Podcast appearances and mentions of ross one

With Ross Douthat, Author, and New York Times Opinion Columnist   With spring approaching, we look forward to the opportunity to spend more time outdoors. But while we're enjoying the warm weather and sunshine, we also need to be aware of the heightened risk of contracting tick bites. Although tick exposure might occur any time of year, ticks tend to be at their most active during the warmer months of April through September and we need to be extra cautious. Reducing our exposure to ticks isn't simply about avoiding an annoying insect bite, it's about the very real threat of contracting a serious tick-borne infection such as Lyme disease or Rocky Mountain spotted fever.   According to the CDC, Lyme disease is the most frequent tick-borne infection with over 300,000 new cases diagnosed every year in the United States. Keep in mind that since the ticks that transmit Lyme disease, deer ticks, are roughly about the size of a pinhead when they come out in late spring and early summer, they're often difficult to see. That's why it's so important to avoid getting bitten. The CDC recommends a number of simple precautions we can take to avoid tick bites while still enjoying our time outdoors. One of the best ways to protect ourselves is by being careful to avoid tick habitats. Ticks love to hide in areas of tall grasses and heavily wooded areas. When hiking, it's best to stay in the middle of the trail and avoid uncut, grassy edges where ticks may be lurking. Since ticks get Lyme disease from mice, it's important to do everything we can to eliminate mouse habitats and avoid attracting them to our gardens or campsites. This includes eliminating mouse-friendly wood piles and rock piles where mice live and breed.   Try to avoid going barefoot and whenever possible, wear long-sleeved clothing. Apply and re-apply insect repellent, preferably one containing DEET. Another recommendation is to use Permethrin, a commonly-used tick pesticide that can be applied to clothing and will safely remain on clothes for months without having to be reapplied. It's equally important to protect our beloved pets. Dogs are especially susceptible to tick bites and tickborne diseases. Work with your veterinarian to discuss Tick prevention. In addition to keeping our pets healthy and tick-free, we are also guarding against them unwittingly bringing these nasty insects into our homes.   One of the most frightening aspects of Lyme disease is that it is often hard to diagnose and if left untreated, it can lead to horrific long-term consequences. That's what happened to New York Times columnist, author, and podcast host, Ross Douthat. If you have any questions as to how debilitating and serious a tick bite can become, you'll want to check out Florine's December 2021 interview with Ross as he discussed his book, The Deep Places, which documented his five-year journey and ultimate recovery from Lyme disease.   What You'll Hear on This Episode: How was Ross's life before his illness? How did the symptoms begin? When did Ross first get the diagnosis of Lyme disease? What treatment did Ross get, and did it help? Does Ross know when he got bit? What inspired Ross to write his book Privilege? How writing runs in Ross's family. Was Ross healthy before his illness? Why does Lyme Disease persist so badly in people? How did Ross's geographic location affect his diagnosis? Did doctors dismiss Ross's symptoms? How Lyme disease treatment can be very costly. How did his illness impact Ross's family? Did Ross try any homeopathic approaches? How long did Ross suffer before he got any relief? Is there a chance that Ross's illness will come back? How did Ross get through the dark times? What would listeners be surprised to learn about Ross? What brings Ross happiness these days?   Today's Takeaway: At a time, when so many people are still recovering, from the coronavirus, and still, exhibiting neurological symptoms, months, after contracting the virus, our definition, of what it means, to live with an ongoing chronic illness has changed. We no longer see chronic illness, as the unique, or rare exception, that perhaps we once did. Instead, we now know, it to be far more common than we might ever have imagined. When the medical profession may not have the answers, or our symptoms fall outside the norm, many patients, choose to do the research themselves to find other treatment options. We may find relief, from our symptoms, outside traditional medicine, but whatever it is, that works for you and offers relief, is worthy of exploring.   There is no better gift, than the gift, of a healthy body and a healthy mind. The lesson to be learned from Ross's experience is that there is hope, for someone diagnosed with a chronic illness. I'm Florine Mark and that's “Today's Takeaway”.    Quotes: “I probably saw 10‒15 doctors in the span of two or three months and none of them had any clear idea of what was going on.” — Ross “If you have one of these chronic conditions where there isn't an official CDC approved approach to treating it, then they are less likely to be able to help you.” — Ross “I was healthy. I was 35 and I'd had a few things here and there, but I'd never been sick for probably more than a week-and-a-half in my whole life.” — Ross “I was accustomed to having my body do the things that I asked it to do.” — Ross “Lyme disease is famous for this bullseye rash that develops around the tick bite.” — Ross “Before I started getting better, in the period when I was just sort of trying things desperately and unable to find something, the sense that things were just falling apart was incredibly, incredibly strong.” — Ross “A whole network of people, but especially spouses, carry a particular kind of weight with these illnesses.” — Ross “One lesson is that things can get better. It's important to have faith and confidence that they can get better even when things are at their worst.” — Ross “Hope is essential for human existence, but not hope alone. You also have to act.” — Ross “In the end, other people can help you, but when it comes to illness, only you understand your symptoms at some level; only you will know when you get better, and you have to fight for that.” — Ross   Brought to You By: Gardner White Furniture   Mentioned in This Episode: Ross Douthat Ross Douthat for NYT Opinion The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery, by Ross Douthat Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class, by Ross Gregory Douthat  

