've changed everything so many times over the years. I can't remember who said it, it was something like, "You have strong ideas, held lightly," something like that. The longer I'm in this industry, the more I fully agree with that.I fully believe in what I do and how I do it, but if you show me some evidence or a compelling study, or show me a different way of doing things, I'll willingly change and try something new. That willingness to change, I guess that's [inaudible 06:13] . My willingness to change and to be shown to be wrong, I actually welcome now.Ross: That sounds like a perfect description of the Dunning‑Kruger effect. After your cert course, you believed a hundred percent in everything, like it was the gospel. The more you learned, the less confident you've become in those things.Do you think there's a problem then in how we present information to trainees on cert courses? I always find that maybe it's at diploma level that we maybe encourage people to think critically about the things that are being shown to them. The emphasis on introductory courses is, "Here's what you need to just be OK in the classroom and survive your first year."Maybe we're giving people false confidence. Maybe the more effective learner autonomy, long‑term strategy to teach people is, "I'm going to show you these things, these principles, but you also need to be able to question them."Simon: That goes back to something I've said before. You can take it to the wider education industry as a whole. In the language class, should we even be teaching language? Should we just be teaching skills and applying motivation? If you give someone the motivation to learn and the skills to be able to do so independently, then they're inevitably going to be able to learn a language.It's the same with any course, almost. I think the days of the tutor being gatekeeper to information are long gone with the advent of the Internet. Sure, a curated course is much easier to work through step‑by‑step because you can trust the authority of the source. It's broken down and spoon‑fed to you in a certain way.I do think that, in most courses that we run, there is that lack of teaching meta‑skills at the beginning or teaching to think critically. I think every course assumes that a course before has done that, even going back to initial education from 5 to 18. It's something, I think, missing in that, but that's a much larger issue.Dave: Yeah, we assume that everyone's got a degree or whatever, so they must know this. Then the university course, "They must have learned it before."[laughter]Dave: At secondary school, "They must have learned this at primary school."Simon: They thought, "Oh, parents must have...Dave: "The parents must have taught them that."[laughter]Simon: It might make a flip‑side argument. We're saying this from a position of 10, 15 years in the industry. As a new teacher, I can still vividly remember going, "Just tell me what to do next. I just want to get through my next lesson. I want to survive."I think it is a responsibility for initial teacher training courses to be able to provide that to teachers, so they can go into the class with the confidence that the learners will probably learn something. If you just give them a bunch of meta‑skills to work with, and then throw them into a highly pressured environment, they're going to fall to pieces. They need to have something to fall back on.Ross: Maybe there's an advantage of the Dunning‑Kruger effect. If you know almost nothing and you're really confident in it, that will overcome your lack of skill. If you're a new teacher and you said, "I'm telling you all these things, but maybe they're true. Maybe they're not."You maybe go into the classroom, and you wouldn't have the confidence to make up for your lack of skills. Maybe that Dunning‑Kruger effect, maybe there is some benefit to having that and believing in something even when you don't know much about it ‑‑ as a new teacher.Dave: It is to some extent, but every time, just keep on reminding the trainees that they can make their own...Simon: "This is the best way to do something. Or is it?[laughter]Dave: Just keep on pushing for deeper questions, like, "Was that effective in your lesson today? How do you know that? What real evidence were you going on? I saw the student do this. Why do you think that was? Do you think the same thing would work in another class?"Simon: What's the point of life? Why are you here?[laughter]Simon: Yes. Is anything even worth it?Ross: It's interesting. There must be a point where it would become counter‑productive and you just end up with...[crosstalk]Dave: Yeah, there's in so much doubt.Simon: No, it's true. Again, as a good trainer or a good manager, you should be able to spot when your teachers are ready, if they're not been challenged. When I was at [inaudible 10:14] you could see teachers that are ready to be pushed to the next level. People reach plateaus, and you could see when somebody goes, "Well I know everything now."Ross: That's a good point.Simon: "Actually, you don't. [laughs] Let me introduce you to some new ideas, like differentiation in the classroom or some of the higher‑level teaching skills." They go, "Oh wow! I had no idea you could do this." When their ability to implement what they know reaches what they know, then that's the time to give them more knowledge so they then turn that knowledge into skill.Dave: I like this idea of that plateau. If someone's already on like a slope, you don't want to stick them on a much steeper slope just for the sake of it.[crosstalk]Dave: ...just pick a Sisyphean boulder something. But if you're on a plateau already, you've got to get them on the slope.Ross: If you've had a trainee at the beginning of the course who's really struggling to give instructions, and you're like, "OK, here's a three‑step way of doing it," tell them in simple language, model it, and then ask questions.Dave: Show them, tell them, ask them, give them, Ross.Ross: Right, but then you wouldn't want to do afterward, "Well, when would that not be effective?" Do you know what I mean? You're just trying to get that person to that basic level.Simon: When you're observing them, you wouldn't want to sidle up to them and, "Sorry, um, you know that, according to Vygotsky, that's actually [inaudible 11:27] what you shouldn't have really done that there. This kid's ZPD is way off.[laughter]Ross: That might be too much.Paul Nation Ross: Hi, Paul. Welcome back. You published your first paper on language teaching in about 1970. You've had a very long career as well as a fascinating one. Can you tell us what's one thing that you've changed your mind about during your time from being a teacher all the way up to the present?Paul Nation: First of all, I like to think I always got it right from the beginning, [laughs] but I guess the main change that has occurred to me is the idea of the roles of the teacher and how the role of the teacher as a teacher becomes an important role but not the major role of the teacher.I say there's four or five roles of the teacher, and I always forget one of them. You know the number one role is the planner. The number two role is the organizer of activities and opportunities to learn. The third role's something like the trainer who trains the learners in strategies to learn, vocabulary and strategies to deal with the language learning.The fourth role would be the teacher as the tester who's giving learners feedback about their progress and showing them how much vocab they know and so on. The fifth role is the teacher as the teacher who actually gets up in front of the class or guides them through an intensive reading passage or something like that.I think that those roles are sort of ranked in the order of planner, organizer, trainer, tester, and teacher. That probably would be the major change I've come to during my reading of research, doing research, and so on. On the other hand, I also have to say that just about every PhD student I've had, and I've had a lot, have proved me wrong about the topic that they were working with.That's virtually without exception, sometimes proved me spectacularly wrong. I remember, for example, Teresa Chung doing research on technical vocabulary. I'd said in the first edition of "Learning Vocabulary in Another Language" that technical vocabulary probably made up about 5 percent of the running words in text.When she did her research, she found it made between 20 and 30 percent of the running words in the text, which is quite a bit different, one word out three compared to one word out of twenty. [laughs] That was sort of major changes, once people have done the research, to say, "Wow! I think I'm going to step back and change my ideas about that."I would say that the biggest one is the idea of you need a balanced approach to vocabulary learning and you need to see that teaching is a part of that, but only a part of it. You've got to make sure that the others are there. I would've given a much greater role to teaching very early on in my career.Matt Courtois Ross: Matt, what's something that you have changed your mind about, and why did you change your mind?Matt Courtois: What haven't I changed my mind about?[laughter]Matt: Looking back to my first year in Korea compared to now, I don't think there's a single belief that I still have that I had then. The biggest underlying thing that has changed in me was, at first when I was a teacher, I kind of thought the more knowledge I had about the language I could acquire, the better teacher I would become.I actually don't think that's really necessary. Being able to discuss any grammar point at the drop of the hat to me is not what makes a good teacher anymore. Having some of the skills to draw that from people, to run a good activity, and to facilitate improvement is much more essential to being a teacher than just knowing the subject matter.Ross: Can you remember when you changed your mind about that? Was it a long process?[crosstalk]Matt: It was a really long process. I taught in Korea and Russia, and probably my first year within China, I looked at teaching language in this way. Within my first year of teaching at my last company, there's a job opening for a content developer, content writer, something like that.I remember I took one of my favorite grammar skills lessons ‑‑ I think it was about the passive voice ‑‑ and I submitted it to the manager of this department. He sent me back an email that was three pages full of criticisms. The most positive things he said were basically about some of the animations that I had in my PPT...[laughter]Matt: ...not about the content of this deep analysis of the passive voice. He was just saying, "The method in what you're doing it, it's not about the grammar itself. It's how you present it," and stuff like this. I think I improved so much when that manager sent me such a critical feedback.I started approaching teaching grammar from, "What context am I going to use?" rather than having this giant scope of understanding the passive voice, every tense in English, rather than looking at myself as somebody who analyzes language. That's not my job.So many English teachers talk about how being prescriptive is so bad, but they're teachers. That's what they're doing. They're not writing dictionaries. They're not contributing to the corpus. We're not describing the language here. We're taking what those guys have and then presenting it to students in a way that they can practice it.Once I got over that mindset that, "I'm holding the key to the language, and I'm the person who's defining the language," and said, "No, I'm coming up with situations and facilitating situations in which they can use it," I think I improved a lot as a teacher and a trainer.Karin XieKarin: Teachers used to just think, "Well, my English is good, so I can teach English," or "I'm not confident in teaching English because I'm not confident in my English." Language awareness, like your knowledge in phonology, lexis, and grammar, they are important and are very helpful. It's just the teaching skills, they are very important, and they should be emphasized more.Ross: You need both, don't you?Karin: Yeah.Ross: If you don't know any English and you're the best teacher in the world, you can't teach English. Equally, if you're amazing in English and you can't teach at all, that's not going to work, either. You need a bit of both. At some point, especially for lower levels, the knowledge of English becomes less important than the skill to put it across.Karin: Because I was trained in the CertTESOL, DipTESOL way, I always believed that I need to build the classes around the learners, and I need to train teachers a reflective coaching way. I believed that was more effective than any other ways.Recently, I just come to realize that not necessarily, and use that as good challenge or good chance for me to try out different things, or give people different options and see how things goes. It's not one way better than the others. It's just there are different ways of doing things.Ross: This is one of the dangers of just working in one environment for a very long time. You're often only exposed to one way of doing things. You get transposed to another place, and you automatically just assume, "Well this isn't the right way to do things. This is wrong. This isn't the most effective." But is that true? Is there any evidence?Karin: Exactly. I think all the things that I've tried out shaped how I do training and classes now. They're definitely not the same as when I was in the old environment for such a long time.Carol Lethaby Tracy: Hi CarolRoss: Hi Carol. I think you're very well known for integrating ideas from research into your practice. We'd love to hear from you about what was one of the most important or the most interesting things that you've changed your mind about over the years.Carol Lethaby: I think the example that came to mind here certainly was not using the mother tongue in the classroom. I did my PGCE in the UK in learning to teach French and German. This was mid‑'80s, and the communicative approach in foreign language teaching then had a big hold on the profession.We were explicitly taught not to use English at all when we were teaching French or teaching German. Of course, I carried this on when I started teaching English. I did my Delta and the same thing, it came up all along the way. I remember it seemed to go against my intuition, but as I know now, don't always rely on your intuitions, because they might not be right.I actually did some research into this as a part of my master's degree here in Mexico and found out that, when you ask learners, one of the things I asked them in a piece of research I did, was, "Do you want your teacher to have English as their first language? Do you want your teacher to be a native speaker of English?" a list of pedigrees.The one that came out top at all levels, especially at beginner level, was they don't care if their teacher is a native speaker. They want a teacher who can speak their first language, who knows their first language.It made me think about, "Why then are we telling people you don't need to speak the learners' first language, you don't need to know the learners' first language, and you don't use the learners' first language. It's better not to"? Obviously, I was reading the history of English language teaching, Phillipson's Linguistic Imperialism.You realize how this happened and how this idea was transmitted and perpetuated. Now, knowing more about the brain and how we learn, I really don't believe that. I am convinced that we need to use the learner's first language in order to teach them another language.Ross: How would that look like in the classroom then, Carol? Do you have any examples of what that might look like with a group of students?Carol: I remember trying to teach the difference between first and second conditionals when I was teaching the younger Mexicans in Guadalajara here. There was this explanation that I was trying to work with them with levels of probability. It depended if you were an optimist or a pessimist whether you would use the first conditional or the second conditional.How confusing that was and how unsatisfactory that was for a learner, I'm sure. Now I would just tell those learners, "This is how you say it. The first conditional corresponds to this in Spanish and the second conditional corresponds to this in Spanish."Spending ages trying to define a word or an expression when just a quick translation could really help in that case, using the learners' language for effective reasons.I remember I didn't speak a word of Spanish when I first arrived here. I was given beginner's classes precisely because it was the idea that this would be a genuine communication situation, etc. I couldn't get to know my students.It means I couldn't ask them, "How are things going? How are you getting on in these certain situations?" Or, "What things are worrying you about learning English? Don't worry about this [inaudible 23:43] . It just means this. I can help you with this later."All these kinds of things that really enhanced language learning, I wasn't able to do because the idea was that we couldn't speak each other's language and only think in monolingual situations. It's just ridiculous not to take into account and use the learner's mother tongue.Ross Thorburn & Tracy Yu Ross: We heard there from a bunch of our favorite guests over the last couple of years about things that they have changed their minds about. Tracy, to finish the podcast, what have you changed your mind about?Tracy: There are a lot of things I have changed over the last few years. One thing is how I can connect on education‑related either theories or practice and into what I'm doing, my work in context. In the past, I remember when I started being a trainer, I read a lot of books about teaching, training, and theories in ESL, TESL, exactly related to this industry.Then, I realized maybe I just focused too specific to this industry, to this area. When I listened to podcasts and watch TV, or read other books, magazines, or journals, sometimes I realize that actually something that relates to this industry could really help what I'm doing. I need to give you an example, right?Ross: Give us an example, yeah.Tracy: I read a book about how marriage works. The book is "The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work." When I started reading this book, I didn't expect any connection to work, but the more I read about it, I realize actually there were a lot of principles [laughs] can apply to work, to manage a team.For example, there's one thing mentioned about criticism versus complaint. You can see the difference between these two. You can say...Ross: What's the difference? Do you want to give us an example of each?Tracy: A complaint, you can say, "Oh, you didn't do this very well," or "You didn't complete this on time," for example, at work. Criticism, it's like, "Oh, you always did this this way. You're not able to do this," something like that.Ross: It sounds like more you're talking about the person rather than the actions that they've taken or not taken.Tracy: Yeah. Of course, people can complain. You can give constructive feedback to the other person. You can talk about the facts, you can talk about the behavior, but you don't jump into conclusion and say, "Oh, this person is not able to," or "This is always like this." You're not giving the person another chance to reflect and then to make things better.When you're working with colleagues or you're managing a team, it's really important to distinguish the difference between a complaint and a criticism. Another thing is super, super useful, when I had a difficult conversation or tried to give feedback to our staff, just try not to have a harsh start‑up when you're having a conversation.Even though before you start a conversation, you knew it's probably towards some kind of a conflict or uncomfortable situation, still try to avoid a harsh start‑up in a conversation. Maybe you want to ask this person how they feel, what's going on, and what happened, and find out more information.Then provide more specific information to the person. Then give the feedback and then action plan, rather than at the beginning is said something very negative. It's difficult for the person to receive your feedback.For you, Ross, you work in different roles for the last 12, 13 years. You were a civil engineer, and then you work in education. Anything that you've changed over the last few years?Ross: Something I'm in the process of changing my mind about is a lot of the things that we talk about here and we do on teacher training courses in materials design and management is we concentrate so much on what goes on in the classroom as that's where the learning and everything takes place. That's fundamentally the most important thing.I used to believe that, but I'm coming to believe more that what happens in the classroom might not be the most important part of their learning process. What might actually be more important is what happens before the class and what happens after the class.I found a nice quote yesterday from someone called Ausubel, hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. He says, "If I were to block out and reduce all of education's psychology to just one principle, I would say this. The most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows. Ascertain this and teach them accordingly."That was really cool. How much time do we ever spend actually finding out what students already know? I would guess, generally, not very much time or not a lot of time. Certainly, on this podcast, we don't talk about that very much.I think the same thing for what happens after class. We tend to assume that things finish once the students walk out the door. We know from memory curves and things, if students don't revise what they've already learned, then they forget the vast majority of things that happen in classroom.That's something I've changed my mind about. I think we need to spend more time focusing on what happens outside the classroom every bit as much, if not more, compared to what happens inside the classroom.Tracy: How can you do that then, to find out more information before the class about the students?Ross: I don't have all the answers to it, but I think it's more important that we think, like ascertaining what students already know before lessons, finding out what problems do they have, and designing our lessons to try and solve specific issues that students have.What normally what happens is students get placed in a certain level. Then they just work through a course book, which roughly approximates what they know and what they don't know.We don't go into enough effort to find out what are the holes and the gaps, or the peaks and the troughs, in students' current ability and knowledge, and try and smooth over the troughs, to make sure what we're doing in class fills those in.Tracy: Have you ever seen any examples or some teachers who were able to focus on what happened before the class or after the class?Ross: Some things, like the whole flipped classroom principle, goes towards that. Some educational technology works towards aiming to find out what students know before the class. It has them answering questions and makes sure that they reach a level of mastery before they move on to the next topic.I don't think that's the norm in most scenarios. It's something that we don't talk about enough, and I think those things are every bit is important probably as what goes on in the classroom and deserve our attention a lot.Everyone, I hope that was interesting. I presume for a lot of people that the reason that you're listening to this podcast in the first place is so that we can change your minds about some issues that are important. Hopefully, it was useful hearing how some of our favorite guests have changed their minds about different things over the years.Tracy: Thanks very much for listening.Ross: For the last three years, thank you. Good‑bye.Tracy: Bye.

Find Lesson Planning for Language TeachersFor more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Principles of Task Design (With Dave Weller) - TranscriptionRoss Thorburn: Welcome back to the podcast, everyone. Today, our favorite guest is with us, Dave Weller.Dave Weller: Hurrah!Ross: [laughs] Today, Dave and I are going to talk a bit about Task Design. Before we jump into that, why is Task Design useful or important, or worth thinking about?Dave: Good question. Mainly because when we first become teachers or, at least, I know when I did, I just ran with whatever activities were suggested to me, or games that other teachers have worked very well to get the students engaged and motivated.It was only later [laughs] that I started to question, "Hang on, are my students actually learning anything?" Then shamefully, I didn't think about that soon enough.Dave: That's when you start to realize that, is what I'm doing actually helping the learners, or is it just using time. That's where Task Design pops up, and I think, "OK, the way I run my activity, the way I've structured my activity, it can make a huge difference to what students think about, the language they use, and the practice they get."Ross: There's also maybe something about evaluating what you're already doing there, isn't there? That first step that you mentioned maybe is looking at, "What am I doing now? How good is it?" Maybe before I start designing anything else.Today, we're going to run through Dave's six top tips for ways to design tasks. We're going to look at aims, gaps, load, materials, thinking, and rehearsal. Tell us the first tip tasks should support aims.Dave: When you think about the task, think about what language is it likely to get students to produce. Is that the same as your target language? Often, especially if you're just looking for an activity or a game to fill time, you start running that activity, and the language that comes out of the student's mouth is very different.I'm using different grammar, different lexis, different from maybe that you were expecting. Sure, that is practice, but it might be something they already know really well. They default to something that they are confident using. It's not pushing to use things they're not comfortable with. Therefore, growing or getting better at the language doesn't really happen.Ross: I think as well this, it's maybe when you're lesson planning, it can also be worth thinking about changing your aim to reflect the task as opposed to just changing the task to reflect the aim. A lot of people maybe tend to start off with the aim and work forward from that. It's like forward planning, whereas, something I sometimes encourage people to do is reverse planning.Starting at the end of the class, what's a great task that you think is going to be useful for the students, and then trying to make sure that your aim, and everything you teach matches the task.Dave: If you have the luxury of doing that, that's almost the best way to do, but it depends where you're working and the context you're in. Some schools are quite strict about the syllabus they're using, or the course book you have to follow. You have to tick off certain grammar points or sets of vocabulary.If you would just let me free a context where maybe a class works, just like an English corner, then, sure, coming up with an activity you know will work well for that group and working backwards from that is freer.Ross: Again, maybe as well with that aim, it's easier practically to add things to it than to take things away from it. You're probably less likely to get a complaint if you've taught an extra few things that have gone beyond what's in the syllabus. The issue is usually when you cut things from it.Dave: Yes, totally.Ross: The next step is tasks need a gap. What's a gap, for those unfamiliar?Dave: [laughs] It doesn't mean you just stop half‑way through, and you freeze.[laughter]Dave: If there's no input for five minutes at all, you just have to take your little nap.[laughter]Ross: It's the same as a break.Dave: Yeah, I wish. Now, surprisingly, I don't see much written about this. There's an author, Prabhu, and he mentioned that in any type of communication, there are gaps. The three are the information gaps, where perhaps you and I have different information about subjects.Maybe, I want to get to the train station, and you know the way, and I don't. Then, there might be a reasoning gap. Perhaps we all have the same information, but we're trying how to use that information to achieve an objective.For example, planning a night out or choosing where to go on holiday. We're using our logic and our reason to pick the best option, and we can do that collaboratively.The last gap is an opinion gap, where students would agree or disagree with each other based on their personal preferences. Debates are a good example.Ross: I choose a new picture for the classroom or something like that, and here's a choice, which ones do you like, and justify it, why, that kind of thing.Dave: Yes. Exactly.Ross: I've also seen people add to this experience gaps or getting people to talk about what they personally have experienced in their own lives, and how that might be different between students and [inaudible 4:39] to that.Dave: For me, a lot of that could fall under the information gap because you're just talking about life experience, and I have that, and you don't. That's really good in more adult classes if you have a nice mix of students with different experience in the classroom.Ross: Do you want to talk about this for young learners for a second? Because I think with these, it's easier to think of examples for adults than for kids. For kids, we're talking about, for example, what might be a reasoning gap for young learners that would work?Dave: Sure. I'll start with the information gap. That could be, you give pairs different pictures. Student A has a picture of a toy or a character, and person B has a blank piece of paper. They're taking turns to describe that character to them, and then they got to draw it. Then I'll [inaudible 5:26] get, "Sky" and they've got a big head, they've got small eyes, or whatever it might be.Ross: [inaudible 5:31].[laughter]Dave: Yes. No hair.[laughter]Ross: It is something that is worth talking about is this classroom management aspect. When I see this going wrong, a lot of the time, someone's had this idea that student A will have this information, student B will not, and they have to talk, but what just ends up happening...Say, if it's a running dictation that the student whose gone outside to look at the picture, we detect just ends up writing the answer, or are going to find someone who activity...I've got my sheet with...Find someone who can speak more than two languages, and then I just give you the pen. Tell you to write your name in there.I've also seen one where students have to find a way from A to B on a map, but these students show each other the map, so there's no gap there. With that, it's really worth thinking about how it's actually going to play out in the reality of the classroom. How, as a teacher, are you going to make sure that students don't just take the short‑cut of showing the other person the information?Dave: Oh, absolutely. An example, just stay with the A and B describing pictures to each other, I might line mapping roads. We'll have them get one road to [inaudible 6:36] and face the other road, and fixed seats somewhere. They will have to visibly hold up their paper in front of them.As a teacher, you can immediately see if someone's not doing what you've asked them to do, and it's a point of frown on them, whatever your behavior management system is.Ross: Sure.Dave: Or even making a favorite toy, or you're going to have to design a new character when you've watched a very short clip of a monster movie, a cartoon monster, and they have to make you a monster. You give them a certain set of features.Like, you can choose from these body parts. There's a selection of ears and eyes, your legs and arms, and body types, and then they have to put them together to create the scariest monster they can.Ross: I love those. One of the problems you often get with that is that teachers assume that, because I've taught, say, body parts, that that type of task is going to work really well. What I think the actual language you get in a task like that is like, "No, I disagree. I want this one. This is better. I don't like that."I think often with those, that's something that's really worth thinking about. Like what is the language that's going to come up? Because, really probably a lot of time what you're doing is just pointing to something and say, "I want this one," or "I like that one."Dave: Sure. The trick is, again, that's just shouldn't be the main task. That should be the pre‑task almost. Actually, it's really nice. It's another one of the criteria for task design, which is, think about or consider what students are going to think about.Cognitive psychology does show us that what students think about, they will remember. There's a really nice quote that memories erases your thought. You probably heard that on here before.Ross: No, actually I think that will be the first time, but Daniel Willingham, right?Dave: Yes, from his book, "Why Don't Students Like School?" If students are over‑excited, if the task is too stimulating, I always revert to the first language, especially young learners, and start using first language to complete the task.Ross: Because almost with kids there's this maybe lack of being able to self‑regulate in both your own behavior, but I guess, also in what language you're going to use. If you've got them dialed up to 11 on the excitements scale, then the chance that you're going to be able to decide to use your second language to do this thing is pretty unlikely.Dave: Exactly. Yes.Ross: Taking that also links back to what you're saying at the very beginning, that, as a new teacher or as new teachers, I think a lot of us assume that if the students are smiling and having fun and they're excited, then it's a great class, but maybe sometimes dialing that back a bit is actually beneficial.Dave: Absolutely. The opposite is entirely true, as well. If they're bored, I'll be talking in the first language but probably off topic.Ross: It's some sweet spot in the middle [laughs] between utter boredom and complete excitement.Dave: Yeah, exactly. That thing, that example you gave of, if they are making or creating something, maybe drawing or making something out of Play‑Doh, or whatever they're doing, they won't be using the language to do that. They'd taken a product of that task and then using it to use the language that you want to. That's where the learning's going to happen.Ross: Sorry to start jumping around there, but I think this relates to your last point of mentally rehearsing the tasks and thinking about like, what is actually physically going to happen here? I think that's one example.Another one is maybe, we took the farm animals and then for the last hour people are going to make their own farm, but, of course, what language are you using there? You're probably saying things like, "Can I have a red pencil, please?" Or, "Please, pass me the scissors," which is completely unrelated to the farm animals. The students won't be thinking about that at all.Dave: Exactly. It's so simple to avoid that by very quickly putting yourself in the student's shoes and thinking, what language do I need to use to complete this task?Ross: To take us back maybe to a minute if we're teaching adults. I think if it's a very high stakes class, if you're being observed for something that's really, really important, and you've got a task. You can always just find maybe two or three students wandering around the school and trying to do the task within 15 minutes.Not the students that will be in your class later, but just to see how actually it pans out, or just turn around to the person next to you in the teacher's room and go, "Can you do this with me for two minutes?"Dave: Jump out from behind and photocopy it.[laughter]Dave: I need your help with a task.Ross: Yes, covering this farm.[laughter]Ross: How about going back to number three then, cognitive load? That's a term that certainly I was not familiar with until relatively recently. What's cognitive load?Dave: Cognitive load is the challenge of the task itself. How difficult will learners find it? If you are expecting to use language that is far above what they can do, they'll look at the task or start to think about, realize it's well beyond what they can do, and you'll see engagement just drop like a stone.Again, the idea of picking a sweet spot between something that they're able to do with help, and this is almost like scaffolding of all the idea of what they can do. [inaudible 11:20] what I can do with help today, they'll be able to do without help tomorrow.Ross: I guess, here, as well, we're not just talking about necessarily how difficult the language is, but we might be thinking about how cognitively tough the task is. Earlier, for example, we were talking about information gaps, reasoning gaps, and opinion gaps.Maybe a reasoning gap where you've got this much money, these are some different options, these are some different preferences of people in the groups. That sounds like there's going to be a lot more thinking going on there from the students than an information gap where you described...[crosstalk]Ross: Right. When that happens, maybe it's worth thinking about how the processing power and the student's brain is going to be used to be maybe more thinking about the problem rather than for producing language.You might get less accuracy and less fluency. Just like me on this podcast, I stumble over words when I'm trying to explain a difficult concept.[crosstalk]Dave: That happens to all of us, right? You can see when someone's very familiar with the topic because they're fluent, they're calm, they're confident. They're not using discourse markers like, "um," "uh," and so on. When we're trying to think about how best to explain it, we slow down, we stumble over our words.Another thing that is very worth mentioning is that this level of challenge can also apply to the incidental language in class, like teachers giving instructions. I've observed classes where the students are frazzled by the time they get to the task, because the teacher speaks very quickly, they're not creating their language appropriately for the level.The students are leaning forward, trying to follow the thread of the teacher, and then they finish, they have to clarify with their friends next to them. "Did she say this?" "Did she say that?" Then by the time they get to the task, "I've just spent five minutes of intensive listening practice," and now you can get a listening to do that.Ross: It's almost like what students will think about. It sounds like in your example there they were thinking about what on earth could the instructions be rather than what was in the lesson.[laughter]Ross: Well, Dave, thanks for joining us. All of those tips were from just one tiny part of one chapter in "Lesson Planning for Language Teachers ‑‑ Evidence‑Based Techniques for Busy Teachers" by our very own, Dave Weller. Dave, where can people get a hold of it?Dave: Thanks to the plug, Ross. This is a brand new book for me. You can find it on Amazon as an e‑book or a paperback. Planning should support learning. It should use evidence‑based best practices, and it shouldn't take long.[laughter]Dave: Yeah. I think that's the key point. With those principles in mind, I've created 9 or 10 chapters in the book using current research, tested techniques so teachers can end up planning better, faster, and with less stress.Ross: Great. All right. Dave, thanks for joining us.Dave: It's been a pleasure.

Professor Cook tells us about his own experiences as a language learner, teacher and researcher and what has changed in language teaching over the course of his career.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

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.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Ross Thorburn: Hi, Allan.Allan Crocker: Hi, Ross.Ross: Do you want to tell us a bit about who you are, Allan Crocker?Allan: Yes, I am Allan Crocker. Someone has to be. I'm a teacher trainer here in China. I'm course director for CertTESOL. I also do basic training and management training in our company. Before that, I've been a director of studies, a manager in a training school, and been a teacher for about six years teaching English. Before that, about a year‑and‑a‑half trying to teach music.Ross: We're going to talk about timing today. Then we can talk a bit about timing in the classroom with students. Then maybe, later on, we can talk about how teachers spend their time.Allan: This is interesting how it always seems to come up in self‑evaluation. This is like, "My timing was not good." [laughs]Ross: You're right. It's so interesting because I'd never thought about this before, either. It's such a common thing for people to talk about after an observed lesson, but I've almost never seen a training session on it. This is definitely the first podcast that we've done on it. Yet, that's what people always talk about.Allan: People talk about that. There's a few areas here. Firstly, my real sort of annoyance, we start with that, is the use of alarms and timers and, "OK, I'm going to give you two‑and‑a‑half minutes."At the end of the two‑and‑a‑half minutes, the alarm goes off, and they go, "Have you finished?" Luckily, I don't see many people then saying, "OK, let's go for the answers." Usually, teachers are aware that no one's finished. You put pressure on people. You slightly make them feel bad about themselves if they're not finished within the time.Where that comes from is seeing the lesson as yours. It's like, "Here's my plan, you're going to be subjected to it," rather than, "I'm going to help you learn by giving you these exercises." Then it's not, "How long is this going to take?" because that's obvious.Ross: In my plan, it says 2.5 minutes.Allan: Yeah, but the answer is until the students are finished or bored or there's something better to do. You can judge that other ways.Ross: Although to play devil's advocate to this, there is obviously a value to having deadlines. We obviously see this on teacher training courses when there's assignments. For example, one course I did before where you had to hand in 2,500 words every three weeks. Everyone did it on time.Then on other courses that we've seen, you maybe have to hand in 10,000 words after three years. Guess what happens? Everyone leaves all that work until two years, 10 months. Then they panic, and they start working on it. There's obviously some value to those deadlines.Allan: Yeah, I agree, but, in that case, it should be a focused deadline. It's like, "OK, they may be right. You have 10 minutes to prepare your side of the debate, and then we're going to do it." That will be 10 minutes.Ross: I almost see it as you want to set the time limit, but not actually use the timer to decide when it's going to finish. Like you'll say, "All right, guys, you've got five minutes to do this." There's some urgency, but then you walk around and you monitor.I don't think I ever set a timer, but I can see when people are close you need to get their skates on and go, "All right, you've got one minute left." You're using the times to motivate people to get their skates on, but you're not actually necessarily using a timer to do it.Allan: That's one point. When it gets to the evaluation of a lesson, like a real obsession with time and time management, teachers will often list as a key positive or a key negative, "I managed the time well. Therefore, I completed everything," versus "I didn't have enough time for some stuff, therefore, that..."Ross: Does that mean then that almost the aim of the lesson is to complete the lesson plan?Allan: To complete the lesson plan, yeah, absolutely. I used to do this as well.Ross: Do you think it's a nervousness thing? I often think, as observers, we see...Obviously, there's this observer's paradox thing where people are more nervous. Maybe they think the observer...Allan: It's going to be class, right?Ross: Yeah, it's a little class, also the observer is expecting them to carry out a plan or something.Allan: It could well be that they expect that. I remember talking about this fairly recently with a trainee who then said, "Well, when I'm observed in my regular job, I get told off if I don't follow the timings." There are definitely situations where you're under pressure there, or you have an observer who doesn't really know what they are talking about if I can say that.[laughter]Allan: They see the lesson plan as part of the exam. It also comes from a lack of tolerance of ambiguity or intolerance of ambiguity.Ross: Talk about that for a minute or two.Allan: Mrs. Dietrich told me all about this, and I love it. This is the idea that some people are tolerant of ambiguity and some people are not. This is a skill that can be trained.What it means is, if you have intolerance of ambiguity, it means that you feel threatened when you don't understand or they'd have confusion. Something you might do is keep asking questions used to search for a black and white answer.Ross: I've come across this before in language learning. The kids are generally more tolerant of ambiguity because, as a child, you're used to not understanding a lot of what's on TV or what your parents are saying. As an adult, especially with language reading, people get freaked out when it's like, "I don't understand one thing."Allan: A very good example of that was a recent lesson. The learner asked me a question about grammar and phrasal verbs and why we use of certain preposition. It took quite a while for me to just be essentially, "No way. You just have to use this preposition with this verb, sorry." She just wanted to know a reason.That's a very lack of tolerance for ambiguity. What it means here is, it's like, "OK, my lesson is on the plan. I can measure my success if I complete it." It requires a higher level of tolerance of ambiguity to say, "The lesson is in the learners' heads. I can't measure that. I've not really got any idea what's going on. Let's just let them work this out, and we'll try and explore together."It's really hard to measure what's impossible to measure. You have to take a leap of faith that like, "They're talking to each other about the task. Good."Ross: Something useful is coming out of this.Allan: Yeah, if we trust in our methodology, something useful is coming out of that. Let's work with it. That's a lot more tolerant of ambiguity than I completed the plan. I know I did something. [laughs]They'll learn the same thing where, in a similar way, the teacher might say, as a plus point, "Learners completed all the exercises correctly." Then me being an asshole, say, "Why is that a good thing?"Maybe a tip here for this as a trainer or observer is, if someone says, "I got through the lesson plan, I did everything on time," you can say, "OK, were there any points where you feel the learners could have benefited from more time there."Conversely, "I didn't manage to do everything." It's like, "Was that the plan or did you lose time at some point that you should have done, or did you plan too much? What was the reason there?" It might often be that "Oh, I just planned too much." Then it's, "OK, that's a learning there is you had a too complicated plan."There's the areas where time gets lost. These are, firstly, presentation where you think it's lasted a minute, but it's actually lasted about 10 and everyone's asleep. Where you'd like to elicit a few things and you just want to ask some questions, and then you get stuck there.Answer checking, I see a lot were it's, like, "Let's go through every damn answer." You already know they're all right. Let's go deeper or move on and just say, well done. A tip would be to record yourself doing that and then listen. It's like, your presentation, maybe that takes seven minutes of you presenting that. That's a bad use of time, I think.[crosstalk]Ross: It almost seems like a prioritization or like a value for time. If you could look through your lesson and think about which minutes was the most learning happening? Which segments have the highest value for time?Allan: Or which minutes where I'm not really aware of what was going on? That's where the time really matters.Ross: It could be your example there of going through the answers. That seems to be a perfect example of no one learned anything in these five minutes. Could you have cut out these five minutes? Probably.Allan: You can monitor, obviously, and then you say, "OK, everyone got everything right? Let's look at number two. What do you think about the answer to number three? Give your opinion." You can still then turn that into a learning opportunity, rather than just repeating what they already know.You mentioned before, time becomes a problem when they didn't do, say, the free practice or the core part of the lesson, which then yeah, that's a real issue. A way to get around that is to set a time, which is the latest that the core task can start.Ross: I like that. Not that I've done this much, but one of my best friends is into mountain climbing. The couple of times I've done a mountain with him, never actually gotten to the top, there's always a turnaround time of if we're not at the top, regardless of where we are, even if we're 15 meters from the top, at 4:30, we're turning around.Otherwise, we're going to be walking home in the dark, and someone might break their leg. That's a great metaphor for the free plan. It's always going to start at least 10 minutes from the end of the class, come hell or high water.Allan: Yeah, 20 minutes, 15 minutes, whatever it is. Then if you want practice making sure that happens, then set a personal alarm or something that just goes off in your pocket and you go, "OK, everyone, we're going to move on to this."Ross: That's so nice. It's almost like the point of the timer is not for the students, it's for you.Allan: It's for you, right?Ross: It's for you. An interesting question's to look at...Because of the thing that we always say as teacher trainers is, "That final activity, you've got to get it done," or whatever, but why? Where is it we're spending time in a lesson on say, for example, accuracy versus fluency or input versus output? What's our rationale, maybe, as teacher trainers in those decisions?Allan: It's funny, they're right. The free practice must be done because, otherwise, they haven't applied it in the "real life" situation. Therefore, they've learned nothing. It's like, "Well, yeah, but..." The flippant answer is where learning takes place. That's where you should [laughs] spend more time, but where is that?Monitoring your learners and seeing what they're talking about, what they're saying, what mistakes they're making, finding places where you can improve, that's worth your time. It's maybe not accepting a mediocre answer.Maybe it's control practice, and someone said it with a bad pronunciation. It's like, OK, let's spend 20 seconds getting that better. That's worth your time. What else is there to talk about time other than...?Ross: Something interesting with timing is the idea of different timings with different age groups. I often find that's one of the big challenges going from teaching adults to kids, or kids to adults, or kids of different ages, is realizing that with three‑year‑olds, for example, if you have anything that lasts over five minutes, that's going to be a big problem. You need to plan.If it's a 60‑minute lesson, you probably need to plan like at least 12 different steps in there. If you do the same thing with adults, which I did before moving from teaching young kids to teaching adults, that's way too many stages. That's just not going work. Taking into account the attention span of the students of different ages.Allan: One advantage of teaching young learners in that regards is the kids will tell you. They'll tell you very loudly that they don't want to do this anymore.[laughter][crosstalk]Allan: In a way, the monitoring becomes quite easy in that respect. Stuff is being thrown, time to move on. Where adults, you have to listen a bit more carefully.Ross: Another key thing there is almost setting too much or setting these flexible aims of like saying, "You've got to write at least three sentences," or, "You have to answer at least seven questions," but maybe there's 12. Then, if people get to seven questions, and, "OK, you need to move on," people still have the sense of, I completed it.They don't have this frustration that I didn't finish, but then you don't get the early finishers just sitting around and doing nothing.Allan: Then maybe people choose different ones and then sharing at the end. Yeah, absolutely.[pause]Ross: Another thing about timing I wanted to mention was just what teachers spend their time on in general. When I was teaching 20 hours a week, I don't feel that I developed very much. I feel that the year I developed the most was when I was a director of studies and I was only teaching for about five hours a week. I could really plan those five hours. Really apply things...Allan: Are those lessons special in some way that they...?Ross: When I was teaching 20 hours a week, you were just surviving, it was keeping your head above water. Whereas I found, when I was teaching much less, all of a sudden I had this opportunity to go, "I'm going to use corpus in this lesson. I'm going to try and spend a bit more time making my materials on this."Allan: I used to work with teachers who also had customer service jobs as well and they would phone the parents. A lot of teachers worked with that dual role, and they had no time to plan lessons at all. They wouldn't develop really.Ross: Because you'd just be going in and winging it every time.Allan: Yeah, and, "Well, I'm not going to think up a new activity or new way of doing this because I don't have time."Ross: There's always some sort of teaching hierarchy of needs there like I'm going to get...Allan: Survival is first.Ross: Yeah, it's like, "If I don't mark the homework or phone the parents, I'm going to get fired. I'm going to do those things first. Then what's next? Write down the vocabulary and four activities on the back of a Post‑it note." Then gradually, if you have the time and maybe you do have the opportunity to think in more detail and reflect.Allan: Then there's some idiot does try to get you to do that jigsaw activities which involve cutting up pieces of paper.Ross: [laughs]Allan: Even in a top tip matching activity, you only need to cut one half of it. The other one you can keep there. Top tip, I've saved you hours and hours of your life.[laughter]Ross: That's amazing. I never thought of that before.Allan: Really?Ross: Yeah, really.Allan: Used to drive me mad to see people cutting both sides of it. Like, "No, you fold. You just need..."[laughter]Ross: Obviously, thanks for coming on.Allan: My pleasure.Ross: For people that want to find out more about you, no Twitter, no Facebook.Allan: No, I have nothing. No social media present at all.Ross: Wow, cool. Well, congratulations on having no social media.Allan: You'll see me on the streets.

