Dave Weller

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 

in class. We discuss prediction activities, what engages students in stories, and how to do follow-up activities.<a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website</a> <a href="https://www.buymeacoffee.com/RossThorburn" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!</a><a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com/diploma-in-tesol" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChZoXAq-mPNQMdMOligUAIA" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel</a>

How to Use Stories in Class (with Dave Weller)

Jeremy Harmer

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 

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? <a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website</a> <a href="https://www.buymeacoffee.com/RossThorburn" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!</a><a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com/diploma-in-tesol" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChZoXAq-mPNQMdMOligUAIA" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel</a>

Deliberate Learning (with Jeremy Harmer)

Matt Courtois

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 

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?<a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website</a> <a href="https://www.buymeacoffee.com/RossThorburn" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!</a><a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com/diploma-in-tesol" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChZoXAq-mPNQMdMOligUAIA" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel</a>

Observing New Teachers (with Matt Courtois)

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 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?<a href="https://www.buymeacoffee.com/rossthorburn" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Support the podcast by buying us a coffee</a><a href="http://www.tefltraininginstitute.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website: www.TEFLtraininginstitute.com</a><a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com/mailinglist" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sign up for our mailing list</a><a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChZoXAq-mPNQMdMOligUAIA" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel</a> <a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com/diploma-in-tesol" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses</a>

Episode 200! Best and Worst Common and Uncommon Teaching Practices

Anne Burns

Thomas Farrell

Karin Xie

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 

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.<a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website</a> <a href="https://www.buymeacoffee.com/RossThorburn" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!</a><a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com/diploma-in-tesol" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChZoXAq-mPNQMdMOligUAIA" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel</a>

How To Get To Know Your Students (with Anne Burns, Thomas Farrell and Karin Xie)

Amol Padwad

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

I speak with Amol Padwad from <a href="https://aud.ac.in/faculty/dr-amol-padwad" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Ambedkar University Delhi</a> 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?<a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">For more podcast, videos and blogs, visit our website</a><a href="https://www.buymeacoffee.com/RossThorburn" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!</a><a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com/diploma-in-tesol" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses</a><a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChZoXAq-mPNQMdMOligUAIA" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel</a>

What Motivates Teachers to Develop?  (With Amol Padwad)

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 

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.<a href="https://www.buymeacoffee.com/rossthorburn" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Support the podcast by buying us a coffee</a><a href="http://www.tefltraininginstitute.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website: www.TEFLtraininginstitute.com</a><a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com/mailinglist" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sign up for our mailing list</a><a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChZoXAq-mPNQMdMOligUAIA" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel</a>

Encouraging Young Learners to be Creative (with Matt Courtois)

Pete Jones

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 

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.<a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/petejonesielts" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Watch Pete’s YouTube Channel</a><a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website</a> <a href="https://www.buymeacoffee.com/RossThorburn" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!</a><a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com/diploma-in-tesol" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChZoXAq-mPNQMdMOligUAIA" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel</a>

Demystifying IELTS Speaking (With Pete Jones)

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 

Kirsten Campbell from Busuu joins me to discuss how to keep learners engaged in learning using an app.<a href="https://www.buymeacoffee.com/rossthorburn" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Support the podcast by buying us a coffee</a><a href="http://www.tefltraininginstitute.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website: www.TEFLtraininginstitute.com</a><a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com/mailinglist" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sign up for our mailing list</a><a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChZoXAq-mPNQMdMOligUAIA" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel</a> <a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com/diploma-in-tesol" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses</a>

Motivation in App-Based Learning for Adults (with Kirsten Campbell)

Sandie Mourão

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

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

Independent Play in English with Very Young Learners (with Sandie Mourão)

Far too much of language teaching literature is, to quote Stephen Krashen, “Far too long, far too incomprehensible and far too full of jargon,” not to mention far too expensive. The TEFL Training Institute podcast is short, easy to understand and free. In each 15-minute episode, we discuss practical, thought-provoking or controversial topics with our friends, and some of the biggest names in language teaching. From motivation to materials, training to teenagers, approaches to assessment, if you want to become a better teacher, trainer or manager, start here. With host Ross Thorburn.