Building a 100 year company with Ross Chaldecott, co-founder of Kinde Lessons from Atlassian, Campaign Monitor & Shopify How to approach building a 100 year company Raising a $10.6 million seed round Why the best designers are the best problem solvers.  Kinde's ambition is a reflection of its co-founder, Ross Chaldecott. Ross believes every founder has the potential to unlock the future of human achievement - and that everyone should have the tools and the opportunity to participate. Ross breaks down this ambition with vivid clarity in our interview today, explaining the power of “have[ing] the biggest purpose that we can possibly imagine, which is to create a world with more founders”. Episode Highlights from Ross: “One of the big things (I learned at Atlassian, Campaign Monitor and Shopify) and we think about it a lot at Kinde as well, is building a 100 year business. It forces you to think quite differently, you stop thinking about how we solve just today's problem, you think about how you solve it for the long term.” “One of the things that Mike and Scott and Atlassian did so well is giving people that space to experiment, to play, to learn, to try new things, and to fail if they needed to. Failure was never something that was penalised, failure is just a sign that you tried something different.” “The reality is that it takes time to build a platform… And so what we cannot do is kid ourselves that we are gonna build out the whole platform because that's when we're five years in the garage, never getting any customers. And so what we've had to do is look at the product that we're building towards and say what is the most sensible, smallest piece that will bring exponential value to our customers, and go and build that thing.” “The best designers that I've ever worked with, spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about and understanding the problem and understanding the solution. And then a very small amount of time on actually executing that… The best designers are the best problem solvers.” “How can we enable as many people as possible to go out there and change the world? Founders are fundamentally the people who are changing the world.” Learn more about Kinde here

Jamie and Kim talk with Shannon Ross about what he has been doing over the past year. The commitment, determination, and inspiration is unbelievable. Listen to his amazing journey. Learn More at https://sociatap.com/Thecommunity/

https://embassycity.com

Episode 190: "The Return Of Everyday PPL" Feat. DJ Moma + DJ Ross One On this week's episode of the @RoadPodcast, the crew speak with NYC's finest @DJMoma (co-founder of @EverydayPPL) and @DJRossOne (author of @RapTees). The fellas speak about #EverydayPPL's new curated playlist “House Party” on @Spotify (1:50), LA's #Saadiq party at @TheHighlightRoom (4:02) and DJ's reaching out to “homies” for bookings after a long year of no communication (9:21). They speak on the lack of younger DJs aspiring to work at “Bottle Service” nightclubs (30:15) and how booking multiple DJs in a night destroys the room (24:02). Moma speaks on the obstacles he went through to relaunch #EverydayPPL's first event on June 19th and the negative comments they received regarding the “proof of vaccination” required for entry (44:44).