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.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Ross Thorburn: Hello, everybody. Welcome to our podcast. Today, we've got two guests. Matt, our regular guest...Matt Courtois: Hey, how's it going?Tracy: Hey, Matt! And we have Karin.Karin Xie: Hello.Tracy: Karin Xie!Ross Thorburn: What do you do, Karin? What's your job now? It's changed since last time.Karin: Yeah. I am now the Academic Manager for Trinity China. My job is helping teachers preparing their students for Trinity GESE exams, and also expanding Trinity TESOL courses to teachers in Mainland China.Tracy: Great, OK. Welcome.Ross: Today, I thought we could talk about questions. I thought it would be interesting today to look at different aspects of questions, or different ways that we can look at questions using Bloom's taxonomy, open and closed, and a whole lot of other things.Tracy: We've got three questions about questions. The first one is questions teachers can ask, and the second?Matt: The second one is questions trainers ask.Tracy: And the third one?Karin: The questions we can ask ourselves to reflect.Questions teachers askTracy: You know, we all are teachers, we were teachers, and we've trained teachers. What do you think teachers really feel struggle with asking questions in the classroom?Karin: I got curious in that question. That's why I used it as my section one for my DipTESOL portfolio topic. We ask so many questions, but we are not necessarily always aware of why we ask the questions we ask, and what we were trying to get from the students.Matt: Did you find anything in your research?Karin: Yeah, the main thing was teachers rarely paid attention to the proportion of display questions and referential questions they ask.Ross: Before we jump into what kind of things teachers ask, what are some different types of questions or ways of categorizing teacher questions?Karin: The simple way of categorizing questions like open‑ended questions, and yes/no questions, and there's also, display questions, and referential questions.Ross: I think most people can get closed and open questions, but what's a referential question or a display question?Karin: A display question is when the person or the teacher knows the answer, or the other people also know the answer to the question. For example, when you hold a pen, so everybody can see the pen, and you ask, "What color is this pen?"The referential question, on the other hand, would be when you invite opinions, or ask questions that there's no definite answer to.Tracy: I think the display question is quite similar to experience questions, because everybody can see it, can feel it.Ross: I suppose that's good for checking some kind of meaning. You can be sure that however the students answer it, they've either got the concept or not.Tracy: For example, can you find a microphone in this room?[laughter]Ross: I can imagine that must be a problem. If teachers ask too many display questions, there's no real genuine or natural communication. You would never normally ask someone, "What color is this pen?" because you can see the color of the pen by looking at it.Tracy: Yeah, there's no need to ask a question.Matt: It's OK to ask questions about the function of language sometimes, like what it means. I guess we're talking about vocabulary here, but with grammar as well, asking questions, comparing two different grammar structures. It's not necessarily something you would do in day‑to‑day conversation, but I think it's the kind of question that's really essential in the classroom.Karin: It's almost like a concept‑checking question you're talking about.Matt: I think a well‑formed concept checking question can drive a student's understanding of this grammar point or vocabulary point forward. It's not just, "What do you know about it already?"You can ask, for example, after reading an article. I think it's really useful to ask, "Why did the author choose to say it this way? What other ways could he have said it? What other grammar could he have used? How does that change the meaning?"These can not just display that you understand what the grammar is, but it can actually push forward your understanding of grammar.Tracy: It seems like you give the students an opportunity to go further and to make connections between the language, and also how the language can be applied in real communication. For example, where can you use it, and why people use it, instead of using that.Karin: Or getting students to analyze and evaluate the language that they've heard, or they just used.Ross: Sounds like now we're heading on to Bloom's taxonomy as a way of looking at questions.The lowest levels of Bloom's taxonomy might be "What's this?" or "What did you read?" or "What did this person do in this passage?" whereas, higher up, it would be, "Why did they behave this way? Why did they make this decision?" Then maybe at the top it might be, "Can you rewrite the ending to this story?"Tracy: Did you read something recently, Ross, about reading comprehension questions?Ross: I have here a couple of other models for reading comprehension questions. One is by Diane Freeman. She splits reading comprehensions into three different areas. One is questions about the content, like what happened in the text or why did this person do this.Then, you get questions about the language. Maybe those are ones like Matt mentioned earlier. What tense did the person use here? Why did they use that? What does that show?The final one, as she calls them, affect questions. It's like a personal response. What do you think of this character? Why do you think they did this thing? Or, evaluation, like what did the author mean by this?Matt: Or what stance does the author take? How does it represent the values of society? Where is the author's place in this?Karin: One thing that I didn't know or wasn't aware of before I did my research, but I did come to realize, was that the follow‑up questions really made a difference. For example, the first few kinds of questions that you mentioned, most teachers would ask them, but what really made a difference was the later ones, because not many teachers ask them.[crosstalk]Ross: I always thought forward these things, like going to those higher levels of Bloom's taxonomy, it's nice to have, but maybe it's not really helping people learn language.The more I've read about this recently, the more I'm beginning to believe, or understand, that the deeper you get students to process and think about it, the more they're able to remember and recall ideas later on. Really pushing people to think about things in a much deeper way actually helps them with language acquisition.Tracy: Recently, I read Edward de Bono's book, "Teach Your Child to Think." What he mentioned is about there are a different type of practice and you can help the children to improve their thinking skills.There are four different types of item, and they are fun items, which means the questions should be imaginative, and they can be a little bit crazy.What would happen if we all had a third arm? They have a remote item beyond their experience and means. For example, what factors would you consider when you're choosing a place to set up a new restaurant? For children, probably, they've seen restaurants, but they don't know what is the process to set up the restaurant.The third one is called backyard item. For example, what do you think your school policy is. Do you agree with it or you disagree with it? It relates this to their life.The last one is called highway item. It's serious and directly relevant to their life like how can you make more friends in your neighborhood?These questions, of course, not always, were used in a classroom. Also, I think teacher and parents should help their children to be able to improve their thinking skills.Questions trainers askRoss: Let's talk a bit about questions that trainers ask them. I know Karin, you and I and Matt, we talked before about almost this danger of trainers asking questions to trainees and doing that classic thing of, "Hey, I'm trying to elicit an idea. Do you know what it is?"Matt: Years ago when I was a teacher, I had a trainer who was talking about board work and she asked us something about, let's say, word stress. She was saying, "What's a way we can symbolize word stress on the board?"Somebody was like, "You could draw a circle over the stress syllable." The trainer went, "Yeah, I guess we could."[laughter]Matt: She kept going at it and somebody else was like, "You could underline the stress syllable." "Yeah, yeah, yeah."[laughter]Matt: Finally, we got to the point of just saying, "What is it?" and she was like, "Guys, we have different colored markers on the board." Then we're like, "Oh, OK. I get it," and she's like, "So, what can you do?"[laughter]Karin: It's almost like reading my mind or guess what I'm thinking, rather than what we can do, or different options.Ross: At least in that example, none of those other options were any less valid than the other one. I think the thing is that people will be more likely to use their idea than something that someone else spoon‑feeds you.Matt: Ross, when you observed my training before, or maybe when you observed my lessons at the very beginning, the first question you asked was what kind of feedback do you want. Do you want to do a coaching reflection thing? Do you want to just give you a few points to work on?I thought that was pretty cool. I think we ended up doing a reflection thing. Then we finished that and I said, "OK, what's your advice?"Karin: That's because maybe you both preferred that coaching style. We were so used to a certain way of doing things in training and feedback. We just assumed that people would prefer similar ways. We are just how we trained.Tracy: Like Matt mentioned, it's great if the trainer can give the options to the trainee on what type of feedback you prefer. It also doesn't mean that's always true. If I say I prefer direct feedback, it doesn't mean this person can really accept and then to be reflective on those direct feedback, or take actions. I think there is always a balance.Ross: I don't think I do that anymore. I don't think I give people that choice because what I found was that people just say, "Yeah, just tell me what you think." That's like the default setting.I often find that after you tell someone, "These are the three things I would change," they're like, "Well, that was a bit direct."[laughter]Ross: It's like that's what you thought you wanted but maybe that's not what you actually wanted. In that situation, now, I usually go, "What do you want to talk about, about the lesson or about the training?" Tell me about it.Usually, you find that the thing the person first starts speaking about is the thing they're most interested in. Then you can start exploring that area.Tracy: I think it's also a good opportunity if they felt that they did something really well and we can still explore. Why do you think it went really well?Matt: When we were talking last night, you drew a distinction between two kinds of questions. You're saying that's eliciting, it's not really...what was it?Ross: Right, I think, Karin, your example.Karin: Self‑discovery.Ross: Yeah, your example was...I ask these questions so people can self‑discover. I think there's a difference between self‑discovery and eliciting. If you ask a lot of questions to elicit, that's like, "I have an idea and I want to 'coach you' to get to this idea that I'm already thinking of."That's the thing people find annoying. Whereas self‑discovery is different, because that's, for me at least, you're discovering your own answer to the question. I don't really care if the answer that you get is the same answer as I've thought of or not.Matt: So often I think what every trainee hates is when the trainer is eliciting from them and they try to disguise it as self‑discovery.Questions we ask ourselves to reflectRoss: We talked about teachers asking questions and trainers asking questions. I think that probably all of us have found, when you get to a certain point in your career, there isn't anyone asking you questions and coaching you. It comes down to yourself, to be in charge of your own professional development. What questions do you guys ask yourselves to help yourselves improve?Tracy: I always try to ask myself...I read something or I heard something or just to find out a new concept and how can I make it relevant to my working context.Karin: Remember, Tracy, I was showing you the Chinese quote from my friend. The three questions. She said, whenever you talk to people, ask yourself, one, would people be able to understand what you say?Two, the things that people and the things that you mention, would people know about them? The third would be, would people be interested in what you're talking about, and why? I think those were three really lovely questions for us to ask ourselves.Ross: The other useful question that I find I ask myself is ‑‑ this is not so much as a trainer but as a manager ‑‑ when things go wrong and you often think, "Wow, it's because this person messed this thing up." So often that is the case.The most powerful thing that I find for helping me learn is stepping back and thinking, I can't change how my boss behaves or I can't change how this person in the sale department behaves. Those things were out of my control.Even though this was 99 percent this other person's fault, what's the thing that I could have done differently in this situation? I find that's a really useful thing. Also, for people who work for you, going, "This wasn't your fault."But, what's the thing that you could have done differently to prevent that from happening? Then all of those annoying situations, all of those problems when they arise, you can still turn them into some opportunity to learn something.Ross: Matt and Karin, thanks very much for coming in again.Matt: Thanks for having me, Ross.Ross: You're very welcome, Matt.Ross: Bye, everyone.Karin: Bye.Tracy: Bye.

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? For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Ross Thorburn: Welcome back to the podcast, everyone. This episode, our guest is Dr. Marek Kiczkowiak. Marek teaches in Belgium. He runs a TEFL show podcast, as well as the website TEFL Equity Advocates.In this episode, Tracy and I interviewed Marek about native‑speakerism inside the classroom. How do our views and assumptions about native speakers, non‑native speakers influence how we teach students, and how does that influence the students and how they use English. Hope you enjoy the interview.What Does Native‑Speakerism Inside the Classroom Look Like?My first question, I think most of the listeners out there will be familiar with the idea of native‑speakerism outside the classroom and discrimination that maybe non‑native English teachers face when they're job hunting. Can you tell us a bit about the other side of native‑speakerism and how that manifests itself inside the classroom?Marek Kiczkowiak: At the beginning when I got interested in it, obviously the first point that you notice is discriminatory recruitment policies. All the other aspects have a lot to do as well with teaching English.If you look at all the major coursebooks, if you look at the pronunciation syllabus, the aim is either to imitate standard British or general American English. This perpetuates the idea that your students have to speak like a native speaker in order to be successful.Of course, coursebooks have been moving forward with a few artificial non‑native speaker accents, usually recorded by actors. Actors are trained to imitate voices and accents, so there's a reason why coursebooks do that.It's very subliminal, you can call it, or subconscious. It's not overt, but I think if, for a very long time that's how you learn English, it doesn't surprise me that so many students prefer native‑speaker voices. The way we're teaching them leads them to believe that, "Yeah, clearly native‑speaker accents are better than non‑native speaker accents." That would be one example.Tracy Yu: I remember when I was a student from middle school to high school and university, maybe 10 years, definitely it's close to either British accents or American accents. At the end, I don't know which accent I have.Ross: It seems clear then from the point of view of schools employing non‑native teachers that there's an advantage there, that you can get great teachers.If you have students that say, "I want to learn authentic American English," or, "I want to learn British English," I wonder what their business argument is to a publisher for saying, "You need to include more examples of non‑native English."Marek: There's another reason why publishers have been reluctant, let's say, to abandon this model, where they primarily have American and British accents, is that students and teachers might complain.I remember talking, at a conference, to a coursebook author from a very big publisher. He said that they went on a tour to Russia. He was approached by one of the local teachers. The local teacher openly told them that, "We don't like your coursebook because there are all these strange accents in your coursebook. We want the British accent. I won't buy your coursebook."I had spent years persuading the publisher to finally do this, and now I get this. It's probably because those teachers have been educated and teacher trained to believe that, that British accent is the only accent they should aspire to.Accent is just one belief and factor, but there are many others. One example would be culture. A lot of people say the native speakers are better teachers because they know the target culture. If you look at some research by, Ryan Bank, if I remember the names correctly, in these coursebooks, a vast majority of place names, characters, and so on, were Western and the local Chinese students would never be familiar with it.That leads to a situation where in order to be a successful language learner, you need to learn a stereotypical image of British or American culture. That further makes native‑speakerisms seem normal and common sense.Ross: Something that Vivian Cook has written about, about how non‑native speakers should not be considered equals and failed native speakers. He says that you really need a different yardstick to compare those students. I think that's true if you look at the CEFR.Probably, there's an assumption if you're a native speaker, you should be a C2 level. Has there even been any research about a different set of standards that are based around something else that do not hold this final goal as being pretty much the same as a native speaker?Marek: The difference here that we should make is perhaps not between native and non‑native speakers but between monolingual and bi or multilingual users of the language.If you look at second language acquisition research that compares the research into critical period or compares the proficiency and intuitive knowledge of grammar, for example, pronunciation, it's usually a group of monolingual native speakers to which non‑native speakers are compared.That's a bit like comparing apples and pears because your monolingual brain is different from my multilingual brain. I might use the language in a different way. If you were to become, maybe already are a bilingual or multilingual users of English, even if your mother tongue is English, learning those other languages will change your brain.I remember reading a study where all the monolingual speakers performed completely differently on tests of intuitive grammaticality than those who are bi or multilingual, even bi or multilingual from birth. We do have this idea that the monolingual native speaker is at the top, but why should that be?All of our students will be at least bilingual. That's the goal. We're trying to create people who can operate successfully in two languages. Comparison points should be somebody who already speaks two or three languages, not somebody who's a monolingual native speaker.If as a non‑native speaker, for example, you're listening to this podcast and you've never felt confident about your identity because you're a failed copy of a native speaker, you have a foreign accent, and so on, you have to think of yourself as you're a bi or multilingual user of the language. It's absolutely amazing.There are so many people in Britain or the States who have never learned any other foreign language. Equally, if you're a native speaker and you know other foreign languages, I think your selling point should be not that you're a native speaker, but that you're bi or multilingual user of the language.Tracy: I think as a non‑native English speaker, I definitely experienced a lot of the criticism. I totally agree with you, what you just mentioned. Be proud of who you are and what kind of accent you have, and also you can speak more than one language.In reality, there are a lot of negative information or feedback or criticism just around you. It just damage your confident, you always think, "OK, I'm still far away from the standard that people perceive."Do you have any suggestions or something that you think, this could help other speakers, and they can feel more confident or boost their confidence, what kind of suggestion you want to give them?Marek: Absolutely. One suggestion, sales pitch starts, you can join TEFL Equity Academy where I have a course specifically designed to boost your confidence, end of sales pitch.First thing, you have to rethink how you brand, market yourself, think of yourself. You really have to, not just on a superficial level though, but deeply believe in yourself in all the abilities that you have. You have some amazing superpowers. For starters, that you've learned English. That can be used as a great selling point to students.In terms of pronunciation, people will tell you, "Well, you have a foreign accent. That's bad." Why is that actually bad? Ross has an accent as well because that's where he comes from. If we're to be honest, the vast majority of our students will never be able to speak like Ross does, for example because there's...Ross: They probably wouldn't want to, Marek.[laughter]Ross: Yeah, I'm not sure if they would want to. The Scottish accent is not specifically desirable, yet.[laughter]Marek: There is a critical period, right? It's an unrealistic model to present them with. Whereas you are a successful user of English, your students can imitate you, and they can improve themselves. They can imagine themselves speaking English as well as you do.If you're told that, "Well, you've just made a mistake there, clearly you're not proficient enough," but then there's hundreds of examples of native speakers making what we would call "mistakes" by just speaking non‑standard English.Also, you need to understand as well, why native speakers are not better teachers because they are native speakers. A native speaker can be a fantastic teacher, not because of their first language but because of the skills and experience. You need to understand the native speaker myth, its different components, and why it's not true.Ross: I definitely find myself having that cognitive bias. If I'm listening to a non‑native speaker and I hear a mistake, I go, "I heard a mistake there. That's interesting." Whereas if you hear a native speaker making a mistake, you just go, "It's just part of ordinary spoken discourse that we don't always speak according to grammar."To go back to the other thing you were saying about the lack of confidence there, how much of that do you think there is down to not just the attitude of the non‑native speakers but the attitude of the expat, new teacher who just finished, "I'm a native speaker, come and ask me. I'll tell you the answer."What do you think, more generally, teacher education needs to do to reverse those attitude?Marek: There's a lot of truth to that. As non‑native speakers, everything in our profession or industry, industry is probably a better word here, leads us to believe that native speakers are better teachers. We're constantly told that.You go on Facebook and the stuff that you see, you wouldn't believe people telling me sometimes, "Marek, you're still banging on about the same thing? Won't you ever stop? It's over, right?" No, it isn't. Go to Facebook, and stuff that you will see, it's just unbelievable.It's your colleagues, fellow English teachers saying really horrible things about non‑native speakers. You read that.Some of the students might say those things about you like they're surprised to see a Chinese teacher at B2 level. In some cases, native speakers as well, who will have a very condescending attitude, their place of birth and their mother tongue gives them the right to correct you all the time. All of that can really affect your confidence negatively.In terms of teacher training and education, there's a lot that needs to change. At the moment, I can't see how CELTA or Trinity, CEFR could ever incorporate that because the courses are just too short. It's unbelievable. It's a topic for another podcast, that we still have four‑week crash courses and we call the people after them professional English teachers.Ross: Those are the best courses as well, right? That's the irony. They are four weeks.Marek: I think that there should be sessions specifically for non‑native speakers to boost their confidence, to talk about these issues that we've discussed. There should be sessions for everybody to discuss native‑speakerism and discuss how it can negatively affect all of us in the industry, how it makes our industry much less professional than it should be.It devalues your qualification. It devalues your experience. The only reason why you might be hired is because you're a native speaker.Ross: And white. [laughs]Marek: And white. Absolutely. A white, native speaker. You want to be hired because you're a fantastic teacher, and you fit the qualifications.Ross: Oh, and male. I forgot. [laughs]Marek: Sorry?Ross: And male. [laughs]Marek: And male, yeah.[laughter]Ross: It's terrible. Final thing on this topic then, we've been using the term non‑native speakers. I know Vivian Cook suggested L2 users as a term to use instead. What do you think about the terminology that we use? How does that play into the attitude?Marek: I think it's a difficult issue here because none of the other terms capture the same meaning. If we talk about multilingual teachers, that can be both you and me. I think L1 and L2 users perhaps it doesn't have the non‑prefix, perhaps it's slightly better, but in essence, it's still exactly the same.When we were writing the book with Robert Lowe, we were very much aware of the fact that, on the one hand, we are rallying against and showing that these terms are subjective, ideological, but then we are using them. We did try, whenever possible, to use, for example, multilingual users of the language and so on.Sometimes, the terms can be good to draw attention to the problem. They do also reflect how some teachers see themselves. I see myself as a non‑native speaker of English and a multilingual user of English, as well.I do think that perhaps in professional ELT discourse, be it in job ads, in advertising, but also in teacher training, there has got to be a move away from these issues certainly, in recruitments. I've seen absolutely no place for these two terms, in recruitments, in advertising.Ross: Once again, everyone, that was Marek Kiczkowiak. If you'd like to find out about Marek, please visit his website www.teflequityadvocates.com.Thanks very much for listening. We'll see you next time.

We ask David Crystal about standard English: why does standard English exist? How is it changing? Should students be exposed to different accents from around the world? And what role should culture play in English language teaching?For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Ross Thorburn: Welcome back to the TEFL Training Institute Podcast. This episode, we have Professor David Crystal ‑‑ linguist, writer, editor, lecturer, and broadcaster. In this episode, I asked David Crystal about standard English. Why does standard English exist? How is it changing? What type of English or Englishes should teachers teach?We talked about pronunciation and also the role that culture plays in language teaching. I hope you enjoy the interview.David Crystal, welcome to the podcast. Can you start off by telling us, when did the idea of standard English first start? Is it something that also came into play in the 18th century along with things like prescriptive grammar and Samuel Johnson and the first dictionary, etc., or was it something that started earlier than that?David Crystal: One has to ask the question, what is a standard for? A standard is to guarantee intelligibility amongst lots of people, because if you carry on writing in your regional dialect, eventually you won't understand each other.The first signs of standard English come in the Middle Ages when England becomes a nation rather than a set of independent kingdoms and there is a national civil service evolving, and a national parliament and all these things and English is becoming the language of the nation.Then it became essential to get rid of some of these variations, and all sorts of influences caused the evolution of standard English ‑‑ civil service scribes, for instance, individual authors like Chaucer, the influence of the Bible ‑‑ many, many different variations, but the point is that between 1400 and 1800, standard English as we know it today evolves.By 1800, virtually everybody was writing, and this is the point. Writing standard English is essentially a written form of English, not a spoken form. Even today, only a tiny proportion of the world's English‑language users speak standard English naturally at home as a first language. Most people learn standard English in school, and I'm talking not just about foreign language learners. I'm talking about native speakers as well.Only about four or five percent ‑‑ maybe even that's an exaggeration ‑‑ of people in England speak standard English as a natural home language. Most people speak regional variations. Most people say, "I ain't got this. We ain't got no nothing" and things of that sort. Double negatives, all non‑standard features ‑‑ that's how they normally speak.Then they go to school and they learn that, "That's not correct, dear boy. You have to say it this way," and you learn standard English. That's very useful, as long as you don't then your local accent and dialect demeaned in the process, which of course used to be the case.Anyway, around about 1800, standard English in this sense of a universal, pretty unified form of writing had emerged, thanks to Dr. Johnson, with his dictionary. People like Lindley Murray and Bishop Lowth with their grammars, people like John Walker with their pronunciation dictionary and so on and so forth.There's still a certain amount of variation, but on the whole, it's pretty standard. Then along comes Noah Webster in America and messes everything up, saying, "We don't want that standard anymore. We want a different sort of standard for a new nation," so he develops different standards for American English.Again, only about five percent of American English is different from British English in terms of spelling, punctuation, vocabulary, grammar, and so on, but it's a pretty significant five percent, nonetheless. Suddenly there are two standards in the world, British and American.Then that opened the floodgates, doesn't it, because any other country now who comes along and wants to use English. As soon as they adopt English they immediately feel they need to adapt it to express the identity of their own milieu.This is where non‑standard comes into play, because what non‑standard does is it expresses identity rather than intelligibility. You and I are speaking now non‑standard English to each other. We're not going to understand each other, but I'm proud of my non‑standard English and you're proud of yours.Of course, the result could be chaos but in many parts of the world, what happens is that the two varieties are so distinct that they don't mix each other up. I use standard English on some occasions. I use non‑standard English on other occasions.Ross: Presumably, now, then, most people recognize that one version of English isn't necessarily superior to the other. It's just that they get used at different times and in different situations, I suppose.David: Yeah. In other words, it's a notion of appropriateness rather than a notion of correctness. The 18th‑century notion was that only standard English was correct. Everything else was incorrect and rubbish and should never be used. You'll be punished if you use it.These days it's a notion of appropriateness ‑‑ that standard English is appropriate for some kinds of functions, non‑standard appropriate for other kinds of functions. This is where it gets relevant to all countries. We're not just talking about British and American and Australian and Indian or the old colonial territories. We're talking about Chinese English and Japanese English and so on.What is Chinese English for me? Chinese English is not somebody learning English from China and getting it wrong.No, it's somebody learning English from China who is now developing a good command of English but using it to express Chinese concepts and Chinese culture in a way that I would not necessarily understand, because I don't understand Chinese culture, coming from outside it.All over the world now, we see these "new Englishes," as they're called, being very different from traditional standard British English and traditional standard American English.What they're doing is they're allowing the expression of their local identity to become institutionalized in dictionaries and in novels, you see, and plays and poetry and grammars and things like this, so that we now have to respect the identity of whatever it might be ‑‑ Indian English, Nigerian English, Chinese English, by which I mean, English written by Chinese authors expressing a Chinese milieu but with a competent command of English, so that one can't just say, "Hey, that's a mistake."That is a genuine, shared expression of some section that's coming from China.Ross: Given all that, then, it really complicates the job of English‑language teachers, doesn't it? What's acceptable to teach and what is it acceptable to leave out? It's a lot more difficult, I guess, than it used to be, isn't it?David: Oh, gosh, it does, doesn't it? It is a fact that English‑language teaching has become more difficult because of the evolution of English in this way. It isn't a simple, "Oh, there's British and American English. As long as you know those two, you're home and dry."It's not the case anymore. Everything I've said, mind you, is really only relevant for language comprehension, not so much for language production. After all, if you're used to teaching standard British English in Received Pronunciation, as many teachers are and in any case as many exam boards expect and as a lot of materials expect anyway, then fine. Carry on.Standard British English is a good thing. RP is a good accent, etc., etc. But when it comes to listening comprehension and reading comprehension, if one restricts one's ability only to British English and RP, then you miss out Heaven knows how many percent ‑‑ probably most of the English language around the world.How many people speak traditionally British English in an RP accent? We're talking about, what, a couple of percent of the world's population. It's a very useful accent still. No question about that.Standard British is still a very useful dialect, but nonetheless, from a comprehension point of view, how often are you going to encounter it in the street, in literature, and so on? Only a minority of the time.It's an increasing gap, it seems to me, between production and comprehension when it comes to teaching. That's me finished now, Ross, because now it's your problem to decide how to implement this in terms of syllabus design and at what point in the teaching process do you introduce these variations? I have the easy job here.[laughter]Ross: That's a pity, because that was actually my next question.David: [laughs]Ross: What do you think? Should teachers and course books and writers be trying to work in examples of non‑standard English and non‑standard accents from all around the world into their lessons and in their course books?It seems that even, for example, native speakers might even need help with their listening skills in developing an ear from accents from parts of the world that they're maybe traveling to that they haven't been before. Presumably the same is true for non‑native speakers as well.David: Absolutely. These days there is no difference, essentially, between a native and a non‑native speaker of English in this respect. I go to another part of the world just like a second‑language learner goes to the same part of the world and we're both equally foxed by the local identity of the language.I have this all the time. I go to places. I don't know what the heck is going on, because I just don't understand the local words, the local expressions, the local nicknames of the politicians. All these cultural identity things are everywhere now. It's a problem for me as much as for the other.As far as materials are concerned, yes I think one should build in right from the very beginning an awareness of variation. Some programs do this. Global, for example, does this to a certain extent. I think it's more general than that. All the materials, of course, have always had a certain cultural input.You teach the present tense by for example saying, "Let us go for a walk down Oxford Street. Let's buy some things," and we'll use the present tense for that. It's drama driving the content.You can also at the same time let culture help to drive the content. Not only do you have a vocabulary list at the end of the chapter which says what's going on or explains what's going on, but you have a culture list as well.For example, we've done Oxford Street. When somebody says, "Let's look at your watch," and you say, "Oh, it's a nice watch," and the person says, "Yes, but it's not actually Bond Street. It's Portobello Road."That's the kind of comment that anybody might make ‑‑ completely unintelligible to most foreigners until they know that Bond Street is the posh street and Portobello Road is the street market.You could easily imagine how going into a shop to buy a watch to drill the present tense or whatever might also be supplemented by a little cultural panel somewhere or other which says, "Here ‑‑ this is a posh place to buy. This is not a posh place to buy." You gradually build up a sense of the cultural identity of the place.I'll put it another way. If I go to Beijing, how do you translate Bond Street and Portobello Road into Beijing or wherever? How would you do it? If a Chinese person said that sentence to me in English ‑‑ "Go to this part of..." ‑‑ I would not know what it meant until it was explained, which, you know what I mean by saying it's a very general issue.Ross: I also wanted to ask you a bit about how new meanings come about, because obviously that's something that happens, I think, both in standard and non‑standard English. I think you mention in "A Little Book of Language" about encouraging people to look up word meanings in dictionaries.Is it also the case that words often only really take on new meanings when people misuse them? Can you tell us a bit about how new meanings come about, or maybe how first they might be non‑standard or maybe even just considered to be wrong?David: To begin with, some people would say that any new meaning was a wrong use. There are always pedants around who will say that any change is an error to begin with. Then gradually usage grows and people forget that was ever a problem. They focus on new things that are taking place. This has routinely happened.It's only happened since the 18th century. Before that, change just took place...People did object to it. Some people tried to stop it, people like Dryden and Swift and, to begin with, Johnson, said, "We must stop language change. Look, the French have done this with their Academy. They've stopped..." Of course they hadn't. But they tried and thought they were doing so.Johnson himself recognizes this eventually and says, "Even the French haven't managed to stop language change. That's why we don't want an academy over here."Change takes place. It will always get reactions. It's a very natural process, very subtle process. Most of the semantic changes that affect vocabulary take place without anybody noticing them happening at all until they become established, they get a new the dictionary, a new sense comes along, and people say, "Oh yeah. Of course. We've been saying that for years. We just haven't noticed it happening."Ross: One more time, everyone, that was Professor David Crystal. If you'd like to know more about David's work, please visit his website at www.davidcrystal.com. I hope you enjoyed today's interview and we'll see you again next time. Goodbye.