I am an ESL teacher and I follow quite a few TESOL podcasts. This is by far the most inspiring one not just because of the quality of the content but also the passion of hosts.

The most inspiring podcast for TESOL teachers/ teacher trainers

The length is perfect for busy schedules. The topics are pertinent. The info is concise and well-organized. I find great takeaways from each episode. Grateful for this podcast.

Practical in So Many Ways

Far too much of language teaching literature is, to quote Stephen Krashen, “Far too long, far too incomprehensible and far too full of jargon,” not to mention far too expensive. The TEFL Training Institute podcast is short, easy to understand and free. In each 15-minute episode, we discuss practical, thought-provoking or controversial topics with our friends, and some of the biggest names in language teaching. From motivation to materials, training to teenagers, approaches to assessment, if you want to become a better teacher, trainer or manager, start here. With host Ross Thorburn.

TEFL Training Institute Podcast

Stephen krashen

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.

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.<a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website</a> <a href="https://www.buymeacoffee.com/RossThorburn" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!</a><a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com/diploma-in-tesol" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChZoXAq-mPNQMdMOligUAIA" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel</a> 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 <a href="http://sdkrashen.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">sdkrashen.com</a>. SD Krashen operators are standing by. <a href="http://sdkrashen.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">sdkrashen.com</a>, 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.

What Teachers Need to Know (and What’s Stopping Them) (with Stephen Krashen)

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 

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.<a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website</a> <a href="https://www.buymeacoffee.com/RossThorburn" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!</a><a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com/diploma-in-tesol" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChZoXAq-mPNQMdMOligUAIA" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel</a>

Podcast: Who Owns English? It's Not Who You Think

Marek Kiczkowiak

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 

Marek talks with us about the discrimination non-native English teachers face in finding jobs, being promoted and being respected in general.<a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website</a> <a href="https://www.buymeacoffee.com/RossThorburn" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!</a><a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com/diploma-in-tesol" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChZoXAq-mPNQMdMOligUAIA" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel</a>

Xmas Special - Native-speakerism and Discrimination (with Marek Kiczkowiak)

Fifi Pyatt

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 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…<a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website</a> <a href="https://www.buymeacoffee.com/RossThorburn" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!</a><a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com/diploma-in-tesol" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChZoXAq-mPNQMdMOligUAIA" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel</a>

Podcast: Taking Role Plays from Nerdiness to Awesomeness (with Fifi Pyatt)

Debbie Hepplewhite

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.

Not sure if you’ve been teaching reading right? Listen to Debbie Hepplewhite and find out what you might have been doing wrong…<a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website</a> <a href="https://www.buymeacoffee.com/RossThorburn" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!</a><a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com/diploma-in-tesol" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChZoXAq-mPNQMdMOligUAIA" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel</a> 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 <a href="http://www.syntheticphonics.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">www.syntheticphonics.com</a>. I hope you've enjoyed the interview, and see you again next time.

Podcast: How not to Teach Phonics (With Debbie Hepplewhite)

John Hughes

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.

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?<a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website</a> <a href="https://www.buymeacoffee.com/RossThorburn" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!</a><a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com/diploma-in-tesol" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChZoXAq-mPNQMdMOligUAIA" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel</a> 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 <a href="http://www.elteachertrainer.com?" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">www.elteachertrainer.com?</a>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.

Applying Critical Thinking In Classes and Materials Writing (with John Hughes)

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.

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.<a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website</a> <a href="https://www.buymeacoffee.com/RossThorburn" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!</a><a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com/diploma-in-tesol" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChZoXAq-mPNQMdMOligUAIA" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel</a> 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.

Principles for Vocabulary Teaching (with Hugh Dellar)

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.

