TEFL Training Institute Podcast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We speak with Professor Alan Maley, author of Creativity and English Language Teaching, about how constraints can prompt creativity in teachers and what teachers can do to bring in their lives, interests and personalities to make the classrooms more creative.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

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

Mark Hancock (author of Pronunciation Games, English Pronunciation in Use, Pron Pack and Pen Pictures) tells us about basing lessons around pictures and using these to generate stories, descriptions, language needs and much more.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

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

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

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

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

Dr. Paul Thompson from the University of Birmingham talks to me about how teachers can use corpora and corpus data with students. We discuss the benefits of using corpora with students. What teachers and students need to know about corpora like COCA (The Corpus of Contemporary American English) to be able to use these effectively. Paul also tells us about his favorite corpus-based activities which teachers can use with students.Learn more about Campus TalkVisit COCASupport the podcast by buying us a coffeeFor more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website: www.TEFLtraininginstitute.comSign up for our mailing listWatch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

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

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

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

Professor Michael McCarthy joins me to talk about what vocabulary we should teach and how to teach it. Mike tells us about the most common words in English and what non-common words we should teach our students, what aspects of vocabulary we should teach at different levels and how to stop students from forgetting the vocabulary they've already learned.Visit Mike's websiteSupport the podcast by buying us a coffeeFor more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website: www.TEFLtraininginstitute.comSign up for our mailing listWatch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How can teacher education help make teachers more autonomous? How do observations from supervisors and student testing encroach on teachers' decision making? And how can observations and testing be redesigned to give teachers the freedom to teach students the way they need to be taught?For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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