In our second of two podcasts recorded at IATEFL Liverpool, we speak with our favorite podcast guests Matt Courtois, Simon Galloway & Dave Weller about how teachers and trainers can challenge themselves.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

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.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

We interview ELT author and teacher trainer Edmund Dudley about why teaching teens can be so enjoyable, how to avoid sabotaging your classes and how to inspire your students with the right activities.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Tracy Yu: Hello, everyone.Ross Thorburn: Welcome to the podcast.Tracy: Today, we actually talked about something we haven't explored much, which is teaching teenagers.Ross: Right. A lot on the podcast, we talk about teaching adults and we talk about teaching young learners, but teens is a group that we've not really spoken about much.Tracy: Have you ever taught teens before, Ross?Ross: I have, yeah. I must admit they were not my favorite group to teach.Tracy: When I first started my teaching job, I was teaching teenagers like 14, 15 years old.Ross: Today's guest who's going to tell us all about this is Ed Dudley. Ed is from the UK. He's worked in Hungary for a very long time. He specializes in teaching teenagers. He's got a book out called " ETpedia Teenagers." Ed is also a freelance teacher trainer with Oxford University Press.As usual, we have three areas that we talked to Ed about. First of all, we generally go into what it's like to teach teenagers, and then we ask him about general tips related to teaching teens. Near the end, we ask him to share some of his great activities from his book that are specifically geared to teaching teenagers.What is it like to Teach Teenagers?Ross: Hi, Ed. Thanks a lot for coming on the podcast.Ed Dudley: It's my great pleasure.Ross: Do you want to start off just by telling us a little bit about what it's like to teach teens and how you got into that age group?Ed: I have to say that when I first began teaching, I avoided teens for the first 10 years or so of my teaching career. I think that was partly because I was very young myself, and so I felt a little bit intimidated by teenage students.It was also because I needed that difficult baptism of working in the primary classroom, which I still think is the hardest arena to teach in as a teacher. Once I got some experience under my belt, I then felt much more confident about working with teenagers.As soon as I began teaching teens regularly in a high school setting, I actually felt straightaway that it was the age group that I had most success with, both in terms of what my students were producing and in terms of how I was feeling about the interaction between this and the lessons that we were having together.Tracy: What kind of strategies or tips that we could use from teaching adults or young learners to teaching teens?Ed: I think looking back on that period of your own life is always a really useful way to start when you're working with teenagers. I remember it being quite a volatile time. I remember it being a time of great insecurity and also being obsessed with the idea of what people are saying about me and what judgments people are making about me.Very often, it's quite common for teens to be having a difficult time of things with their parents, also with their teachers. I think it is quite interesting that they're growing up very fast, and yet some parts of them are maturing and growing more quickly and more successfully than others.You have this weird combination of young people who are amazingly mature and impressive in some ways and yet incredible childlike still in other ways. That's I think unique to the teenage classroom.Top tips for teaching teensTracy: How do you build rapport with the teenagers, and then how do you win them over? Because when I was a teacher, it was really difficult from the beginning to make sure they trust you.Ed: My own approach is to bear in mind what I don't want to do. I think it's far easier to make mistakes than it is to actually build rapport in a proactive way. I often feel that it can take months, perhaps even years, to build rapport with a group of students or with a particular student.On the other hands, it's possible to ruin rapport in a matter of minutes. I think if we can avoid, for example, finding a reason to laugh at their expense, teenagers are very often quite awkward in the things they do and the things they say.The teachers that I had very often used to prey on that and would score a cheap laugh at the group's expense by laughing at one student, trying to get a laugh is exactly the way to make that one student hate you.Also to plant the seed of doubt in the minds of everybody else in the class, thinking, "What's this teacher going to say about me? What's going to happen if I do something which is awkward?" That leads straight away to the students keeping their mouths closed when they're asked questions.I think another thing that we can do is that's a mistake when working with teenagers is to be impatient with the fact that they don't want to talk. It's taken me a while to realize that a lot of our teaching in the classroom is based on promoting fluency and promoting communication. That often leads to us putting pressure on students to speak.It's ironic in a sense that teenagers, especially teenage boys, are very often at a stage in their lives when they don't want to say anything to adults at all. Being aware of this and being accepting of that is also something that I think is an important thing to do.It can also be tricky when setting up classroom tasks. If I think about, for example, pair work, in a sense when you're working with very young learners, you can be much more of an autocrat in the way you set up tasks. "OK, you two, I want you to work together. You stand up. Come here. Work with this person."That's not going to work with teenagers. There are all kinds of reasons why certain individual students are reluctant to work with other students in the class. I think those things have to be respected equally.We tend, or I tend, to overlook how very, very busy and complicated teenagers' lives are. You see this every time students come into the lesson, that they're usually distracted. There might be a couple of moments late. They're very often looking at their phones.It's easy for a teacher to think, "Well, here she is again late for class." When actually what's happening in her life right then, what was that message she just got on her phone ‑‑ it's very easy for us to assume that students have nothing better to do than concentrate on our class.In fact, I've realized that in a large number of cases with teenagers, our lesson is the least important thing going on in their lives at that particular moment. Not realizing that, instructing them to put their phones away and, "Come on, let's get down to business," this kind of approach can actually be hugely counterproductive.Ross: You mentioned using phones. What do you think about using phones with the groups of teens?Ed: To me, a lot of this context is dependent. I wouldn't like to make general points about how phones should or shouldn't be used. The problem I have personally with that is that once a phone comes out, it's quite hard to get it put away again.My own tendency or my own default is to use them towards the end of the class rather than at the start of the class, and also to do tasks which make use of offline functionality.I know from talking to Shaun Wilden who's written a book on "Mobile Learning" that there's an awful lot that we can do with the basic functionality of a mobile phone. For example, getting feedback on lessons very often using an emoji approach or using something, using Instant Messaging, can be really effective. Shaun has got all kinds of good ideas for doing that.Ross: What are some of your favorite things? I think we spoke a lot about the challenges. What do you think are some of the best things about working with that age group?Ed: The thing I love especially about younger teens is that energy and that vitality, particularly when it comes to certain topic areas or things that students are particularly interested in, and then you'll find that certain teenagers have an encyclopedic knowledge of things that you know very, very little about. You have also that kind of wonderful sense of humor as well.One of the things that I loved about working in a high school was that I got to go and spend my working day in a room with kids who are on the verge of laughter most of the time. For especially young, for 13 and 14‑year‑old boys in mixed classes can be really tough because of that kind of boisterous slack behavior.When it's channeled in a positive way and when they're really on point of making funny observations in English and are able to bring a smile to your face as well, there's something really joyful about that, that you do get sometimes with other age groups. Not as consistently as you get it with a group of good teenage student, with whom you've established a very good rapport.Great activities for teaching teensTracy: Ed, would you like to share some activities that you use with teenagers in a classroom?Ed: One activity that I love doing with teenagers is a speaking activity. Really, it's a technique for motivating students to repeat themselves or to try and polish a piece of spoken language. The reason I like this is that very often teenagers don't want to polish their work. They don't want to try it again.The way it works is they have a topic they have to talk about and maybe they've had some time to prepare something. I used to get students to talk about a photograph of some graffiti and talk about why they'd chosen it. Anyway, the students film each other. When they finish their short piece of language, what happens is they review it.Very often, the student says like, "No, that's terrible. I sound really bad. Delete that. I want to do it again." It's that power of control that students have over that work which motivates them to make it better.Unlike teachers who still don't like seeing themselves on video or hearing recordings of their voices, teenagers are absolutely fine with this. This technique of getting them to film themselves actually motivates them to do a much better job than they would have normally done.The other one that I like is a random slide show, like a random PowerPoint task. The way this works is you prepare a few slides at home and you give the students a topic. You tell them what the topic is, for example, 21st century life or something like that. They have a few minutes to prepare a short presentation of what they're going to say.The thing is they're going to have some slides as well to go with that presentation. The first time they get to see the slides, their slides, is when they're standing up to give their presentation. Each time they click on Next Slide, what they see on the screen is completely unexpected.Now, this is the challenge that can be just hilarious. The images that you have, you might just, for example, have a picture of a forest, then they have to figure out quickly on their feet what a forest has to do with 21st century life.It might be a cup of coffee and they have to talk about that, or it might be something really absurd like a picture of a rabbit with the title politics is complicated. They have to think on their feet and figure out a way that this is relevant to that topic of 21st century life. You often get a lot of laughter and then a lot of hugely imaginative and memorable answers from students.That's the random PowerPoint idea, that is one that I've had a lot of success with high‑flying students. That idea grew out of the compulsory phrase activity where you have a student who is really not interested in doing the compulsory written task that you have to do like a letter to a hotel or something.You make that task more open ended and challenge students who are willing to be challenged to include a preposterous phrase in the letter which you have given them beforehand, which has nothing to do with the topic of the letter, like, "The warm glass of Sri Lankan mango juice," or whatever it was.That's something which allows you to have task which work at two levels, the standard exam practice tasks for those who wish them to be back. They have this added value of the challenge to those who want a bit more to keep them entertained and engaged.Ross: Ed, thanks so much for coming on and being so generous with your time. Can you tell our listeners, if they want to find more about you or they want to read about your writings related to teaching to teens, where's the best place for them to go?Ed: The thing I'm most proud of at the moment is the book that I've written about teaching teenagers. That's called ETpedia Teenagers. You can find out about that at myetpedia.com. I sometimes post ideas about teaching teenagers as well. There's also a link I can give you for that. www.legyened.edublogs.orgRoss: Great. Thanks again.Ed: Thanks so much for having me.Tracy: Bye. Thanks for listening

We know about discrimination against non-native teachers, but what about other kinds of discrimination? We welcome back Jessica Keller and David Tait to talk about their experiences with discrimination in ESLFor more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Tracy: Hello, everyone. Welcome to our podcast. Today, we've got two special guests. One is Jessica Keller, who has been working in recruiting for more than 15 years.Ross Thorburn: We talked to Jessica ‑‑ I guess a lot of it's you, as well, Tracy ‑‑ about sexism in TEFL.Tracy: Yep, and another one is?Ross: David Tait. David's a published poet, an author, and works as an ESL writing teacher in China. David is talking about homophobia, and neither Jessica nor Tracy nor David, their examples of people they mention are about their current colleagues.Sexism in ESLRoss: I'm a man. As far as I know, I'm often surprised when both of you tell me about sexist things that happen at work. Before, I always used to think of sexism as someone low‑balled your pay, or they didn't give you a promotion because you're a woman.From what both of you have told me over the years, a lot of it's just people treating you differently or condescending to you or being more aggressive towards you. That's something that's completely new to me. It would be super interesting to get just one or two examples of things that happen and one or two examples of what you do as women, obviously, to get around that.Jessica Keller: I think about how people speak to you like you're a child. Someone I've worked with before, definitely. Every time he speaks with me, when he asks, for example, very specific things. It's not open‑ended like, "What do you think about this?" It's more of yes or no questions.Tracy: Like this person is control the conversation?Jessica: Mm‑hmm.Tracy: Yeah.Jessica: Definitely speaks in a pitch also. That's very talking down like you're either...I don't want to say younger, but it does appear more of like talking to someone who's lesser than intelligent as this guy is. It makes you want to really get out of the conversation as quickly as possible.Tracy: It's quite interesting. This is like male colleagues or whoever talking to the female colleagues. I heard from my alpha male colleague, actually, it's the way around. It used to be a female colleague and she speaks the way that you described earlier to the male colleague.Ross: Oh, really?Tracy: Apparently, this still bothers the male colleague so much.Ross: Wow.Tracy: Yeah.Ross: How can you tell with these that the person is doing it because they're sexist?Jessica: I can't say for all certainty that somebody does something just because of gender roles, but I do feel there's a number of people. The one that I was talking about is very different with male colleagues, right?Ross: Oh, OK. You can observe those other interactions that...Jessica: Yeah. How you communicate with people is so ingrained. Who knows what people's early family life is, what learned communication they have.Tracy: But for me, I probably have the same proposal and just approach to either the manager or the colleagues. They're male. It's just within the short period of time so these ideas have been delivered again, again, again to the same person, same way.I'm just by myself. I've just never been accepted. One day, I somehow changed my mind. "OK, I'm going to ask one of my male colleague to go to this conversation we're meeting, and then to have the same proposal and see how it going to change." The result is interesting.Ross: Would the person accept the proposal?Tracy: Accept it. Yes, and happily accept it.Jessica: Well, that's a lot more hard evidence.[laughter]Jessica: That's the thing I was talking about because that's pretty cut and dry. That's a really good example, for that reason.Tracy: Also, another thing is the language. If I'm using my first language, it's difficult for me to let people accept my idea. If I'm speaking English, the possibility is a lot higher. That depends on what first language the person you are talking to. For me, I use English, because I feel it's better because the person I'm talking to first language is not English.Ross: You're saying you almost carve out some advantage for yourself because you can show your superiority in English?Tracy: Yeah.Ross: That's one strategy that you've developed with, I presume, male Chinese managers.Tracy: For sure.Jessica: I think just being confident, not backing down and not being afraid of the label of being bitchy.[laughter]Jessica: Which is what comes along with being confident in a business environment for women.Tracy: Another thing is because still a lot of people, they have that concept of you're a lady. You probably are too emotional. That's why if you have this opportunity to present yourself, please make sure we're not being emotional. We give a lot of facts. We do contribute. That's the great opportunity to change people's impression of you, especially in the professional context.Ross: I don't know, but I would guess, with a lot of other cognitive biases probably where you think that is, there's a lot of men that are not aware that they are sexist. What tips do you have for men to be less sexist or to be aware, maybe, of when they could be perceived as being sexist?Jessica: That's very easy for me.[laughter]Jessica: I would say just don't dominate every conversation.Tracy: My advice is please use appropriate name or title, how you call the person or how you call the lady. At least in China, in a lot of companies, older male managers likes to call female colleagues or younger female colleagues like, "Oh, you're a little girl."Jessica: I was just thinking something like when people say, "Oh, that's cute," or something like that.Tracy: Yeah.Jessica: Like that type of...I don't think they mean it as demeaning, but it still comes across as...because they wouldn't say that to another guy.[laughter]Tracy: Yeah.Jessica: At least on most circumstances...Homophobia in ESLRoss: Hello again, David Tait.David Tait: Hello, Ross.Ross: David, you've just written your book, which is called...?David: It's called the "AQI."Ross: Which is about?David: It's all about...a lot of stuff about living within contemporary China, a little bit of stuff about air pollution, and also quite a lot about homophobia as well.Ross: Great. I thought we could ask you about homophobia and some of your experiences with that since we're looking at different types of discrimination. This is one of the least talked about and yes, some of your personal experiences, if you'd like to share them, and advice for people that might be in the position of being discriminated against because of their sexual orientation.David: Yeah, sure. I'm not particularly excited by my sexuality. It is what it is. I've been out since I was 16. I'm 32 now. I've been out more than half my life. It's not a big deal. When I came to China, at first I thought it would be a big deal and then I met people that are like, "Hello!"[laughter]David: OK. It is a thing. It's one of those strange things whereby if I sound gay, and I'm very open about it, then I think it's acceptable by virtue of me being a relatively confident white male.I think it's much harder for people that are lesbian. It's really hard for local people to say it, particularly. They can become quite discriminating against you in the workplace because of it and not taken seriously.I know people who've been gay, been openly gay and working with young learners. This is a really thorny issue at the moment.I know somebody who's a teacher of young learners, who was very open at first about being gay, and parents would complain that it's not appropriate for their child to be studying with LGBT teachers because he was very open about it.Ross: Can I ask you to go back? What did he do? Do you have any advice for people in that situation?David: He didn't do anything. He just was in the teachers' office and said, "Yeah, I'm gay," did a normal teaching job. For some reason, I don't know why, somebody in the teaching office spread some rumors or talked about that. It became common knowledge among people wider than the teachers' office. Then it became a problem because parents complained.Ross: Did he still keep his job?David: I think he decided to leave.Ross: That's pretty unfortunate when it gets to that.David: Yeah.Ross: Did he regret that decision to be so open?David: It made him think twice about it in the future. You'll find that there are a lot of people that don't...I'm gay and I'm very open about it. Anyone who cares to listen to this will know it. If you didn't know it, I'm terribly sorry.[laughter]David: It's one of those things where you can be quite open about it, but you don't need to talk about it or feel the need to talk about it. Quite often, I find myself...if students ask me, "Do you have a girlfriend?" rather than saying, "No, I'm gay," I would just say, "Oh, I don't." I don't do that for any sense of shame.It's just to keep things simple, but there is a bit of a needle that lies in there. Why can't somebody just say, "Actually, I don't like girls very much"? Fortunately, for the most expats and indeed most locals, who go into teaching, I would say, are relatively liberal, relatively open‑minded people.You'll get some conservative people. You'll get some very conservative people, but on the whole, most people are quite chilled out. The fact that they've moved to the other side of the world to experience another culture suggests that they're quite open‑minded so somebody saying, "I'm gay," isn't a big deal.You will get situations whereby, actually, that can be seen as being a big deal and some fuss can be made over that.Ross: As someone who's moved from a bit more open society to a less liberal society, what advice would you have for someone who is LGBT moving to either China or to somewhere else that might not be as open as what they're used to?David: My advice will always be, "Be yourself." Who else are you going to be? Ultimately, you're going to potentially have people who will discriminate against you but you're also going to have a lot of people that don't. Most people are good at heart.It's really tough, as well, for me to answer that question, because I can't answer that question for all the LGBT people and the experiences they've had. For me, for instance, I'm, ultimately, somebody who a lot of people will know me for a while and they would say, "Oh, I didn't know you were gay."I wonder if that has an impact on the way that I am discriminated against compared to some friends who are, quite obviously, in that person's eyes, gay, who say, "Oh yeah, that is a gay person. That is what a gay person is."There's always going to be discrimination. Unfortunately, if you're moving to a place with less liberal, more conservative values, you're going to run the risk of more discrimination. There's always going to be good people. Particularly, if you're moving to China, rest assured there are lots of gay people here.[laughter]David: So, good.[laughter]David: I should also say, as well, one thing to definitely include would be, because of my personality and assuredness, I suppose, I don't particularly have much time for people being homophobic towards me. In that respect, I've been quite lucky in that people haven't given me much of a hard time but homophobia definitely exists within the industry.It's often quite shameful. I don't really think it has much of a place. It's something we should all be considerate of and make sure that we, ourselves, are not affected by it.Discrimination in ESLTracy: This is one sensitive topic and maybe people get really offended, or they feel really unhappy, or they feel uncomfortable when they're talking about it. I really appreciate Jessica and Dave. They're very open‑minded and willing to share how they experience in their life.Ross: Yeah, I think we're all aware of, for example, some of the discrimination that happens in TEFL, for example, for "non‑native" English teachers. Maybe we don't talk enough about some other forms of discrimination. If any of you have been through anything like that and you want to share your experience or your advice, then please leave us a comment.Tracy: Mm‑hmm. Bye!Ross: Bye, everyone! Thanks for listening.

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.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Ross Thorburn: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the TEFL Training Institute Podcast. This week, I'm very excited to tell you that our guest is Professor Stephen Krashen from the University of California. This episode, I ask Stephen Krashen about what teachers need to know and what stops them from finding out. Enjoy the interview.What Teachers Need to Know About Language LearningRoss: Stephen Krashen, welcome to the podcast. Can you start off by telling us a bit about what the teachers need to know? What sort of research and concepts, maybe, from second language acquisition do teachers most need to know about?Professor Stephen Krashen: What I want to do is talk a little bit about theory, what I call the 40 years war.Stephen Krashen: It's actually longer than that. God! You know how it is when you discover that your old pair of pants is 30 years old and your new pair is 20 years old?Stephen Krashen: That's the situation I'm in. Anyway, the 40 years war is really now nearly the 50 years war. This all started in the '70s. It's a war between two hypotheses. One of them, which I think is the good guy, I call the comprehension hypothesis. It's very simple, says we acquire language and develop literacy when we understand what we hear, when we understand what we read.Credit where credit is due. I am not the inventor of this idea. I have been mostly responsible for public relations and seeing if it's true or not, but there are several people who were there before me. In the field of literacy, Frank Smith, raging genius, in my opinion. Kenneth Goodman, the whole language people were, in my opinion, all there. They had it.We learn to read by understanding what's on the page. We learn to read by understanding messages. In the field of second language acquisition, people like James Asher, Total Physical Response, he was there before I was. Harris Winitz, a foreign language expert in the States, was there before me.A whole number of people had the idea pretty well. I do try to cite them in my work. This is what we've been working on since the '70s. We acquire language when we understand it. Here's the interesting difference, the rival hypothesis, we call skill building. Skill building and comprehension idea are complete opposites in terms of cause and effect.Comprehension hypothesis says the cause is comprehensible input. The cause is understanding what you hear and what you read. The result is vocabulary, grammar, writing style, all these things. Competence, in other words.Skill building reverses it. Skill building says the first thing you should do is study. Do things consciously and work hard. Memorize vocabulary. Learn grammar rules. Practice them in output. Get your errors corrected. Make sure it's right. Do this again, again, and again. Then someday in the distant future, you will be able to use the language.I call this a delayed gratification hypothesis. Not happiness now, but happiness later. Comprehension hypothesis says happiness now. In fact, it's got to be pleasant or it won't work. You have to have input that you understand and that you pay attention to. You'll only pay attention to it if it's interesting, if you like it, if it means something to you.The problem with skill building is that the delayed gratification never comes. In my opinion, there is not a single case of a human being on this planet who has ever acquired language using skill building. Every time you see someone who got good in a language, they've had comprehensible input. It's never there. It never exists without that.In our studies, where we compared comprehension and skill building, which is really all we've been doing for the last now 40 years or so, comprehensible input always wins. It has never lost in all the experimental research, not one. It's more effective, and it's more pleasant.My observation, and it's backed up by the research, if you look at kids in a skill building class, 95 percent of them hate it. The five percent who like it become language teachers. These are the people who love grammar, who think diagramming sentences is fun. I know because I was one of them, and I still am.It took me years to overcome my fascination with Noam Chomsky and grammar, etc. They really, really like it, but that's not how language is acquired. Two things. Comprehension hypothesis, the research supports it, does not support skill building. The comprehension hypothesis makes language acquisition pleasant and fun. Skill building makes it torture.This is win‑win, but here's the problem. For the general public, the skill building hypothesis is considered to be an axiom. People are not aware that there is an alternative. For all civilians, and even a few in our field, skill building is the only game in town.If you think we learn language by study, hard work, all the ways we torture students in school, all the grammar, exercises, all the tests, all the quizzes, they make perfect sense but that's not the way it happens.The Problem with Teachers Reading ResearchRoss: Let's talk a bit more about teachers' access in research, then. What do you think stops teachers from reading more about teaching and more about research?Stephen Krashen: Everyone complains teachers don't read. This is the general mood in the United States. That teachers are stupid, teachers are responsible for the depression, economic hard times, etc. This is part of the general attack on teachers. We have done studies on this, and teachers read a fair amount, but they don't do a lot of professional reading. My feeling is it's not their fault.There are three problems, and they're serious. One is, professional literature is extremely expensive, and it's getting more so. If you want to get latest advertisement for professional books, papers by experts, and all that, 150 American dollars. I don't know about you, but nobody can afford this stuff that I know of.Ross: Definitely not on a teacher's salary, right?Stephen Krashen: Not even on a retired professor's wage. On nobody's wage. I don't know anybody who can afford this, and they're getting more and more expensive. Journals, which used to be reasonable, you could subscribe these things for 15, 20 dollars a year, now it's way up there. Hundreds of dollars.I keep records on this because I deduct it from my taxes, but I can't afford them anymore, much too expensive, especially, if you're someone like me who tries to work in several different fields at the same time. It's not just one or two journals. I have to keep up with about 30 or 40 journals. Nobody can afford this.The only people who can are people who are current university professors, who have access to a first‑class library, and that's very few of us. It's too much money.Number two, the articles are really long, and they've gotten longer. Someone once said, "When you ask someone the time, you don't want a history of the wristwatch." People have long, long introductions. Then, at the end, they want to give everyone advice on what they should do with their research. Ridiculous. Far too long, and far too incomprehensible. Full of jargon.I wrote several paper on this called, "The Case Against Gibberish," just what goes on in the journals. They are written not to be read and understood. They're written to get published. With junior scholars, very often, it's their PhD dissertation.Someone wrote me the other day. There's a new article on age differences. That was one of my major research interests, critical period, all that. The person sent me the link to the article. The article's about 40 pages long. For me to get it, I have to pay $40, US dollars. The dollars do not go to the authors, they go to the journal.For me to read a 40‑page paper is a full day's work, and I must say I'm very good at reading. I have all the background knowledge. I've published lots of papers. I know the research very well. I've usually read already most of the citations. It takes forever to get through these things because they are so dense. They want to put in everything to show off. It's impossible. I've given up.Ross: It's long struck me as ironic in a profession that's really all about simplifying our language to the point where it can be understood by language learners, we do such a bad job of presenting useful information to teachers in a format which is easy to read.Especially, when you consider that most of the teachers out there, English teachers anyway, are non‑native speakers of English. Why do you think that happens? Why is so much TEFL literature so difficult to read?Stephen Krashen: A lot of it has to do with impressing your colleagues, basically. Making it sound profound. One of the political writers in the States made a really good argument. He says, "When you take a simple idea, and you make it very complicated, you can hide. You can say the most outrageous things and feel good about yourself. No one's going to understand it, so you're OK."Ross: That reminds of Charles Bukowski. He said that, "An artist takes a complicated idea and makes it so simple, and an academic takes a simple idea and makes it complicated."Stephen Krashen: Charles Bukowski. What a guy! [laughs] Yes.The Solution to the Teacher Researach GapRoss: That's the problem with teachers not being able to get their hands on readable and affordable research. Do you want to tell us a bit about the solution?Stephen Krashen: I have been inspired by a couple of people. First of all, there's a guy named Tim Gowers. His specialty is algebraic geometry. He announced that he was no longer submitting papers to journals. He was no longer reviewing papers for journals. Just as I said, the journals are too expensive. Nobody can do it, and it's no longer worth it.He started a petition. 17,000 scholars have signed it. Possibly every major mathematician has signed it, including my son who's a math professor. So proud of my boy. What has happened, because of Tim Gowers, is that libraries started cutting back. The mathematicians were not ordering the journals, didn't matter anymore. Now, Europe has a full‑blown campaign in favor of free, open access research.The problem with it is that if you're a junior scholar and you want to get a job, or you're an assistant professor, you want to be promoted associate, the review committees typically, except in math, have no respect for open access.This will only change if people like me, senior scholars who are not going to be reviewed anymore, and other people not worried about review, start doing it. Eventually, it will catch on.My real inspiration for this, though, was The Grateful Dead rock group. The time The Grateful Dead were touring, there was a lot of concern about piracy, about kids coming out, recording the songs and sharing it with their friends. Resales of recordings started to drop, so they policed the concerts. You may not record this, against the law, blah blah blah...The Grateful Dead turned it all around. They would start their concerts by saying, "You want to record us? Go ahead." They decided not to make money on recordings, but to make money on touring. It worked.Of course, I haven't figured out how to make money yet, but at least I'm doing the first step. [laughs] I'm not going to do it through selling books, etc. Nobody can afford them, anyway. This is the revolution. My hope is that it will spread.Ross: Fantastic. Putting this on to practice then, where can teachers go to start finding research in literature online with teaching that's easy to read and, hopefully, free?Stephen Krashen: Here's what they should do. I'm going to push my stuff, of course, because that's the whole purpose. We're talking about my career. I give stuff away for free. All you have got to do is go to sdkrashen.com. SD Krashen operators are standing by. sdkrashen.com, that's my website. There's like 300 articles posted.Please consider, ladies and gentlemen, following me on Twitter. My goal is to catch up to Justin Bieber in followers. This is probably going to take four centuries at the rate I'm going.Twitter's great. What I use Twitter for is for short announcements, my papers, my colleague's papers, and how to link to them. Occasionally, some political comments, or some really good jokes, but please follow me on Twitter. I'm also on Facebook. Just Stephen Krashen on Facebook and several other categories. I used that for, again, bad jokes, but also to tell people what's new.I think this is the future. Social media's wonderful for disseminating information. If you look at me and my stuff, you're going to find other scholars who publish free things. I have really exceptional colleagues in Korea, Kyung Sook Cho; in Japan, Beniko Mason; Taiwan, Sy‑Ying Lee; Willy Renandya now in Singapore.All of us do this stuff. We post things, etc., then you find other people. They're short, and we hope they're easy to read. It's simple and it costs nothing.Ross: Great. Thank you very much again for coming on.Stephen Krashen: OK, Ross. Thanks.Ross: We'll see you next time, everyone. Bye‑bye.Stephen Krashen: Bye‑bye.