We discuss the differences between theory and practice in teacher development and the most effective was to learn from theory and learn from practice.<a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website</a> <a href="https://www.buymeacoffee.com/RossThorburn" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!</a><a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com/diploma-in-tesol" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChZoXAq-mPNQMdMOligUAIA" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel</a> 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, <a href="http://barefootteflteacher.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">barefootteflteacher.com</a>. 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 <a href="http://www.barefootteflteacher.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">www.barefootteflteacher.com</a>.Ross: Wonderful. Thanks again.Dave: Welcome.

Podcast: Learning from Theory, Learning From Practice (with Dave Weller)

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 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.<a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website</a> <a href="https://www.buymeacoffee.com/RossThorburn" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!</a><a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com/diploma-in-tesol" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChZoXAq-mPNQMdMOligUAIA" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel</a>

Episode 75! What's The Best Way to Learn a Language (With Dave Weller)

Mario Rinvolucri

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?

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?

Student Centered Vocabulary Teaching (with Mario Rinvolucri)

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 

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.<a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website</a> <a href="https://www.buymeacoffee.com/RossThorburn" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!</a><a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com/diploma-in-tesol" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChZoXAq-mPNQMdMOligUAIA" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel</a>

Podcast: Stop Reading And Start TAVI-ing! Get The Most Out Of Texts In The Classroom

Mark Hancock

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 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 speech<a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website</a> <a href="https://www.buymeacoffee.com/RossThorburn" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!</a><a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com/diploma-in-tesol" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChZoXAq-mPNQMdMOligUAIA" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel</a> 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.

Understanding Connected Speech (with Mark Hancock)

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.

<a href="https://amzn.to/31HJtpk" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Find Lesson Planning for Language Teachers</a><a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website</a> <a href="https://www.buymeacoffee.com/RossThorburn" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!</a><a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com/diploma-in-tesol" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChZoXAq-mPNQMdMOligUAIA" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel</a> 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.

Principles For Designing Better Tasks (with Dave Weller)

Vivian Cook

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 

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.<a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website</a> <a href="https://www.buymeacoffee.com/RossThorburn" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!</a><a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com/diploma-in-tesol" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChZoXAq-mPNQMdMOligUAIA" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel</a>

How Do L2 Users Think Differently from Monolinguals? (Vivian Cook’s Career Highlights)

Ray Davila

"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 

"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.<a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website</a> <a href="https://www.buymeacoffee.com/RossThorburn" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!</a><a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com/diploma-in-tesol" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChZoXAq-mPNQMdMOligUAIA" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel</a>

Podcast: Lessons about Lesson Planning (with Ray Davila)

Diederik Van Gorp

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.

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.

The Art of Story Arcs and Transitions in Language Lessons (With Diederik Van Gorp)

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.

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.<a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website</a> <a href="https://www.buymeacoffee.com/RossThorburn" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!</a><a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com/diploma-in-tesol" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChZoXAq-mPNQMdMOligUAIA" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel</a> 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.

Questions About Questions (with Matt Courtois & Karin Xie)

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

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 Weller<a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website</a> <a href="https://www.buymeacoffee.com/RossThorburn" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!</a><a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com/diploma-in-tesol" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChZoXAq-mPNQMdMOligUAIA" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel</a> 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 Students Don't Like Language Class (With Dave Weller)

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.

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 <a href="http://www.barefootteflteacher.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">www.barefootteflteacher.com</a>.Ross: Great. Dave, thanks again for coming on.Dave: You're very welcome.

Ethics of English Education (With Dave Weller)

Allan Crocker

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.

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.<a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website</a> <a href="https://www.buymeacoffee.com/RossThorburn" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!</a><a href="https://www.tefltraininginstitute.com/diploma-in-tesol" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChZoXAq-mPNQMdMOligUAIA" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel</a> 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.

Getting Time on Your Side (with Allan Crocker)

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