Ben Graff and I are interviewing Chris Ross today, one of Yorkshire's finest chess players, my team mate in Geoff Brown's Darnall & Handsworth squad in the Sheffield League in the UK - and he also happens to be blind. Can you give us an idea of how STEVE DAVIS got you into chess in the first place? Playing chess around the world, what's been your most unusual experience? You have to manage the clock, your guide dog Bovis (you can hear his squeaky toys in the background), take account of the match situation - how do you juggle all those things? What's been your most satisfying victory so far? You do a lot of chess coaching with quite strong players, what are your top tips for improving your game? What makes a good team Captain? THANKS TO OUR SUPPORTERS! Grandmaster Simon Williams (GingerGM) does super video courses on gingergm.com, and books such as Arkell's Endings. I have won many games with his ideas! Buy quality e-books from Forward Chess - for instance The Woodpecker Method or 100 Endgames You Should Know. Want to impress your friends? Cook them an amazing meal - get brilliant recipes and all the ingredients you need delivered by Gusto - get 50% off your first box and 30% off your first month! Thanks for supporting my newsletter. Premium subscribers get discounts on tournaments, more articles and regular updates on the chess world. We also have a podcast which comes out every week with interviews and analysis. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thechesscircuit/message

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

6:00 - Roadside Buys. 7:00 - Crazy Things Parents Did. Early Xmas Displays. 8:00 - Business Mistake In Fav. Little Stresses. 9:00 - Working Remotely. Vacation Gone Wrong   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode 156: "Welcome To Marvel" feat. Alain Uy + DJ Ross One On this week’s episode of the @RoadPodcast, the fellas speak with actor/director @AlainUy, one of the new stars from @Marvel’s upcoming new @Hulu show @OfficialHelstrom (with special guest host @DJRossOne). The fellas explain meeting Alain in 2010 through his production company @ThemToo (4:50) and their amazing videography work with @HakkasanLV, @SkamArtist, and @DJRossOne’s #KeepItMoving video series (15:57). Ross and Alain recap the filming for his first #KeepItMoving video when he spun the star-studded opening of @MarqueeLV on #NYE 2010 with guest performances from #JayZ, #KanyeWest, #Rihanna and more (22:35). @DJCrooked explains the difference between DJing a club and DJing a celebrity event (31:40). Alain breaks down how he got the role for #Marvel’s new #Helstrom series (39:40) and further explains how the success of movies like #Parasite and #CrazyRichAsians has shifted Hollywood to cast more Asian actors and produce more Asian content (1:06:44). Finally, the fellas discuss Alain’s latest Kung-Fu indie film @_ThePaperTigers set to release in 2021 (1:14:00) and question whether @KingJames deserves to have his @Lakers jersey retired after his recent @NBA championship win (1:28:03).

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

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

The new Scottish Conservative leader on football refereeing, his unusual knowledge of cattle and whether he can stop a second independence referendum

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

Episode 146: “Beats, Apps + Rap Tees” feat. Thando1988 + CFLO + Ross One On this week’s episode of the @RoadPodcast, the fellas speak with New York’s very own @Thando1988 and @DJCFLO (co-hosted by @DJRossOne). Thando explains juggling local “open format” gigs while producing Dance Music (3:25) and shares his reasons for signing his next single “Questions” to @Atrak’s label @FoolsGoldRecs (10:54). CFLO speaks about his latest “acapella-making” app @StemVerter that’s taken over the DJ community (14:45), as well as his DJ Agency in NYC struggling to collect almost $30k in past due invoices from multiple venues after the pandemic hit (29:01). @DJRossOne talks about the ownership of bars/clubs possibly changing after the pandemic (40:32) and how he’s been focusing on music production w/@PaseRock and making a video series on @Youtube based on his book @RapTees (49:50). The fellas speak on the effectiveness of DJs petitioning against record labels over copyright issues (59:30). Finally, Thando talks about his inspiration behind his first single “Your Love” (1:00:55) and shares some advice to up-and-coming DJs who wanna focus on production (1:14:01). StemVerter has given all our listeners a 25% discount when purchasing the app, just use promo code “ROAD” at the time of your check out to receive your discount.

In reaction to Covid19, many teachers and schools have had to move their English courses online. But where to start? Dr. Marek Kiczkowiak tells us about his experiences creating online language courses for students and what he’s learned about online platforms, marketing and social media along the way.Setting Up Online English Courses (with Marek Kiczkowiak)Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to "TEFL Training Institute Podcast." I'm Ross Thorburn. This week, my guest is Marek Kiczkowiak. Marek is founder of TEFL Equity Advocates and TEFL Equity Academy. He's a materials writer at the moment in Belgium.In this episode, I ask Marek about putting English language courses online. For obvious reasons, recently a lot of people are having to create online language courses for the first time. Marek's got experience of doing this, both as a material's designer and also as a teacher trainer.In this episode, you'll hear Marek talking about some of the challenges of putting courses online, the different platforms to use, and of course very, [laughs] very importantly, how to get students to actually take your courses. Enjoy the episode.Ross: Hi, Marek. We're obviously talking about this because of COVID‑19. Before we go on, how has the pandemic changed where you're teaching?Marek Kiczkowiak: Yes. I think the classes shut down late March, early April. I don't know if they're going to resume from the new academic year. I doubt it. I think maybe some classes will, the absolute essential ones like work in the laboratory that you can't do online. This might resume. I think a lot of it will be done online, still.I haven't been teaching. I've been just developing academic writing courses on academicenglishnow.com. The reason I set them up was...For three years I was teaching academic writing basically to university students in Belgium. When I started my new job in Brussels, I wasn't teaching anymore. I was developing materials.I've been thinking at the back of my mind that I could do all of what I was doing in the classroom with students, I could just offer that online. Then I'm not limited. I can be anywhere in the world and deliver the same quality program. When the lockdown happened, I was like, "That's it. If I don't do it now, then I've missed the boat."Ross: The online courses that we're talking about today Marek, can you tell us about them? I feel that online learning covers so much. You could have synchronous online classes in real‑time with groups of students in a virtual classroom. You can have asynchronous where people interact with each other, but maybe they are in different time zones, and they comment in a forum throughout the day.You can even have completely self‑accessed courses where learners are working their way through things at their own pace. They don't interact with each other very much. Tell us about the courses that you've created and why did you design them that way.Marek: Most of it is completely asynchronous, and there are two reasons for that. The first reason is that at the moment, I have most of my PhD students in Bolivia. The time difference is big. Therefore, finding a suitable time for a live class ‑‑ even now when these 15 students come from exactly the same university ‑‑ proved completely impossible.Also, because people can work through it at their own pace, they can jump through the different lectures and focus first on the ones that they feel are the most important to them. I might start at a certain point, and I, as a teacher, feel that this is the best point to start with, but maybe for other students, they have a different problem they want to tackle first.These are some of the reasons and why it's better for students. For you, as an online teacher, it's also much better because I don't have to constantly give the same material online. Time is money as a freelancer. That's why in the online courses that I offer, the basic package just includes the online work.There is no input from me apart from answering students' comments. There is a forum. They can ask each other questions, and I come in and answer their questions. The second higher tier that you can add is feedback on assignments. If you pay more money, you can do the assignments that are on the course, and then I'll check them and give you personalized feedback on them.I'm now including my time, so that's got to be more expensive. Then even above that, we've got group live sessions where we meet live and discuss any problems students have. They can send in the questions before when we have a live session. Even higher than that has to be a one‑on‑one class.It doesn't cost €20. It doesn't cost €50. It costs much more than that. Ultimately, there'll be few people who will buy it, but that's good. You want to limit yourself to people who actually really, really want to work with you. A lot of people might not need that. They'll just need the online course.Ross: You mentioned lectures there. In my experience, online courses tend to involve a lot of reading. They also sometimes have quite a high dropout rate. I think it's quite difficult sometimes to stay motivated for a long period of time when studying at a distance.What input do you use on your courses, and how do you make sure that those courses will be able to stay interesting?Marek: Sure. I guess I refer to them as lectures because my market is in universities. Otherwise, I would refer to them as lessons or maybe videos or whatever you want to call them. You definitely can't have lessons, lectures, or videos that are much longer than five minutes. People's attention span nowadays, we can hardly even finish a five‑minute video on Facebook.Maybe if it's educational and we paid for it, we'll give it more effort. I really like to think of them as little how‑to steps. To give you an example, one module is, "How to Write an Introduction." Within that bigger task, you have a smaller task, which will be, "How to Identify the Research Gap." This smaller task will consist of even smaller tasks, and those smallest tasks are individual lectures.You might have four how‑to lectures in, "How to Identify the Research Gap." Each of them takes about five minutes ‑‑ each video ‑‑ and then there is a task below it. A task could be for students to write something. Sometimes it can be as simple as writing one sentence. Sometimes it will be a longer 100‑, 200‑word assignment. It could also be a quiz.Sometimes, for example, because things vary from discipline to discipline in academic writing, I often like to give students a task to now go off and read an academic paper from their discipline. Then tell me whether what I said applies to their discipline. For example, some disciplines like to have introduction and literature review together as one section. Others will separate it.I tell them that in the lecture about organizing this. Now they need to read the text and comments and let us know how it's organized in the field.Ross: I wish I'd known about your academic writing course before I started my heavy dissertation.Marek: Well, take it, Ross, if you want to.Ross: Sadly, it's too late now. [laughs] For these courses, you need to put them online on a platform. Can you tell us about how you made that decision, which platform to use?Marek: That's a very good question because I think that's one thing obviously that's got to be pedagogically sound. There's lots of different platforms, and it really depends what you want to do and what you want to have.To give you one example, my initial TEFL Equity Academy courses were on a platform called Teachable. Teachable is free to access at the beginning with some limitations, and then it has certain plans. The advantage of platforms like Teachable or Kajabi, for example ‑‑ that's another one K‑A‑J‑A‑B‑I, Kajabi ‑‑ is that they are all in platforms.They give you free video hosting ‑‑ free as long as you pay the platform. It's video hosting. It's a payment gateway. The websites are predesigned for you, basically. Kajabi has email funnels. When somebody buys your product, they get a sequence of emails. Kajabi has webinars, for example, built‑in. It's an all‑in solution.It's a good solution if you don't have time and you don't feel very techie, and you just want something quick. However, if you want to put in a little bit of effort ‑‑ and it's not that difficult because I was able to do it and have zero website building skills, literally zero, I just watched YouTube tutorials and did it ‑‑ is to host it on WordPress.That gives you incredible flexibility. Obviously, Teachable has its website layout, and you can't really change it that much. You cannot make it look as you want it to look. To really access all the features you want to have, you'd be looking at $100 a month with Teachable and $150 with Kajabi. This is only for people who have high volumes of sales. You might not have that.Now all my courses are on WordPress, and I don't personally think it's too difficult to set up. Just to break down the numbers, instead of paying $100 a month, you're probably looking at maybe $30 a month or less. It's just you need different pieces.You need your WordPress hosting, you need video hosting, and then you need your online course plug‑in like LearnDash or something like that.Ross: Let's talk about finding students. How do you go about marketing your courses and making sure that students actually want to buy them?Marek: Sure, yeah. Never create an online course just because you think it's a good idea. Don't create a whole course before getting the proof of concept and trying to see if it actually sells. You'll spend months creating this amazing online course, but nobody wants to buy it.The simplest idea is the sales funnel. You start with something free that's downloadable, so people give you their email address. It always has to be something valuable for your audience, so maybe even before that, you need to really define who your audience is. I help university students and researches write better academic papers and thesis.I'm not interested in people who want to learn Business English. When people download it, they need to give you their email address to be able to download it. Then usually there is a very cheap offer of something. This could be a 60‑minute training session on something. This could be a mini‑course.A hundred people opt‑in to download something, maybe 10 percent of them ‑‑ if you've got a very, very good funnel ‑‑ will decide to get the opt‑in offer. You already have some initial clients. Then a smaller percentage of those might get the upsell as well. Once people opt‑in and buy something from you, you can offer them a higher package or another product.Think about it as building a relationship with someone. First, they get to know you and then maybe then read a blog post that you've written. They kind of think, "Wow, that was really, really helpful." Then they see this PDF guide that further helps them, and they're like, "Oh, I might download that."Once they really like you and feel that you're knowledgeable, they will buy something from you. Never offer a course to people that don't know you. Don't go to a Facebook group and something and post, "Hey, I've got this amazing course. Do you want to buy it?" It's not appropriate. People need to get to know you. In marketing, it's kind of the same.Ross: Really, it sounds there that a lot of it is about making sure that your potential students trust you before you try and sell them something.Marek: Yeah, I think so. I think you need to establish trust and also show people that you genuinely want to help them. If you start with the idea that I'm in this to make money, people will easily see that. The reason why you're offering a certain product is because you can't just help people for free. You can do that in a blog post but in a very limited way.It probably means you need to know your target audience pretty well. That's why I started with the academic writing courses. That's something I've been doing for a long time now. I feel I really know what problems my target audience is suffering from, what questions students have asked me over the last 10 years.Ross: Obviously, the sales funnel though is after people get to your website. Another really important part of this is getting people on to your website in the first place. Tell us about that, Marek. How do you just attract people to come on to your website?Marek: Absolutely. There are two ways of getting to your target audience. You can buy your way in which is through Facebook ads. This has got the advantage that if you run them correctly, and if you've got this funnel that I described to you, you can basically break even.You're not really spending any money because, for every hundred dollars that you put in, people buy a hundred dollars of your courses. Much quicker, you are building an audience.The second way is not buying it but through hosting content, doing content marketing that is valuable to my audience, and that Google is going to start ranking highly on the search pages. This is really, really important because if Facebook changes their advertising policies, your whole business could go bankrupt if you just rely on Facebook ads.Another really important way is to do what we are doing here, for example. Do collaborations where you, for example, do a podcast, a video, or a blog post for somebody else who already has your target audience or has people who are very similar to your target audience. Both of us reach more people, but also, if other websites add hyperlinks to your website, that increases your ranking in SEO.If you do collaborations like this, you add a hyperlink to my website, I add one to yours, and hopefully, we're going higher in the search rankings as well.Ross: One more time, everyone, that was Marek Kiczkowiak. For more from Marek, please check out his website www.teflequityadvocates.com. You can also find the TEFL Equity Academy on there with some of the online courses that Marek has created before for teachers.If you enjoyed this podcast, please visit our website, www.tefltraininginstitute.com, for more. If you really enjoyed it, please give us a good rating on iTunes or wherever you listen. We'll see you again next time. Goodbye.

Greg Ross One Person Going the Wrong Way

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

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

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

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

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

Episode 127: Quarantine Chronicles feat. Roctakon + DJ Moma + DJ Ross One On this week’s episode of the @RoadPodcast, the crew is disbanded as @DJCrooked explains why they decided to practice self-isolation and record remotely during the coronavirus pandemic (0:53). Crooked offers some advice on how to downsize and decrease personal/business expenses while everyone is out of work (7:51). @Roctakon, @DJMoma, and @DJRossOne join Crooked as they speak on everyone’s current status (19:13) and how the pandemic will affect our society as a whole (32:23). Moma speaks on @EveryDayPPL’s tour being canceled and when it’ll return (35:48). Crooked ask the fellas how they’ll stay productive during this potential 8-month lockdown (44:32), and how this break will change the landscape for nightclub DJs (56:44). Finally, Crooked speaks with @DJNeva, @DJDMiles, and @JaimeDaGreat to wrap up the episode and see how their first weekend of not DJing has been (1:04:25).

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

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

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

Episode 119: SILENT ADDY (FT. PASE ROCK + ROSS ONE) On this week’s episode of the @RoadPodcast, the crew sits down with Miami’s finest, Dancehall DJ/Producer @SilentAddy (co-hosted by Cincy’s own @PaseRock & @DJRossOne). Addy speaks about growing up in Kingston, Jamaica (6:10), the huge impact Sean Paul (@DuttyPaul) made in mainstream America during the mid-2000s (14:43) and why there hasn’t been another major crossover dancehall artist/record since (21:35). He talks about his mother being unsupportive of his DJing when he first started (29:31), the affordability of learning on DJ controllers nowadays (34:40) and having the right OG’s when growing up (39:32). Addy explains the @ShellCorpIntl, a collective partnership with @DJMoma @DZA3000 @SpinserTracy @DJSeanG (49:20), and speaks about his infamous party @Bashment.TV (56:03). The fellas ask Addy about his latest project with @VybzKartel (1:09:00), discuss the lack of Caribbean culture on the Westcoast (1:04:51), and he explains how @MajorLazer changed his life & what business lessons he learned from @Diplo (1:24:30). Addy educates the fellas on “Skin Bleaching” in Jamaica (1:17:47) and the amount of preparation and labor he puts into the sound for his events (1:27:15). Finally, the fellas speak on the new generation of DJ’s and their unique approach to mixing without BPMs (1:47:17).

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

Not sure if you’ve been teaching reading right? Listen to Debbie Hepplewhite and find out what you might have been doing wrong…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.

Tom, Mark, and Nate talk via skype with special guest Charlie Ross. Charlie is From Canada and does a show called One Man Star Wars Trilogy. He also has a One man Stranger Things, Pride and Prejudice, and 80s "blank tape". He just preformed a show in Milwaukee and will be back in Appleton later this month. They talk to Charlie about the show and how he started out as well as a lot of Star Wars Talk. If you would like to find out more about Charlie's show go to http://onemanstarwars.com

Episode 49: DJ ROSS ONE 2.0 Ross One rejoins the crew on the R.O.A.D. podcast. The fellas reflect as Ross One was one of the first guests on the podcast almost a year ago. Ross talks about doing production, as well as his infamous video "Keep It Moving", in which Crooked stated "Changed the way DJs make videos". Ross goes on to express his opinion on the Fatman Scoop/Crooklyn Clan situation. Crooked does a live call-in with DJ Sizzahandz in response to Scoop. Ross One discusses the current state of New York hip hop, and the buzz generating in the city. The crew evaluates the new Lil' Pump and Kanye West single "I Love It". Ross gives his opinion on the Nicky Minaj vs Cardi B beef, as he was there in attendance during New York fashion week. The crew also breaks down with Ross One the "Bobby Brown" special, and his place in music history.

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

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

Episode 2: DJ ROSS ONE “Behind The Scenes”, “BTS Boyz”, just a couple of names for the show that were considered but still didn’t feel right up til this point. Ross One discusses his love for Fly Fishing, growing up in Cincinnati, Ohio. And the struggles of keeping up with hip hop culture in the Midwest in the early 90s. And also developing a passion for Rap Tees in the process. 1:00 - Fishing Vs Djing 10:00 How old folks saw music videos 1:10:25 Vintage gear 1:28:25 Bootleg vintage t shirts

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

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Showtime and Eesh Rock are kicking it and having a conversation about the new albums from Drake and Rick Ross. The two discuss their likes and dislikes about "More Life" and "Rather You Than Me" with a special drive by interview from producer Bink! who was responsible for three songs on "Rather You Than Me" Showtime and Eesh Rock also discuss new releases from Gary Clark Jr. and Thundercat on this episode. .

Every Wonder if anyone could reinact all 3 original star wars films? Well Charles Ross can do it all in 60 minutes and with no props! In Toronto to perform his popular One Man Star Wars Trilogy show, Todd and A.J sneak a interview and even get a preview of the show!

My Summer Lair host Sammy Younan interviews Charles Ross the solo stage performer of One Man Star Wars. My Summer Lair Chapter #23: What Is Your Favourite Star Wars Sound? Recorded: March 29, 2016 2:30pm (on the phone) Edited by James Khan

Show #122 | Guest: Gabriel Thompson is a Steinbeck Fellow in Creative Writing at San Jose State University. He is the author of several books, including Working in the Shadows, and has written for Harper’s, New York, Mother Jones, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Nation. | Show Summary: Community and labor activist Fred Ross’s story remains poignant and relevant today, though he first started organizing in the 1930s. Author Gabriel Thompson joins Angie to talk about his book America’s Social Arsonist: Fred Ross and Grassroots Organizing in the 20th Century.

Randy Ross' "One Day in Thailand" is the Finalist in the 2011 Drum/Side B Dual Publication Award. Brief, clever, and with a final twist, "One Day in Thailand" presents a comic observation on the experience of the ex-patriate in Asia.

Ross Schwartzman aka DJ Ross One is multidimensional in the fact that he is not only an International DJ. Ross is a curator and collector of all things Hip Hop and we get to not only talk about our time working together in Nightclubs, but how he came about the idea of his book Rap Tees based on his love of vintage hip hop concert t-shirts and recently his collection of 80's Boombox's was Constructed into a work of art called the "Wall of Boom"Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-faqs-project-hosted-by-james-grandmaster-faqs-boyce/donations