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.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Tracy: Hello, everyone. Welcome back. Today we have a special guest, and this guest you've never listened to. His experience and valuable input in ELT. We have Diederik.Diederik Van Gorp: Hello, thank you. I'm very happy to be here.Tracy: Diederik...Ross Thorburn: It's awesome to have you on.Tracy: Would you like to introduce yourself?Diederik: Yes. I'm Diederik. I was born in Belgium. I got into ELT in 2001. I took my Trinity certTESOL in 2001 in winter. Pretty much went straight to China to teach, and then 17 years later I am still doing this.It brought me to very interesting places. I worked in China. I worked in Hong Kong. I worked in the States. I worked in Uzbekistan, Spain, Italy, and now, I'm back in China.I worked in, I think, probably every aspect of the industries. Obviously, teaching. Teaching all ages and levels. I was a DOS so I managed schools.I managed larger regions. The materials. I was an examiner. I wrote materials to prep people for exams.I'm a teacher trainer, mainly for Trinity. I'm also a moderator for Trinity, so I go to other courses and check if they meet the requirements, and now I'm a certTESOL trainer for Trinity. That's mainly what I do at the moment.Ross: That's it for the podcast. [laughs] It's so much experience I took 15 minutes. You were also my boss for a little while.Diederik: Yes.Ross: Correct. As I said earlier, you were probably the first person to make me realize it was more to teaching English than just flashcards and fly swats.Tracy: Finally.Ross: Today we're going to do, I think, two parts. Over at context, we could talk about, first of all, the Trinity advantages first.Diederik: Yes.Ross: Then talk about the tyranny. I thought we can call this context, "Triumph or Tyranny."Advantages of Context Ross: Let's start off with talking about some of the advantages of context. I don't know if it's since I did my diploma, it's become more and more popular or if it's just something that I've become more and more aware of. It's definitely something I've been borderline obsessed about. Might be in the past, probably too much.What of your experiences been with that and your opinions on it?Diederik: Very similar. At some point, I would say it was the only thing that I would not question in like a sacred cow context. The context has to be right, has to be relevant, has to be real‑world.When you see a lesson and the context is absolutely right. It's beautiful. The students are so talkative. They keep on going because it works but getting the context totally right is very hard.What I tell trainee teachers, "When you think about context, the more WH questions you can answer, probably the tighter the context is." If you can answer only one, then you probably just have a topic, let's say, what.The why and the when are also very important, and who are you talking to. Sometimes that's maybe one that you can't quite answer, and then you feel there's something missing in the free practice, or whatever.For example, there was one lesson I observed that was really good but it was something was lacking. It was about movies, so they were recommending movies to each other, but in the end, it was mechanical. They were doing it because they were nice students and it was nice language.In the end, there was something lacking and it was the why. Why are we talking about movies? Why are we even recommending it to each other?Just a simple thing like, "Well, today's a rainy day. OK, let's go to the cinema." There's a lot more purpose to it.I still think that the why is one of the more crucial ones.Ross: It almost seems to be like a task out come type thing. That if we had this task, then what's the result we need to get at the end?Diederik: Exactly. I think task‑based learning has had a massive influence on it. Especially it seems to be that one of it needs to be relevant, needs to be real world.Tracy: Because I think the most important thing of having the context, why the students are really motivated, because there is a connection. You talk about real‑life situations. Even though sometimes maybe something the students haven't experienced it yet, but they can see there might be a chance in the future and they can be in that situation.I think that's the intrinsic motivation for learners to be connected to that context.Diederik: Yes. It's too often forgotten, "Why are we here?" It's because you need to use it outside of the classroom, there are no flashcards there.[laughter]Tracy: Yes.Diederik: Hey, you're not going to rank or turn over flashcards and use the word in a sentence.Tracy: I was thinking, maybe we can give a little bit explanation about what context is, because when I was doing teacher training, it seems so many teachers that couldn't fully understand what it is.Ross: I was thinking about this today, sort of the context continuum perhaps. Maybe at one end, you've got turning over name and flashcards, where there's no who, what, why, when or where. We're just in a language classroom naming flashcards or the fill in the blank. What is it like, "Bob went to work by blank."[laughter]Ross: Who's Bob? Where does he work, that kind of thing.Diederik: I think at the other extreme, was maybe when the context is real, or the students might believe it to be real. Like, "We're actually talking about something that is," for example, "where are we going to go on our class outing?" Or, "Can you give me advice about learning English?" Or the teacher one, where the teacher comes in and brings in a problem and pretend it's real life, and the students then react to that.Ross: See? That is being at the far end of the continuum where it's real or you're pretending it to be real. I think slightly further down is that cafe type of situation. Maybe where, "We're in a Cafe and we're having small talk about this," and it's obviously pretend, but it's maybe realistic. Then gradually that fades away all the way down to naming flashcards.Diederik: Basically, any language doesn't exist in isolation, especially fixed expressions or sentences on larger utterances. You need context, what was said before that? What comes after, but beyond the sentence?Tracy: I'd like to share an interesting story. After a teacher, she told me, her daughter went back home, and then she asked her, "What did you learn in your English class today?" Her daughter said, "Oh, we learned something about subject plus beaver plus I‑N‑G."She said, "OK, can you make a sentence?" "No, no, no. That's what I learned, subject plus beaver plus I‑N‑G."I think that's so interesting that definitely she remembered the form, but I think the teacher didn't really explore the context and when, in what situation you were using this form.Ross: I think you've found something even further along the continuum, beyond the flashcard thing.Tracy: Yeah, yeah.Disadvantages of Context Ross: Diederik. Can you remember the moment when you started to sacrifice or question the sacred cow?Diederik: Yeah. A little bit of context first, of course.Ross: Yeah.Tracy: [laughs]Diederik: When I became a trainer for the Trinity diploma course, a relevant context ‑‑ real‑world context ‑‑ is a must‑pass criteria. For whatever reason, you cannot justify this context to. That it has to match your learner's needs, interests, everything, then it's a straight fail.OK, but then you sometimes see actually lessons that are quite interesting, students are engaged, there is a topic that obviously is new for them, they never thought about, and it's a straight fail, and I think that's a bit difficult to justify. That's where I think that something can become a bit of a straitjacket.There's so many interesting things and so much languages that you cannot immediately think of a clear context, while the context might be totally new to your learners that you just exclude it from it. That's when if context is the only guiding principle, there's so much language you can't cover, so many interesting topics that you can't do.I had a lesson on poetry. It was a straight fail. Teachers go all out of their way to come up with a context, waste 15 minutes to set something up, and you think, "Those 15 minuets could have been spent better," because it has to be a real world, so they come up with very elaborate contexts like, "Yeah, this is something I can imagine to be real."Also, there's quite a lot of language that there's no specific context for it. Talking about your childhood, talking about music, favorites, so it's like, when do you actually talk about your childhood? So you have to go all out of the way to create some kind of situation where you might be talking to somebody like that. Is that really worth all the time? I don't think so.Tracy: I think that's why I noticed when I was a trainer for CerTESOL and also assessing DIP, I feel like most of the teachers there are choosing topics like travel, holidays, and work‑related.Diederik: Yes. Airport...Tracy: Yeah.Diederik: And everything is real, and it becomes so limiting.Tracy: Exactly.Diederik: There was once a lesson about a religious cult that I saw.Ross: [laughs]Diederik: It was fascinating, but obviously, it was a straight fail, because you can't begin to justify it. Not...Ross: [laughs] Unless you're in a cult.Diederik: [laughs] Yes, exactly! It's the same. Let's say, predictions. Actually, a fun context is fortune telling. That would be a straight fail, so you go into something a bit more boring like career consultancy.You do limit it a bit if it has to be absolutely real world. I think sometimes there's a bit of negative backwash of a qualification like that becomes gospel, and that people who almost brainwashed by that experience constantly think, "Oh, it has to be relevant," that when they leave, they get a bit too much like that, and then they limit themselves in the real world. Well, it's just one thing.When I was a student of English in high school, what we talked about, it was about racism, homophobia. We were 16, 17. Those were not the topics of our choice, you know? We want to maybe talk about music or something.But there are obviously had something a bit... We want them to talk about social issues, and ethical dilemmas, and all the thing...Ross: This is an English class, is it?Diederik: Yeah.Ross: OK.Tracy: Wow.Diederik: We would never really had vocabulary lessons. I remember moving to England, I didn't know the words for Hoover.[laughter]Diederik: I could talk about social issues...[crosstalk]Ross: He means "vacuum cleaner," if you're American.Diederik: Yeah.[laughter]Diederik: In that context, you would limit yourself. I mean, the world of a 16‑year‑old and maybe many people back then maybe didn't travel that much. "What are you interested in?" "Nothing."[laughter]Diederik: "Nirvana, The Red Hot Chili Peppers..."[laughter]Ross: Even that, I think we were talking about this earlier. Even that, what's the context for talking about music? Where's this task out come for that? It's very difficult to pinpoint something.Diederik: It's very hard.Ross: Beyond going, you're in a cafe and music comes on in Starbucks. You say to you friend I don't like this.Diederik: You want to change it. You want to go to the jukebox.[laughter]Ross: We scraped all our money together. We only had [inaudible 11:26] . We could only choose the one song in the jukebox. That's it.Diederik: That was an interesting thing as well. You were talking about these ethical dilemmas. Actually, when a teacher went out of the way and would talk about something you're interested in, you didn't like it.I remember teaching something around Nirvana which was very popular back in the day. That's like, "No, no, no. That's our music. You don't touch this. This is not the classroom topic."Ross: Yeah. It seems like there was this underlying assumption that all language is used to achieve a goal, isn't there? But, of course, it's really not. If you think about this conversation, what's our goal to record it?[laughter]Ross: Why? There's no goal.Diederik: We should put waffling maybe a bit more on the pedestal. Today the context is we're going to waffle.Ross: Yeah. If you actually looked at this sort of maybe the origins of language, a lot of it comes down to forming relationships with people gossiping so that people can adhere to social standards. Even just things like thinking. The whole idea that is it possible to think if you don't know a language? Maybe it's not.The person you speak to the most in your life is yourself in your own head. What's the communication or the odds in there? You write a diary. Why? What's the point that you see?Diederik: That's a very good point. A lot is bonding. Sometimes, you showing empathy or something. Actually, not because you're friends.Ross: To wrap up then, do we have any rules or guidance or guidelines for teachers of when is it useful to adhere to context? When is it useful to stab the sacred cow?Diederik: My most recent experience of learning a language just a few years ago in Spain, I really didn't like to first stage of the lesson. It's setting the context and engaging to steer it.I don't need to see a picture of a closed shop. Let's just practice the language.Give my feedback on if I'm using the vocabulary correctly. The phrases are how much those had cost? I know that. There you could use that language.Ross: I've seen a closed shop before.Tracy: Do you think it's because of the learner like a young learner or adult learners? Do you think it's related?Diederik: I was thinking about it. Also, it had to do with my level. I was very much A1.You've got clothing items. It's basically you're in a shop. You'll ask how much it costs, what is my size? It's very concrete.Once it becomes less concrete, then indeed, you do maybe have to spend a bit more time on the context. Once you're into phrases like, "Don't worry. I'll pick you up," or something, then you do need context.At least, brainstorm ideas for context. Maybe at the lower level, sometimes it's better to just spend less time on that and just get to the practice which I guess happens in teaching learners on low levels.Tracy: Thank you so much, Diederik, for coming to our podcast.Diederik: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Not sure if you’ve been teaching reading right? Listen to Debbie Hepplewhite and find out what you might have been doing wrong…For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Ross Thorburn: Hi, and welcome back to the TEFL Training Institute Podcast. This week, our topic is how not to teach phonics. We have a real expert on that. That's Debbie Hepplewhite. She'll be telling us about some of the common mistakes that teachers make in teaching phonics.Debbie's worked as a phonics consultant for Oxford University Press developing their "Oxford Reading Tree Floppy's Phonics Sounds and Letters" programme.She's also the author of the online "Phonics International Programme" for all ages, and the author of the "No Nonsense Phonics Skills" programme published by Raintree, and the "Phonics and Talk Time" series. She's a wonderful speaker. She's a real authority on phonics.I really hope you enjoy the interview as much as I enjoyed speaking to Debbie.Ross: Debbie, I wanted to start off by asking you about one of the first big don'ts in teaching phonics which is the whole word approach. I think it's something that generally frowned upon.Are there any times when you think it is useful for teachers to teach using a whole word approach? That's like helping students to recognize words as whole blocks rather than using the phonics approach to decode the sounds.Are there any context, maybe, where you think that might work? For example, in Japan or China where students maybe are used to using that approach of memorization to learn to read in their first language.Debbie Hepplewhite: Fantastic question, and I can't give you all the answers, because what's really clear to me from the Chinese people I've met and from learning about teaching English in China is that there is a capacity for Chinese children to try to memorize whole printed words as if it's a global shape.In a way, they may be able to do in a more superior way than children who aren't taught at all they have an alphabetic system.Think about it. You've already said languages got thousands of words. It has. The English spoken language has got thousands and thousands of words. You imagine the diet of introducing a large number of printed English words and trying to teach the children to recognize the word shape day in and day out.It's a horrendous logistical exercise. Also, so many of the printed words looks similar to other printed words. Even if you've got, more or less, a certain word, but then you brought in a similar shape, similar size word, how is that learner to discern? The sheer feat of trying to learn hundreds to thousands of words as whole words is mind-boggling.What I'm suggesting is that even in this Chinese situation, bringing a good content-rich phonics program, and also at the same time you're teaching the spoken language, because they've got to take on the spoken language, and you can teach the spoken language with no print.We know the method. The children come into school in the morning. You use a common greeting. You might say, "How are you today?" You might talk about what the weather is like. You might talk about family members. You might talk about items around the room.All of those things can be done without print, because you're teaching the spoken language. Then when you're teaching the print side of it, I highly recommend that you try a content-rich phonics program to do that, to run parallel with the spoken language.Ross: You can see in China, for example. It takes students so long to learn to read here in the first language. If there's any shortcuts, I guess why don't use them. Anyway, mini whiteboards, I wanted to ask you about these.Mini whiteboards seem to be quite common in phonics teaching. I've seen teachers use them in second language learning programs as well. Can you tell us a bit about some typical activities that teachers do with mini whiteboards? How useful are those?Debbie: I'm actually against mini whiteboards in that they are overused or not used in a fit for purpose way. There is a role for mini whiteboards for some of the phonics activities and the main activities. There's two main activities.Sometimes, early phonics work or early phonics program uses magnetic letters or little piece of magnetic tiles with the letter printed on. They can be useful for changing the patterns of the letters to do some early manipulation work.You give children sounds and they can point to the letter, or you give them a simple word and get them to identify the sounds and select the letters for spelling.It's quite a good thing for early spelling. It's also good for whole group and whole class work for quick fire, show me activities. The teacher can say a sound. The child writes down the letter or a letter group and holds up the mini whiteboard. At a glance, the teacher can see the whole class.The teacher might give a spoken word and the children have to identify the sounds, write down the word and then show the teacher. In that respect, it can be fit for purpose.However, a lot of phonics work is just only mini whiteboard work, so children aren't each getting a bank of printed words for each child to practice his or her own sounding out and blending, and engaging with their own work and ticking what they know and circling what they don't know or they're not sure of.One of the things I heavily promote is that your phonic program, your provision needs to include banks of printed words for children to practice with that they can interact with. They can draw the cat on there, the dog, the ship, the jet.Teachers can have something tangible to see what the child can do, and that can be shared with parents at home or other teachers in the setting. If a child needs intervention which can be more little and often, you've got a printed work there.In that phonics teaching and learning cycle, when you go on to sentence level or text level work, each child needs that in a printed format to be able to look through to technically try and say the sounds and say what the sentence is. You know, what the sentences are.Then you can work with that print, so now let's do the meaning making. When you understand what the meaning is, you can draw a picture.I don't understand how you can give high quality phonics provision without print and for the core resources to be for each child making the print tangible and the sense of their own learning tangible. If phonics is all mini whiteboard work, it all gets wiped off. There's nothing to show. There's nothing to repeat.You can't repeat it at home. You can't show off at home with it. You're right. I spent a lot of time talking about mini whiteboards to say to teachers identify when it's fit for purpose to use them, and when it's not fit for purpose. Good phonics provision needs, at least, some core resources ready printed.[music]Ross: I also heard, Debbie, you talk about the parachute game. It's another infinite game for teaching phonics, isn't it? What are some of the issues with that game in particular? In general, how can teachers decide when they're teaching phonics what activities are useful and which ones are less useful?Debbie: There's several issues with this, because we're very mindful that often phonics provision starts with very young children, and people identify young children with needing games and activities to engage them that are age appropriate.One thing that's concerning about that is the idea that children won't enjoy working on paper, with paper, with print, and doing their own work. That's associated in many people's minds with formal teaching learning, or Draconian, or Victorian, or old fashioned, or for older children.I'd like to disavow people of that understanding because I have found and other people have found that when you give children their own work and their own phonics book or phonics folder, they absolutely thrive on it. That's one thing.The other thing is when Sir Jim Rose did a review of phonics provision back in 2006 in the UK context. What he said when he wrote about it was we can do real great multisensory things with these young beginners, but be careful that the activities aren't, what he called, extraneous.In other words, they are so convoluted or so time-consuming that the core learning is lost because the activity becomes bigger than the phonics learning.With that parachute, that was me doing a very challenging speech at a Reading Reform Foundation Conference. What we were pointing out was one that the commentator of the video that that was taken from was saying that children are not turned off by that kind of activity.That's the first thing we need to challenge, because I have just explained that they're neither turned off by sitting down with paper doing their own activities. That was really a bad steer for teachers.When you actually examined what we call the phonics parachute game, where the children are sitting round the circle of the big parachute, and they have to flip it up to get to some toys, to get to a spoken word, to be able to spell it on their mini whiteboards.In reality, it was neither a good active team work parachute game nor was it a good content-rich, fit for purpose, phonics activity. It didn't touch either spot.In reality, the children were sitting on the playground a lot waiting to take a turn and may never got round to having their own turn to get a toy, because there were so many children to get round.What we needed to challenge was the idea that you need to dress phonics up with a fluffy activity, and two, teachers need to be able to evaluate what it's covered in the lesson, because when I go into schools I observe a lot of very shallow lessons.It's not that children aren't learning, because they definitely are, but they're not learning nearly as much as they could. There is a lot to learn when we do literacy, foundational literacy.Teachers need to examine their own mindset about any prejudices or preconceived ideas they might have about what little children will enjoy, their capacity for learning. Then we need to evaluate our practices.By now, so many people have invested a lot of money in phonics games and activities, maybe card games, maybe an interactive whiteboard game. What I try to say to people is view those as enrichment outside of the main phonics lesson.As long as you are doing a very rich phonics lesson as your discrete phonics lesson, of course you can supplement that or complement that with any amount of phonics games and activities, but be aware of what is core and what is additional.Ross: You've done teacher training for phonics all over the world. What do you find that maybe are some of the challenges in training teachers to teach phonics and maybe some mindsets that teachers have that maybe prevent them from teaching phonics in a more effective way?Debbie: When I've done teacher training in other countries, I find great differences in whether the teacher passionately believes that in English lessons you should only ever speak English. You should never resort in mother tongue.I know that works well in scenarios when you get the children very young, so it's not as stressful perhaps to start to introduce the small bits of speech in the English language.I would suggest that the older children get it and just have been speaking in their mother tongue that is actually more stressful to go into a scenario where the teacher is suddenly only speaking in that new language with no explanations in mother tongue.I personally think that when you get older children, teachers should feel comfortable to depend to mother tongue for explanations and almost why wouldn't you to make things clear. [laughs]Always we have to look at the context of the country, the language, the age of the children, but we should never ever get away from the fact that the more knowledgeable the teacher is the better supported the teacher is with supportive materials for teaching and for learning.The more you're working from the language itself, the complexities, but also the understanding that we need to drip feed information. We need to repeat information and not presume too much, the better job we'll do of teaching English as a second language.Ross: One more time, everyone that was Debbie Hepplewhite. Debbie, thank you so much for taking the time to speak to us. If you're interested in finding out more about Debbie, checking out lots of great free resources that she has, please go onto her website. It's www.syntheticphonics.com. I hope you've enjoyed the interview, and see you again next time.

Patsy Lightbown, Professor, author and second language acquisition researcher tells us about language learners of different ages. Are kids better language learners than adults? Who learns languages faster? Are there any advantages to learning a language later in life? Listen to find out…For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the TEFL Training Institute Podcast. This week, we have an interview with Patsy Lightbown, who is currently professor emerita at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada as well as being most famous for being a second-language acquisition researcher and for the fantastic book, "How Languages are Learned."In today's podcast, we talked about language learning and specifically looked into the differences between how children learn languages and how adults learn languages. I hope you enjoy the interview.Ross: Hello. Thank you. Thanks so much for coming on.Patsy Lightbown: Hi. Thanks.Ross: Let's start off by talking about how people regardless of whether they are kids or adults, how do people in general learn a language?Patsy: I would agree with most people that language learning begins when people encounter language that they understand and that they are interested in understanding. In other words, the whole idea, the comprehensible input is the beginning of language strikes me as pretty plausible.There has to be a reason for learning. One reason for learning is to understand something that you hear or try to read. Some people have long-term goals when they start to learn a language. If you don't trigger a short-term desire to understand at the moment, then the long-term goals are hard to pursue.That's one of the things about language learning that we sometimes lose sight of in the classroom that people need to have immediate goals, immediate needs and interests, understanding, and communicating what they understand, or asking questions about it.I guess that's how language learning starts. Clearly, language learning is a long, long road. That's another thing we sometimes lose sight of, certainly in formal education the idea that people can reach high levels of competence in a language, that they are exposed to for an hour or so a day.It's also pretty misguided. What I always say is the classroom language teaching is a starting point, but what you really need to learn in the classroom is how to keep learning outside the classroom.Ross: Is this the idea of creating learner autonomy? Almost that the language classroom is giving students the skills to learn a language rather than actually the knowledge of learning.Patsy: Exactly. It seems to me what the classroom has to do is to prepare students to keep learning by helping them to learn strategies for understanding, and strategies for understanding what they hear, or what they try to read, strategies for making themselves understood to people outside the classroom.Of course, now the opportunities for coming in contact with another language, the opportunities are so much greater than they were in a previous era of different kinds of communication technologies.Now there's really no excuse for not finding ways of using the language outside the classroom. You don't have to actually live in the place where the language is spoken. You can encounter the language by using technology.You have to be motivated, and you have to have the confidence. That's another thing that the classroom can build.It's the confidence that you can keep learning outside, that you can approach another individual, or that you can approach a resource, and get something from it, that you have the strategies and the skills to learn from the encounters, that you can have either in person or online through technology.Ross: How much does that happen then? In my experience, most course books don't really do that. Most teachers, definitely being guilty of this myself, probably see the classroom as the beginning and the end of language learning and teaching rather than just really a starting point.Patsy: That's a really interesting question because, of course, like everything having to do with language teaching and learning, the variations in the answer to that question probably equal the number of classrooms there are in the world.Certainly, also it would depend on the age of the learners, and things like that. If it's not happening, it ought to be happening, I could put it that way. I can't say that it's happening more often, but I believe it should be.I don't know why it wouldn't be, but when you started out this piece of our conversation saying that unfortunately teachers do tend to believe that the classroom is the be-all and end-all, I think students may be convinced on that as well.I'm arguing that if teachers are not encouraging students to continue learning outside the classroom, then that should be a priority in teacher education that we say to teachers, "Prepare your students to learn outside the classroom."If we turn to the research domain, that would back that up. You may be aware that I've written some about phenomenon in cognitive psychology called "Transfer Appropriate Learning" or "Transfer Appropriate Processing."The idea behind that is that when we learn something, we learn not just the something that we are trying to learn, but we also internalize features and factors that are present in the environment where we're learning it.If all of our learning takes place not just in a classroom, but within the traditional definition of a classroom where teachers ask questions and students answer, then we're not preparing people to continue using language in other environments where they do the questioning.For example, or where the opportunities for using the language are very different from those of a classroom environment.Transfer Appropriate Processing would tell us that we need to get students experiences in the classroom that prepare them for using language outside the classroom.It's the thing such as making the language that they are exposed to, challenging, age appropriate, interesting, and all of those things that sometimes get lost in classroom instruction.[music]Ross: Let's talk about some of the differences between young learners and adults. How do those groups learn languages differently? Maybe, also, what might be similar between the two groups?Patsy: It seems to me that one of the biggest differences between child learners and older learners is that child learners are more willing to accept that they're learning. They're learning all sorts of things.We're talking here about a classic foreign language learning situation where the students are in a class where now we are learning English or now we are learning French. Now, we are learning science, math, or history.Young learners are more accepting of that. It's like a suspension of disbelief. You're not sitting in the classroom saying, "Why am I learning this?" You're sitting in the classroom saying, "I'm learning this because it's the English class. That's why I'm here." When you're dealing with older learners, I think the issue of why I'm learning this becomes more important to them.For one thing, they don't have as much time to lose as children do. Not time to lose, but they want to see results. The evidence is that older learners can learn more quickly than younger learners in a classroom setting. We've got lots of research to show that.Adults are certainly more able to use their intentional or explicit knowledge because they have more of it. They're able to build on it more than children can.Probably the most important thing is that adults don't have the time to learn something that's not important on the grounds that eventually it will be important, whereas I think children are more forgiving, and more willing to do what the teacher says.As students get older, they feel the pressure of time. I think that's especially true for people who are in second-language learning situations, as contrasted to foreign language learning situations.It depends on what their goals are. If they are learning the language, so let's say that they can travel or go and study abroad, then they also feel the pressure of time. Time is the thing that older learners have less of because there are so many other things that they have to do with their time.Ross: There must be a limit to that, though in that maybe adults are faster in some settings. I've read research on the critical age hypothesis. If you start learning a second language beyond a certain age, you'll never going to be able to sound like a native speaker.It's very, very difficult, whereas if you are immersed in a language before a certain age, then almost everyone ends up learning the language to the level of a native speaker.Patsy: Then you've also hit on the idea of becoming like or sounding like a native speaker. I think people have finally got over that. I hope. I'd like to think so. That is not the goal of most language teaching and learning.Sounding like a native speaker is not something that most language students aspire to. What they aspire to is reaching a level of proficiency that allows them to make themselves understood and to understand what they need to understand without aspiring to sound like native speakers.You can say the older learner learns more quickly, but may reach a certain plateau in some aspects of language learning. There are so many successful older learners. Focusing on what older learners can't do is pretty self-defeating.I think we need to focus more on what they can do and emphasize the remarkable success of many older learners if they are given the right instruction.If realistic expectations are set or how much time they need, that's part of the problem that people think they can, not just because of commercial ads, learn French in six months. People are unrealistic in their expectations of what they can accomplish in a very limited time.Adults sometimes get frustrated because they've been going to their evening class three days a week for six months, and they still can't do this x, y and z.Part of our job as teachers and as researchers is to reassure people that they are learning and that they will continue to learn that. Just because they have been studying for six months doesn't mean that they should be now fluent and competent in the language. It takes a long time.That's one thing we definitely know about language learning. It takes a long time to acquire high levels of proficiency, and it takes a long time of re-using the language in a great variety of situations.If you keep doing the same thing over and over again, you'll get very good at that thing, but you need to be able to use language in a great variety of settings in order to get good at using it in a variety of settings. All of that takes time, more time than people ever realized.One of the biggest limitations for adults is not their intellectual, or cognitive, or whatever language learning ability that would allow them to acquire another language, but just the amount of time they have to devote to it.Ross: It's interesting. In my own experience learning Chinese, I found a few years ago that my Chinese was quite good conversationally, and then I moved to a Chinese company and started attending meetings that were in Chinese. It was so difficult.I found I could hardly understand anything and they're all this vocabulary about costs, and turnover, and profits. There was so much of it. It was incredibly difficult to understand even though I thought I had the background and the grammar, but in terms of the vocabulary it was so difficult.Patsy: That's really interesting. I'm sure, again, this is one of those things that we've talked about for years but when Jim Cummins first started talking about the difference between basic interpersonal communication skills and cognitive academic language proficiency.People were shocked that he said that it would take children five to seven years to achieve cognitive academic language proficiency, even though it would take them only, maybe, one or two years to achieve this interpersonal communication skill.Over and over again the research demonstrates that it takes years. It takes not just the passage of time chronologically, but the actual engagement in different kinds of activities and in different contexts, because it goes back to the transfer appropriate processing.You have to have the experience of a particular kind of language use in order to be prepared to use the language in that way outside the classroom.Ross: That was Professor Patsy Lightbown. If you want to find out more about her work, you can go to her website. There's a link on our links page. You might also want to check out two of her books. One of them is called "Focus On Content-Based Language Teaching" from Oxford University Press, or "How Languages Are Learned" co-authored with Nina Spada.Hope you enjoyed the podcast and see you again next time.

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).For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

We discuss the differences between theory and practice in teacher development and the most effective was to learn from theory and learn from practice.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Ross Thorburn: Hi everyone, welcome to the podcast. No Tracy today, but instead we have Mr. Dave Weller.Dave Weller: Hurrah! I have to say hurrah. It's become my tradition.Ross: Great to see you again. Thanks for coming on the podcast. What do you want to talk about today?Dave: One thing I've been thinking of a lot recently is the difference between theory versus practice in teacher development. There's that classic quote from that baseball dude, Yogi Berra, saying that, "In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice."In practice there is...[laughter]Dave: ... which is really nice. It got me thinking about have I used theory or practice? Which one have I used more to develop myself over the years? What is the difference? Why are they different? Is there a better one or is there a worse one? What are the best methods of learning theory or the best methods of learning through practice?Ross: Awesome. The three questions we're going to try and answer today are, what's the difference between theory and practice in teacher development?Dave: How teachers can learn from theory?Ross: And three, how can teachers learn from practice?What's the Difference Between Theory and Practice in Teacher Development?Ross: Again, I remember when I was doing my diploma a few years ago and reading about what teacher development should be, like reflection, team teaching, peer observations and all this kind of bottom‑up stuff. What I found in the place that I was working was it was a complete opposite. It was just top‑down observations and teacher workshops.Largely, pretty much everywhere I've worked, pretty much everywhere I've heard about, there is that huge difference between the theory and practice in teacher development. Why do you think that happens?Dave: It's just the different management style. Again, essentially, they're doing the same thing. They're recognizing patterns in what they've seen work before in teacher development. That's been quite charitable. It could just be that's the way they've always done it. No one's actually bothered to put in the thought or the time to test that out, to see if it actually is true.Ross: Another thing with those things is it's probably what is easiest to implement. I've found before, a previous company trying to implement much more bottom‑up ideas for teacher training. It just seemed to be too abstract for senior managers to understand.For them, it was like bums on seats in the training. They could see that. They could understand what it was, but if it was a teacher peer observing someone else or doing an online teacher training course, those senior managers couldn't see that and couldn't understand what it was.Dave: My personal belief is that if you have a bunch of newer teachers, say, first and second‑year teachers, normally top‑down is more effective because they don't know what they need to develop so they need that quite directive input. Go and read a chapter on this, teaching listening, or teach how to do an error correction.OK, great. Then they can try that again, that side that we talked about earlier. Once you get to those teachers, the majority of teachers in your school, they've been there a while, they're very self‑directive. They end up resenting that top‑down approach. They want to take things new directions.Their passions or their interests in teaching naturally develop from their time in the classroom. In which case, those are the guys you give free rein to go, "You develop, however, you like. Just come in to chat with me once a month about what you've been doing. We can bounce ideas off of each other. Of course, in the meantime, I'm here for input and ideas."Ross: That's interesting because you're almost dividing their quality control and development as two separate things. That's often one of the problems that we have with observations in teacher development. We lump these two different things into the same category.From a business point of view as a school, you have your students and you've promised them a minimum level of service from these teachers. If you're the manager and you're responsible for quality control, then your job is to get teachers to be able to deliver that quality of service. That's not optional.If you work there, your job is to get to that level. My job as a manager is to make sure that you get to that level. Once you're beyond that, it's a lot more open‑ended, isn't it? That's when it can open up.Dave: Exactly.Ross: Who knows where that could lead to? It could lead to you doing a podcast regularly. What have you learned from doing this one, in your development? Has it been helpful for you?Dave: Yes, absolutely. Incredibly.Ross: In some ways it means I have more conversations like this one. Maybe, you and I would normally talk about this in a bar, but I don't think we go down the rabbit hole quite as much as we do when there's a microphone recording. You're right. You wouldn't put this in someone's action plan, would you? Record it and make a podcast.Dave: [laughs] As iTunes gets flooded with podcasts in the next year.[laughter]How can teachers learn from theory?Ross: Let's talk about then how teachers can learn from theory.Dave: Sure. There's not as many ways as [inaudible 05:17] . I do think that some of these will overlap when we talk about how people learn from practice, as well. Again, it's normally seen as a slightly more buoyant one. It's typical, pick up a book, or read this, read that.I also think learning from theories is something as simple as talking to your colleagues after work, when you go for dinner with them after a long day or you find out what they worked. Find out if there's an idea behind it, or it was just something they were trying.It doesn't need to be an established theory. It can be, "Oh, I tried this." "Why did you try that?" "I don't really know." For engagement purposes, I think that the delivery channel is really important.Oftentimes, authors can be quite dry. That's a bit of a barrier to people, to picking up a book and reading through it. Whereas, if you have a YouTube channel, like a short snippet video or a podcast even, where you can multitask while you're doing that almost. You commute to work, you can get three good ideas to try in class that day.Ross: There's something very interesting about how so much of our profession is about grading your language, so that you can have people who are learning a language understand you.There seems to be a massive disconnect between our ability to do that as teachers and authors' abilities to put across ideas about teaching in language that's simple and accessible to all the English teachers in the world. Especially, when you take into the fact that most of the English teachers out there in the world are not native speakers.To quote or paraphrase Charles Bukowski, he says, "An academic is someone who takes a simple idea and makes it complicated. An artist is someone who takes a complicated idea and makes it simple." We need to be a lot better in this industry of becoming artists, as opposed to academics.Dave: I would fully agree, absolutely. I've read those same books, and guilty of reading through a page and stopping. I have no idea what I've just read.Ross: Yes, what did that say? [laughs]Dave: That's actually something I try and do on my website, barefootteflteacher.com. When I sat down to write it, I thought, "Well, who am I writing all this for?" I thought, I'm going to write this for first or third‑year teachers. Therefore, I'll keep the language simpler.I'm not going to name‑drop every single concept or idea. I'm going to try and break it down, and, basically, explain it like I'm five, using simple words, diagrams, visual aids. It's something I hope you're doing very well with this podcast as well, actually, opening these ideas, concepts, and theories to a wider world as well.Ross: What do you do running the Diploma in TESOL to help teachers apply theories more easily?Dave: Well, that's something that, hopefully, the tutorials will take care of because I always ask the students on the course to not think of it in modules. We have 10 modules. I say, "Don't think of it like a module." You start learning and then finish, then start something else and finish it. I say, "Try and think of as layers or threads running throughout."As I mentioned, we do a teacher test to start with. We do a video lesson which is observed. We pull out several points to work on based on the examination criteria, "That's OK. Pick one lesson a week. That's your experimental class. Try one of these. Do a bit of research on that aspect."Say it's error correction, learn all the different types, where the pros and cons to using that, and test it out. That will carry on throughout the rest of the course with all the other criteria.Ross: Of course, with that Dave, anyone could do that, right? You don't have to be on a teacher training course to do that.Dave: Shhh! [laughs]Ross: You could even film your own class, observe it, and figure out what things you're bad at, and you could do all those things yourself. I love that idea, by the way, of having an experimental class. I think that's such a cool idea. What do you think?Dave: The learners aren't quite so happy about that. [laughs]Ross: What are the ethics of it? Actually, I listened to a podcast the other day. They were talking about how, in Finland, they wanted to run an experiment on universal basic income.They had to change the Constitution because the Constitution says everyone gets treated equally. As soon as you run an experiment, you're no longer treating people equally. We can play that quote for you.Man 1: All the constitutions of democratic countries in the world, they say that you have to treat people equally.Man 2: By definition, if you're running experiments, you're not treating people equally...Ross: ...because they, the people who are part of the experiments, are not being treated equally.Dave: The ethics of it, as long as you're not doing something completely bonkers, doing something where it doesn't have much value, it's, in the long‑term, benefit for those learners in your class.Otherwise, every time you get a new teacher you're doing the ethic...You shouldn't let them teach until they're a wonderful teacher, because every teacher is constantly learning.How can teachers learn from practice?Ross: Let's talk about learning from practice.Dave: Sure. This is the one that everyone naturally does [laughs] because you have no choice. When you're a new teacher, it's survival mode. You end up, hopefully, just responding to the learners. You try and carry out your lesson plan.When the class finishes and the adrenaline [laughs] gets out of your system, you can hopefully reflect and go, "What went well and what didn't go well?" You do a little bit more of what did go well and a little bit less of what didn't. Over time, you learn from practice.After that survival period of, maybe, three to six months, you can start thinking a little bit more objectivity about what you're doing and spot the patterns. In the meantime, I'm sure most people have sympathetic colleagues that you can rush into the classroom at break time and go, "Ahh! Help."[laughter]Dave: They go, "Try this, try that." You get lots of useful suggestions, but I think there's no substitute from practice except to keep practicing, keep trying new things.Ross: There's a huge danger with that, though. I'll give you an example. I did this as well, in my first year. A colleague was recently telling me about this idea that you start off teaching and everyone has problems with managing students' behavior.For a lot of people, the thing that they do is they go, "OK, I'm going to be angry. I'm going to be there's going to be really strong discipline. There's going to be lots of punishment in my class." Their practice leads them down this road, which for me is really going in completely the wrong direction from what the theory would actually tell you to do.There is obviously a danger or you could learn, for example, I don't know. I tried giving instructions in English. I find that the students couldn't understand. What I learned from that is I'm going to give all instructions for all activities in the students' first language. Have you seen that?Dave: I have, and I would argue, that's just a growing stage. Hopefully, people don't become fossilized in that theory. If you continue to develop, you will discover that that does not work for a long time, or there are better ways to approach it. As a developmental stage, we've got no problem with that.Obviously, if that works better than something they were doing previously, where they had simply no control in the classroom, it was a riot. They went in a little bit too strict, but the students were able to sit down and learn something as a result. That's still better than the first thing.We can't expect people to become perfect immediately. You're going to make mistakes. You're going to learn bad theories. I remember giving a workshop on learning styles.[laughter]Dave: Along the way, you will make mistakes. You will learn incorrect theories or theories that have become outdated. They do stick in your mind.Talking the talk and walking the walkDave: I still think there's this idea about theoretical knowledge, which you have in your head. It's not being applied. Then you have this huge body of tacit knowledge, or the knowledge you gained through experience in the classroom. I really feel that's more valuable, that idea of when you speak to someone, they can talk the talk, but they can't walk the walk.Ross: I almost think it's surprising that we find that surprising, like if you take a different context...Dave: I'm surprised you think that way.Ross: [laughs] Say, you talk about football. You could be an expert on football and know so much about it. You could have watched thousands and thousands of games. You could be a commentator. You could be very, very respected. You could even be a manager, but you might not actually be able to kick a football.We, for some reason, assume in teaching the crossover between knowledge and skill is very, very small. Just by reading about something or being able to talk about something, you'll be able to apply that skill.Dave: In some cases, that's fine. The best boxers in the world have coaches who aren't the best boxers in the world, but they have the knack.Ross: The same as football, all these things.Dave: They have a knack of being able to pass on knowledge and break down technique and do that, which is fine, but they still, again, have a minimum level of that ability, as well.Ross: Dave, thanks very much for coming on. For anyone that's interested, where can they find you online?Dave: Thanks for having me, Ross. It's a pleasure as always. If you want to find out more, you can visit my blog at www.barefootteflteacher.com.Ross: Wonderful. Thanks again.Dave: Welcome.

Carol Lethaby 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.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Tracy: Hello everyone. Welcome back.Ross Thorburn: Today, we've got a special guest on our podcast. That person is Carol Lethaby.Tracy: Carol is an English teacher, trainer, author, and a ELT consultant. She has spent a lot of time in Mexico and in Greece. You probably have noticed her name in our ITEFL podcast.Ross: Both 2018 and 2017. Today, we are going to speak to Carol about what neuroscience can do for language teaching. As usual, we've got three broad areas that we're going to speak to Carol about. The first area we are going to look at is what myths about language teaching are there.Tracy: The second main area is what teachers can apply from research and neuroscience, and the last one...Ross: ...is why findings from research often don't get applied in language teaching.Myths about language teachingRoss: Hi Carol. Thanks so much for taking the time to come on the podcast.Carol: Hi Ross.Ross: How are you doing?Carol: Well. Thank you.Ross: Carol, do you want to start off by telling us about some common myths that exist about language learning?Carol: The first one is we only use 10 percent of our brain, which gets perpetuated so much in the popular media. Then, of course, there's the idea that you're right brain or left brain dominant, again, something which neuroscientists grimace every time someone says that.The idea that accommodating learning styles will create learning and the idea that we can ignore learner's first language when they're learning a new language.Tracy: It's really interesting. How did this myth change what teachers do in the classroom?Carol: Yes. That's what's really important for us as teachers. The first thing is the idea of left brain, right brain. You are either analytic or you're creative. People taking this into consideration and saying, "Oh well, there's nothing you can do about it."When really they're denying the role that education plays, your preferences, the same with learning styles. We identify them. We have these formal and informal assessments.We try to teach to the preferred learning styles to enhance in learning. We teach people on initial and in‑service training courses that is of utmost importance when there's absolutely no evidence that it helps.I think there it's more like wasting time, money, resources on things that don't work. Then with the English‑only idea, the idea that the L one shouldn't play a part in second language learning. I'd just been working with a group of teachers last week.I was talking about different ways that the first language can help us learning a second language or another language and the reaction from some of the teachers I could still see there the [inaudible 03:17] and the kind of disbelief. This idea, I think, is pretty firmly entrenched in many places.Ross: Is it almost like we could put that research into two categories then? Research that shows that what we're doing at the moment is wrong, or doesn't work, or isn't as effective as it could be. Then research that might show why things like common practices that teachers do now do work perfect.Carol: Yes, I think that's a good way to think about how neuroscience can help us. One of the things that it can help us to do is to think about things that our intuitions might tell us are true, but which evidence tells us are not true. It can also the other way around, as you've just mentioned, show us something that we do do in the classroom is actually a good idea.The big one here for me is taking into consideration prior knowledge. This is something that studies of the brain and looking at MRIs. There is something going on physically in the brain when we are learning about something we already know something about.The part of the brain where old information and new information connect is a part that has been identified. We have to say, at the same time, we do have to think too about how can we actually apply these ideas both from neuroscience and from evidence‑based teaching practice. How can we apply this to English language teacher?A lot of the studies that have been done have been done in the area of math teaching or content teaching. Language teaching is a little bit different in terms of the language itself being the content.Ross: Another theory like this that we've mentioned before on this podcast and one that I've also heard you mentioned before, is cognitive load. I always find the easiest way to visualize this is to think of the brain as being like a smartphone or a computer.The idea is that if your phone or your computer, you've got a lot of apps running at the same time, then the computer runs much more slowly. If you only have one app running at once, then it runs faster.This is similar to the brain that if you give students, for example, a task that includes a lot of higher order thinking skills and a lot of speaking, students are going to speak a lot more slowly.In other words, it's like a language app on their brain's going to be running a lot more slowly because of the increased processing power that they need to do that higher order thinking. Do you want to tell us a bit more about cognitive load and some of the things that you've spoken about with that before?Carol: Yes, that's it in a nutshell, but that's a nice little analogy with apps, etc. In language learning, we started looking at it related to the idea of overloading learners in terms of their different senses. People thinking, we're going to present this piece of language. You have to listen to it, you have to read it, and you have to look at pictures all at the same time.That, in actual fact, you think you're helping the learner, but in fact, you're making it harder for the learner because, maybe, the visuals don't support the text in some way. When are we overloading the learners?How could we avoid overloading the learners? By doing the opposite. Actually, help them using visuals that support their learning rather than actually overload the learner.What teachers can apply from research and neuroscienceTracy: We talk about teaching. We talk about neuroscience. Do you want to tell us some researching findings that from neuroscience, for example, the teachers can apply in their classes to make them more effective or, maybe, something that teachers commonly do in the classroom that neuroscience has shown benefits teaching or learning?Carol: Well, obviously, the first example is going back to the mother tongue again, using what you already know about your first language and what you already know about your second language to help you to learn new things. I'm thinking too of things, like practice testing. Just say, a quick vocabulary test after you have learned some vocabulary.Just the idea that practicing retrieving things from your memory actually strengthens those connections that you have and makes it easier to be able to do it in the future. It's just things like this that we're doing in the classroom, recycling material. We say we're recycling, but why are we doing that?Well, because it's going to help learners to actually learn new things if you remind them of what they know already. Then you add something new to it, doing pre‑tasks before we do reading or listening.That's a reason for doing that. You help learners to remember what they know already about the topic. In the case of the beginner learners, you're probably going to have to do more work for actual making up for their comprehension gap.Ross: You mentioned distributed practice there, which is something that we've also spoken about before in the podcast. Maybe, the easiest way to think about distributed practices, it's the opposite of cramming, which I think is something that we all know doesn't work very well.In the long‑term it might work OK if you've got an exam tomorrow, but it's not going to help you very much in the long‑term. Can you tell us a bit more about why distributed practice helps students remember things better?Carol: Yes, so most evidence‑based studies they call that distributed practice, but the idea of not cramming everything all at once to try and learn it, but the idea of spacing it. You start it on one day. Then you come back to it at another time. Every time you come back to it, you're adding something new so it becomes a cumulative process.Then it's really helping you, hopefully, with your neuroconnections. We could say that, doing some distributed practice with me. First of all, we do some work on a particular grammar and function structure. Say, we're working with simple past tense. We may say one day, we're going to learn some words to talk about the past.Maybe, we often do it first with the regular verbs, etc. We don't say, "Here are all the irregular verbs to learn all in one go." We say, "Next time we return to this." In the meantime, we do some other stuff.We're into leaving our practice. Perhaps, we go back and do some more vocabulary on a particular theme, for example. Then in the next class we come back to learning some verbs again, and perhaps work on more irregular verbs, learning more of them, again, in a theme, but relating them to what we did the day before.Ross: Obviously, with this podcast we're trying to get teachers to learn more about learning strategies and neuroscience. Do you think that teachers also have a responsibility to tell students about what learning strategies work?Carol: That's a great question. It's helpful to tell students why you're doing the things that you do. The idea of practice when students complain that. "Oh, we've already seen this and we practiced it." Well, why do we practice things again and again and again? Because we know that that helps you to learn it.Tracy: Can we also use them with young learners?Ross: Or is it something that works for adults?Carol: That's a good question. In terms of the cognitive strategies, that's something that needs to be dosified a little bit, depending on the cognitive level of the learner.It's very hard to talk about cognitive strategy, like making a conclusion from patterns if you don't have the cognitive abilities yet to be able to do that. That's going to depend on age, but there are some things definitely we can start working on with young children.Why findings from research often don't get applied in language teachingRoss: We've spoken a little about neuromyths, Carol. Why do you think it is that the neuromyths that you mentioned at the beginning of the show, things like, we only use a small percentage of our brain power, left brain, right brain learning‑selves. Why do these things still persist? Why is it people still believe in these? Why do they still get taught on teacher training courses?Carol: That's a good question. There are a few reasons. One of them is that going back to the women's and men's brains, for example, there's so much over reporting of studies that purport to find differences when the majority of studies actually don't find any differences, but those studies aren't reported. Why not? Because nobody's interested in them.In terms of learning styles right brain left brain, people love that stuff in the popular media, don't they? It's like you love to read a little quiz. Are you like this, or are you like this? It's very hard when that is passed on in the popular media as truth.Secondly, I think that's related to this, that a lot of the evidence for those things. The reality is a lot of it's hidden in a neuroscientific journals, for example. It's quite hard for us to access it unless there's someone helping us to read it and make sense of it and say, "Well, what this really says is this."Then the third reason, some neuromyths or ideas about the brain are actually untestable because they're black box theories, if you like. The multiple intelligences theory, for example. You can't test that because it's not something that we can look at if you like. It's a black box theory.It's a combination of those things. Probably the main one in language teaching is the idea that the myths are often not challenged.Tracy: A lot of teachers, including myself, just felt they're a lot of things going on in terms of research about learning from neuroscience. How can we make sure that we keep up‑to‑date? You just pointed out actually articles in a lot of popular media is probably quite unreliable. What can we do as teachers?Carol: Another good question. Something that I find very helpful is trying to find blogs by neuroscientists, who, in the blog, they will often explain themselves in normal person's language that we can understand.If you read the blog first, then you can go back to the actual study and make sense of it much more. I like Daniel Willingham's blog. He talks about, particularly, education and evidence based on ideas and education.More from Carol LethabyRoss: Carol, for any listeners that want to visit your website or learn more about your work and what you do, your website is www.clethaby.com That's C‑L‑E‑T‑H‑A‑B‑Y.com. Is that right?Carol Lethaby: Yeah. That's my website.Tracy: Really nice talking to you today.Ross: Thanks again, Carol.Carol: Thank you to you. It's been so nice to meet you and talk to you.

This episode we look at how we can observe through three types of observations - being observed, observing others and observing ourselves.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Whoever you are, whatever you teach, you’ll probably use a coursebook. How can you make best use of the coursebook you've been given?For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

How honest are we with our students? How honest are schools with their teachers? And how can we be more honest with ourselves? We discuss with ESL recruitment guru, Jessica Keller.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Tracy: Hello, everyone. Today we've got our special podcast and then who has been on our podcast before is...Jessica Keller: Jessica Keller.[laughter]Tracy: Welcome.Jessica: That's me.[laughter]Tracy: Welcome, Jessica.Ross Thorburn: Jessica, thanks for coming on again. Do you want to introduce yourself very briefly for people that missed you last time?Jessica: Yeah, I've been recruiting for English language teachers and actually now other different subject teachers for both Asia and in the US for the last 13 years.Ross: Before that, you were an English teacher, a manager and the regional manager, those kind of things in Japan, right?Jessica: Yes, I did start as a teacher in Japan.Ross: Something happened at work to me fairly recently that I wanted to mention to you guys. We were talking about kids taking English lessons for about two hours a week and this person said to me that our school's competitors all tell parents, "If your kid studies with us, they'll sound like a native speaker after about two years."Jessica: Wow.Ross: I thought that's just a lie, right?Jessica: [laughs]Ross: Like a blatant lie. He said, "Well, we have to do that because that's what our competitors do. We don't really have a choice." I thought, "Well, surely that's going to lead to so many other problems."Anyway, it reminded me of this quote that I heard from Sam Harris who if you've not listened to him before, you should check out his "Waking Up" podcast.Sam Harris: It's amazing to me that we have to get back to a place where being out of harmony with what is demonstrably true pays a penalty.The value we have to all embrace is we have to care to be in register to the truth. Especially, people who are in power, whose decisions affect the lives of millions, we have to care when they are in register or out of register with what's true.Ross: Yes, therefore, we can talk a bit about lying and how lying comes into language teaching, recruitment, Jessica, which you're an expert in, teaching, training, management and all those things.Tracy: What the main areas today we're going to talk about? Lying?Ross: I think we can talk about when we lie and then how we can maybe lie less or at least be more honest.Jessica: Especially in sales. The nature of sales and recruitment for that matter is also just, of course, trying to get people to buy into something. Having a situation where you're trying to sell the benefits of something as opposed to being you listing all the negatives and all the positives.We don't necessarily think of that as lying all the time, but if you're openly leaving information out, then it can be really deceptive.Ross: Let's first of all talk about lying to students and then maybe how we can lie less. Then secondly...Tracy: ...we're going to talk about lying to our teachers and how honest we are in teacher training and management. Then last...Jessica: ...also about lying to ourselves.Lying To StudentsRoss: Let's talk about lying to students. When you, Tracy, taught adults before, what did you feel maybe that people weren't honest about or teachers were not honest about the students?Tracy: I think when the teacher is trying to give students some feedback, especially with adult learners. They have to make sure how much corrective feedback you are giving them because they don't want to lose face in front of other classmates.Even though they made mistakes they have to make sure, "Oh, yeah, really good. Well done," but actually, they didn't do a very good job.Ross: I guess it depends. If you praise someone maybe for trying something, that's honest but I have seen teachers say, "Oh, how else could you say X?" The student says something that's completely wrong and goon. Then the teacher says, "Yeah, well done. That's great." You can still say, "Oh, thanks for trying," or "That's interesting but not quite. But I think..."[laughter]Jessica: "Oh, good try. But here's what it actually is," or something like that.Ross: You're not giving them a lot of help by telling them they're right when they are actually wrong. [laughs]Jessica: Yeah. Also, I think to the original point you had about sales if you're setting an expectation to the parents of the kids who are going to sound like native speakers, and the kids have that pressure, obviously, they're going to be manufacturing and trying to live up to some expectation.That's not really realistic. It almost encourages a lie in some ways and the teachers also for maybe passing them along.Ross: I think that maybe we do have a bit of a lie in general that's like language learning is...We make language learning out to be a little easier than it actually is. I think in schools often will paint a picture for students that's a lot more optimistic than actually should.Tracy: That's a really good point, actually. If we just look at the people who can speak fluent foreign language, they definitely put a lot of efforts and it's not just one year. For example, I studied English for 29 years maybe.Ross: [laughs]Tracy: 29 years. I still made mistakes.Jessica: I have a friend who's sending her daughter overseas for four weeks. The daughter is taking one year of high school language study. My friend is convinced her daughter is going to be fluent and I'm like, "Aargh."Ross: After a year?Jessica: After one year of high school study and four weeks overseas.Ross: Wow.Jessica: She's like, "Well, it'll be really intensive." I'm like, "Yeah, I don't know about that."[laughter]Jessica: "Maybe you're right." I'd love to be wrong on that but it's that people have again these expectations that it's going to be easy to do.Ross: That's so interesting. I wonder where that comes from.Jessica: I think sales is partly the blame, for sure.Tracy: Yeah.Ross: [laughs] Yeah, absolutely. I also wanted to mention here something about how honest are we to students about what people actually say.Jake Whiddon, who's been on the podcast a couple times, he was telling me about he hang out with his daughter for the whole summer. He said, "I watch my daughter play with dozens of different kids and never once did I hear her say, 'Hello,' or 'How are you?' in either English or Chinese."I thought, "That's so interesting." The first thing that we teach...you know how that works. The important thing you can learn in English is, "Hello, how are you? I'm fine, thank you and you?" The majority of people that we teach those phrases to are kids, but actually kids don't say that.Tracy: I partially agree with that. I always hear foreigners talking to Chinese kids if the kids can speak English. They always say, "Hi! What's your name? How are you?"Ross: That argument is self‑justifying. The only reason they ask them those questions is because they know that's what they've been taught in school. I see your point, but I think with that those are interactions between adults and kids. For kids, the majority of interactions they will have will be with other kids.I think what someone really needs to do somewhere, is make up a corpus for children, and find out what the kids say to each other, what language the kids actually use. Then we could start teaching children some language that's going to be genuinely useful to them right now as opposed to learning a bunch of stuff that, when they grow up, they'll be able to use in 15 years' time.Tracy: Fair enough.Lying To TeachersRoss: Let's talk about lying to teachers. One of the reasons that I was very motivated to leave a previous job was, I found out that the Marketing Department, that marketed to teachers online, have much higher salary on their online advertisements than their first‑grade teachers actually get.That struck me as being so dishonest. I was much more serious about finding a job somewhere else. What do you think is the argument as a business, or as a school, why you wouldn't do that?Jessica: Why you wouldn't lie about the salary?Ross: Yeah.Jessica: I feel like that's something you can pretty easily punch a hole through. You don't want to be a dishonest company. As much as you want to get people on board and you want people to be interested in your job more than any other job, if you're known in the industry for being dishonest, then that's going to come through pretty quickly.If you advertise a salary of a certain amount, and then you get a job offer that's significantly lower than that, you're going to feel pretty disappointed, right?Ross: Yeah. Absolutely. How honest do you think schools should be when they're hiring teachers? Like you're saying, you do want to sell the benefits obviously more that the disadvantages. Equally you have to talk about some disadvantages in order to be transparent and give people an accurate picture of what life's going to be like.Jessica: For example, I've had jobs in the past that I've recruited for that have split days off or split shifts in the salary. I haven't put that in the job advertisement, but I'll talk to them about it.Ross: I think the advertisement is an advertisement with the route, but the interview is when you can get into those parts of it.Jessica: Well, admittedly, I know people will be less drawn to an ad if they see it. It's easier just to have a conversation. It's less concrete.Ross: One other thing that I wanted to mention here, related to lying to teachers and being honest to teachers, is I used to work with someone who thought that best way to give feedback to a teacher, who had a complaint, was to tell them, "Oh, hey, Jessica. I observed your class. I thought it was absolutely perfect.""There was nothing wrong with it all. Well done. You're such a great employee. By the way, you might want to read about error correction. That might be something you'd be interested in learning about."This person thought that would be the best way of getting those people that, for example, have a problem with error correction or got a complaint about not correcting enough errors. That would be the best way to get them to improve. Do you not think you're denying that person some avenue for development? That's important information that that person has a right to know.Jessica: Yeah. I am certainly glad that when I was a teacher, it was a while ago, I received feedback on complaints. Lying about something they've received is also deceptive and condescending, like, "We can't tell you this information, because we're afraid you might crack." Right?Ross: Right. How weak do we assume that people are? That they can't handle even direct criticism, just passing on of something negative.Jessica: It also could be that managers fear of conflict. I guess it could be their own thing.Lying To OurselvesRoss: Last one. Lying to ourselves. Something I've wondered with teacher training that we could do to be more honest about it is follow up with people a long time after the training. I think that we often in teacher training courses measure the success by how well the teachers meet our own standards on the course.Whereas I think, what we need to do more on that is call people up six months later, or a year later, and go like, "How did this help you find a job, or improve in your job, or get promoted?"Jessica: Or, "Did it help you?" [laughs]Tracy: Yeah.Ross: Or, "Did it help you at all?" Because, maybe it didn't.Jessica: It's the same with interviews and recruiting. We think we have a really good idea of this person. I do think generally we do, but we have to remember it's not exact science. I remember hiring someone that I was...No, I didn't even hire him.Ross: [laughs]Jessica: I took him over from another recruiter. I helped him with the last stages of his arrival. I was like, "This guy's going to be a complete failure." He completed his contract, and he was eligible for rehire, which blew me away, because he was not someone who I would've wanted to work with. There's people, who I've thought would be great, and they didn't even last probation.Ross: That's something I think that you do that's really great in recruiting. You find out the results afterwards. It's not just like, "We hired this guy. I thought he would be OK," and that's the end of it. You have this great system where you hire people, and then you can find out if they lasted six months, or a year, or if they got promoted, or what happened.It's not just that it's an amazing tool, but I think yours is a really amazing job of getting that feedback and plugging that information back into the system to help you make even better decisions in the future. For a while, when someone got fired, that you hired, did you not go back to your interview notes? Or get your staff to go back to your interview notes and go like, "What did you miss?"Jessica: Yeah. We still do that. We look at anybody who fails probation. We look at what happened. We definitely analyze. It's a post‑mortem, I guess, of everyone.Ross: Imagine if we did that with training as well. We did a post‑mortem like a year later.Jessica: It's not like, "If this teacher fails, it's a fault of the training."Ross: I was more getting at the idea that what the course teaches as good teaching is different from the reality of what schools expect. I think that there is a value in training course like teaching excellence or something as we see it.Also, there's got to be part of this. We're preparing you to go and get a job, and be successful. If we're missing out some skills that actually are going to help you succeed in a sort of a semi‑corporate school environment, or whatever environment you're going into, then maybe we're missing out on something there.Jessica: True.Ross: Cool, all right. Jessica, thanks again very much, for coming on.Jessica: Thanks for having me. It's great to be back. Can't wait for my next trip up here.Ross: Yay. [laughs]Tracy: Oh, great. Bye.Ross: Bye.Jessica: Bye.

At one end of the spectrum, language classes often include memorization and paraphrasing and at the other end creativity in the form of writing and role plays. In the middle lurks critical thinking. What is its place in the language classroom?For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Tracy: Hi, everyone.Ross Thorburn: This week on the podcast we have a special guest.Tracy: John Hughes.Ross: John Hughes is an award‑winning ELT coursebook writer and a teacher trainer. He's written over 30 coursebooks, as well as methodology books.Tracy: He's twice been ELTon award finalist. In 2016, received the David Riley Award for Innovation in Business English and ESP for the book "ETpedia Business English."Ross: Today we're going to talk to John about critical thinking. As usual, we've got three points. The first segment, we'll start off by asking John about what critical thinking is and why a language teacher should bother teaching it.Tracy: Then we'll get some of his idea for critical thinking activities for different levels and age groups and finally...Ross: We'll ask him about some of the challenges in including critical thinking in language classes and how we can overcome these.What is critical thinking and why should language teachers teach it?Ross: Hi, John. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Do you want to start off by telling us a little bit about what critical thinking is? I'm sure most of our listeners have heard of the term critical thinking before but it would be really useful to get your definition.John Hughes: It depends on the context because the history of critical thinking is such that it's developed into different sorts of strands. We can talk about critical thinking in its very traditional sense which goes back to this idea of questioning. If you read texts about critical thinking, they start referring to people like Socrates.In essence, it's about reading a text, questioning the evidence, looking more deeply at the sources and at the research. It's linked to this whole vocabulary that's emerged, things like post‑truths. It's this idea that everybody needs to be a critical thinker in terms of being able to look at information, news coming online and decide what is true and what is fake.In terms of education and its impact on ELT, critical thinking is much more linked to the idea of lower order and higher order thinking. Language teaching is not just about memory and recall and basic understanding of language.It's actually that ability to analyze language, to evaluate it, to go further with it, and perhaps to be creative with it. When you talk about critical thinking in that higher order thinking way, people start talking about Bloom's taxonomy.Tracy: Given what you just said, John, why is critical thinking something that language teachers should bother to teach? Could we just argue that there is something that should be covered in perhaps other areas of education?Ross: Like math class, or history, or science or something.John: There's a couple issues here. In terms of English language teachers, if, in general, many of those use a communicative language approach, there's a lot of resources that already exist that encourage group communication, group problem solving, those types of collaborative tasks that by their very nature require students to apply some critical thinking.We're well‑placed to develop those critical thinking skills anyway. The other side of it is whether as a language teacher we see ourselves more broadly. The term used is often the term educator. We're more than simply just teaching language.We're also educating our students perhaps to approach things in different ways, think in different ways, that may influence their learning, not just within language learning, but also in all sorts of other areas, and their ability to what could be called life skills or communicative soft skills. It's that type of thing.Ross: For teachers who are planning on using critical thinking activities in a lesson, what stage in the lesson do you think it would be most appropriate to add a critical thinking activity? Is there a particular stage, like in discovering language, or preparing students to talk, or as part of a role play, that you think it's most effective?John: Yeah, it's a mindset in the sense of how you approach different parts of the lesson. For example, if you think about your lead‑in task, you might ask students questions to which they already know the answers.For example, if you were doing a lesson on the topic of sports, you might say, "What sports do you like playing? Which sports do you like watching?" They would just draw on their existing knowledge.If on the other hand, you showed students a photograph and it wasn't quite clear what they were looking at, or it was a slightly abstract photograph where the students had to think more deeply about what it was and what they thought the topic of the lesson might be about, you instantly get your tapping into students' more critical thinking.If you're doing a grammar presentation, you might take the approach, "I'm just going to tell students the grammar rule. They're going to learn that rule." If it's learned that regular verbs end in ‑ed in the past simple, as a teacher you make a decision. Do I just tell them that that is the rule, or do I give them a task where they have to discover it?Maybe they read the verbs in context in a text. They recognize that it's written about the past. You encourage them with a guided discovery approach to discover the rule. I would say that's a balance. It's all about using both approaches to teaching a grammar point.Ross: Is it like a lens through which you can view a lesson and ensure it's balanced, as in the same way, you might look at your lesson plan and say, "Is there enough movement in there, or is there enough variety in interaction patterns?" Is that how you see it?John: Yeah, I think you can look at when, for example, as a coursebook writer, if I write a lesson, you're looking at the flow of your tasks and you're aware that sometimes you're writing exercises which could be called lower order thinking.You might think, "Well, I've done four or five of those in a row. It's time that I stretch the student more. I'm going to include some higher order thinking task." Equally, don't always make your lessons all singing or dancing creative experiences. Sometimes students just need to do those more traditional language exercises.Critical thinking activities for ESL classesTracy: Can you introduce some examples of typical critical thinking activities that teachers could use in their classrooms?John: Simple approaches would be when you do group work, and you ask students to brainstorm all the different types of holidays that might be appropriate for a certain person. Afterwards, look at what you've brainstormed, choose the two or three best ideas. Then choose the best one and present it to the class.What you've got going on there is some creative thinking with the brainstorm. The critical thinking kicks in because you actually start to analyze and evaluate those ideas. It's that kind of process.Teachers can use that approach all the time with all lessons, particularly case studies, problem‑solving tasks, that kind of thing. That all requires students to read deeply, think deeply about a problem and respond in a reasoned, rational kind of way. It's useful for practicing the English they want. It's also a skill that they use or need to develop their own work.Ross: I guess up to this point we've been talking about using critical thinking with adults or older students. Do you think critical thinking naturally lends itself more to adults than to teaching teens or teaching young learners perhaps?John: I don't have much of a background in teaching young learners, but people who do...For example, a colleague of mine called Vanessa Reis Esteves, she wrote a book called "ETpedia Young Learners."She would probably argue that the six, seven‑year‑olds at that age there's a natural critical thinking mindset. There's that age when kids ask "Why?" about everything and question everything.In terms of maybe teenagers, if we imagine that they're quite a visual generation, critical thinking tasks with images are quite a nice way into a lesson. For example, there's a very good book called "The Mind's Eye." I think it was edited by Alan Maley. It was one of the first books that just included sets of pictures.Instead of asking students to describe what was in the picture, they had tasks like, "Imagine you just walked into this picture. What would you say?" or "Look at this picture. What do you think was happening before this picture?" or "What's the character in the picture about to say to the other person?"Also the use of video, simple tasks like playing a stretch of video with the sound off and get students to script that and so on. It's quite a simple way to get students personalizing text or using text in quite creative ways.When should we teach critical thinking in EFL, and when should we not?Tracy: Do you think there are cultures or contexts in particular which critical thinking tasks work better than others?John: Yeah, it's a contentious area. I've read all sorts of research papers on this topic and looking at critical thinking and whether it's cultural. I'm a bit skeptical of it all because I've met lots of individual students who have come to class naturally with a critical thinking mindset. They've been from all over, from all sorts of different parts of the world.There's an educational culture. There's obviously the education system that you've grown up in, and have you been in classrooms where you've been encouraged to ask questions, or not accept everything at face value. That naturally impacts on, when you arrive as a student in class, what your natural assumptions are about what happens in the classroom.If you've got a student who's come through an education system where they've been encouraged to put up their hand and ask questions themselves, naturally that student comes across as being more of a critical thinker. We also shouldn't confuse the fact sometimes that students not saying anything does not equal them not thinking critically about something.Ross: I'm sure most teachers have been in the situation before of giving students a discussion or debate and it ends up finishing a lot quicker, maybe without the depth that we were hoping for. What can teachers do to make sure that those critical tasks work more effectively?John: Maybe the problem is that we haven't actually spent the time providing them with the language they need to express their opinion. There's two things going on here. There's, perhaps, students are thinking critically, but they don't have the language they need to express themselves, to say what they're thinking. We have to make sure we've taught them the language they're going to need.Tracy: John, you just mentioned that preparing students linguistically for our critical thinking task. What might that process actually look like? What would a typical preparation for a critical thinking task be?John: You have to scaffold things. Sometimes if you want students to have a certain discussion or write a particular text, I do think it's helpful to have given them some models. They may have listened to a conversation that models certain language and certain ideas, or they might have read a text.They need time to have studied those things and identified their internal structure or the key phrases that might be useful for themselves. Planning time, students notoriously don't spend much time planning.If you ask them to write an essay, you've have that experience of students starting to write the essay straight away without spending a useful 5 or 10 minutes just brainstorming, planning, thinking about the structure. It's that planning critical thinking time that's the difference between a really good essay and one that meanders and loses its way halfway through.More about John HughesRoss: Finally, for anyone who wants to read more about critical thinking, your blog is www.elteachertrainer.com?John: That's right.Ross: Do you have anywhere else that you'd recommend for listeners to go to read more of your stuff or to find out more about critical thinking?John: Well, we're bringing out a methodology book with National Geographic Learning. It'll be out the beginning of next year, which gives the background theory but also will include practical ideas and activities. Really just demonstrate how critical thinking can be integrated as part of language teaching.The other course book series, I have a series called "Life" with National Geographic Learning which was our attempt with a general English course to highlight and feature the idea of critical thinking and creative thinking into language teaching so that the material we've provided hopefully provides a balance between lower order and higher order thinking.Ross: Thanks again so much for coming on the podcast, John, and sharing all those amazing ideas.John: You're welcome. It was very nice to speak with you. Thanks.Tracy: Bye.Ross: Bye.

Find out how to help students apply their learning, how teachers can apply what they learning on teacher training courses and what trainers and teacher educators can do to encourage teachers to apply more of what they learn in professional developmentFor more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Ross Thorburn: All right. Hi, everyone.Matt Courtois: Hey, Ross.Ross: Good to see you again, Matt. Today we have on the podcast special guest, Karin Xie. Hi, Karin.Karin Xie: Hello, everyone! This is Karin.Ross: Do you want to tell us a bit about what you do, Karin?Karin: I'm a teacher trainer.Matt: Great. You work at a test prep school, right?Karin: Yeah. The teachers in my schools, they help students get ready for studying overseas.Ross: I think one of the interesting things about that, especially in the test prep industry, is we often see that students go to study English. They get prepared to take their IELTS or TOEFL. They go abroad and they can't actually speak English.Karin: Yeah, they mention that it's really hard for them to apply what they learned in the classes here when they go to college overseas.Ross: Yeah. We often see the same thing on teacher training courses, as well. We sometimes see people taking a CertTESOL, like an entry‑level qualification. Then, six months later, they're actually worse than they were when they finished. It's like they learned all this stuff but they haven't been able to apply it.Matt: It's amazing. They would spend 120 hours studying something and not improve from it. I don't know how that would happen.Ross: Absolutely. Today, let's talk about that and let's talk about how we can get people to apply learning. We have three questions. The first one is, how can teachers help students apply learning? The second one is...Karin: How can teachers apply what they have learned themselves into their teaching practice?Ross: And Matt?Matt: How can trainers help teachers apply learning?How Can Teachers Help Students Apply Learning Ross: Cool. OK, let's start off with teachers helping students. The classic thing here is that we want students to speak. That seems to be the industry standard for are you applying it. You have to get students to speak as much as they can by the end of the lesson. What do you guys think of that? Is that a useful paradigm?Matt: I always found it frustrating when I was a teacher to see my colleagues...I think a really common piece of advice is that you should study 10 new words a day or five new words a day. I know for me, with my Chinese...Ross: [laughs]Matt: ...I'm not very good at Chinese as you guys...Ross: That's why I laughed. Yeah.[laughter]Matt: Maybe you guys, because you're much better at Chinese than me and your English is much better than my Chinese. I have always looked at the CEFR thing and what I can do and...Ross: Order beer.Matt: Yeah. I can...Ross: Ask for the bill.Matt: I can flirt with a girl for maybe one minute.Ross: [laughs] That's all it takes.Matt: Yeah.[laughter]Matt: No, I can take a taxi. I can order food in a restaurant. That's how I measure my ability in Chinese. Is that how you guys measure...?Karin: I guess the reason that people quantify things like that is, as teachers, we need evidence of learning. If we have something like "by the end of this lesson, students would have learned these words," it's easier for teachers to evaluate their classes. They need to be aware that when teachers think they are teaching, there's not necessarily learning that's happening.Ross: Yeah. That's interesting. It reminds me of that thing, the management quote of "What gets measured gets managed." This idea that if you measure sales numbers, if that's your quantity, that becomes the most important thing in the company, what everyone gets focused on. Maybe it's the same thing in the classroom.If the easiest thing to measure is how many words can a student say by the end of the lesson, that's what the teacher ends up managing and focusing on in the class. Maybe that's not necessarily the best thing to do, right?Karin: Yeah. It reminds me of Bloom's taxonomy because when we say applying, what do we mean? What would students need to be able to do when they apply? That's like a lot of words. For example, you have things that's remembering, understanding, then analyzing, evaluating.When we want students to apply what they have learned, we could have them name things that they've learned. Name the five words that they've learned. We could have them compare what they learned in this class back to what they learned previously. We could have them evaluated, like their own learning.Ross: Yeah. Interesting. This reminds me of something I heard on the Sinica podcast. They looked at one of the differences between American and Chinese education. They talk about how Chinese education tends to focus a lot on memorization whereas what I think a lot happens in the West is that we focus on getting students to apply things.Tracy: What the Boston teacher was really great at doing is introducing a concept and then asking kids, what do you think about it? Not only that, let's apply what we just learned. The Shanghai classroom is really run very military‑style. There are 30 kids in a room and she's calling them by number, "Student number two, what is the square root of 9?" or whatever it is.Kids are popping up and answering her questions. It feels like a drill. It's like drill and kill. If you actually talk to the experts, there are certain things in math that you need to memorize.In Shanghai, at least, multiplication tables are being cemented to memory in something like the second grade. In the average American public school classroom it's not happening until a couple years later. These international math experts are saying that's a little bit too late.Matt: Even Michael Lewis for the lexical approach is all about experimenting with lexes you know in different context and everything. Even he in his book believed in the early stages of learning. He said like, "You do just need to memorize a bunch of words or you can never experiment with language in different context."Karin: I agree, yeah. There's a balance we need to have there, either the Chinese one that you mentioned or the Western one. What we need to is to remind teachers to have a variety in their classrooms so they could have the access to understand or to memorize things as well as things to compare or to evaluate.Ross: Yeah, as Matt was saying, to apply that into role‑playing, taking a taxi or flirting with someone at a bar.[laughter]Matt: Useful.How Can Teachers Apply What They Have Learned Themselves Into Their Teaching PracticeRoss: Let's talk about how can teachers themselves apply what they've learned. I thought here, it might be useful for us, in an egotistical way, to talk about ourselves. We've all done a bunch of different certificate courses and diploma courses before. What did you guys find, as a teacher learner on those courses, helped you apply what you learned? Not everyone does, right?Matt: I definitely found that I improved most as a teacher once I became a trainer.Karin: Same here.Matt: I always try to incorporate into my trainings, maybe I do it too much. I always get the trainees training other trainees.Ross: I think, for me, one of the differences in our backgrounds is that more of my background is in teaching kids than teaching adults. I always find one of the big advantages of teaching kids is they don't really have a lot in the way of expectations of what you will do in class.I found, when I was studying my diploma, I had so much opportunity to experiment in class. For example, I remember reading about the silent way and thinking, "I wonder if I could teach a class for an hour without talking." I tried it and I could.I don't think it was a great class, [laughs] but it was a great opportunity to practice what times is it not necessary to speak and what different things can I get students to do that I wouldn't do otherwise. That's something you can never do with adults because you never really have those opportunity. If you did that in an adult class, you'd get complaints.[laughter]Matt: Sure.Ross: I wanted to ask you guys, how much were you able to experiment by teaching adults? For me, with kids, it was super easy.Matt: I just think it's cool. I'm just thinking about feedback I heard from people who were taking the Dip. They would be reading about pedagogy and reading about all these classroom methods. Often they'd come to me and say, "Oh, this is fine but we're just reading about theory." I always found that so strange because it is theory about what you're doing.[crosstalk]Ross: It's theory about a practice.[laughter]Matt: Yeah, I think it's cool to hear that, as you were reading those books, you were actually applying the theories that you were reading. Often, myself included, I just read it as extra knowledge that I could have rather than something that I should be doing.Karin: When I first finished my CertTESOL course, I felt that I couldn't find opportunities to apply what I learned because during the course, I had to design classes from scratch for group of learners, consistently.When I went back to my own teaching, the classes were all made and I had to follow the classes. The flexibility of me adapting the classes is really limited comparing to what I did during the course.Ross: On training courses, we often train people to plan a class from scratch and teach that class. At least in most of the places I've worked in, that's not the situation.What people need to learn to do is not plan a lesson from scratch but follow and adapt a plan that someone else has made. Those are quite different skills. I feel that's an area where a lot of training courses don't really match up to the reality of teaching practice.How Can Trainers Help Teachers Apply LearningRoss: Guys, how do you think trainers or training systems and training courses can help teachers better apply their learning?Matt: We were talking about before, with the DipTESOL that I think it is a really good system, overall, for the whole course because it does assess every aspect of ability to be a professional in this industry. Not only do you have to be pretty good in the classroom, but you also have to be able to do research and be able to observe other teachers and talk about phonology.Ross: Yeah, and be able to answer questions about grammar on the spot, like you might get in the classroom as well.Matt: Yes. I found that maybe before the Dip. I did have some strengths as a teacher before the Dip, but by going through that process, I also had some glaring weaknesses. I became much more well‑rounded as a professional in this industry because of that course.Karin: It's really important for us trainers to encourage teacher‑learner autonomy and reflective practice because, at the end of the day, it's down to the teachers to decide how and when they're going to apply what they've learned.At the beginning of the course or even before the course starts, we really need to deal with the matter learning side of it so that teachers are reflective and teachers are autonomous.Ross: Yeah. I think that's a super good point. A lot of time, on courses, teachers do get all these opportunities to learn through peer observations, especially certificate‑level course, through observing their trainers, through teaching themselves, through getting feedback, through doing all these different things, doing research, interviewing students, blah‑blah‑blah.We could do a much better job of making them more aware of why they're going through that process and then making that learning on a metacognitive level, really explicit to people. The reason we're doing this is so you now have the skill to observe someone else, who's also a new teacher, not a great teacher, and you can learn something about your own teaching from that.Matt: Then that bit of the portfolio which, at the time, I think I didn't value very much...I bet all three of us, since we've started our new jobs and stuff, we've written our own rubrics for observing lessons. We were able to do that on that course, get feedback on it, test it out, try it and do it in a methodical way.It wasn't the first time on my job where I was going through this process, or, I don't know, writing a survey to ask for feedback from a training session that I'd written. It's not the first time I've written a survey, either, because it was taken care of that course.I mean, as I was going through it, I didn't value it. It wasn't really made explicit to me that these are skills that I will need in the future. As time went by, I look back at it and I appreciate that I went through that process.Ross: Yeah.What's Important In Applying LearningRoss: To wrap up, I need some final thoughts on what's important in applying learning.Karin: My advice is that you could do what Steve Jobs suggested. Take everything you do in your learning and your teacher learning as different dots and just bear in mind that those dots could be connected.Whatever you do or whatever you learn, for example, training course that you attended, some classes that you observed, some students that you've taught, really see them as something that's relevant to each other and constantly look back to see if you could connect the dots.Ross: OK, bye‑bye.Matt: See you!Karin: See you!

We celebrate our second anniversary episode by interviewing Emeritus Professor Paul Nation about reading. Paul tells us about research into the effectiveness of reading, why as teachers we tend to avoid including reading in our classes and how we can start doing more reading in class.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Ross Thorburn: Hello everyone. Welcome to this second anniversary podcast. Today, we're going to talk about something that we've not talked about much before on the podcast which is reading. I know we always say we have a special guest but today, we really have a very, very, very special guest.Tracy: He's a true world expert on reading, Paul Nation. I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with Paul Nation. Paul is emeritus professor at the School of Applied Linguistics and Applied Language at Victoria University, New Zealand.Written dozens of books and been publishing research on these topics since 1970s. There are three areas that we're going to talk about. The first one is, how does reading help students learn vocabulary?Ross: Second, we'll ask, how can teachers include more reading in their lessons? Finally...Tracy: Why isn't there more reading in most language courses?How does reading help students learn vocabulary?Ross: Hi, Paul.Paul Nation: Hello.Ross: Thanks so much for coming on the podcast.Paul: No problem.Ross: Do you want to start off by telling us a bit about vocabulary teaching and how reading relates to vocabulary teaching?Paul: The problem with vocabulary is when it's framed as teaching vocabulary because most of vocabulary learning will occur not through the teacher teaching, but through the teacher planning well, organizing well and providing opportunities for the learners to develop strategies to take control of their own learning.There are just too many words for teachers to be able to teach them. Really, we have to see learning of vocabulary is really occurring through input which is very, very important. Learning through output and learning through fluency development, but also learning through some teaching and then through deliberate learning and so on like that.I think that's really important because otherwise, teachers feel that they're the only source of vocabulary for the learners in the classroom. That's a very wrong view indeed.Tracy: That's really interesting. Does that mean teachers aren't really that important then in language learning?Paul: I didn't say the teachers weren't important. I said teaching was not important. There's an important difference. That comes back to what you see as the role of the teacher or the roles of the teacher. I put planning as the number one role of the teacher.From a vocabulary perspective, planning involves working out what vocabulary your learners already know and making sure that they have plenty of opportunities to learn that vocabulary.It's deciding what vocabulary your learners need to learn and then making sure that they have plenty of opportunities to learn it. If we just take meaning‑focused input, teachers need to know and the learners need to know how many words they know. Then what level of graded readers they should be working on in order to help expand their vocabulary through input.The teachers' roles are very important because it's, first of all, making sure that learners were spending time reading at the right level for the students so that they have the opportunity to learn vocabulary through guessing from context and through some dictionary lookup and so on as they do reading in order for that to happen.If you had a really good extensive reading program that learners were spending anything from half an hour to an hour or two a week on and maybe more, they could be learning at a rate of around about a thousand words a year, which would be a native speaker rate of learning.The teacher has a good job to play there, a very important job to play but the teacher is not teaching. The teacher is making sure that the materials are available to the students.The students know why they're doing it. The students are, therefore, motivated and they're getting some feedback on their progress. The teacher needs to do all those things but it's not fronting up saying, "This word means X and that word means Y." It's getting the learning going.Ross: I'd heard before that the big problem with reading is that it's actually much harder to guess from context than most of us assume. Something like students need to know. Is it 95 percent of words in a text?Paul: Yeah.Ross: If you're getting that correctly.Paul: That's 98.Ross: Right, 98 percent. How do you reconcile those two areas, that guessing from context is really difficult, but reading is also extremely helpful and helping learners build up their vocabulary?Paul: It depends on the standard used for guessing. You have to view knowledge of words developing over time. If you meet a word in a reading and you have a guess at its meaning, and your guess is good enough for you to carry on reading, you might have added only a little bit of knowledge about that word to your knowledge of words.When you meet it again, the next time you'll add a little bit more knowledge. You can show...if you set your standard of knowledge for one meeting with a word is high, you can say, "Oh, people don't learn anything from context."It's just to have the guess the full meaning of a word from one meeting. That's absolutely true. All of research on learning from context used to have this problem of saying, "Well, actually, we know that people learn from context, especially native speakers, but it's very difficult to show it experimentally."You've got to see that when you guess from context, it's something which you're going to have to keep doing for the same word a dozen times at least. Each time you're building up knowledge, strengthening knowledge and enriching your knowledge of that word.How can teachers include more reading in their lessons?Tracy: I read about some other studies before. Students, they make some really, really good progress in using graded readers. The progress was even bigger than attending teacher lec classes.Have you ever seen any other examples of people applying these ideas? For example, they have a school and using these ideas, and then they provide the students an opportunity environment to read more.Paul: I always like giving the example of a language school in Tokyo that I heard about and couldn't believe. I went along to see it. This language school is...But I think they call it a Juku. Juku is where kids after the normal school day go and spend three hours, say from 6:00 to 9:00 in the evening doing study.It's a private language school. The parents have to pay money for them to go. They have to take time away from their lives to go to it. They might go to one three‑hour class a week or maybe two.This language school for at least half of that three hours simply gets the students to sit down and read. They can choose the book. They'll get a guidance and advice on what books to choose. Each classroom has lots and lots of books graded readers and text written for native speakers.Some of the students, if they wish, can actually spend the whole three hours doing extensive reading. Most choose not to do that. Most do one and a half hours and then they have one and a half hours session of conversation with a native speaker.The guy who owns these schools is making a fortune. He's really doing well. His results in the entry exams to universities are so good. That word of mouth just keeps them coming and the students love it.I couldn't believe that parents were paying a lot of money for their kids to go to a language school where for at least half of the time they sat down and read while the teacher sat in front of the classroom and just did other irrelevant work.I went along and sort, and oh boy, it was working well. The teacher said, "Here, you watch." This was the owner of the school, actually. He said to the students in this particular class I was observing, "Do you like coming to these classes and doing them?" Of course, being obedient students all the hands went up but I think they made it.He said, "Now, watch this." The next question was, "Would you do this at home?" Only about two or three hands came up. They said, "Well, at home, we're just too busy. There are too many other things to do at home. Even though we could sit at home for an hour and a half, or also each week and quietly read."There's so many other...We got homework to do, there is computer games to play and all of these things. We just never get around to it." Having to come to this class and sit down and do it. I was talking to some of them after the class and they were really proficient.Ross: It sounds a bit like going to the gym, doesn't it? That example of, if you pay for the gym, but a lot of the things that you're doing at the gym, you could just do a home. Actually, if you don't pay for the gym, probably none of those things you end up doing at home for whatever reason. Right?Paul: You don't. No, I know. You don't. That's right. Once you have a dedicated time where your money is being paid out and that sort...people ask about extensive reading, "Why don't we just get the students to do it at home?"There is a research which shows, in fact, you're much better starting off in the classroom at least. For the start at least of getting to do it because then you make sure that they do it. Then you make sure that they suddenly come to the realization that in fact, there are books that they can read, understand, enjoy, which are at the right level for them.That's quite a revelation. A lot of students have never read a book in English from the beginning to the end. Through well‑planned extensive reading program, they should be reaching the end of a book at least once or twice a week.Tracy: Paul, those students that you just mentioned, they're younger learners rather than adults?Paul: They were teenagers. I think that were getting off to university in a year or two.Tracy: Is it possible to use graded readers with younger learners?Paul: You can have meaning‑focused input right from the very beginning stages of learning English. The lowest level of graded readers assume knowledge of 100 different words. You could start from that and the second or third week of a course if you really was switched on.Why isn't there more reading in most language courses?Ross: Why is it then that all English schools don't actually have more reading in their curriculum? Pretty much everywhere I've ever worked there's been some reading in courses but it's been a very small one.Paul: That's right. The research on extensive reading is clear. We know how much extensive reading learners need to do. We know that very, very significant progress can be made through doing extensive reading. Every teacher should read the book "Flood Study" by Warwick Elley and Francis Mangubhai.It's only about a 20‑page or so report, but it's such a significant piece of research showing that by getting meaningful input and comprehensible input as a significant part of the program, learners can make almost double their learning compared to a teacher in front of a class.The researchers are clear on that but teachers are very reluctant to take up the option of extensive reading. One of the reasons is that if you have a really good extensive reading program, once it's running, once it's planned, organized and set up, the teacher has little to do. Teachers feel guilty about that.They feel, "How can learners learn without me teaching them?" That's one of the false beliefs. Then, "Here are the learners working away and I'm doing nothing. Am I earning my money?" You could say, "Well, the teachers are very conscientious and things like that." It worries them that they do that.Ross: I presume that you need pretty interesting and engaging books for the students for all this stuff to work then...Paul: I would think so. In the Elley and Mangubhai study, they found that actually there was quite a lot of agreement among students on the books that they liked. The books that they liked, the books that native speaking kids also liked. The material also has to be at the right level for the students.You need to get the good books. The good books part is really easy because every year the Extensive Reading Foundation runs a competition for the best graded readers. That's been going on for...I don't know, maybe 10, 15 years now. You can simply go to their website and find the best ones.More from Paul NationTracy: Thanks very much for coming to our podcast.Paul: No problem.Tracy: I'm sure our listeners would really appreciate all the valuable information you shared with us.Ross: Everyone, highly recommend that you go into Paul's University of Victoria web page. I'll put a link for that on our website. You can find lots of great resources from in there, vocabulary tests, free books, etc.Tracy: Thanks everybody for listening to our podcast for the last two years and then really appreciate your support.Ross: Bye.Tracy: Bye.

Understanding what people in say from the sounds they make is all but impossible without context, even in our first language. So how can we make more use of this amazing tool which helps prediction, understanding, engagement and application? We discuss what context is, why it’s important and how to incorporate it when teaching adults, teaching kids and in teacher training.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Tracy Yu: Hello, everyone. Welcome to our podcast. We've got our regular guest, Matt Courtois!Matt Courtois: Hey!Tracy: Hey, Matt.Matt: How's it going?Ross Thorburn: As our starting point, I wanted to play you guys a quote from Jordan Peterson's podcast. He's a psychologist. This is from a lecture actually about music, but it's him talking about how human beings can understand the sounds that come out of other human beings' mouths.Jordan Peterson: ...It turns out that it's very difficult to listen to what someone's saying, and that's partly because all of the information is not encoded in the sounds that they're making.For example, part of the reason you can understand what I'm saying is that you know, more or less, that this is a lecture about psychology. You know it has a scientific basis. You know that there are certain things I'm not going to talk about.The entire context within which you sit, informs your understanding of my speech. Every word I say helps build a framework for you that informs your ability to understand each word.Ross: Basically, just what we say to each other isn't enough, by itself, to be able to understand what's going on. We all have to understand what context we're in to be able to pick up all those clues and decode meaning from sound.Matt: I had a student years ago, a really high‑level student, and I asked her to quantify how much English she could understand whenever I was speaking. She said it was about 30 to 40 percent.The rest of it was knowing me and knowing this context and understanding things I probably would be saying, and she's able to fill in all that stuff. In this student's case, the other 60, 70 percent of her language is guesswork.We're actually talking about how you can do that within a real conversation.Ross: That's definitely a skill, isn't it?I had a really interesting example of this a few years ago. I went for a run. It was in Beijing, actually, in the winter. It was really, really cold, but I was still wearing shorts and tee shirt. Afterwards, I went into a 7‑Eleven and bought a bottle of water. The person on the other side of the counter, said, "Are you cold?" and leaned across and touched my arm.I remember thinking, "If I couldn't understand Chinese, I would be so freaked out."[laughter]Ross: I wanted to pay for the bottle of water, and then the person started massaging my arm. I think that's because context causes you to predict what is going to be said, and what's going to happen.When you go in to a shop and you put something down on the counter, you can say with 99 percent certainty that the thing that the person behind the counter is going to say next is the price.All these great examples of how we use context in our day to day lives to predict what's going on, but we also need to bring those ideas into our teaching and probably our training, as well.Tracy: I think what I encountered when I'm training teachers...Usually, teachers, they feel quite difficult to understand the concept of context, because it's basically about where you're going to use a language in real life.I usually tell them, "In real life, think about, if you're talking to somebody, who the person is. Is it a friend? It's a family member? It's a colleague? Is it a doctor or is it some stranger on the street?"Why did you need to talk to them? Ask for advice? Ask for directions? Maybe you are paying for something at the cashier? What kind of situation you are, or where you are," and then try to help them understand what context is.Ross: I would almost say it's like language learning physically happens within a classroom, but you want, mentally, for it to happen in another place.For example, we'll talk about examples later with kids, but if you're teaching kids the names of some wild animals, don't make it take place in a classroom with some flashcards. Make it take place on a safari, or make it take place in a zoo.I think people make the mistake of thinking you need context when you practice language ‑‑ you do ‑‑ but you need context everywhere. From the moment the students walk in to the class, there should be context. For when they first encounter a new language, there should be a context. When they're practicing a language, there should be a context.Matt: You reminded me of a podcast I was listening to recently.This person went and saw "Sweeney Todd." Before the show, they walked in, and people were serving meat pies ‑‑ which is part of the plot ‑‑ and everyone was speaking with a London accent, and it was in the US. Everyone who went to this just said it was such a richer experience for the actual play, that they...One thing, we're teachers...When they struggle with context, it's like they choose a grammar point, and they decide, "This is what my class is going to be about. I'm going to have a class about the second conditional."They start off with a bunch of advice like, "If I were you, blah, blah, blah." Then they ask a question, "If you won a million dollars, what would you do?" then everybody answers it. Then it's like, "If you were an animal, what would you be?"The only thing stitching the whole thing together is the actual grammar that's being covered, and it's a really boring class to watch.[laughter]Ross: Or to be in.Matt: My advice is always to think about...Don't stitch your lesson together with the grammar points. Stitch your lesson together with that context that you were talking about.Tracy: It's so difficult to cover the different language points. If they really want to teach some certain language points, they feel difficult to find the context.Ross: Maybe over the next few minutes, we can help people by giving them some examples of how to include richer context in their lessons.Let's go through our three questions. First of all, we can talk about how to use context with adults. Second, we can talk about...Tracy: How to use context with young learners.Ross: Finally, we can briefly talk about...Matt: How you can use context in training.How can we use context with adult students?Ross: One of my favorite things to do with adults to set a context, is to go in and to take something that the students actually think is real and use that as the thing for the lesson. Something I've done before, for example, is gone into the class, and I've pretended to take a phone call.I start talking to the students, and I get someone to call me. I pretend to answer and I pretend, "Oh, it's my girlfriend's called me. She's really, really angry at me. It's her birthday, I forgot to send her flowers."I say, "I don't know what to do," and then the students say something like, "You can take her to dinner tonight.""OK," and I'll write that on the board. "Do you have any other ideas?""You can say sorry.""Anything else?" and you get all these examples. "Thanks very much, that's really useful. Actually, before I came in here, I was speaking to my friend, and I asked him the same thing about what I should do with this situation. Do you want to hear?"They're like, "Yeah, we want to hear." Then you play the conversation. All of a sudden, there's this rich context for the lesson where the students believe that some of this is actually going on, that it's real.It's almost like a comedy show, when comedians talk about, "You know yesterday I was doing this and this thing happened."I'm like, "I'm not sure. Did this actually happen to this person, or are they just making it up?"Or avant‑garde theatre, where you're not sure what's really part of the act?I went to a pantomime when I was back home for Christmas. People walk in late, and the person on stage accosts them and starts asking them questions, and you thought it was real, but actually, my sister had been to see the thing before. She told me that that happens every time. When you're watching it, you're not sure. They're blending the lines between the act and the reality.Matt: Not only is it more interesting, but also, the fact that, if you can relate it to real life, you're showing them that this is a real interaction between us and the classroom. They're actually giving you advice, about what to buy for your girlfriend. It's not just context, it's a realistic context.I don't know if you've ever seen a class where somebody is like, "We're going to be the first group of people to go to Mars. We're going to set up the government, and we have to create a constitution and everything."[laughter]Matt: That might be somewhat interesting for that person who wrote the class, but the odds are that none of the people in that class are going to be in that SpaceX mission to Mars, you know?[laughter]Tracy: Well, you don't know.Matt: Yeah, maybe...[laughter]How can we use context with young learners?Ross: I think for kids, sometimes, people find it even more difficult to think of a realistic context, because kids' lives are often limited to school [laughs] and home.Tracy: I think that we should allow a little bit imagination or creativity your lesson, because kids, they do do that.They think about, "Oh, what I want to do in the future," when they play with each other. They have teddy bears or toys, and they try to give them names, give them different characteristics.I think we should take this kind of stuff into consideration. Allow the kids to use their imagination, not just, "Pretend that you are in a restaurant, and you're ordering food."Matt: Is that really a skill they need? To be ordering food? Because their parents are going to be ordering them food.Ross: Presumably, yeah. I think for them, like you say, a lot of things involve imagination.For example, your thing of going on a space exploration and starting a new colony somewhere, that actually might be more realistic for kids, because that's the sort of thing that kids might think about or talk about or watch shows about. I think those imagination things can work perfectly for kids.Tracy: We talk about games in the class, right?Kids like playing games, but you have to also make your games meaningful. Ross, you wrote a blog about how to use games in your classrooms, and I think one of the key point is to have the aim in it.You have to make sure why you need this game. Is it really help them to practice the language, or make them realize, actually in this situation, they can use this language.Ross: One of the best classes I think I ever taught, we got some bits of paper, scissors, and tape, and we tried to make a really tall tower ‑‑ me and these 10 students ‑‑ out of bits of paper and tape. All the students had to do, was say to me, "Can I have some paper, please? Can I have tape, please?"Tracy: That's something also reminds me...Now it's quite popular, teaching online, but the field is so difficult because everything just depends on the Internet. They cannot use real flash cards and let students to touch it, to feel it. All the kids can't see each other face to face. It's quite difficult to manage.I think don't just have a big lesson topic. Make sure the first second the kids see the screen, they understand where they are, and they are already in that setting.Ross: Right. Is that a zoo, a pirate ship, a pet store, or any of these things?Tracy: In Chinese we say, "Lead you into that setting or scenario." I think that's context, right?How can we use context in teacher training?Matt: I know all three of us have done teacher training at some point. One of the biggest frustrations I always had was, when you cover any point in the training room, that teachers won't necessarily transfer those skills into the classroom when they're teaching.I always thought it was my fault by not...by making that separation. "This is the training room, and that's your classroom, it's another place." I think it's really important in the actual training sessions to create the context of the classroom where teachers will be applying these skills.Tracy: Of course, if the time is really limited, but I try to maximize the practice time, because a lot of teachers, when you tell them, "I want you to teach..."Ross: To practice your skills.Tracy: "...To practice your skills, and not talk about how to use it." For example, you practice giving instructions, not talk about, "First, I would like to get the students' attention, and then, I'm going to do this and that." No, not talking through the steps...Do it! [laughs]Matt: Just do it.Ross: Even with doing it, you can then make it more specific. For example, I'm doing a training next week.As part of the training activities ‑‑ so there's a bit more context ‑‑ it's not just, "Teach this lesson to your partner." They have a lucky draw type thing.Someone has to draw out the age of the student, and then they have to draw out the student's personality. Are they shy? Are they outgoing? Then the teacher has to draw out a scenario like they're running out of time or they have to make up too much time.All of this goes in, there's all these extra constraints, and it makes it a lot more realistic. There's a lot more context then going into that practice, rather than just saying, "Now, practice."Tracy: Thanks everyone. Hope this episode help you understand and use context in your class and training. Bye!Ross: Bye, everyone!Tracy: For more podcasts, videos, and blogs, visit our website at...Ross: ...www.tefltraininginstitute.com.Ross: If you've got a question or a topic you'd like us to discuss, leave us a comment.Tracy: If you want to keep up‑to‑date with our latest content, add us on WeChat at @TEFLtraininginstitute.Ross: If you enjoy our podcast, please rate us on iTunes.

Do teachers of different races get treated differently? Do schools prefer white teachers? Do students care what color their teacher's skin is? We Discuss with Asia Martin.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Tracy Yu: Hello everyone, welcome to our podcast.Ross Thorburn: This week, we're going to talk about racism.Tracy: Wow, that's a really sensitive topic.Ross: Have you witnessed much racism when you were a teacher?Tracy: I don't think I experienced or witnessed a lot, but I definitely heard people talking about racism when I became a manager.Ross: Me too. I did notice at least when I was a teacher, for example, that a lot of schools I worked in, all the foreign teachers were white. Yeah, I agree with you. It's only since becoming a manager that I heard things.For example, somewhere I used to work, I asked the person in charge of recruitment, "What are companies' requirements for hiring teachers?" The person said to me, "Teaching experience, not black."Tracy: Wow.Ross: Today, we can look at this from two different aspects. One aspect is we'll interview Asia Martin, who used to work at Shenzhen about her experiences on the receiving end of racism.Tracy: The second part, I'm going to basically interview you, Ross, about your research paper and recently published in IATEFL about racism in teaching recruitment.Interview with Asia MartinRoss: Hi, Asia. Thanks a lot for coming over to the podcast. How are you doing?Asia Martin: I'm doing all right. I'm getting over a cold. I may sound a little nasally.Tracy: Asia, do you want to introduce yourself?Asia: My name is Asia Martin. It's been about six or so months since I last left China. I had been there for about two years working as a English teacher at a language center. I was stationed in Guangdong Province, China.Ross: Do you want to start off by telling us before you came to China? What were you expecting from the experience and how did that measure up to reality?Asia: I did a bit of research. I had a friend, he was black and he had worked in China a few years before I even went. I asked him about his experience. Without me even asking, he did warn me.He said, "Just be mindful that some of the things that you might hear or see in regards to your skin color is out of pure ignorance. You might just the first person that they've ever seen close up." I said, "OK." I was like, "So what do you mean?"He told me the story about how he was out of school and he took a drink from a cup. One of the Chinese girls walked up to him, who was a student, and said, "Teacher, your color didn't come off."When I got there and those things happened, I was open in the beginning. When people were asking, "Oh, can I touch your hair?" It didn't bother me at first. It began to bother me though, however, when certain individuals came up and were very negative about it, and they did make comments.I no longer was as accepting it being to close up a little bit. I was more so prepared for accidental things, not people who purposely had an issue with my skin color.Tracy: When I was working in training school, I got involved in those management meetings. I often heard sales staff talking about how much they prefer to have white teachers. When I was allocation manager, that's what my general manager and also the sales manager basically told me very directly, because it's good for our sales.Have you ever noticed yourself being treated differently by sales staff?Asia: It became very clear with amongst the staff that there was a slight hints of...I'm not sure if I would say that it is racism, but I would also say that it's a bit of colorism because it's more so based on the paler you are, the farther you can go with selling to students.The racism did come into play maybe with people watching me and not really wanting to get to know me as much maybe as teachers who were fairer skinned.Ross: What you noticed and what you experienced in China, how is it different to maybe what you'd experienced with regards to racism in the US?Asia: You really have to leave whatever you learned about racism and intercultural interactions in your own home. Not all of it, because of course, a lot of things did help me navigate being in China ‑‑ common sense and things like that, and just common decency with people. Not everything that's happening in America was occurring in China.A lot of things that people said to me, in the beginning I was like, "Was that really trying to be racism?" I found out, "No, it's more so colorism. They have with beauty standard that they have."They don't even see me as a threat. In the US, a lot of times, black gets associated with being the threats. I did witness that in China, but it was more so people were not really afraid of me. It was just they were afraid of me as a foreigner.You just have to really go on with as an open of a mind as you can and really listen to people when they're talking to you and realize that the way they learned English is not necessarily how you learned English.A lot of times, people use one word with you. You already associate it as a negative word, but they have not learned it culturally as a negative word. They're not thinking there's a cultural definition going on of how you understand the words that you're talking, that you're speaking. That plays a lot into it as well.Tracy: Can you tell us a bit more about the other foreign teachers that you worked with and what their attitudes about this issue?Asia: I had to learn how to process a lot of things. Even my colleagues working with me, at first, as being the only black person in the office, people thought I was adding drama or where drama wasn't.Over time, it was interesting, because when students would say certain things about black people like, "Oh, black people steal," is when another American teacher came to me and she said, "I couldn't believe that the student said that."In a way, I was somewhat like, "Well, finally, you got a piece of evidence [laughs] that proves that I'm not sitting up here making stuff up for the hell of it." Once that happened, I noticed people began to see I'm not sitting up here making up stuff.Ross: Do you have any advice then for anyone listening who might be working with someone who is on the receiving end of racism or maybe some other kind of discrimination? They might be the only person going through that in the school. How do you think it'd be best? Should they leave that person alone, try and engage them, or what?Asia: In my personal experience, it's best to definitely not allow that person to be isolated, because when I felt isolated, meaning no one heard me, I definitely no longer felt like I could really share because I was being judged simply just for expressing a negative incident that happened.I no longer really wanted to be a part of the team, because at that point, it's like, "This is happening to me in the classroom and no one wants to really validate it."You just have to listen. You have to validate it. Don't argue with the person. It is OK to ask questions about what exactly happened and you can say like, "Oh, I'm not quite sure if that's racism or not."There are times where I get that people exaggerate stories and I do understand that. If it sounds like I'm using dramatic language, it's probably because it really hurt my feelings. That's why you ask questions. You don't try to call them a liar.Tracy: Like I mentioned earlier, I think a lot of decisions were made by management. I'm sure managers play a really important role in this topic. What about your managers? Did they help? How did they help? Do you have any advice for those managers on this topic?Asia: My first manager was quite open and supportive. He would give me examples of other teachers who was going through what I was going through. That was comforting to know that he had been through this as a manager in his office before.He didn't see me as a problem. He was just like, "Here, you can go talk to this person. They went to the same thing that you went through and things like that." That was helpful.My second manager unfortunately made it very clear that she did not like talking about race and thought that was insignificant. At least that's how I felt, probably because of her attitude in the things that she would say in response to me talking about racial issues in office.For example, if I said, "That is the student who would cause trouble on my classes and would say things about my race," an then in response, that particular manager would say, "Do you feel that that really is important right now?" That response let me know, "I'm not going to hear about anything racial whatsoever."Managers cannot be afraid, especially when you're dealing with an employee who is dealing with racism. If they're coming to you to talk about it, it's because they're feeling something about experiencing it in the office. Otherwise, they wouldn't come and they wouldn't say anything about it to you.Ross: Asia, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Really appreciate you sharing your experience on what's [inaudible 10:35] the difficult topic and some tough experiences. Thanks so much for doing that.Asia: Thanks, bye‑bye.Racism in TEFL recruitment Tracy: Ross, what made you want to do the research about racism in teaching recruitment?Ross: Two things. The first one was that a long time ago, I read in "Freakonomics" about how people had researched racism in other fields using ethnic names, a name which sounds ethnically black and a name which sounds ethnically white.They use the two names and they put them on the top of very similar CVs or resumes, send them out to hundreds or thousands of companies, and then see which name gets the most replies. From that, you can see how people are discriminating.I read about that years ago. More recently as a manager, I'm hearing or seeing more racism in terms of recruitment. I spoke to friends about it and people said to me, "Oh, you know, if you think China's bad, Korea's worse."I wonder how bad it is. If you are white, how much more likely are you to be able to get a job than if you're black in TEFL?Tracy: How did you start doing this survey? You send out the CVs to different companies?Ross: I basically made two CVs. One had a photo of a white person [inaudible 12:08] , one had a photo of a black person. I went on this job board website and applied for 100 jobs in China, 100 in Korea, and 50 in Europe. I did fewer in Europe, just because there were fewer jobs being posted for European countries.Tracy: When you started applying for those jobs, when you're started receiving responses from the different companies, is there anything that make you really surprised in this process?Ross: Yeah, it was pretty surprising. I expected there to be a difference, but I wasn't expecting the differences to be this big as they were.In Europe, the white teacher and the black teacher both go at exactly the same number of responses. In Korea, the white teacher got 33 percent more post of responses than the black teacher. In China, the white teacher got 64 percent more positive response than the black teacher.In other words, if the black teacher got applied and got 100 positive responses, the white teacher would have received 164.Tracy: Wow, that's a huge difference.Ross: Absolutely.Tracy: Why do you think this happened?Ross: I think what most people would assume is that the recruiters are racist, but I actually found some research that said that it might not be the recruiters' racism. It's almost that recruiters are scared that parents and students are racist.The study this came from, they found that recruiters discriminated against black applicants when they apply for jobs for people who are facing customers.They found that when black candidates applied for management jobs or jobs that were not customer‑facing, there was almost no discrimination at all. That's also a possibility here that recruiters and schools are afraid that parents and students want white teachers.Tracy: This week, we actually have discussion about a controversial topic. Obviously like Ross and I, one is a white person and another one is Asian. I'm not the expert actually to talk about this topic. I really hope all this information that we talked about, there's something might be useful for teachers and who are actually going through this.Ross: We thanks very much for listening everyone.Ross: We'll see you again soon.Tracy: Bye.

Teacher talk. It was good, then it was bad, now it's good again. Are you confused? We are! We look at teacher talk from four different perspectives - time, aim, language and quality (or TALK for short).For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Tracy Yu: Hi, everyone, welcome to our podcast.Ross Thorburn: Hi. Something we do a lot on this podcast is...Tracy: Talking. [laughs]Ross: Exactly. Something that teachers are often told not to do is...Tracy: Talking.Ross: Yeah, right. I put teacher talk into YouTube and here are the short clips from the beginnings of three of the videos on the first page of YouTube.[video]James: Hi, I'm James and this week, I have three tips on how to reduce teacher talk time in the classroom.Man 1: What percentage of time do you talk in your class? The typical research shows that we as teachers talk somewhere between 60 and 80 percent of the time. Maybe we need to reduce that.Man 2: In this video, we're going to talk about how to reduce your teacher talk time.Tracy: It's really interesting. Seems the information kind of negative in terms of the teacher talk. Why is that?Ross: The general attitude in the industry a lot of the time is teachers should talk less so students can talk more. There's lots of other people that actually say the opposite. Penny Ur, who you know I'm a big fan of, she in her book "100 Teaching Tips" says that teachers should talk a lot.Our friend Dave Weller, he's got a blog post called Why I love Teacher Talking Time saying that sometimes it's really good for teachers to talk more.Tracy: Instead of discussing three questions, this time we are going to look at...Ross: Four aspects of teacher talk.Tracy: They are...Ross: First one is...Tracy: Time, and then how much time that the teacher should speak in the class. The second one...Ross: ...is the aim. Why are teachers talking? Third...Tracy: ...is language and what language they are using when they are talking. The last one...Ross: ...is the quality of what teachers are actually saying. Is it things that are going to be useful for the students or not.Tracy: They are T‑A‑L‑Q, no?Ross: T‑A‑L‑K.[laughter]Tracy: Kwality. TALK.TALKTracy: The first part is time. Like you mentioned at the very beginning, I think a lot of teachers were told, "Reduce your teacher talk time." What will that mean?Ross: I think before we talk about what it means, we can talk about why people say that. There's a misconception that the less teachers talk, the more students talk and the more students talk, the more students learn. I think that's a massive over‑simplification of what makes a good language class or what leads to language learning.Tracy: Yeah, because sometimes teachers, they do need to talk more. [laughs]Ross: Exactly. I remember, for example, observing classes before and marking teachers down for teacher talk because they didn't talk enough. They needed to explain something more to their students, for example, and they didn't talk enough.Tracy: That's interesting.Ross: I've heard of crazy policies from somewhere you used to work. Did they not have like, they even made a ratio of how much teachers were allowed to talk in some classes to how much students were allowed to talk, which to me is just absolutely nuts? It's crazy.[laughter]Ross: I heard teachers talking about like, "I wasn't allowed to correct a student error because my company won't let me talk more than whatever is 10 percent of the time in class." If you're doing a class that's focused on listening, then I think it's OK if the students aren't talking very much and the teachers' talking most of the time.It probably depends a bit on the level as well. If I was teaching very young learners, I'd probably end up talking a lot more than if I was teaching advanced level adults.Tracy: I think you mentioned a lot why teachers need to talk. Also, on the other hand, when you think about when teacher...Ross: ...need to shut up.[laughter]Tracy: Yeah, don't need to talk that much. For example, we also experience the silence. You see the students struggle in activities or learning process. I think teacher naturally want to facilitate and give a lot of support to the students and then move on to the next stage. That few minutes or few seconds are so precious just to let them to figure out and ask each other, have a discussion.Maybe use a first language and they can clarify the meaning. I think that's really, really important for the learners. Digest information by themselves rather than passively accept the concept from the teacher. Naturally, we are teacher, we want to help people, so we always want to give them more rather than...Ross: Rather than figure it out themselves.Tracy: Yeah. Don't steal that moment from your students. Another thing that I usually suggest to teachers is actually instead of statement, asking questions.Ross: Can you give us an example?Tracy: For example, if I say, "Hey, Ross and Tracy, you did a very good job. Well done. And you used these words correctly and you used these tenses very well, blah blah blah." You can just ask a question.Ross: You would take that and instead, you say, "Oh, guys, what do you think you did a good job of there, how did you manage to complete that activity?"Tracy: Yeah, something like that. You are giving the students more chance to reflect on what they did and how they did it rather than you summarize what you saw.AIMRoss: Let's talk about the aim. Why should teachers talk? What is the aim in teachers' talking in the class? [laughs]Tracy: I think there are some fundamental functions of teacher talk. Number one is giving instruction. The second one is probably clarification.Ross: Explaining?Tracy: Yeah, explaining. What else?Ross: Correcting errors. I think eliciting as well, we mentioned that earlier. Asking questions to get the students to reflect or to say things. Building relationships and building rapport with the students. Little things making jokes, trying to use people's names. All those things help to reduce student anxiety and all that kind of stuff.Especially with young learners, storytelling is a big one. I know Dave Wellers is a big fan of that. I think all those things together are giving students comprehensible input, which is going to help them learn the language.I think I've read Stephen Krashen talk about this, and say that one of the main things that students are paying for or getting out of a language class is someone that's speaking in a specific way that's tailored to them. You are paying for a professional that's really good at changing the way they speak for the students. All those things together should help the students pick up language.Tracy: I also think about how your language help you and the students personalize lesson or the content. For example, we watched a class together the other day. If you remember in the video, the teacher basically went through all the PowerPoints.Ross: Yeah, she was teaching how old are you but didn't actually ever take the time [laughs] to ask the students how old they were.Tracy: Yeah, I think that's a great opportunity to personalize the materials and also make the lesson more engaging relating to the kids. Like how old are you and how old is your mom, how old is your best friend? This kind of thing, and that's definitely necessary teacher talk.Also, a lot of people are actually using PowerPoint. It seems so much information included on the slide. I think that's also indirect teacher talk. Maybe teachers think, "OK, I put everything on the PowerPoint, and I don't say anything, that means I reduce teacher talk time," but actually it's not.Ross: We mentioned there then some good aims for why you might talk, good reasons why you might talk. What are some bad reasons why teachers talk?Tracy: Just repeating themselves?Ross: Yeah, or even repeating the students. Echoing.Tracy: Yeah. I think I have different ideas about echoing. I don't think it's that bad sometimes because especially with younger learners, you probably want to emphasize something, so you have to repeat. I don't think it's all bad. It seems echoing is such a taboo word in teaching, but I don't think it's that bad. Sometimes, you probably want to say something to reinforce some positive behavior.Ross: It does actually sometimes happen in real life. Actually, I can play an example of...this is Axl Rose from Guns n' Roses being interviewed. Check how often the interviewer echoes what Axl Rose says.[video]Jimmy: How old were you when you moved to Hollywood?Axl Rose: I think 19.Jimmy: 19 years old, and you came by yourself?Axl: Yeah, I hitchhiked out here.Jimmy: You hitchhiked, wow. You hitchhiked. How long was it before you guys started making money as a professional musician?Axl: A few years after we got Appetite going.LANGUAGERoss: Let's talk a bit about language. I think it's something that pretty much all new teachers, and certainly I had a very difficult time doing was grading my language, which just means simplifying what you say for the students.Before I went to university, I lived in one fairly small town my whole life. Before I went to university, I don't like I realized what words that I used were words that only me, my family used, words which only me and my friends used, words which are only from that town, words which were just...Scottish.Tracy: Aye. [laughs]Ross: Yes, that's one for yes. Maybe I knew that but for example, word like, messages, like, "Go to get your messages." Where I'm from, that means go and do your shopping, like your weekly shopping.Tracy: Really?Ross: Yeah, or right now you could say, so it's five past 8:00, you could say right now it's the back of 8:00. I remember saying something that to someone at university, "I'll meet you at the back of 8:00," and the person said, "What does that mean?" I was like, "Back of 8:00, like 5 past, 10 past 8:00." They have no idea.That process of learning to grade your language, it's very difficult to pick up quickly.Tracy: Yeah, that's a very, very good point. Actually, I'm doing training, usually we focus on language, and we try not to use difficult words but how do we define difficult words?Even you're teaching in the same foreign country, but different level students and different area they probably exposed to certain topics or things or access to Internet and what they, what they encounter every day is so different. It definitely takes time for people to realize what...Ross: What's easy and what's hard?Tracy: Yeah.KWALITYRoss: Let's talk about the quality. The thing I wanted to bring up here is the idea that students come to class, and you know the classic joke of the student says to the teacher, "Oh sorry, I'm late." Teacher says, "Why are you late?" The student said, "My dog dead today," and the teacher says, "Your dog died today. Now go and sit down." Is it not funny?Tracy: I've never heard that.Ross: It's like the teachers correcting the student instead of responding to them naturally. This idea that you want to respond to the students naturally in the class because that's how people are going to respond to them in the outside world. You don't always have to be in this teacher mode where you are giving instructions or correcting errors. You can respond to them like a real person.TEACHER TALK WRAP UPRoss: Hopefully, that helped as a bit of a model. Instead of saying that teacher talk is good or teacher talk is bad, I think when you come to think about teacher talk, you can look at it in those four different aspects. How long are you talking for, the time? Why you are talking, so what's the Aim? What Language are you using? Finally, is it good Quality or not, so T‑A‑L‑K.Anything else, Tracy, before we finish?Tracy: When we're a little baby and [laughs] we can only handle a small amount of food, but we have maybe more times every day. Maybe I don't know four or five meals per day and when we grow up and we have more food each time.Ross: Fewer meals altogether.Tracy: Yeah, so I'm thinking maybe it's similar to teacher talk. With different group of learners like young learners, you probably want to use teacher talk a little bit...Ross: At a time maybe but more for the adolescent.Tracy: Yeah, with adult learners, maybe each time that they can handle a longer period of time and then try to reduce the number of time that we are using big chunk of teacher talk.Ross: Great. Thanks for listening everyone.Tracy: Thank you, bye‑bye.Ross: Bye.

The second of our two-part special from the 2018 IATEFL conference in Brighton. We chat with our friends, fellow teacher trainers and returning podcast guests David Weller, Simon Galloway, Fifi Pyatt and new guest and DipTESOL candidate Will Ferguson.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Didn’t make it to Brighton for this year’s IATEFL conference? We chat with returning guests and friends Dave Weller, Simon Galloway and Felicity Pyatt and new guest Will Ferguson about the best ideas and concepts from the IATEFL’s 52nd annual conference.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Cognitive biases screw up our thinking. They make us make bad decisions, come to wrong wrong conclusions and for the most part we're completely unaware of them.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Ross: Hi everyone.Tracy: Today we've got our special guest, Simon Galloway.Simon: Hello everyone.Tracy: Simon, do you want to...Both: ...introduce yourself?Simon: I'm mostly working with Trinity Diploma in TESOL, and Certificate in TESOL at the moment.Ross: You've done a bunch of other stuff before that, right? You were teaching in Japan, in China?Simon: Yes. I taught in Japan. I taught in China for several years. I was a director of studies and production...Ross: Regional manager as well?Simon: Regional manager for a while, yes.Ross: I remember years ago, Simon, watching you do a workshop for managers about how to do performance reviews. One of the things you spoke about was cognitive biases, right?Simon: Yes. That was focused on performance management, and all the things that managers tend to overlook when they're gauging the performance of their teachers. They might think they're giving a completely objective viewpoint, but actually these cognitive biases affect the way that they think.Ross: They don't just screw up managers thinking, they screw up everybody's.Simon: They screwed up everybody's thinking, yes.Ross: Screws up yours so much you brought a book about cognitive bias for your train journey on the way to Beijing.Simon: I did. It was quite good. It's "The Art of Thinking Clearly," by Rolf Dobelli. It's an international best‑seller.[laughter]Simon: I guess many of the people listening have also read this.[laughter]Ross: For those people that haven't heard of cognitive biases before, or don't have Rolf Dobelli's book, what's a cognitive bias?Simon: This is something that affects the way that we think and prevents us from thinking clearly, but we're probably not aware of it. As soon as we became aware of it, we gain a power over, or a power to stop it. It's usually something that we're not so aware of.Ross: Awesome. I guess over the next, whatever it is, 13 and a half minutes, we're going to try and give everyone a bit more power over their own thinking by talking about three things. First of all, cognitive biases for teachers.Tracy: Cognitive biases for trainers.Simon: And cognitive biases for managers.[background music]COGNITIVE BIASES FOR TEACHERSRoss: In terms of why cognitive biases are really incredibly important, here's a little quote from one of my favorite podcasts, which is Joe Rogan. He is interviewing, on this, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and they're talking about cognitive biases.Neil deGrasse Tyson: There should be a course called "Cognitive Bias 101". Forget college. Every high school should have a course "Cognitive Bias." The entire course should be about all the ways we fool ourselves, if we are going to emerge as adults no longer susceptible to charlatans, going forward.Joe: Yeah. We're thinking about just giving people facts instead of teaching them how to manage your mind.Neil: Yeah. Your head is your vessel, into which you pour information. Nowhere, and at no time, are we trained how to turn a fact into knowledge, knowledge into wisdom, and wisdom into insight.Ross: An example of a cognitive bias, confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is when we have our assumptions about something.Simon: Sure. Yeah.Ross: We ignore evidence to the contrary, and only listen to evidence that supports what we already think, right?Simon: Yeah. I see this a lot with teachers reflecting on their lessons. You ask them at the end, "How do you feel about your lesson?" They'll say, "Yeah, I feel really good about it. I saw this and this and this."As an observer, I'm like, "I didn't see any of that." Then I try to second‑guess myself, then. I'm like, "Maybe I missed something," but I think, really, a lot of this is that the teacher knows what they're looking for.Ross: And ignores what students didn't say.Simon: Yeah, ignores what it didn't say, exactly. That's the key about confirmation bias, is that they only look for evidence that confirms their viewpoint. They don't look for any of the conflict in evidence.Tracy: You know, they call hot or cold cognition or something? I think the hot one is definitely influenced by the people's emotion and motivation, and the cold one doesn't have much emotion involved in it.Ross: I wonder if this then affects you also in that same situation that Simon just mentioned, where just after a lesson it's more like hot cognition, so you still feel emotionally attached to the lesson, but maybe days or weeks afterward you feel less like that.Simon: Somebody's TP journal should be more objective, right?Tracy: Yeah, yeah.Ross: You'd think so, right?Simon: You'd hope, wouldn't you?Ross: After you'd had time to...Another one I'd read about before, I think it's called fundamental attribution error, or fundamental attribution bias.Simon: Attribution error, yes.Ross: This is where, if you make a mistake, you do something bad, you say it's because of the situation. But if you see other people doing the same thing, you put it down to their personality.The classic example is, you're driving down the road and you're speeding because you're late for work and you go, "I'm only speeding because I'm late for work." Then you see someone else speeding past you the next day and you think, "Oh, that person is such a reckless driver," and you ignore the fact that maybe the reason that they're speeding is because they might also be late for work.I thought this was applicable for teachers, because maybe you teach a class and it goes very well and you think, "Oh, I taught such an awesome class. That was fantastic. I'm such a legend."Then you have the opposite experience doing a class and it was just utterly awful. You go, "Why? Well, the students weren't motivated, the students weren't interested in the topic, the students were at the wrong level." You make all these excuses about why it didn't go well, based on other people rather than based on yourself.Simon: Yeah. You've got to look at it more objectively. You've got to realize that the environment has a much bigger effect than you might immediately think, right?Ross: Yeah.Tracy: How can people realize that they are experiencing the cognitive bias? How can they prevent to have the bias?Ross: I think a part of it is just knowing that they exist, right?Simon: Yeah, I think so. Just knowing that these are ways that we think is a big first step to fixing them.[background music]COGNATIVE BIASES FOR TRAINERSRoss: Should we also talk about the trainers? What are some of the biases that you think we can fall prey to?Simon: I was thinking here about trainers observing lessons. I thought of a few things here. The first one is regression to the mean and anchoring. Two different biases here, if we're actually formally assessing candidates or teachers.With regression to the mean, it's this sense that, you can watch a teacher. Maybe they did a really bad lesson. You think, "I'm going to give a load of advice and all these tips." Then in the next lesson, they do much better. You think, "Well, I'm an amazing trainer."[laughter]Simon: "I've just changed their whole outlook on teaching. Really successful." Sometimes a teacher might do a really good lesson. You tell them, "That was amazing. That was really awesome."Then the next lesson, they do much worse. You think, "Huh, praising obviously didn't help this candidate. Obviously, if I give too much praise, the candidate gets complacent and they do worse." But in reality, perhaps in both of these cases, they're just regressing to the mean.Ross: They're just going back towards the norm.Simon: They're just going back towards the norm, right? Because there's a kind of a standard‑ish lesson, which might be just a pass, or that kind of thing. If the candidates are not amazingly proficient, or else not amazingly bad, they're going to tend to regress there, regardless of the trainer's feedback.Then of course, based on a fundamental attribution bias, we tend to think, "Oh, we're the trainer. We're changing their lives. We are the big changing point."Ross: Right. Yeah. "I have this huge influence over this teacher."Simon: "I can have a massive influence, a massive impact on these teachers," when in reality there's so many other factors affecting the quality of the lesson.Ross: Almost sounds like the over‑confidence bias, as well. Like my five minutes of feedback has completely affected this person for the next week.Simon: Changed their lives, yeah.Ross: Then anchoring is where, for example, you have an expectation of where the limits are on something, and you don't want to go move too far beyond that, right?Simon: Yeah. Sometimes in my experience, I've had cases where the trainer before me has observed a teacher and told me, "This teacher is amazing. See what you think about them." Or "Oh my goodness, that teacher was awful. See what you think about them."Then when I go in to watch them, got that in my mind. I'm thinking "OK. This teacher, I don't think they're that good, but yeah, that was quite good," so I give them quite a high mark. I give them a higher mark than I would have otherwise. Or I think, "That teacher wasn't great. Yeah, OK, the last trainer was right," and I give them a lower mark. But actually...Ross: Are you really looking at it objectively?Simon: Am I really looking at it objectively, right. If I hadn't had that piece of information from the other trainer, I may have given them a different mark, regardless.Ross: I'd read about this with Donald Trump speaking about, for example, immigrants to America and saying, "We're going to deport all illegal immigrants," and that's the sort of anchor for the conversation. The one extreme end.Simon: Yeah. Pushing it to the very extreme, yeah.Ross: Yeah. You're then framing the conversation as, "That's how far I'm willing to go." Then things move back from there.Simon: Yes, exactly. In that way, Trump changed the whole narrative of how things were talked about in America.Ross: Yeah.Simon: Marine Le Pen did the same in France. With Trump, somehow, he actually managed to get into power, but say you were Marine Le Pen in France. Even though she didn't get into power, she changed the narrative in France towards a more right wing bias, through anchoring.Tracy: I think there's something also related to the outcome bias. Another example, people probably got A for their TP lesson and they thought, "Everything I did for this lesson worked perfectly," and they kept using the same thing for the next TPs. But actually it didn't work very well for another group of learners.They didn't really realize or identify what worked and what didn't work, and just go in depth and reflect on what exactly students reacted, to the materials and the teacher's behavior. They just looked at the outcome because "I got an A."Ross: There was another interesting example about cognitive bias in a book called "Black Box Thinking" that I read about, which is prisoners going up for parole. The main thing which decided whether they got parole or not was whether it was the morning or the afternoon.Simon: Yeah, right.Ross: If it was after the judges had just eaten lunch, there was a high chance that prisoners will be allowed parole, and if it was in the morning when they didn't, then they wouldn't.Simon: Yes.Ross: This relates to trainers because...Simon: Yes, yes, absolutely. This is how we first got onto talking about the subject.Ross: Yeah.Simon: I did quite a lot of analysis on trainer observations on a teacher‑training course. After doing quite a thorough analysis, it was quite clear that the trainers gave much better marks in the morning than they did in the afternoon.It seems that the trainers were not taking a lot of time to eat lunch. They were often missing lunch, or they were just having a coffee for lunch, or this kind of thing. The result was that the afternoon lessons were 5 or 10 percent lower marks than the morning sessions.Ross: Yeah.Simon: To the point where significantly more afternoon sessions were actually failing than the morning sessions.Ross: What I think is fascinating about this is obviously taking a class and passing or failing it in a teacher‑training course is much lower stakes than getting released from prison.In those examples from capital punishment or from parole, no one was aware that those things were going on until someone actually collected the data. I suppose the takeaway here is, looking at the plain numbers and seeing what story numbers can tell us, as trainers.[background music]COGNATIVE BIASES FOR MANAGERSRoss: I remember years ago having a new teacher who I was training. I think they came in late, and they were dressed too casually. They didn't impress me in training.When I was talking to my boss about it, saying,"Should I pass on this feedback to this person's manager?" he said, "Beware of the self‑fulfilling prophecy," which is, you pass that information on and that the new manager hears that this teacher has turned up late and they wore the wrong clothes.They then start to look out for all those attributes in that person, and it very quickly turns into that person ends up getting fired, but maybe they didn't actually have to.Simon: There was a very interesting study done on this. They took a class of primary school students. They just took five students at complete random and said to the teacher, "Look, these students have been identified as very high potential." They took another five at random and said, "These five, you're going to have some problems with these students. Just find a way to deal with them."They came back a year later they saw the students that they had chosen at random as high performers actually had much higher results.Ross: I thought the take away from that was...Simon: Belief in those children can really make the big difference.Ross: Presumably, having higher expectations of the students is the key there. Tell us more about the performance management, and some of those biases for managers. How do those operate?Simon: If you're rating teacher's performance, as a manager, you can be prone to a lot of different biases. I was doing this kind of performance appraisals for teachers for a long time, and I realized that I was quite prone to a lot of these biases.[laughter]Simon: A lot of new managers, and even experienced managers, will make the same mistakes. As I've said before, when you realize that you're doing it, that's the first step towards changing it.On a rating of one to three for a lot of areas, you might just think, "Well, all right. They're not too terrible and they're not amazing at this, so I'll just give them a two." And you just give them twos.Ross: Two out of three is?Simon: There's a one, a two, and a three. One is below expectations, two, meets expectations, and three, exceeds expectations. Then, what the teacher gets is just a whole lot of twos.I've seen teachers also evaluate themselves this way. It's like, "Can you self‑evaluate?" I had a teacher before. I gave them some time to fill out their self evaluation. They took about 30 or 40 minutes all together. Finally, when they gave it to me, it was a line of twos, the whole way down.[laughter]Simon: There's that one. Then there's the other ones, where you can look at a halo bias, where you've got a teacher that you think, "This is my star teacher in my team. They're great," so you just give them a three for everything.I had a center director before who did this. Every single teacher that she liked in the school, she would just give them all threes. Then there was a teacher that she didn't like, gave them all ones. It's like the opposite of that, saying that if somebody is good, then everything is good.[background music]Ross: We talked a lot there about things that can go wrong. What could people do to get around those problems, to be less cognitively biased?Simon: As I've said before, I think just by knowing what will happen, you can start to stop it. With all learning, you can start by noticing and then turn it into action. If you know what these biases are, you notice yourself doing them, kind of stop yourself.Tracy: Thanks for listening everybody. Thanks, Simon, for coming to our podcast today.Simon: My pleasure.Tracy: Bye.Ross: Bye everyone.Simon: Bye‑bye.[background music]Tracy: For more podcasts, videos, and blogs, visit our website...Both: www.tefltraininginstitute.com.Ross: If you've got a question or a topic you'd like us to discuss, leave us a comment.Tracy: And if you want to keep up to date with our latest content, add us on WeChat at tefltraininginstitute.Ross: If you enjoy our podcast, please rate us on iTunes.

Every class doesn't need hundreds of handouts, every training doesn't need a fancy PowerPoint presentation, every team doesn't need to have endless meetings. We explore the times when less is more in teaching, training and management.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

We meet with Dave Weller to discuss the issues surrounding native and non-native English teachers such as attitudes of parents and teachers, the responsibilities of language schools and how to change opinions.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Tracy: Hello, everyone.Ross Thorburn: Hi, folks.Tracy: Today, we've got our regular podcast guest...Both: Dave Weller.Ross: Hello, Dave.Dave Weller: Hello, everybody. I was trying not to say hurrah again.[laughter]Dave: Regular listeners will know what I mean.Ross: Dave's here this week to talk with us about a rather controversial issue...Tracy: Which is native English speaking‑teachers versus non‑native English‑speaking teachers.Ross: Today, we've got three questions. The first one is what's all the fuss about? Second...Tracy: What do the parents and the students think about it? The third one...Ross: What can managers and schools do about it?What’s the “Native” / “Non native Teacher” debate about?Ross: Guys, what's the debate about?Tracy: Based on my understanding, just schools, parents, teachers and students feel a different mode of English ‑‑ native or non‑native...They've got advantages and disadvantages. So it seems more people, native English‑speaking teachers and have a better model of English.Ross: As well as that, it seems like there's a bit of a tendency in the industry that native speakers who are teachers will tend to get paid more. Native speakers who are teachers will tend to be given more opportunities.Dave: Actually, I read about a study that looks at higher education institutions in the UK. They found over 70 percent of them made hiring decisions for staff based on whether they were native or non‑native speakers.Ross: That doesn't surprise me a lot. It's almost like our whole methodology and approach to teaching language, doing everything in the students' L2, is almost based around having native‑speaking teachers, right?Dave: Definitely. It goes really deep. Again, there's different levels of it. It's fine if it just stayed as an opinion, but once it turns into action, policy and systems, that's where discrimination kicks in. It becomes distinctly unfair and entrenched within our industry. Despite being what a lot of people think of as a very nice and liberal industry, it hides quite a lot of trade dark secrets.Ross: Interestingly, if you do any reading on this, you find that it becomes very difficult to define what a native speaker actually is. One thing that you can't deny is that the person grew up speaking English, but when you start to look at other criteria, they're very, very woolly.It tends to be things like they can be creative with language, they don't have a foreign accent, they're aware of the culture of the language. All these things, which clearly, it's possible...Dave: Of course. Non‑native speakers have that as well.Ross: Ultimately, you get to this point where, really, the only difference between the two is that one of them grew up speaking English, and one didn't. Which, if you're learning English from someone, is pretty irrelevant, isn't it, what language or what they did in their childhood. Who cares about that?Dave: Precisely. All you really care about is how good they are as a teacher, how well then can connect with you in the classroom, they can motivate you, and all the other things that go into making up a good teacher.This whole argument actually needs to be rephrased into clearer lines. Silvana Richardson mentioned in her IATEFL that we need a new word for non‑native speakers. For me, that word would just be English teachers.There's no point devolving that word into finer detail. You should actually go back up the chain. We're all English teachers. Just some of us have different skills and backgrounds than others.If we were to do that, it would solve a lot of these problems. When you talk about a teacher, you can, "OK, which language can they speak and at what level?" That way, you can say, "Well, in the old parlance, there's this native‑speaking teacher who can speak a little bit of the learner's L1, but not to their level."Then there's a native speaker who can't speak any. Then there's a non‑native speaker who is local to the area. Then there's a non‑native speaker that isn't local from the area."Ross: Part of it is linguistic determinism. The Sapir‑Whorf hypothesis, made famous by the recent movie ‑‑ "Arrival." This idea that because of the language that we use, that we have to describe the teachers as native and non‑native teachers or speakers, that's the thing that we end up focusing on.If we changed it, and say, we called them monolingual or bilingual teachers, then which of those would you have a preference for?Dave: I agree to a point, but this is why I might be against that. I can't say everything goes as you plan. Then in 20 years' time, you actually might get a reverse situation where there's prejudice against native speakers because of the bilingualism versus monolingualism.All I think you should do is revert back to the phrase teachers and then what skills does that teacher have.What do parents and the students think about “Native” / “Non- native Teachers”?Ross: Interesting in that the research I've done on this and the survey where I looked at parents, students, teachers, and sales and service staff, and asked every group, I had a bunch of different attributes in there.For example, attitudes, qualifications, personalities, relationship with students, being native speakers, what people look like, their nationality, and their ability to speak the student's L1.The number one thing was definitely not being a native speaker. That ranked about number three or number four in people's preference. The native or non‑native speaker is...people use that as a proxy.It's something that if you don't know anything about the industry, then you can relate to that very, very easily, but if you're a parent and you don't know anything about language learning, you're not going to know what qualifications the teachers should have.It's very difficult to see what the teachers' attitudes are or their personalities, if any, or of those things. It is quite simple to check. Is this person a native speaker or not?Dave: I find it fascinating. To go back to non‑native speakerism for a second, I was reading some of Adrian Holliday's work. He said that it started out as almost a marketing ploy from various aid agencies back in the '60s to propagate the idea that native speakers were the best model.In which case, that obviously links up to the idea that Silvana Richardson said in her plenary that we can change the perception in the industry. All it takes is a little time.With research that backs this up ‑‑ research coming out that actually says that it's not just OK, but beneficial to use L1 in the classroom ‑‑ you put those things together, then this is the way forward to actually eradicate bias in our industry.Ross: Let me play you that quote from Silvana now.Silvana Richardson: Employers always have choices. Collusion with inequality and prejudice is a choice. Discrimination is a choice. As Rajagopalan says, "In our neoliberal world, who will dare challenge what the market dictates?"The answer to this is, just because the market is demanding certain things, it does not mean that the market itself cannot be made to perceive things differently.Ross: Do you think that's true? Is that realistic though, that the market can be made to perceive...Dave: Of course, it is. Yeah, definitely. If you look on an individual on a mass scale, how many times have we changed our minds over the course of our professional development over the last 10, 15 years?Precisely, it's the same thing with the industry. Industries change, ideas change, views change. It happens usually, I would argue, from the ground up rather than direct from above, especially in an industry such as ours which is quite fragmented and has no overarching body to dictate the standards.Tracy: I still think there is a huge market, because you just look at the education companies doing online or offline. The business...they create the scenario, and having native English teachers is the better choice.Ross: In that case, do you think it's an easier or difficult or a long or short task to change the way that Chinese parents and students see local teachers?Tracy: It's going to be a long way. I have to say all the non‑native teachers need to work really hard, because if you constantly made the mistakes, and you constantly misspell the word, and you constantly use the utterances or expressions that people don't normally use, and use those language to teach your students, there is a problem.Ross: It's so unfair, because I see a lot of really bad native‑speaking teachers [laughs] who don't get picked up on making teaching mistakes or methodological mistakes.Dave: Or even language mistakes of teaching language which is highly improbable, possible but doesn't often get used. They end up teaching...It's, maybe, not going technically wrong, but you'll hear people teaching language that never gets used.Ross: They're from one particular part of the Deep South in America and they use a phrase that only them and their family and the people in that village use and are like, "I've never heard it before."I don't see them getting picked up on those mistakes. They tend to get a free pass because they're a native speaker. That's really unfair.Tracy: A lot of teachers or parents always say, "Oh, I want my student or my child to speak Standard English," or "All the students should learn Standard English."Dave: There's no such thing anymore, is there?Ross: I don't think so. Is that a cultural concept that exists in China? There is a standard Chinese, but there's no Standard English.Dave: Let's play devil's advocate just for a second. I can clearly understand what they mean though. Even though we're looking at it from a technician's point of view, we're looking at it from a point of view of professionals in the industry. What parents mean...it's almost like the shadows on Plato's cave, to take it deep for a second.The concept of a horse, despite all horses can look slightly different...Again, they're using that term as a proxy of an English that will be understood around the world. No matter where they go, it'll be effortless to be able to communicate with other English‑speaking teachers and not be hindered in any way through pronunciation or grammar or phrase. That's shorthand for what they're trying to say.Ross: Indeed, but is it not also the case that a very, very small percentage of learners will learn English or an accent or something to the point where they're at that level of, "Oh, I want to sound English" or "I want to sound American," but, really, for most of the students I've taught, even after years, they sound Chinese, because...Dave: Maybe your students, Ross.[laughter]Dave: Sorry, that's such a flippant answer. No, I completely agree with your point. In fact, I'd even add to that and say, it's not about increasing their level. It's about teaching the skills to grade their language if they do encounter another non‑native speaker who has trouble understanding their accent, maybe because they're from a quite different culture. Again, you're arguing against a perception and a belief.What can managers and schools do about “Native” / Non-native Teacher” discriminationRoss: Can we talk for a minute about language schools and, maybe, what language schools can do about that? I've got another Silvana quote for you. Do you mind if I play this briefly?Dave: Please do.Silvana: This is part of the California/Nevada's position paper opposing discrimination against non‑native English speaking teachers. It says, "Teaching job announcements that indicate a preference or requirement for a native speaker of English trivialize the professional development teachers have received and teaching experience they have already acquired.Such announcements are also discriminatory and ultimately harm all teachers ‑‑ native or not ‑‑ by devaluing teacher education, professionalism, and experience.Ross: To what extent do you guys agree or disagree with that?Dave: 100 percent. Again, I really speak with authority from my background, which is as a native speaker. Again, it does trivialize my experience and the amount of work I've put in over the last 15 years of professional development, studying...Ross: Getting qualifications and things...Dave: Precisely. The extra work I've put in ‑‑ thousands of hours ‑‑ and then to be reduced to being called, "He's a native speaker. He'll do."Ross: It still happens so often. Tracy, you had something like that a few weeks ago over organizing a teacher training thing here. Again, you've obviously got your diploma, you're studying your MA, you've been a tutor and a course director on accredited courses.The people running the course said, "Oh, can you make sure there's a native speaker or foreigner for at least half the course?"Dave: Who's just finished a 40‑hour online course, perhaps.Ross: Or maybe not even that. Isn't it fascinating that that still persists?Tracy: They even didn't care about what qualifications or experience they have. Also interesting, the person from the organization even asked me, "Can you tell me more about this trainer?"I said, "OK. Maybe I can ask this person to send the CV, send the training, teaching experience." She said, "We really don't care about it. Just tell me his age, which country he's from, and also if he's white or black."Ross: What about on the flip side for a minute then, Dave? As someone who used to be a director of studies before in a school where you had to make hiring decisions, where's this balance? Were you ever in some tough situations there?Dave: [laughs] Yes.Ross: How did that work out then?Dave: The thing is, as a manager ‑‑ anyone who's been a manager, I'm sure, can relate to this ‑‑ you have to pick and choose your battles. That was the one that I'll actually go to bat for.If you had several candidates and various degrees of discrimination in different things as one that Tracy mentioned earlier about someone's skin color, also about non‑native speaking teachers, you just go and not actually ask if these persons' qualified, they're capable, they've gone through the interview process, and that they would be a good fit for this team, they'd be a good fit for this country, and they'd be a great fit for our school.Then you'd put your foot down. You'd have an argument, almost, with the culture of the school. If you won ‑‑ sometimes you did, sometimes you didn't ‑‑ often, unfortunately, it depended on how badly the school needed teachers, and how many classes waiting you had, how many students waiting to start class.Unfortunately, it was usually the deciding factor. Once the teacher arrived, whereas the students after a few lessons, would be delighted with the experienced teacher, the parents would turn and become delighted and insist on having that teacher as a future teacher for their children.What’s does the future hold for “Non-native English teachers”?Dave: It's always sad that we actually have to do this, or that it's something that we do have to get passionate about. Do spread the word on.I'm very optimistic about it. I like to think there are enough people out there that people will go back, spread the word, and take small actions. There will be this groundswell of people that do this.Ross: All right, Dave, thanks very much for coming on. It was a pleasure talking to you again.Dave: It's a pleasure to be here, as always. Thank you.[background music]Tracy: Thanks, Dave. Bye, everybody.Ross: Bye.Tracy: For more podcasts, videos, and blogs, visit our website...Both: Www.tefltraininginstitute.com.Ross: If you've got a question or a topic you'd like us to discuss, leave us a comment...Tracy: If you want to keep up to date with our latest content, add us on WeChat @tefltraininginstitute.Ross: If you enjoyed our podcast, please rate us on iTunes.

In this episode, we discuss how teachers can personalize lessons and materials for students, how trainers can personalize development for teachers and how managers can personalize work for their staff.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Tracy Yu: Hey, Ross.Ross Thorburn: Hey, Tracy.Tracy: I really like your shirt.Ross: Thanks.Tracy: Did you buy it in a shop or...?Ross: I got it tailor‑made.Tracy: Really? Also, it must be really expensive.Ross: Not really.Tracy: It's quite interesting actually in our lives. We are trying to have tailored, customized, and personalized experience like tailor‑made cloth. The same thing for learning, and our students also are looking forward to something actually tailored and personalized for their experience.Ross: If you're listening to this podcast now, you've tailored your radio experience. 20 years ago, what you listened to on a radio would just be whatever was on the radio at the time, but that's not true anymore, is it? The same goes for TV as well where you can choose what shows you want to watch and download them and watch them whenever you want.That's how we get personalization the rest of our lives. Why is it important then for students to have personalization and personalized learning experience?Tracy: Because it engages students in the whole process. If they can talk about something or learn something that's relevant to their lives, their interests and preferences, and it's more likely for them to get involved in the process. There would be more engage. They will have more curiosities to find out more information.Ross: Can I add in a little quote from the Khan Academy? He's talking here about what happens in regular one size fits all classes. He's comparing it to riding a bike.Khan: In a traditional classroom, you have a couple of a homework, homework, lecture, homework, lecture, and then you have snapshot exam. That exam, whether you get a 70 percent, and 80 percent, a 90 percent, or a 95 percent, the class moves on to the next topic.You go build on that in the next concept. That's analogous to, imagine, learning to ride a bicycle. I give you that bicycle for two weeks. I come back after two weeks, and I say, "Well, let's see." You're having trouble taking left turns. You can't quite stop. You're an 80 percent bicyclist, so I put a big C stamp on your forehead.I say, "Here's a unicycle." As ridiculous as that sounds, that's exactly what's happening in our classrooms right now.Tracy: I think it's going to be very interesting to have a discussion about how we can personalize in education. We've got three questions to discuss. The first one?Ross: How can you personalize learning for student? The second one?Tracy: How do you personalize development for teachers? The last?Ross: If you're a manager, how can you personalize work experience for your staff?[background music]Ross: Let's talk about personalization for students. We have an acronym today to help you remember. The acronym for personalizing for students is...Tracy: CONNECT.Ross: Let's go through them. The first C is for...Tracy: Content.Ross: Right. The idea here is that whatever you're teaching, you can connect that content to the students' lives, like where they're from, what they like doing.Tracy: Just making more localized, represent the students' background and where they are from. Sometime, we may have a discussion about something, but the very common situation I experienced was the students told me, "Oh, I don't know what to say."In this point, I don't think the teacher personalized the lesson enough. The teacher can provide the students a chance to link their assumed knowledge and their experience to the new language or concept they're learning in the lesson.Ross: That was C was for content. What is O?Tracy: O is for outcome. How I understand this point is how we set personal learning objectives in class. For example, maybe we have like five new words or maybe two structures that you expect students to achieve in the lesson. It's impossible for every single student achieves the same thing.Don't force the students to achieve the same thing in the same class because they're different.Ross: Throughout different levels to begin with so that they could be able to get to the same point at the end. Yeah, absolutely.Tracy: Next one is N.Ross: N for needs. Something I heard David Graddol say a while ago at ITEFL, he was talking about how if you're a waiter and you're beginner level, often what you get covered in a course book is talking about yourself, describing your family, describing your clothes.He said, "If I go into a restaurant and meet a waiter with A1 level English, I don't want to talk to him about his family, [laughs] I want to order a meal."The point here is to think about why your students are learning English and then taking that into account in what you decide to teach them.Tracy: However, do you think the reason why they're learning the language is because they are preparing themselves for future?Ross: Yes and no. I can see that a lot of people need to learn English to pass a test. A classic thing that I think I have mentioned on this podcast before, is that a lot kids I've met, one of the mains of authentic ways to use English is when they go abroad with their parents.They have to help their parents buy things or translate things but we never really do any translation in class with students. You pretend to be the mom, I'll pretend to be the shopkeeper, and you can translate. I think that's a great example of a need that we don't really fill.That was content, outcomes, need. What's the second N?Tracy: The second N is noticing learning and how can we make the learning visible, and also outreach our students' awareness about how they learn and what they learn. It's everyone...Ross: Everyone will learn a different thing. There's nothing really more personalize than that is talking about what you learned. Even, what activities you found were the most helpful for you in class? You can do that with almost any age group.I remember teaching three‑year‑olds and giving them smiley face and sad face flashcards, after we would play game. For example, that you just say, "Oh, did you like it, or did you not like it?" They could use the flashcards to tell you about their preferences.What's next?Tracy: E means engage. Engage students by choosing activity that match their preferences.Ross: Not learning styles.Tracy: [laughs] Yes.Ross: The point here is that most of what we talked about so far is personalizing the what of the lesson, but here I ' talking about personalizing the how. So funny, for me, students like what activities do they like? Maybe by doing a thing, I mentioned before, "Did you enjoy that? Did you not enjoy that?" Asking it at the end of the class.What was useful? What was not useful? With that all, you can do surveys with them. You can even notice overseas students' reactions and find out what they seem to be more interested in or engaged in.Tracy: Overall, it just means we need to differentiate the task and activity, and to make sure this variety of things going on or use in a class.Ross: That work?Tracy: Yes.[laughter]Ross: The next one is...Tracy: Choice. We try to empower our students by giving them voice and choice during the learning process. Students know what are most suitable for them. Parents always believe, "We are the experts and know what's suitable for them." Actually, no. "I know myself. I know. I don't like doing that. I know it doesn't work. I'm not interest in it."Give them the option. The last one is T.Ross: For tailoring language practice.Tracy: For example, there is accuracy‑based activity, and you have gap fill or make sentences. The sentence probably have a person, like Ross, but the student's name is not Ross, it's Tim.You can just let the students to change the name to someone that they know and make sure the content of the language production, something that they're familiar with, not just imagine a person on its feet or try to make up some facts that they've never heard about. Just make it relative to what they know, what they are sure about, and they feel more confident or more willing to share with us.Ross: CONNECT, C‑O‑N‑N‑E‑C‑T. C is for...Tracy: Content.Ross: O is for...Tracy: Outcomes.Ross: N is for...Tracy: Needs.Ross: N, again, [laughs] is for...Tracy: Noticing learning.Ross: E is for...Tracy: Engage.Ross: C is for...Tracy: Choice.Ross: T is for...Tracy: Tailor language practice.[background music]Ross: Let's talk about how to personalize development for teachers.Tracy: This just reminds me of a teacher telling me and said, "Oh, I've been to this training before but I have to go to this training." I asked him, "Why?" "Because my manager runs this training. I have to be there. Otherwise, I am not showing...I care about personal or career development." It's quite funny.Have you ever got this kind of feedback from teacher were heard?Ross: I've definitely seen it, like, "Oh, we're running a training this week on X." It's like, "Why are you running a training on that?" The person's like, "They read about it the week before." They thought it was interesting, or it's something they know a lot about. It's centered on the needs of the presenter to share rather than the needs of the trainees to learn something.It has a problem.Tracy: How can we solve this problem?Ross: We need to get out of this mindset that the best way for teachers to learn is to have whenever it's 5 people or 20 people or 100 people sitting in a room at the same time, looking at someone going through a PPT. That's not what teacher development should be.Teacher development should start off with either you or you with someone else observing a video of your lesson or someone observing you teach a class, and talking about what went well, what didn't go well, what some of themes were in the lesson, what things you would like to improve on.If you're a manager, for example, or a trainer, then saying, "Why don't you go and observe this person, and you can see them do this thing that you feel didn't go very well, or why don't you read this book, or watch this YouTube video."Tracy: I don't understand. My question is, or my concern is if you have a group of teachers, maybe 200, 500, 1,000, or 10,000, how can you do that? How can you make it so personalize because you have such a big number of teacher?Ross: In those circumstances, it's still possible, for example, to give teachers the tools to observe their own classes. You can quite easily stick your mobile phone at the back of the room, hit record, and then sit down for an hour, the next day or something, and watch back just to work on them.Tracy: When he's very self‑disciplined and...Ross: Again, I think this is one of the problems. There's an assumption that if he sticks on bodies in the room with someone who's presenting something, learning will occur.Tracy: That's true.Ross: I don't think that's true.Tracy: People who are doing training and ask them to sit in training sessions, they believe and the teachers who have never exposed to the concept or information before, it's great for them to understand and learn. For people who have already knew this, and it's great for them to consolidate that area so it won't hurt anyone.Do you think that's right or...?Ross: No. Anytime you force people to develop, it harms [laughs] their attitude towards development. With that stuff, I think it can be harmful. It's also harmful just in the way it treats teachers that assumes that you don't have the knowledge or self‑awareness to know how you should develop.[background music]Ross: Last point, and it's, how do you think as a manager you can personalize the experience of your staff work?Tracy: First of all, you have the same things like we do with our students. Have a chat with them. What's your favorite cartoon?[laughter]Tracy: Do you like playing soccer?Ross: You're talking about the students, not the teachers here, right?Tracy: No, I'm just talking about...I think for managers, it's the same thing. You need to speak to your staff like, "What are you interested?"I manage a team and always try to have a small chat with the team members and just say, "Hey, what are doing? What are you working on?" Then just ask how they feel about it and also something they're super interested and they want to get involved in it in the future.If readily there are some opportunities to provide to them, and we can make the work or tasks even more personalize because everybody got their expertise that something they would like to develop even more.Ross: Maybe key difference here between the students coming to class, we assume maybe that the students don't have to be there, and the same with the teachers developing, they don't have to do it.Of course, the difference with staff is that you're paying people to be at work. It's a limit to choice. When you said one ways, maybe, asking people like, "What they'd like doing?" think in other ways looking at or asking people what they want to do in the future.For example, even if someone's planning on leaving your school in six months' time or a year's time, if you can find out where they're going, what they want to do, and again, you can try and find some tasks for them to work, which match their interest or help build their skills in the directions that they want to go into in the future.[background music]Tracy: Thanks very much for listening to our podcast. That means you've already personalized your own development. That's the first step. Thank you. See you next time. Bye.For more podcast, videos and blogs, visit our website www.tefltraininginstitute.com.Ross: If you thought of a question or a topic you would like to discuss, leave us a comment.Tracy: If you want to keep up to date with our latest content, add us on WeChat at @TEFLtraininginstitute.Ross: If you enjoy our podcast, please rate us on iTunes

We speak to published author and ESL writing specialist David Tait about how to teach writing and the students who thrive when writing that we forget about when teaching speaking.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

We discuss how to set up a classroom, how seating can support your students (or sabotage your lesson) and how teachers and students can benefit from moving their class outside the classroom (from time to time).For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

We speak with TEFL teacher trainer, manager and serial observer Matt Courtois about what you (as a teacher) can do to survive (and possibly even learn from) your next observationFor more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Tracy Yu: Welcome to the "TEFL Training Institute podcast," the bite‑sized TEFL podcast for teachers, trainers, and managers.Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone.Tracy: Today we've got our special guest, Matt Courtois.Ross: Hi, Matt.Matt Courtois: Hey, how's it going?Ross: Good to have you on.Matt: Yeah, thank you.Tracy: Finally, we've got Matt on the show.Ross: Matt, do you want to say something very quickly about who you are and what you do?Matt: Yeah, so I work for a large online education company. I manage the training team there.Ross: Great. I wanted to tell you guys about something that happened to me a couple weeks ago. For my job, I had to film a lesson. It was the first class I taught in a little while, and before, I was so nervous.I was having trouble sleeping the night before because I was worried so much about what I was going to do in my lesson. It really got me empathizing with how teachers feel when they get observed when they teach. All of us got blasé about observing people.When I was just filming myself, there was no one else even in the room. I was really, really, really nervous about it. I thought what we could do today was talk about, if you're a teacher, how can you survive your next observed class?What are some things that you might do differently when you're being observed to what you would do normally?Matt: Cool.Tracy: We've got three parts. The first part is what can teachers do before the observation, and the second?Ross: What can you do in the observation, and finally, Matt?Matt: What can you do after the observation?What can teachers do to prepare for an observed lesson?Ross: Before the lesson, I don't think we need to talk so much about planning. We have done a whole podcast on that. What are some other things maybe out with the plan that you think teachers need to do to prepare for an observed class?Matt: I was thinking about classroom things that you can do before the lesson. There's such easy things you can do. Getting the seating out of that lecture‑style seating, and just put it into a horseshoe, like know how many students you're going to have. Have your board work planned, have a nice layout prepared.Ross: Section off the board before you come in?Tracy: Yeah, or something really basic. Check the marker, is it working, and the lights, air conditioner, computer.Ross: Computer, projector because in a regular class, if those things break down, it's no big deal. If they break down in an observed class, it can be a disaster. You've got an hour to show your stuff, and you spend five minutes of it looking for a new marker, then that can be quite disastrous.For me, one of the most important things a teacher can do before the class is know what's expected of them. Pretty much every time I've observed has been slightly different standards or a slightly different form.If you're being observed, you need to make sure you know exactly what you're being assessed on. Some places I've worked, it was like at the beginning of the class you have to write the aim on the board.If you don't do that, you get marks off, or at the beginning of the class, you have to go over the homework with the students, and you have to set homework at the end. There has to be interactions between the students in the class.Tracy: Yeah.Matt: In my company now, I spent a long time creating the rubric to observe teachers on. It's true of every company. Your observer is there to make sure you're meeting those standards.Ross: In an ideal world, they should have sent that to you beforehand, but if they haven't, then you should probably ask for that, and find out what exactly is expected of you.Matt: That's a fair question. Most observers would probably [laughs] give it to you, it's not a surprise. It shouldn't be.Ross: For a lot of courses, and even when I was a manager as well, a standard procedure was before the class, the observer meets with the teacher. They say, "OK. Can you tell me what you've got planned today? Can you tell me about what's in the plan?"Do you guys have any tips for things for teachers in that pre‑observation meeting? What you would tell them to do or not to do?Matt: In the lesson itself, as an observer, I like to see teachers responding to the students who are in the classroom and not sticking to the lesson plan exactly as they prepared for it.You're teaching the students in the room, you're not just going through the lesson plan. In that pre‑lesson discussion, it's great if the teacher can show they have spent time thinking about those individuals who they'll be teaching, if possible.I'm thinking about those questions. When I'm asking questions of the observees before the lesson, a lot of times people view it as accusations, like I'm trying to steer them away from doing this, and I'm really not. I don't think any observer does that.Ross: I remember getting that advice as a new manager, "When you have that chat, don't freak the person out and question them." I would guess that's quite a common thing.Matt: You're saying it was my fault?[laughter]Ross: In that situation, you don't want to start second‑guessing yourself in the 11th hour, right before you go in. Probably best to stick with what you've spent time preparing.What should teachers do during an observed lesson?Ross: For during a lesson, it's easy to just talk about all the things you should do in any regular lesson. One of the biggest differences for being observed is you're likely to be nervous.One of the problems of being nervous is you end up talking faster, you end up talking more. What are some ways around that do you think?Tracy: Standing in front of the mirror, and see how their body language is. It's definitely going to affect how the student is going to ‑‑ or the observer ‑‑ perceive you as a teacher. If you feel nervous, maybe you can just take deep breath.Make sure that you break the long sentences into small sentences. Always remember you pause between different [inaudible 6:40] . Give yourself a few seconds to think about what you are going to talk about, what you are going to say to your students.Ross: For me, I try and do, in those situations where I know I'm going to be nervous, I do the power poses in the bathroom. Did you guys do that?Everyone's seen the TED talk of that, where you stand in the Superman pose or Superwoman pose, or whatever it is. You try and get more testosterone through doing that.Matt: I've tried it out. It might work for you, Ross. It's not my thing. [laughs]Ross: You're sitting like that now, so...[laughter]Ross: I always find, for me, that helps with the nerves. One of the main problems that teachers have in classes is, we always say, "Teach the students, don't teach the plan."You want to be responsive to the learners. That's so much harder if you're being observed and you've spent a lot of time on a plan. You can feel really invested whereas, normally, you plan something and it's like your shopping list on a bit of paper.Matt: The lesson you observed me on, Tracy, in the dip, I remember. I planned all the stuff, I got pictures of my students and stuff like that. A lot of them were absent from the lesson, and I just went with the lesson. I was frustrated, because I'd spent so many hours working on this lesson plan because the way I reacted to this change was not good.I don't mind if students don't get everything or if an activity doesn't work, but if the teacher reacts to that poorly in the lesson ‑‑ if they're visibly upset about it ‑‑ that's not good. [laughs]Ross: I find that often happens with stuff breaking. I can remember doing it myself as a trainee, showing this video, and the video stuttered and didn't play, then it threw me off. Remember afterwards it was like, "How did the lesson go?" I was like, "Oh, the video!"I find so often when you ask teachers afterwards, "How did the lesson go?" and they're like, whatever it is, "Oh, my PowerPoint didn't work!" You're like, "As the observer, I hardly noticed that."Those seem to be the things that teachers often fixate on. The tip is to not worry about those things. They're probably not as big of a deal as you think they are and just move on.Like you say, if you let it get to you, and you show your frustration, that's probably likely to have a much bigger and a much worse effect than the actual thing not working in the first place.Matt: The worst thing you can do is [laughs] say anything remotely aggressive in ESL classroom...Ross: Again, that's probably something you might not normally do, but because you're under bit more stressed and pressured, then you're probably more likely to do that than normal maybe, right?What can teachers do after an observed lesson?Ross: Let's talk a bit about after the lesson. The standard thing you're expected to do after a class is, usually, they'll give you some feedback, but often they'll ask you some questions first about how the class went, what you might do differently. Any things that you guys would advise teachers to say or not to say?Matt: Again, from the perspective of the observer, having asked reflective questions to trainees before, my thought going in to that as the observer is that I'm trying to train the teacher to think about their lessons and reflect on their lessons a little bit.I'm not trying to get the teachers to say, "This was the best lesson ever, the worst lesson ever." I'm trying to get them to think about it, and teach them how to do that after every lesson. The teacher is responsive to that, and is trying to do this reflective practice stuff, that's what I'm looking for.Tracy: I would say care about the quantity less than the quality of the things that you felt did really well or didn't work very well. For example, you might have, I don't know, 10, or 20, or even 30, 40 different points on the observation form or anything.You really don't have to cover all of them, it's impossible. You always can find something to work on. Just look at a couple things that you want to talk about in depth.Like Matt just mentioned, being reflective, not just go, "Oh, I didn't do really well, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, until 10." We want to hear. Point one, why it didn't work, how students reacted to it, what would you change?Ross: The key point there is prioritizing what were the most important things. You can always find things that went wrong.Another point leads into that is if you have ‑‑ and pretty much usually you do have ‑‑ some time between the end of the lesson and the chat afterwards. It's so important to use that time to take notes, and to decide what the things you are going to speak about.I see a lot of teachers who just, after a class, just sit and hang out with the students or something, or if the lesson's running over, they'll just keep teaching. You're like, "That's such an important time to spend and take some notes and get ready."One other thing I wanted to talk about was the cycle coming right round, which is usually after you've been observed and you reflect, and you might write your journal. You probably get some feedback from the tutor.At some point, you get observed again, maybe by the same tutor or the same manager. My final point on this ‑‑ with the squaring the circle ‑‑ is that when you come to teach the next class, that you look back to the notes from the previous class on what you got told that you can improve.Matt: In a perfect world, you're looking back at those notes periodically before the next observation [inaudible 12:26] . These are skills that you're actually developing in your everyday teaching rather than just for observations.Ross: Did you have a system for that after you did get that feedback?Matt: I don't have a system. Have you ever heard of this, there's a psychological term called rumination. They associate it with depression. This is not a cry for help.[laughter]Matt: It actually refers to a cow having multiple stomachs, and that it digests food several times. I find that I have this habit whenever I receive feedback ‑‑ especially critical feedback ‑‑ I go through that again, and again, and again. It's good for improving yourself. It's bad, maybe, for depressive people or whatever.[laughter]Matt: For a teacher, you should be critical of yourself sometimes. You should be thinking about ways you can improve, having that second opinion of that observer and what they had said, if you can ruminate on that, it's really helpful.Top Tips for Surviving Your Next Observed LessonRoss: Quick wrap‑up. What's your top tip for a teacher that's about to get observed tomorrow?Matt: It infuriated me when I had a manager who gave me this tip after an observation, but I actually like the tip. Be yourself. Be comfortable. If you're funny, be funny. However it is that you need to relax and be yourself, do that.Tracy: Just relax if it didn't go really well and just look into it. See what you can do and what you need to improve. How about you, Ross?Ross: We didn't really touch on this earlier, but it would just be know the one thing that you want the students to get out of the class.Tracy: Matt, thank you very much for coming to our podcast today.Matt: It was my pleasure, Tracy.Tracy: Thanks, everybody. Thanks for listening.Ross: Bye, everyone.Tracy: Bye.Matt: See you.

We interview Matthew Turner and Rob Lowe from the TEFLology Podcast about how podcast can positively influence teacher development and be help students inside and outside the classroom.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

This episode we look into the dark secret of the TEFL industry - teacher turnover. If you’re a manager, how many of these teacher turnover blunders are being made in your school?Tracy Yu: Welcome to the "TEFL Training Institute" podcast, the bite‑sized TEFL podcast for teachers, trainers and managers.Ross Thorburn: Tracy, how long have you worked in the same company for?Tracy: Almost 10 years. A long time.Ross: You must have renewed your contract a whole bunch of times then, have you?Tracy: Yeah.Ross: Can you tell me some of the reasons why you decided to stay?Tracy: I remember clearly the first time I renewed. I was really, really sure that I enjoyed the job teaching. I also enjoyed working with my colleagues and I liked the work environment. I listed the pros and cons and I think the schedule is not great but...Tracy: ...compared to some other factors, I think, yeah, I definitely want to stay.Ross: What about more recently?Tracy: For last two times, when I renewed contract, it's mainly because there were new challenges and the position has been changed. I can say got promoted or doing different role.Ross: When I do training with managers and I usually ask them, "What's the number one thing that motivates teachers?" Can you guess what they say?Tracy: Let me guess. I will say money...Ross: Yeah.Tracy: ...is one of them?Ross: Some people always say money and yet, again, there, none of the things that you said really were related to money. It was career development, it was your peers, it was enjoying teaching, all those different things.Tracy: I won't deny, salary increase would definitely going to be one reason why people, they are staying or they're changing jobs, but I don't think from my experience, that was the main reason why I did that.Ross: Today, we're going to look at teacher motivation and teacher retention and we've got three questions.Tracy: The first one, what are the common mistakes for teacher retention?Ross: What can managers and organizations do to retain teachers? Finally...Tracy: Why it's important for managers and organizations to keep teachers and to motivate them?What Are The Common Mistakes For Teacher Retention?Ross: Tracy, what do you think of some of the maybe common mistakes that managers and organizations make?Tracy: You mentioned earlier about money?Ross: Yeah.Tracy: I would say most people just assume, OK, no salary increase and compared to other organizations in this field, and the salary is not very competitive, that's why people leave because people live in the real world. They want to get more money, have a better living standard.Ross: Money is important, right?Tracy: Yeah. No one [laughs] is going to say no.[laughter]Tracy: Why do the managers still believe that's the main reason or the number one reason why people stay?Ross: Or why people leave? I think it's just a very 19th century, like a Victorian, very simple way of looking at motivation. A very capitalist way of looking at it. If you want people to do something, offer them money and they'll do it. I think the reason that doesn't work for teachers is because if you were someone that was really, really motivated by money, you wouldn't have become a teacher.Tracy: That's true. That's not the really wealthy industry, to be honest.[crosstalk]Ross: ...or you'd become a lawyer or you'd try to become a doctor, or you'd have become a sales person, but you wouldn't have moved to Prague and got a teaching job. At least for me, when I moved to China, I took a pay cut of about...I was getting paid, I think, a quarter or a fifth of what I getting paid before in the UK.That is not to say money is not important to me, but it's obviously not the main driving reason behind what I'm doing. Otherwise, I wouldn't take a 70 percent pay cut for a new job. I was sure that there was other factors that are important.Tracy: I think that will lead to the next one that I've been thinking about because a lot of time, the managers they believe what they believe. They never ask the teacher, "Is this the reason why you stay or is why the reason you leave?"Ross: There's a quote in the Bible, I think, isn't there? It's like, "Do unto others as you would have do unto you." Have you heard this before?Tracy: Yeah, I think so.[crosstalk]Tracy: It doesn't work...Ross: This is like treat other people the way you want to be treated.There's a quote from George Bernard Shaw who says, "Do not do unto others as they expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same." Obviously, different people are motivated by different things, but I think this is assumption that what motivates me must be the same as what motivates you.The big problem in organizations is that senior managers do get a high salary and probably are quite motivated by money. They may assume, "Oh, that must be the same for teachers," but it's not.Tracy: Yeah. That's a good point. A lot of managers of organizations don't really listen to teachers and what they really need and what motivates them because I think...We talk about sit down with teachers at different time, maybe before the probation or other probation six months or one year or different year before contract.You just maybe have a regular meeting or conversation with your teacher and just find out what's going on with them and what they really need.Ross: I think listening is the key thing there.Tracy: Exactly.Ross: If you're doing a review with someone after however long, that the main person speaking in the review to be the employee not the managers so you can find out more about what interests them, what their goals are, why they're doing the job. If you don't know those things, how can you expect to motivate someone?Tracy: A lot of teacher I talk to, at least, some teachers say, "Do you really think that I'm doing this job for money? No, because I want to really help people and to see my students develop, to learn something. I want to see their happy face at the end of the class." Don't assume people do or stay this job just because of money.What can managers and organizations do to retain teachers?Tracy: You've been a manager for a few years. What are the secrets for you as a manager to keep your staff?Ross: If you care for your staff and you say, "Oh, I know that you're going to leave one day. What I want to do in the next year, we want to give you some of the skills and things that are going to help you get to the next position, either on this company or outside this company."Say, you've told me you want to run your own center, school, or your own CertTESOL school, then great. "Great. OK, let's work on having a plan for you over the next year so that you can get skills, so that you'll be able to run your own school in a year's time, or two years' time." You're much more likely to stay with me for those two years.I think it's counter‑intuitive for people because I think people think, "Oh, I don't want to encourage my staff to leave." I think you want to encourage your staff to achieve their goals and those goals will probably usually be outside the company.For me, that secret is like listening to them, finding out what is it they want to achieve in the future, and then help them to make sure they get the skills in their current job that'll help them get there in the future. Your aim isn't to keep people until they're 65.Tracy: Yeah.[laughter]Ross: Your aim is to keep people as if keeping them for one year, keeping them for three years or four years.Tracy: That's an interesting point, though, because even for employee or for teachers and they stay longer and then automatically, we believe, "OK, the reason why I stay another year because I want to have a promotion." Of course, that's fine, but after what you mentioned, and then you think about, "OK, I'm going stay another year or two. What can I get out of it?"Ross: Yeah, exactly. That's why you want to talk to people about. What do you want to get out of staying here for another year and having that conversation with people?Tracy: That's my point. Just accept the position, the title, and the real skills and the competencies and knowledge and all that kinds of stuff, and people need to consider more. You know what I mean?Ross: I think that's something that managers need to help people to realize. For a lot of people, it's like, "Oh, I'm going to be standing up in front of a room of 15 kids again for a year teaching them ABC."[laughs] There's a lot more in a way of skills that you can get out of that that can help you to get a better job or something when you leave, or you can study a qualification or something that's going to help you get a different job when you leave.It's helping people realize what are the skills that you need for the future and then how can we make sure that you get those skills in your current position.Tracy: Yeah. In another word, I think, just to try to let them see their value in this team work, in this company...[crosstalk]Ross: It's just part, I think of recognizing people. I think it's about recognizing the right things. It's not about saying, "Well, well done. You got the most student retention, or you got the highest demonstration class conversion," or, "Well done. You came to work on time every day for the last month." It's about praising people for things that they want to be praised for.Tracy: Can I ask you here? I'm just confused that should we ask them or do you want me?Ross: You don't need to ask people like, "What do you want to be praised for exactly?" You can find out what people think that they're good at doing, and I think praising people for, "You made the most money for our company every month."That's great if it's a sales person because that is the role of a sales person, it's to make money. If it's a teacher and you praise them for making money, then you're not going to keep people who are very suited for the teaching profession.That all comes down to like you were saying at the beginning, getting to know people's motivation, understand...[crosstalk]Ross: ...and then sitting down with someone on the first day in the new job and say, "Why are you here? What do you want to get out of this?"Tracy: What if the teacher says, "I just want to come here to travel"?Ross: That's fine.Tracy: How can you help them?Ross: That was what I wanted to do in the beginning.Tracy: How can you do that to relate to their retention? Because you know they're going to leave. "I don't care..."Ross: I didn't leave. I came here to travel and I'm still in the same country, in the same organization 10 years later. People's motivations change and we know, again, from research that the majority of what's called Self‑initiated Expats, SIEs, so people who make the decision themselves to go abroad.One of the most common reasons, and the most common reason for language schools is, that they want to travel. Of course, give those people opportunities to do that but they might enjoy the job as I did. Like I really, really enjoyed teaching and as time has gone by, my motivations for staying in this profession, this industry have changed.Why it's important for managers and organizations to keep teachers and to motivate them?Tracy: We talked a lot about the common mistakes and how we motivate and keep teachers. Why do we do that? Why do we care about doing it?Ross: The main, I think, reason for big organizations is just it's very, very expensive to recruit teachers from abroad. You could save so much money by just keeping teachers in the same position for longer.That's the big picture. I think if it comes down to the small picture about teachers and students, then as a teacher, the most important thing you can do is understand and get to know your students.Tracy: Yeah, that's the common feedback that I heard when I met some students in the center and just say, "Oh, OK. After my six months alternative leave, I came back and there's no teacher in this school. I really know. They all left." I think that's a really, really bad effect on the students. It's definitely bad for the students.Ross: It's not necessarily saying that every teacher who's been teaching for five years is better than every teacher who's been teaching for six months. I think it's pretty much always true that you're a better teacher after five years than you were after one year. I definitely was.Tracy: Another thing is, similar to recruitment, is training, because we're doing training. [laughs] You know how much time and efforts we spend with the teachers and then they leave.That's the most frustrating thing for a trainer, at least for me. I have the teachers, I spend all the time, I'll be one or two weeks with them, and then you'll just see in six months or a year and they just left. They can do a really good job but...you know what I mean, and have to train new people again, again, again, and again.Ross: Which is really, really costly for organizations, right?Tracy: Yeah, exactly because they have to pay us to do training and stuff.Ross: This is something that's becoming more and more common not just in education but everywhere. If you look at my parents, they pretty much stayed in the same jobs for about 30‑something years. For your parents, how long did they work in the same companies for?Tracy: Their whole life, yeah.Ross: Yeah.Tracy: Definitely. More than 30 years.Ross: Right. I think now, things are changing a lot faster and I think the world average according to LinkedIn is only something like four years that people stay in the same company.Tracy: Of course, nowadays, we don't expect people to stay in the same company, same position 5, 10 years because that's unrealistic. Again, don't want to spend a lot of time and money, keep hiring new people and training them.Wrap UpTracy: Ross, you just started a new job. If you have a chance to tell your manager three things that can motivate you, what they are going to be?Ross: The team I work with is really important in my last job. I really loved all the people that I had worked with and that kept me there for quite a long time.As a manager, having control over who you hire is really, really important. Things like your work schedule and your work‑life balance is also super important especially nowadays. That's something that research has shown as important for every generation.For me, working overtime isn't a problem occasionally, but I know of some people and friends who've had to work six days a week and 12 hours a day every day for two years. Those people obviously quit.Making sure there's some work‑life balance. Professional growth and development, it might not be getting like doing tons of training courses or anything, but it might just be the opportunity to research and present at conferences.Tracy: That's very good advice.Ross: I hope she's listening.Tracy: [laughs] Good luck. All right. Bye, everyone.

For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Tracy: Hi, everyone. Welcome to our podcast today. We've got our special guest...Dan Elsworth: This is Dan Elsworth.Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Dan, very awesome to have you here.Dan: It's good to be here.Ross: Cool. For any of you that know Dan, he's a, I was going to sa…Tracy: Hi, everyone. Welcome to our podcast today. We've got our special guest...Dan Elsworth: This is Dan Elsworth.Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Dan, very awesome to have you here.Dan: It's good to be here.Ross: Cool. For any of you that know Dan, he's a, I was going to say, jack of all trades.[laughter][crosstalk]Dan: It's as good as any explanation...Ross: One of his specific trades is testing.Dan: I work in English language testing or assessment. I was an English teacher before. I've been an IELTS examiner. I've designed courses and things like that. At the moment, I'm running a large English language center. Not as large as some of the really large ones.Ross: [laughs]Dan: Actually, it's probably quite small in comparison to others. We work in about 80 countries at the moment.Ross: Wow. 80 not 18?Dan: 80. We actually did a test in North Korea.Tracy: Wow!Ross: Wow! That's so cool.Dan: Yeah. When I started working there, I got a parcel at my desk one day that just said Dan Elsworth and postage stamps said North Korea. That was quite exciting for a minute. Another thing that we did was when Aung San Suu Kyi came to power in Burma or half came to power, all of her ministers took one of our tests on the day they went to democracy.It's the two things that I can say is very interesting about my work. I've used them all up right at the beginning.[laughter]Ross: [inaudible 1:38] interesting podcast. If you could turn off...[crosstalk][laughter]Ross: Before we get into it, can I ask you, what's the difference between testing and assessment? Because I use those terms interchangeably.Dan: To be honest, it depends who you ask in the industry. I think generally, the way it's used colloquially is that testing is a formalized process in that it tends to fit into a certain amount of set time. It tends to be like a specific measurement instrument.An assessment is a broadened category. It includes testing but it could include formative assessment or it could include some form of observation. The problem with all of these types of definitions is that when you really get down into the detail, the lines are pretty blurry anyway. I would just say use them interchangeably unless you're particularly worried about the kind of semantics to that, I guess.Ross: With Dan today, we're going to concentrate on testing and as usual, we have three questions. The first question is, what are some different kinds of tests?Tracy: Number two, how do you write a test?Dan: And number three, what does that mean for teachers?What is Testing? What Types of Language Test Are There?Ross: You mentioned already, Dan, what's the difference between assessment and testing. Do you want to tell us a bit more about what is testing? When does it happen and what sort of tests?Dan: There are few different types of tests. The ones that teachers normally come across can be divided into a few categories. Again, you get blurred lines between those categories.What they'll often come across is an achievement test. An achievement test is at the end of a course and one of the things that identifies an achievement test is that it's a set curriculum, it normally covers a very thin slice of the syllabus and it's always specifically around something that you've already done.Teachers probably do that quite a lot. Problem with achievement tests is that there's not a lot of investment in them. Unfortunately, a lot of course materials that you get out there generically on the market at the moment, you buy a set of course books that are all beautifully designed with nice pictures.Then you get this kind of flimsy paper booklet, or sometimes, set of PDFs and those are your achievement tests. They're not particularly accurate measurement instruments because they're not really used to make any important decisions.Ross: Why bother doing them, then? Just to assure the parents that it wasn't a waste of money taking the...?Dan: That's often a good reason as any.[laughter]Dan: It's a business. I mean, with any assessment, when you're asking what the point is, what you're doing is your asking what the decision is that's being made about that candidate, about that student. In some language schools, there is no decision being made. All you're doing is giving them some feedback on how they've done so that they can take that away and think about it.In other places, that decision is a bit more important and so it means it detects what course they get into in future. When I was at a Beijing school the other day, they were using our tests and it decided whether the kids are streamed into a course that takes three years or a course that takes four years.Ross: Wow. That's a big decision.Dan: It's a big decision. Generally, the more important the decision, the more investment is made in the test, the more accurate it is. Achievement test is normally quite low investment.Ross: Can you give us an example there of a test that's the opposite and it's high investment?Dan: High investment test would be a proficiency test like IELTS or TOEFL. Those proficiency tests they tend to cover a huge range. If you're looking CFR, they'll go all the way from A1 to C1 or C2.Ross: Everything, basically?Dan: Everything. The problem with that is you have to sample from each of those areas. You can ask a few A1 questions, a few A2 questions. You have to be very careful and do lots of analysis on the questions. In testing they are often called items. I occasionally call them an item by mistake.Ross: [laughs]Dan: That's why. You have to do lots of analysis on those. You have to spend a lot of time researching it because the decisions are made on the back of a proficiency test, particularly ones used for immigration or university entry, are really important.You have a huge impact on people's lives which is why governments, universities and other people use them will want to know that they've been carefully thought through. We've talked about achievement tests, proficiency tests. There's a couple of others in there as well. You might have a diagnostic test.Ross: This is when you're about to start a course, is it, to put the right level?Dan: Yeah.Ross: Then the sales people just put you in a high level...[crosstalk]Dan: I would call that a placement test.Ross: Ah. OK.Dan: I get asked about placement Tests quite often. Placement tests are very commercial objects in that they always want them to be about 10 to 15 minutes long. The decision isn't very important because it's useless...[crosstalk]Ross: [laughs] The sales person puts the student wherever they want to.Dan: Exactly.[laughter]Dan: All they get, even if the language school is being fairly legitimate, they'll often have a process if a student is obviously in the wrong class, you move them and they've lost a couple of weeks, maybe. That is what you call a placement test.The diagnostic test is a bit more, like...Ross: Oh, can I guess this one? Is this when you find out what sections of your skills that you're good in or bad in...?[crosstalk]Dan: Exactly.Ross: ...strong in speaking, bad at listening, strong in writing.Dan: Exactly.Tracy: It reminds me, like the teacher doing from learner needs analysis, like learner profile for teaching complications. They have interview different number of students and then really find out where they are, then try to plan the lessons and make it very personalized for this person. That's really interesting.Dan: We were talking earlier about the difference between testing and assessment. Again, I think the colloquial definition is a bit more important than the scientific one.I would call that a type of assessment. It might include a test. You might have a test result in there. You might use a placement test under diagnostic test. You might use a couple of measurement tools but you're also using observation, you're using some of the student's coursework, you're using some formative assessment, you're seeing how they interact in class.Building a learner profile is a type of assessment. You're not making a value judgment, you're not saying...Well, maybe you are.Ross: [laughs]Dan: With all the teachers maybe you are...But essentially, you're trying to put together a picture of that student so that you can make decisions about how you interact with them.Ross: Or what to teach them, I guess?[crosstalk]Dan: Who they should work with, or what kinds of activities they're comfortable with. That way, I'm not going to learning styles or anything.[laughter]How Are Language Tests Written?Ross: Nice Next thing Dan, do you want to tell us a bit about how tests are written and who writes them?Dan: It's an interesting area because it's a particular type of person and the job is called an item writer. Remember earlier I said that most assessment people call the question an item for reasons best known for themselves.[laughter]Dan: An item writer will write an individual item. They have a very specific set of specifications. They'll put a stimulus.If it's a reading test, it's a reading passage. They'll normally not write that themselves. They'll normally find that online or it will be a listening audio, video or a picture and then you'll have a few other things in that item. You'll have a stem which is like the beginning of your question or prompt, and then you'll have some ways of responding.Now, there's two types of response. We're just going through lots of definitions.[laughter]Dan: But it is important. You have selected response, which is where you're selecting multiple choice, reordering exercise, or constructed response, which is when you're writing an answer or report speaking. They write them, then they normally go through lots of quality assurance and then they try it out around the world.Let's do it, say, I'm writing a grammar test. I'll try it out in lots of different countries. I'll give some trial candidates a test. In that test, there'll be some items where I know how good they are. What an item does is that it divides a group of people in two, people who can do it and people who can't, normally.Sometimes you have more sophisticated ones. You have some that you know how they performed and you don't. You use the ones that you know how they performed to decide roughly what level someone is and you use the other ones and you work out how they...[crosstalk]Ross: ...is it? Does this do what I thought it did?Dan: Yeah. Sometimes they'll behave really weirdly. Sometimes they'll do the opposite of what you think they're going to do. Let's say, if it's a multiple‑choice question, the right answer is normally called a key and the other ones are normally called a distractor.Sometimes, the distractor will be too attractive. It would just seem so right for a low‑level candidate because it's something that they've been taught about in school but maybe slightly in the wrong way, and that won't be a very good item because it will draw too many people to that [inaudible 10:06] . It's quite an art to get it the right level of attractiveness.Sometimes, it will work very well for candidates who are around B1 or B2 but for some reason, low‑level candidates will be getting it more right if you...[crosstalk]Ross: Oh, really?Tracy: I see.Ross: ...you start off getting it right and you get it wrong then you get it right.Dan: You'll find that even the best written questions sometimes have these weird behaviors around high or low‑levels within certain areas. Actually, you end up throwing away a lot of them.Ross: For me, I remember my first year as a teacher, I taught this group of primary school kids and at the end of the term, I had to make my own speaking test for them. [laughs] I obviously didn't know what I was doing at all. One of the things I taught them was adjectives for what people look like.One of the question I put in there was, "What does your best friend look like?" [laughs] I remember one the girls who was actually one of the better students in the class looked to me with a puzzled look and paused for a second and went, "My best friend looks like a bird."[laughter]Ross: They had obviously never learned that by way asking questions. I wanted to ask you, for teachers, if you're ever in that position as a teacher and you have to write a basic test for one of those reasons, what are some simple rules that teachers might follow?Dan: Actually, the thing that is most approachable to teachers quite short but regular quizzes and assessments. Something that you're doing fairly regularly, it's fairly low stakes and you're doing in every class, that's going to give you more information. It's also going to mean that you can learn better.You write a pop quiz that's got 10 questions and you've got, "What does your best friend look like?" and you get some really weird answers, but you start to think about how people are responding and that's a really interesting exercise.How Does Testing Affect Teaching and Learning?Ross: Dan, final thing to talk about with you with testing today is how do tests affect what teachers end up doing in the classroom?Dan: That's a really important question. It's an important question for the assessment community and it's called wash back, sometimes impact or a few other words. It means when you introduce a test or an assessment to any kind of education system, you distort that education system.As soon as a teacher or a student knows there's going to be a test at some point in their education system, they affect how they behave. If the test is not very good at measuring what you're trying to measure, you'll get a negative effect and that's why it's called negative wash back.Ross: This is like one of the ones where it's a speaking test but it's tested through multiple choice so none at the class anyone speaks, they just practice multiple choice questions.Dan: That's right. Or it might be that they know that, for example, that there's 800 questions they might be asked in that test and so they spend all of their time just practicing those 800 hundred questions because they've got all of the past papers but they're not actually practicing the language.Or it could be that that test focuses very specifically on one skill area, receptive skills are very common, and grammar and vocabulary, just easier to assess its scale.Ross: Usually this is one of the reasons why speaking often happens so little in a lot of classrooms it's because it's really difficult to test.Dan: It's very difficult to assess at scale and cost effectively, but actually, it's one of the first things that we do as language teachers. One of the first skills that a language teacher learns is how to assess someone's speaking skills and get to know it but it's just very hard to scale that.You can have positive wash back where, let's say, you're in an education system where there isn't much speaking being practiced. If you introduce a decent speaking test into that education system, in a cost‑effective way, suddenly everyone's going to spend more time practicing speaking.That will mean that they have more opportunities later in life. It means they're better prepared to pass a high‑stakes exams or get into a good university.When people talk about, in practicing backwash or wash back or whatever, they often talk about it in a negative sense, but actually, a lot of the contracts I've seen it working in, if you're replacing something that's old or wasn't there at all or needs some adjustment, you can have a really positive effect on people's lives.

"Plan-teach-reflect" - everything starts from lesson planning. This episode we look at what to put in a plan, how to plan when you don't have enough time and how to make your lesson go according to plan.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

We discuss how to help students get as much as possible from role plays and also go off on tangents about burning witches and dungeons and dragons…For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

We interview Jessica Keller who has recruited over 1000 ESL teachers in China, Korea, Japan and the USA about the importance of recruitement as well as do's and don'ts for schools and teachersFor more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

We talk with Ross' parents about the differences that teaching has seen over the last 40 years, how to motivate yourself throughout your teaching career and what advice they have for young teachers working with older teachers.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

We speak with three teacher trainers (Simon Galloway, Ray Davila and Dave Weller) about their careers; where they started, where they are now and how they got there.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

We interview Jason Anderson about "the hidden paradigm in ELT", Context, Analysis, Practice as well as how teachers can set context in lessons and what stages we go through in lesson staging and planning.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Plan-teach-reflect, plan-teach-reflect - the reflective cycle is drummed into new teachers, but what does reflection actually mean? We look at why reflection is important, the barriers that stop teachers from reflecting and how to overcome some of these.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

If schools, managers and trainers don’t develop autonomy in teachers, how can we expect teachers to develop autonomy in their students? We look at the contradictions and challenges surrounding teacher autonomy.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Materials creation can be both an outlet for teachers' creativity and an opportunity to make lessons more relevant to students. On the flip side they can also be a giant time-drain and introduce uncertainty to students. For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

We discuss how much we should change our approach based on our students, the importance of connections and to what extent courses like the CELTA and CertTESOL meet the needs of new teachers.

Find out about online teaching, common challenges and the affect online teaching has on the TEFL industryFor more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

What is the difference between teaching and teacher training? Which teaching skills work for training? Which don't? Listen to find out.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Listening might be silent, but it's not a passive skill. Listen to find out how to run a listening activity, how to integrate listening into more activities and why you should teach it more.

You can take a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. You can take a teacher to training, but you can't make them develop. We'll discuss the differences between "training" and "development", what "development" actually means, and what motivates teachers to develop.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Most students will spend less than 1% of their time studying English. Find out how to make your students more independent and what you're already doing to make your students autonomous.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Research shows that students forget 98% of what they learn in class within a month of first learning it. We'll look at strategies to select vocabulary, teach it and help students remember what they've learned.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Becoming a new EFL teacher is almost as hard as learning a new language. We look at typical challenges that new teachers face, consider strategies that teachers and mentors can use to overcome these and help you decide if TEFL is right profession for you.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

You can't teach all of the students all of the time, but you can teach all of the students some of the time. This episode we look at what mixed ability classes are, how to plan for them and how to differentiate on the spot.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

We know that people change their behavior when they are being watched. But is the same true of our students in class? We look into the Hawthorne effect, the psychology of being observed, the advantages and disadvantages of different types of monitoring and the key to setting up successful group work activities.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Conventional wisdom tells us students should speak as little of their L1 (first language) as possible in class so they can speak more English. We look at the assumptions this is based on, consider when we need students to speak English and when it can be beneficial for students to use their L1 in English class. Finally we'll look at some activities which make use of students' L1 which will help them learn English.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

While there are differences between teaching adults and teaching young learners, there are also a lot of similarities. We look at some common themes that cover all age groups as well as looking some of the biggest differences. You'll also hear tips on what skills kids teachers can carry over into teaching adults (if you need to teach adults as part of a teaching qualification) and vice versa.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Learning styles, only speaking English in class, multiple intelligences - there are dozens of neuromyths that guide teachers behavior in the class. We interview ESL blogger and DipTESOL course director Dave Weller about some of the most common misconceptions teachers have and consider how teachers can stay up to date apply the most relevant research with their students.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Are you a teacher? Do you want to be a manager? Special guest Andy Hockley (author of “From Teacher to Manager”) tells us the biggest challenges teachers face as they climb the TEFL career ladder and helps you look in your crystal ball and figure out what’s next in your career.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Have you ever memorized a bunch of phrases for a trip abroad, arrived in a foreign country, been put on the spot and could remember nothing? Stress affects the language production of both English teachers on vacation and on students in class. Listen to find out how the factors you need to think about when lesson planning to make sure your students don't get overloaded.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Teachers have used readings readings in different ways over the last centaury - from translating into their first language to repeating meaningless sentences. Listen for techniques which can help students to guess meaning, relate content to their lives and act as a springboard to get students to have a meaningful conversation.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

It is, and we found six actors and one monarch in waiting to show you why! Learn practical techniques you can use when you lesson plan and teach to help your students use sentence stress to be more easily understood.

Are you a manager, trainer or teacher mentor? Have you ever told your teachers that they needed to give their lessons more spark? More energy? Lower their teacher talking time? Give their students better feedback? And then found nothing changed? Don't worry, we'll tell you why...For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

What's the world's second largest English speaking country? The UK? Canada? Australia? Try again. It's India. If you don't think that's weird, how about the fact that there are more people learning English in China than there are English speakers in America? What does that mean for us language teachers? Hit play to find out.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Every one of your students brings to class a computer more powerful than the one NASA used to send men to the moon. It's usually in their pockets, it's called a mobile phone and it's surprisingly good and helping students learn language. We love chalk and talk just as much as you do, so who better to learn how to use technology in the classroom from than your fellow technophobes?For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Were you expecting little angels and found you ended up teaching little devils? Are your students more interested in running around the classroom than reading the course book? Listen to hear the three keys to getting your students to behave without ever raising your voice.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel