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

A late night conversation with my dad about how entrepreneurs can protect their personal assets. Hit me up on IG! @russellbrunson Text Me! 208-231-3797 Join my newsletter at marketingsecrets.com Also, don’t forget to check out bookease.com ---Transcript--- Hey, what's up everybody. This is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to The Marketing Secrets Podcast. This is actually a really cool late night edition. I'm at my house right now. It is getting close to midnight. I'm hanging out with my dad, who's in town and we're talking about business and some stuff and folks who know my dad, he does a lot of business structuring and accounting and stuff for a lot of the funnel hackers. In fact, almost everybody who joins the Tacoma Callbacks Program eventually ends up getting my dad to set up their books and their company and everything. So he's a lot of experience with a lot of our entrepreneurs, and we're talking about protection and how to protect yourself from creditors and predators. And not only from a business standpoint, but from personal standpoint. And so we thought, hey, while we're sitting here talking about this, we might as well record a podcast. Now, I don't do a lot of podcasts that are interviews, which is kind of fun having my dad here. And I'll also state that I'm not a lawyer or I'm not giving you legal advice, something you should definitely look into yourself. If you do want help structuring these kinds of things that we're talking about. My dad and his company is available to help that. And we'll talk about that kind of at the end of this podcast. So with that said, we're going to cue the theme song, when we come back, I'll have the chance to introduce you to my dad. All right everybody welcome back. Like I said, we're excited to hear tonight, at the kitchen table, all of the kids are finally in bed. And my dad and I are talking about business and excited to have him here and kind of share some really cool things with you guys. Things that a lot of times, as entrepreneurs don't think about, we think about creating things and selling things. And a lot of times we don't think about protecting ourselves. And so that's what people like my dad do is help us with those kinds of things. So, we can keep selling stuff, keep creating stuff, not ended up losing a lot of the things that we've earned. Anything from houses to your money, to all sorts of stuff. And so that's what we're talking about tonight. So, dad, how are you feeling tonight? Ross Brunson: I'm feeling really good, Russell. I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to chat with you and with your audience tonight. I think it should be fun. Russell: Yeah. So, what we're going to start with is I know in the past we've talked about protecting your business, and how you structure entities. I know you do that for a ton of people in the ClickFunnels community, a lot of funnel hackers and things like that. I don't even know how many of our people we sent your way. I know that there's been a lot, but I'm curious, like just with all the people that you're working with, you're setting a business, people thinking past just their business structure and think about the personal stuff or just kind of the business stuff typically right now? Ross: Well, most people, when they contact me, they're interested in protecting their business and that's understandable because they're just going into business and there's a lot of roadblocks out there, a lot of pitfalls that they can step into. And so they come to me and they talk to me about what type of business should I have? Should it be a corporation? Should it be an LLC? Should it be some other type of entity? And we go through and we discuss that. And we like to discuss things with our clients, we point out three major points that we like to address as we are talking to them about their businesses. One, we like to make sure that the business that we helped them, set up around there, the structure we set up around their business. We want to make sure that it gives the best liability protection to the individual. The second thing is we want to make sure that it's easy to operate in. You don't spend all your time working on the business and not have any time to sell your products to people or develop customers and things. And the third thing we like to look at is to see if there is some sort of inherent tax savings ability within the entity that you might be able to take advantage of if you find that you are starting to make a lot of money in your business, and you're spending a lot of money in the taxes. So those are the things we've kind of discussed over time with a lot of your clients. And it's been very well-received, and we've helped hundreds of your internet marketing... Russell: Entrepreneurs, super nerds, whatever we want to call ourselves. Ross: Whatever you want to call yourselves… Russell: Funnelhackers! Ross: set up their businesses. Russell: What's funny is that, and we've told this in other times we've talked publicly, but like when I first started my business, I think I'm like a lot of entrepreneurs where we get excited, we start selling things. And then for me, I'd been selling things for like a year and a half or two years. And we were at a family reunion and I was telling my dad, like "I'm making money, selling things on the internet." And he was like, "So, who's doing your books?" I'm like, "I don't know what you're talking about?" "Who's paying taxes." I'm like, "That's the cool thing on the internet. There's no taxes. You get to keep all the money." And he was like, "But you have to pay taxes, Russell." So, my dad came up and started to help me structure things way back. And it's almost 18 years ago now, which is crazy. But I think a lot of entrepreneurs come into our coaching programs or come to ClickFunnels, and all they're thinking about sending out was, which is how do I sell something? And so it's been nice as so many people who are selling things, you're coming back and like, "Okay, it's restructuring", getting your business in place. They actually having the right kind of business where you're not getting taxed nearly as much. And all those things that typically we don't think about when we're getting started. We're just excited to try to sell stuff. And so let's call that you're doing the business structure. And I think the second side of it, and this is something I didn't realize until my business started growing, right, is just the legal liability, not only to your business, but also to yourself personally I don't think I would ever believe that people sued other people until like my business started growing. And I literally have full-time legal counsel now because people through ClickFunnels, people are suing ClickFunnels clients that comes to me. There's just all sorts of stuff. And so I'm more and more aware of it all the time. And I think that's, what's fascinating we're talking about tonight is I think a lot of people have structured their business to protect themselves. A lot of them haven't thought about it from the personal standpoint yet. Protecting their personal assets as well. And the personal assets can be a lot of things. Do you want to talk about some of the things that those could be, because it could be anything like all sorts of stuff. Ross: Yeah. As you're saying, people spend a lot of time and effort protecting their business assets, but they don't think about their personal assets. When I say personal assets, I mean, things like most people have a savings account. Some people invest in money market accounts or they'll purchase CDs from banks, or maybe they'll set up a brokerage account and purchase stocks and bonds and mutual funds and things, maybe they're into Bitcoin. Russell: Yeah. Bitcoin Ross: Then... Russell: Buying cryptocurrency, we're buying Russell coin and all sorts of stuff. Ross: Right. And so people buy those things and are they also purchase homes and cars and boats. And then they create businesses. And a lot of people like to purchase rental real estate. And they do this and this is great because this is how they grow their family wealth. But the problem is, is that they title everything in their own name when they do this. Personally in their own name. Russell: It's interesting, because I sit at my big point count with all my personal name. And then we recently company ones and it's way harder to get a company one set up, because my guess is most of you guys have your Bitcoin, especially if you're using a Coinbase or Gemini or one of the big crypto things. You're probably, at least if you're like me, you just set up on your personal name, could you even think about it? You're like, oh, this is way easier. Anyway. So yeah. I'm guessing that most of us, including me have done this incorrectly at the get go. Ross: Yeah. Russell: So, the question then I'd add is, okay, so we've talked about a particular business, but like what's... It will say I have this stuff, I have my cryptocurrency, I've got my house, I got my car. I got my things, all my personal name. Why is that a problem? Why should I be concerned about that? Ross: Yeah. That's a very good question. If you think about it, if you have everything titled in your own name, it belongs to you personally and they call those personal assets and unfortunately personal assets can be taken from you. For example, let's just say, one day you're driving down the freeway at freeway speeds. Maybe you're at 65, 70 miles an hour and somebody or something distracts you for a mere second and you look away and you're dealing with this and you look up and you find that all the traffic in front of you is stopped and you don't have enough time to put on your brakes. And bam, you hit into the back end of this car at 65 or 75 miles an hour at that type of an impact, he's going to probably hurt the guy's back, break his back or snap his neck. Russell: 13 car pile-up. Ross: 13 car pile ups, yeah. And so at that point in time, let's say it was a serious accident. Let's say there was a neck broken or a back broken. And the person became paralyzed and could no longer work for the rest of his life. And in that situation, he's going to have a lot of medical bills right up front. And then he's going to have to have round the clock care the rest of his life. And the amount of money you have for your insurance policy on your cars is not going to be enough, no matter how much you have to take care of that. And so if one of those things were to occur, the courts would want to find out if you own any assets that they can take from you and give to this injured party to compensate them for that injury. And so let's say this person's files his lawsuit against you. And it looks like he's going to be able to win. The courts are going to then give you a list and say, we need you to list out all your assets for us. Russell: Give us your Bitcoin now! Ross: Do you have a savings account? Well, yeah, I guess I do. Do you have bank CDs? Yeah, I got some of those. What about money market accounts. Yeah. I got some of those. You have a brokerage account with stocks, bonds mutual funds? Yeah. I got some of that. Bitcoin? Yeah, I got some of that. Russell: Do you have a boat, do you have a car? What do you got? Ross: What do you got? Boats, cars, all these things, and you're telling them and the judge is going good, good, good, good. Russell: Now we know what you got. Ross: Now we know what we've got. And so he says, this guy is going to need round the clock care, the rest of his life, it's going to be extremely expensive and you injured him. It was your fault. So we're going to take all these personal assets that you own that are titled in your name. And we're going to change the title out of your name, into the name of this person that was injured. And so you could lose every single thing you've been building all your life for many years, possibly just because you were distracted for a mere second while traveling down the freeway. Russell: This is the reason why everyone should drive Teslas because Tesla's have auto drive, which would solve that problem. But we're not selling Tesla's tonight, but it's not just that like, it could be all sorts of things, right? It could be a car accident. It could be somebody sues you for a million things. They took one of your supplements that you sell and it got them sick. It could be... I mean, there's a million different things. I mean, the number of lawsuits that happen nowadays is insane. And people try to sue you over everything. So it could be as ridiculous as like, I didn't like your tweet, you posted the other day, as dumb as that is, people can sue you for that stuff. Or they didn't like the way you respond or whatever it is. I'm curious do you know how many lawyers do we have nowadays? How many lawsuits are happening on average? Ross: Yeah, I have some statistics actually… Russell: This makes me want to cry actually. Ross: The US financial education foundation and they have done a study. And they say that it's estimated that there's over 40 million lawsuits filed every year in the United States. And that you asked about the number of lawyers, they say that the average number of lawyers exceeds over 1 million lawyers in our country at this point in time. But if you take that 40 million lawsuits and let's say just divided it by 365 days a year, I mean, that's Saturday, Sundays, holidays. It would still come out to 109,589 lawsuits filed each day in the United States. Russell: Looking at per state, you're looking at that divide by 50. I don't know the math, but that's a lot. Yeah. They're coming after you. So, my question is, and it's fun that very first time my dad taught me this stuff. And the very first event I ever did, what is that, probably 17, 18 years ago, first time I ever did an internet marketing event. My dad came and gave a presentation and he titled his presentation, creditors and predators. And so the question is how do we protect ourselves and our assets from both creditors and predators, people who are coming after us? And I want you to understand too, like, it is insane. The amount of frivolous lawsuits, like the bigger you get, the more you're going to get. I get frivolous lawsuits. They come to us, they're just insane, where you're like just people literally trying to find money. I'll give you a good example of one is somebody signed up for ClickFunnels, And when you sign up, it says, hey, you put in your credit card, and then it says, if my billing doesn't go through, a credit card fails, please text me so that my service doesn't get interrupted, and they type in their phone number. Somebody did that. They signed up for ClickFunnels account, put their credit card in, put in their cell phone number, clicked little check boxes said, "Yes, text me if my credit card fails", it turns out they put in a credit card that was like one of those throwaway ones. And so the first bill went through, but then 30 days later, the bill didn't go through. So our system fired off a text message like that to, they got this text message. And then they filed a TCPA law case against us. And we got sued and it costs me $20,000 to fight this one lawsuit. And we won because the person who checked the box, but cost me 20 grand to fight it. Okay? And that was like one text message was sent and anyway, so it's insane. People can see you for anything, even if it's complete fake. That person that we found, Larry, find the person who did that. And they filed like a thousand TCPA cases a week or something like that. Just because they signed for everything, putting their cell phone number in and they're suing everybody. So like, there's people like that. These are the predators that are out there that are trying to do these things. And it happens to me more often, the bigger we get and it's insane to me, which is why we have legal counsel and we have these things, but I just want to put that out there because most guys you might "Oh, that's never going to happen to me", but as you start growing your business, it's going to happen. And so you got to start thinking about these things now, and protecting yourself now, because the bigger you get, the bigger target you become. Ross: Right. And so we want to be able to protect our assets and you might ask, "Well, okay, how do we do that? I understand protecting my business assets. I can go ahead and set up an LLC or corporation to protect my business assets. But how do I protect my personal assets? What am I going to do? And how is it even possible that I could protect those types of things?" Well, there was a very famous statement by Nelson Rockefeller. I don't know if you know the Rockefeller family, they're the ones that started standard oil, they're some of the major families in the world. Russell: Rockefeller Habits is an amazing book if you guys haven't read it yet. Ross: Yeah, and so they've made lots and lots of money. And of course, as they, just like Russell said, as Russell started making money, people started suing them. Well, same thing happened with the Rockefellers. They started making a lot of money and people wanted it and they started getting sued and they were losing. And they were losing their assets because people were suing them. And so they finally it came, it dawned on them and they made this really interesting statement that I think everybody should know and understand. And they said basically the secret to success is to own nothing but control everything. Russell: I like that. So, that's awesome. The secrets to success is to own everything or to own nothing, but to control everything. So how does somebody like me? How would we do something like that? Ross: Okay, great. Well, we do that by using another type of an entity. We talked about corporations and limited liability companies for your business assets, but there are really nice entity types for your personal assets. And one of them would be called the limited family partnership or limited partnerships. And so they call them nickname, and kind of limited family partnerships because families set these things up all the time they're used in estate work. if you're trying to set up a way to pass on your estate to your children and your grandchildren, the attorneys will use a limited partnership to do that. That's one of the main functions of it, but it can come into play and help us out here when we're trying to protect our personal assets. And so how can it do that? What characteristics does it have that allows it to do that? Well, the first characteristic comes from the way our laws define the term person. Now, Russell, if I was to ask you, "Who's a person? What's a person?" What would you say? Russell: I’d say human being with a brain and a heart. At least a heart. I don't know. Some of them don't have brains. I'm not going to lie, just kidding. Ross: And they’re still currently alive, right? Because if they were dead, they'd be a corpse. So, that would be a person. And yeah, that is actually a good definition of a person. But our laws say, "Well, that's not quite right. In our opinion", they say, "We feel a person as a corporation. We feel a person as a limited liability company. We feel a person has a limited partnership. We feel a person is a trust. And we feel a person as a living, breathing individual, that's alive here on this earth", so they greatly expand the definition of a person. Now, the interesting thing, when they do that, they expand that definition they have a little twist in there that's really beneficial to us. That twist is they say, "Even though you created this person, and even though you control this person a hundred percent, and even if this person owned any assets and those assets generated income, and that income you take and use for yourself, even if all those things are true and happens, that person is not you, it's someone separate and distinct from you." And this person can... Our laws give these artificial people the same rights and privileges that you and I have as individuals. They can have their own name just like we have our own name. They can have their own EIN number, which is similar to our social security number. They can hold title to any type of property that you can think of. They can open up savings accounts, money market accounts, Bitcoin accounts they can do all these things. They can, if someone's bothering them, they can sue that person under their own name. So they can do all these things in their own name. And so because of that fact, we are able to utilize these characteristics of a separate person from us to be able to provide liability protection for our personal assets. Russell: You're saying the characteristics of limit of these people sound like my own kids, except for you said that you can control them, and then they have to listen to you. So it's kind of like a teenager, except for you have no control over your teenagers. They don't listen to you. So, very similar. Ross: Yeah. So how can we use these characteristics to own nothing but control everything? Well, first off, as we mentioned, we'd like to create a limited family partnership that we can control. Remember, we control it, we create it, we control it, we reap the benefits of any income returns, so we do that. And then what we would want to do is transfer the title to your savings account out of your name and into the name of the limited partnership. Remember we said, it can open up its own bank, account savings, account money, market accounts, and things. If you have any money market accounts, you'd want to immediately change the title into the limited partnership, the name of the limited partnership. If you had stocks and bonds and mutual funds and a brokerage account, you'd want to shift those over into the name of the limited partnership. If you have bank or a Bitcoin account, what do you call those, wallets? With the Bitcoins in. You'd want to change the name into the name of the limited partnership and not your personal name. And by doing that, now this person owns those assets and you don't, you no longer own them, but as I mentioned, you control them. And if they make money, the money belongs to you, but that person is not you. So, that fact that that person is not you. How is that going to help you? Well, let's go back to that accident we talked about traveling down the freeway and you're distracted and boom, you hit into this person. And now the courts are asking you to list your assets. And you know that you've wisely beforehand, titled all these assets into the name of your limited partnership. So, now you look at their list that they're wants you to fill out for assets. And they're saying, do you have a savings account? No, I don't. Do you have a brokerage account? No. Any money market accounts? No. Any bank CDs? No. Bitcoin accounts? No. And you're answering truthfully because they're under our laws those assets do not belong to you. They belong to this other person that's not you. Russell: You control that person though. Therefore… you can ride in the boat whenever you want to. Ross: That's right. Exactly. And so the nice thing is, is if you think about it, in that accident we talked about, it was you driving the car that caused that accident to occur. Well, was your limited partnership in the car with you? No. Did the limited partnership distract you in any way while you were driving? No. The limited partnership teach you how to drive a car? No. Did limited partnership manufacture the car? No. That limited partnership didn't do anything to be involved in that accident, to cause that accident to have occurred. It has done nothing to cause that to happen. And because of the fact that that's the case, that person is innocent in the eyes of our laws. And so a court cannot go. through you, the person that caused the accident to this other person, who's not you, and was not involved in the accident and take that person's assets from them. They can't do that. So, all of a sudden, now you have a very safe place to title and hold title to your personal assets that a creditor, or predator can not get to no matter what you do in your personal life, but it's even better than that. It's also protected from anything you do in your business life. Because as an LLC or as a corporation, they had that veil of liability protection that keeps this creditor or predator that's suing your business from going through the business itself to the owners and taking their assets. So it's protected from anything you do in your business life, anything you do in your personal life. And so, as a result, you have a probably only place that you can have to have this type of protection for your personal assets. Russell: So can limited family partnerships be sued? Ross: That's a very good question. Can they be sued? Because if they could be sued all those assets you're titling there could be taken, right? Just like if they're in your name and you injure somebody, they can be taken. So can they be sued? Well, if you think about it, when it comes to a person or a business being sued, there's only about four reasons why a lawsuit can occur. One, if a person creates a product, and sells that product, and the person buys that product and it's injures them, then that person could Sue the business. Or let's say that the business was a service business, it was providing services for people. And they paid for those services, and then down the road felt that they were injured somehow or another, they could Sue the business. Or let's say if the business gave out advice and people took that advice and something happened and they felt they were injured. Well, if they did that, they could sue that person or that business who gave out that advice. And the only other way the business could be sued is if that business or that entity partners up with someone else, either another living, breathing individual, or even another artificial person. And the two partners got mad at each other and wanted to sue each other, then a lawsuit can occur. But the way these limited partnerships that we create are set up, it will never provide a product ever. It will never provide a service to anybody. It never gives out any advice. And the only person it could ever partner up with would be you and no one else, so… Russell: you can’t sue yourself. Ross: You can't sue yourself. Russell: At least you shouldn't. Ross: And so as a result, there's no way it can be sued. It's just a kind of a silent partner that holds title to all your possessions that you can control and reap the benefits from that cannot be sued. And so those assets cannot be taken from you out of that limited partnership. Russell: Okay. So, set up limited family partnership, we put our assets, we put our things into that. Then what's the next step? What do we do with the assets and stuff after they're in there? Ross: Okay. You would do like you would do if you had them titled in your own name, let's say you had a savings account. Well, as your businesses are doing well, you're receiving excess money out of your business over and above your normal monthly expenses. You most likely want to create a savings account. So you'd create a savings account in the name of your limited partnership, and you started funding money into it. Maybe down the road that's growing, you're feeling good about it. And then maybe you'd say, "Well, a money market account may give me a little better interest. So I'm going to open up a money market account as well. So I'm going to start pumping some money there." Then may be one day you're in the bank. And the banks manager says, "Look at these great CD rates we've got. You ought to purchase a CD, a bank CD", and you look at them and you say, "Well, yeah, that's pretty nice, better than I can get some other places. So yeah, I'll invest in some bank CDs." Russell: When you're on Facebook, and you're like, "Everyone's talking about crypto. That's got to be the greatest thing in the world." Ross: Right. So you would set up your crypto account in the name of your limited partnership and you start funding these things, all these things, that you're going to grow your wealth in are all going to be titled in the name of this limited partnership. So, in essence, what happens is that limited partnership becomes your family bank. This is where you hold your wealth. This is where you grow your wealth in your family bank, in this safe environment where people, they can't sue you if you injured them personally, and they can't sue you and take those assets, if you injured them in the course of your business. So that's what we would want to do is start funding these things, creating our own family bank, where we can then grow those funds. Now, as you're growing those funds, there's another benefit to it. Not only do you have a place to store your money and grow it, but most entrepreneurs that I've found they find something that they like and they set up a new business and then down the road, they say, "Well, I see 10 other businesses. I'd like to get involved in." Russell: Shiny object syndrome. Ross: Yeah. I'd like to get into e-commerce or man I'd like to get into rental real estate or man there's all these great things I can invest my money into. And I'd like to do some of that. And so let's say that you want to get into rental real estate. And you start looking at properties, and you then say, "Okay, here's a house I'd like to buy", but then you look at your personal assets. Well, do you have a savings account? No, because it's titled in the name of your limited partnership. Do you have money market accounts, brokerage accounts, anything in your name? Well, no you don't because you don't own those things anymore. So they're all owned and controlled by your limited partnership and it's controlled by you. So you had that money growing in there. And let's say that you're sitting there thinking to yourself, "I have the money to buy this rental real estate, but I would sure like to do it if I had the money." Then you could look to your family bank, which now kind of becomes the investment arm of your business, because it's going to say, "Well, I have the money I've saved all this money. I have the money available to purchase this rental real estate with." And so the limited partnership says, "Let's partner up together and I'll put the money in and you use the money and buy the rental property and we'll share the profits 50/50." And so now you have another stream of income flowing towards your limited partnership besides what you personally contribute to it. And so now you're going to have a chance of growing your wealth at a faster pace than what you would have done normally. So it not only becomes your family bank, but it becomes the investment arm of your overall business structure. Russell: Very cool. And they can use that to invest in all sorts of stuff like you said, from real estate, they can do it in Bitcoin, they could do it in a new business opportunity. They could do it in Funnel Hacking Live. They could do it in some secrets books. They could buy one funnel away challenge. They could buy all my products, my service, I’m sure that’s be the best thing they could invest in. Ross: Well, yeah, you've got a good track record there. Russell: The Inner Circle, if I ever open it up again, Two Comma Club Coaching Program. Anyway, I don't know if that's legal advice or I don't know if that's investment advice, you have to ask your legal authorities, but anyway there's a lot of things, obviously, you can use start investing money in to start growing your wealth portfolio over time. Ross: Right? Your family wealth. So it's a very wonderful entity type that can protect you and give you that confidence in that feeling of safety, knowing that your personal assets are also protected, not just your business assets through your LLC or your S Corp or whatever, not only are those protected, but also your personal assets are protected. And that's a great position to be in. And knowing that even if I slip up, accidentally, people can't get to those assets. So, anyway, it's a great way to take care of your personal assets. Russell: It makes you sleep better at night. I think that's one the biggest things I found over the last five or six years is just the more ways we protect ourselves, the easier it is to sleep at night knowing you can keep moving forward and keep fulfilling your mission and doing what you're called to do. So, all right. So my question for you next, and then we'll kind of wrap after this is for those who are listening to this, that's awesome. I need that. Or maybe they even like step back and they're like, "I don't even have my business structure, yet", so kind of both sides. If you're like, I'm a new entrepreneur, I don't have a business yet. Or if like I got my business stuff structured, I think that's correct, but I’d like someone to look at it, or number three is like, I want to do this piece of it. I need to get my personal assets protected as well, which I think a lot of people haven't done that step yet. Obviously, this podcast isn't about giving legal advice, but I noticed something that you do for a lot of people, a lot of people in our community, if someone wants to have your help getting any of these things kind of set up, what's the best way for them to get a hold of you? Ross: Well, a lot of people will find us by going to our website, which is www.bookease.com. So, that's B-O-O-K-E-A-S-E bookease.com. And on there, you'll see a picture of me. You can click on that and it'll be able to take you to my calendar. And you could then schedule a time on our calendar for us to speak. Or my email address is very easy. It's just Ross@bookease.com. So you can email me and say, "Hey, I'd like to talk with you". I will then send you a link to my calendar and we will then set up a time to talk with each other. So, either my email address, or bookease.com, the website address. Russell: Again that's B-O-O-K-E-A-S-E.com. And I want to say something, I want to say two things. Number one is I don't get anything for telling you about this other than my dad's awesome. And he's helped so many people in our community, so I don't get paid for this. But number two is my dad always undercharges on everything. I keep trying to get him to triple his prices. So just there's not someone who's going to do a better job with this for you, and honestly, at a cheaper price. So someday I'm going to convince him to charge what he's worth. And then none of you guys were able to afford him, but just kidding. But like, in all honesty, like everyone always inside of the Two Comma Club Coaching Program everyone in module one, they go get their business set up with my dad and they always come back like "He explained all this stuff to me I never understood before. And it was so inexpensive!" So it's like, yeah. So it's amazing what he does. And it'll help you guys get, again, your limited family partnership set up if you're looking for that. Or, again, if you're getting your business just started and you need that stuff set up as well. You also, if they don't have bookkeeping and there's a whole bunch of things, you can help them kind of get set up in their business, which are all good. Ross: Yes. Yep. We'd love to chat with you. And I'm the one you'd be talking to. I like to spend a good hour with each new customer and we talk about the strengths and weaknesses of entity types which one is best for them under their certain circumstances. And so we pretty much tailor make our programs for each individual. Russell: Yeah. So, take advantage of that you guys. It's an amazing service and yeah. Go to bookease.com and get started. So, dad, that said, thanks for hanging out tonight with me because that was fun, but second of all, thanks for sharing this piece of, I think, as we were talking about before we started recording, there's just so many entrepreneurs who haven't even thought about this, and usually when you think about this is when it's too late. And so it's good to kind of get this in the forefront of people's minds and help them to be aware of it and get it structured and set up, because not that hard to get it structured. And then you have it as protection makes you sleep better at night and someday when you need it, you've got it. Ross: That's right. You want it set up before the lawsuit hits. Russell: If you get in a wreck, don't call my dad up like, "Help, quick." Yeah, now is the time. That's awesome. Thanks dad. Thanks everybody. If you guys got value from this episode, please take a screenshot of it post on Instagram or Facebook or wherever you do your social stuff and tag me in it. And also all your other entrepreneur friends who are just like me and you who are chasing all the shiny objects, building businesses, and even thinking about how to protect ourselves. Let them know about this episode, so they can know about limited family partnerships. They can know about my dad. He can help them out as well and get your stuff set up and protected. And that way you can just worry about really doing what's most important in your business, which is serving your audience. But getting these things set up will make you sleep better at night and help protect you longterm. So, thank you, dad. Thank you everyone for listening and I will see you guys on the next episode of the marketing secrets podcast. Ross: Yes. Thank you. Appreciate the chance to be with you today. Russell: Go to bookease.com. Let's go! See you guys.

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

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.

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

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

Episode 88: Ripple's YouTube Lawsuit This episode is jam-packed! We discuss a lawsuit against YouTube, a token in the gaming world, our favorite altcoins, and one of the known athletes coming out of retirement to play for a new team. In News Break, we talk about Ripple’s lawsuit against YouTube which centers around “XRP giveaway scams” that the video-sharing platform failed to police. Find out how these scams operate and what this lawsuit against YouTube means for crypto. For Token Time, we feature a “super nerd coin that can make you a lot of money”—Enjin coin. We also discuss the numbers and why Enjin coin is called “blockchain: gamified”. In Whatcha Thinkin’, we answer this question from Ross: What are your favorite shitcoins? What do you think is the price projection of HBAR will be worth in one year from now? Check out our answers in this segment. You too have the opportunity to ask us a question (and become a Beards & Bitcoins Celebrity) by sending us an audio message at ask.beards.live Manspreading’s all about Rob “Gronk” Gronkowski—who comes out of retirement to play with Tom Brady for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. We also talk about the teams we hate, and the football season amidst the COVID19 pandemic This April, we are giving away FREE $10 in bitcoin to the first 50 people who reviews our podcast on iTunes or Apple Podcasts. Just go to ratethispodcast.com/beardsbitcoins, screenshot your review, and send it to info@beardsandbitcoins.com Time Stamps of Segments 11:33 News Break 19:02 Token Time 25:23 Whatcha Thinkin’ (New Segment!) 32:13 Manspreading This episode is sponsored by Monarch Wallet. Rule your own financial kingdom from the palm of your hand. A team at Monarch is working hard to bring you the one app to access all the best crypto services. They believe in delivering tech, not hype. With the universal decentralized Monarch Wallet, you can buy, store, spend, and earn crypto and with Monarch Pay you can set up and accept recurring crypto payments. Monarch Wallet and Monarch Pay are designed to make receiving and paying recurring crypto payments safer, faster, and easier for consumers and merchants alike. For more information, check out and download Monarch Wallet on App Store or Google Play or head over to https://monarchwallet.com Unite the Crypto Community! We now have a way for you to show your love for who is your favorite host. We have Team JChains and Team BitBoy shirts. Check out the merch on beardsandbitcoins.com—just click Merch on the top right side of the website and show us some love. Thanks for tuning into this week’s episode of Beards and Bitcoins—the podcast bringing you news, information, and stories to spread awareness about cryptocurrency. If you enjoyed this episode, head over to Apple Podcasts, subscribe to the show, and leave us a rating and review. Help us spread the word by sharing your favorite episodes on social media. And don’t forget to visit our website, grab your favorite Beards and Bitcoins merch, and follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter! Please also note we do not provide financial advice. Always do your own research when investing or making financial decisions. Get your daily dose of crypto wisdom on Twitter: @BeardsBitcoins Read more about cryptocurrency on our website: BeardsAndBitcoins.com Join us as we take the discussion further on Telegram: http://t.me/beardsandbitcoins Connect with us on Twitter! BitBoy: @BitBoy_Crypto JChains: @CryptoJChains

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

Podcast Episode #87 (feat. Dimples, Oliver and Ross) What's hot in the art world? What's not in the art world? What's in the past, the present and the future? On this weeks "State of the Art" we continue our discussions into the latest creations we have exTRAperienced. Our next full show at The Maltings, Berwick - 13th & 14th March 2020 - Giraffic ParkBook your tickets here → https://www.maltingsberwick.co.uk/events/comedy/7080 For comedy sketches and some of our live show highlights, visit our YouTube or our Facebook by searching Damp Knight Comedy and you can find us as dampknightcomedy on Instagram or twitter @thedampknights.Also check out our new website - https://dampknight.wixsite.com/dampknightcomedy Damp Knight are primarily an improvised comedy group currently touring the North East of the UK. For more information and bookings, visit our Facebook page or email us at dampknight@gmail.com Thank You for Listening. Main Theme: Spacehaze by StoneOceanOur aim is never to offend, only to entertain but with the way of the world at the minute there may be subjects that some people may find offensive within these podcasts.

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

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

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.

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

Podcast Episode #75 (feat. Dimples, Oliver and Ross) What happens when a sudden drug raid happens? Take it all? Maybe. See us live -Our next full show at The Maltings, Berwick - 12th & 13th July - Apocalypse Cow!Book your tickets here → https://www.maltingsberwick.co.uk/events/comedy/4963 For comedy sketches and some of our live show highlights, visit our YouTube or our Facebook by searching Damp Knight Comedy and you can find us as dampknightcomedy on Instagram or twitter @thedampknights.Also check out our new website - https://dampknight.wixsite.com/dampknightcomedy Damp Knight are primarily an improvised comedy group currently touring the North East of the UK. For more information and bookings, visit our Facebook page or email us at dampknight@gmail.com Thank You for Listening. Main Theme: Spacehaze by StoneOceanOur aim is never to offend, only to entertain but with the way of the world at the minute there may be subjects that some people may find offensive within these podcasts.

https://discord.gg/Mmn2FPW Or join us on reddit... https://reddit.com/r/thecitywithinthewalls [Narrator] When a child is born into this fine city, a communication device is placed just beneath the left ear. The device can, connect to a car or house depending on the owner's setting, so communication appears more...normal, and this is how our story begins. Aleen wakes startled, by an incoming call broadcast by her house com, she quickly press's the coms button on her night stand and says... *ANSWERING NOISE* [Aleen] (Waking up to the phone ringing) Mmmm....hello [Jones] Ah Miss Harris. Sorry to call you. However,  I'm a very busy man...and quite impatient. I'm calling for an update...how'd the date go. [Aleen] (Aleen is totally disgusted) (Breath) That's really none of your business Jones...and wasn't I suppose to call you? [Jones] Yes, but as I said before I'm very busy...not to mention, impatient. As far as my business...yes, it kind of is. Now about my update...would it make you feel better if I asked please? [Aleen] (Breaths again) Tharin didn't really want to talk about it. All he told me was, Sorrel placed Dayton in Saris's place and the council isn't happy...at all. That's all he told me. [Jones] (False positivity with Aleen, feels this interaction was on the verge of ‘wasting time’) Well...its not much...and information we already knew...but I'll give you credit for the attempt at least. Thank you Miss Harris, we'll be in touch. (Phone hangs up) [Aleen] Jerk (Song and intro) [Narrator] (Keeping its normative pace, the city is hard at work, ignoring the dangers that loom with each political checkmate. In the heart of the city, a light morning fog sets in around a workshop. The sun, always in it's own power struggle with the thick clouds, lends a slight glow, that gleams lightly off Ross’s spotless high-tech workshop. Tharin enter the shop, eager to see his commissioned device. Ross reveals his genius machine, Tharin looks over it for a second and says...) [Tharin] So I just push this button...and what? It shows me the location of Saris? [Ross] The location of his tracking device at least. Last night I tested it on my own pps unit and it works fine. I just put in Saris's. Once it's done...you just push the button...and it should, yes, show you his location. [Tharin] Perfect, what are we waiting for? [Ross] It has to go through the calculations. [Tharin] Hmmm...how long does that take? (Ding) [Ross] It's done...go ahead. [Tharin] Well that went quicker than I was expecting. Here goes nothing. (Machine makes noise) [Tharin] Is this some kind of joke Mr Ajin? [Ross] What do you mean? [Tharin] Have a look for yourself, see if you can figure out what I mean. [Ross] How is that....what's it doing? [Tharin] Well if you can't figure it out, how am I supposed to know? [Ross] They must have encrypted the signal somehow. [Tharin] Or it doesn't work. [Ross] I assure you, commissioner Grady it works. [Tharin] Ok then, if that's not it, there appears to be, by my count, around 50 Saris's all over the city. [Ross] Yes I see that. They've encrypted his passcode somehow, see how they're all moving around. They've tied his code to others throughout the city. It's going to take a while to figure out. [Tharin] Right....let's hope you can figure it out Mr Ajin. If not, someone must be held responsible...is that clear? [Ross] As a bell. [Tharin] Good...well don't let me stop you...get to work. [Narrator] (Tharin, in a moment of frustration abandons the desk that holds the device. Ross sits in the background behind him, leaning against the duos new machine, he stares at it for a moment, hopelessly as if the answer will reveal itself. Tharin paces back and forth, pressing the coms button just below his left ear saying...) [Tharin] Call father... It doesn't work... [Ross] (Loudly speaking to Tharin as he walks away) It works fine... (Under breath) I just have to figure out the code [Tharin] Hes working on it now. I'll talk to you in a bit.   [Narrator] (Ross Ajin continues his work, continuing to question how ‘he,’ of all people, could be outwitted by the Theosin. Tharin steps away from the workshop for a break from the discord within in his very political life. He makes his way towards Aleen’s, glancing at her coat from the night before that now looks at home, on his passenger seat. He smiles for a moment, and begins to wonder if Aleen enjoyed the night as much as he did.)   (Knock, knock, knock) [Aleen] (Surprised and concerned, but there is a moment of flickering happiness.) Tharin, what are you doing here?   [Tharin] I just wanted to return your coat...and apologize.   [Aleen] Apologize for what?   [Tharin] For not trusting you with the investigation. I have a very hard time trusting anyone, the city is full of people trying...to do...bad things, anyway. I'm sorry to insult your character in that way.   [Aleen] No need to apologize, and I know what you mean about...bad people.   (Awkward silence) (Both talk at the same time)   [Aleen] Thanks for taking….   [Tharin] Well, I just wanted to…   [Aleen] I'm sorry (laughing)   [Tharin] No, I'm sorry go ahead.   [Aleen] I was just going to say, thank you for taking me to Madison Fare last night.  I know you had to, with the bet and all, but...I really had a good time thank you.   [Tharin] I also had a good time. You're quite an entertainer and I needed a break so, thank you, for...forcing me to take you.   [Aleen] We should do it again sometime.   [Tharin] (Momentary pause, considering his next words) I think we should.   [Aleen] Really?   [Tharin] Yes, really...maybe something a little less expensive next time though.   [Aleen] (Laughing) Right, I hope it didn't set you back to far.   [Tharin] No it's fine. Anyways…(breath) I'd better go. We'll talk later though?   [Aleen] Ya   [Tharin] Ok, goodbye Aleen.   [Aleen] Goodbye Tharin.   [Narrator] (Aleen closes the door behind Tharin, watching him for a moment through the looking glass. She smiles. Leaning against the door, she clutches the moment.)   [Aleen] He trusts me…   [Narrator] (Her hands dropping to her sides, her eyes widen, as concern blankets her face… [Aleen] Oh crap...he trusts me.   [Narrator]   (Aleen contemplates the dilemma before her; foster a newfound trust, or betray it.   *pause* Before us sits a warehouse at the edge the city border: windows boarded, corrugated sheets cracked, and fallen from the rooftop, rafters aged, bent and breaking. A swathe of dust would be collected on them if it were not for the mice running to and fro from their homes, rested neatly in unperturbed corners of this uninhabited warehouse.   Saris sits alone. Wrists and ankles burned by the ropes that bind him. His sight darkened by the blindfold. Alone with his thoughts, confined within the silence of this abandoned building. They practically echoed in his mind.   But what's this? Another sound? A foot step. Multiple in fact. They echo off the concrete, shaking the rust from the rafters above…)   [Jones] Moose   [Moose] Yes sir?   [Jones] It would appear our adversaries have found a way to track Saris.   [Saris] (Laughing in his evil “you're so dead” laugh)   [Jones] (Pausing for a moment to recognize Saris's laugh) So here's the plan. Saris is to be moved every 8 hours. Here's the next location, you now have 7 hours and 22 minutes and….23 seconds 22, 21. Anyways, keep him moving.   [Saris] (Laughing again at the plan) If they've already found a way to track me, your dead where you stand.   [Moose] What's the likelihood they'll find us?   [Jones] I'm told by our techs, that we have a 99.7% success rate if we move every 8 hours. That goes down by 20% every half hour afterwards. So I suggest you keep him on the move. (Jones now speaking to Saris in a calm manner) Oh and don't worry Saris, Sorrel has all but abandoned you. Hes placed Dayton in charge. The one looking for you is Tharin. So as you see Sorrel has written you off...the offer still stands if you want to, oh I don't know, help?   [Saris] (A mixture of disbelief, and potentially fostered anger) Sorrel wouldn't abandon me. Not after all that I've done for him, and Dayton won't last a week.   [Jones] Yes well...offer still stands, let me know when you wake up and realize Sorrel cares only for himself...and Dayton. (Jones starts to walk away but stops for one last comment) Oh and...one last thing...don't test my patients by pretending to care for the council. I know your disdain, and soon Sorrel will show his lack of interest in you. When that happens I'll be here to give you a...shot at revenge. Goodbye for now Saris.   (Jones leaves the room)   [Saris] Was he telling the truth Moose? Has Sorrel made Dayton Enforcer?   [Moose] Ya. It's not official yet, but as of right now...Dayton is filling the spot.   [Narrator] (Under Saris’ breath is a growl. His breath feels heavy. His chest knotted, heat rising up the back of his neck. He pulls at his bindings to distract himself. Light trickles of blood scatter on the concrete floor. A new sound, alone once again with Saris’ thoughts.)   *pause*   Tharin, frustrated sits in his car. Unsure if he is more angry by the lack of results from Ross's device, the case to find Saris, or the indent left by the wheel in the palm of his hand. Moments pass, feeling like hours. Even committing to conversation with his car, Salistine.   [Tharin] I am beyond frustrated Salistine. There are so many variables.   [Salestine] Variables you have invariably been trained in, sir.   [Tharin] Yes this is true Salistine.   [Salistine] I just want to say sir...I have done nothing but help when I can, that said sir, I was wondering if you could stop hitting my control wheel?   [Tharin] Yes of course Salistine, I'm sorry. It's just...what do I do with Ross. I know he's not sabotaging the machine, but the lack of results is quite disappointing. I mean, it's not like I can just kill him, we need him.   [Salistine] Sorry to interrupt sir, but an incoming call from councilman Grady's office, do you accept?   [Tharin] Yes of course Salistine, patch it through.   [Salistine] Patching through now sir.   [Jarrett] Tharin, are you sitting down?   [Tharin] Yes, I'm in the car why?   [Jarrett] Sorrel is about to give an address to the entire city.   [Tharin] An address about what?   [Jarrett] He thinks it's a good idea to quell some of the concern over Saris's disappearance.   [Tharin] He's actually going to tell people Saris is missing?   [Jarrett] No...hes going to tell people Saris is Ill and unable to perform his duties as Enforcer.   [Tharin] Well that's better than telling them he's missing.   [Jarrett] I don't agree that lying to the people is a good idea. He's going to dig a hole for the council.   [Tharin] Hmmm, is there anyway to delay him for a few days?   [Jarrett] No, he's going to go live in a few minutes. I have to go. The council has been requested to stand behind him in the address.   [Tharin] Of course, that way you can't deny knowing…   [Jarrett] Exactly...I'm truly concerned Tharin. Find Saris, and do it soon...or we'll have more than just his disappearance to worry about.   [Tharin] I'll do my best father.   [Jarrett] Of course you will, goodbye son.   [Tharin] Goodbye father. Salistine?   [Salistine] Yes sir?   (Salistine is interrupted by an official address. It starts with a bong then the city anthem begins)   [Sorrel] Greeting, salutations, hello and blessings be with you all. My brothers and sisters, I apologize for the interruption of your evening, but I have a grave concern. I've been notified that there are rumors flying about this fine city, about the disappearance of our beloved Saris. Know that he, our sworn protector, our refuge from chaos, our friend and our brother has not disappeared. He is right now...unable to tend to his sworn duties do to an illness, an illness that has him more than just under the weather. I feared, having to inform you of this, because I wanted to save you from the stress you might incur having heard said news. However, I also feared the rumors might cause more damage, so in the Hopes that I, councilman Sorrel, could save you the more stressful thing, I have decided to release this news to you here. My fellow citizens, the council and I care a great deal for you, so know that we always take the actions necessary to keep you all safe. This being said, we have placed Dayton in Saris's stead, til he is either able to return to his regular duties or is forced to retire his title to Dayton. I apologize for the delayed announcement, but as I said before we were hoping to save you the stress. Know that the doctors are working around the clock taking care of our Saris. I ask that you keep the hope that he will be returned to us soon...healthy and ready to resume his responsibilities. I will leave you tonight with our blessing, and pride. For we are proud of the great people of this majestic city, for the way they handle such situations. That is with confidence and courage. Until next time my brothers and Sisters...may the blessing of the council be with you always...goodnight.   [Narrator] Sorrel’s voice echoes in every corner of the city. Across all mediums, his lies spread to an all too trusting populace. Well, trust from some of “his” population. There was one set of ears in particular whose call was interrupted by the message. The man who has Saris himself. The man who without a doubt knows of Sorrel’s lies.   [Jones] Well played Sorrel, but you aren’t the only one with a hand in this game. You want to play?.....Let's play.

Welcome to the Heart & Hustle Podcast with Scott Anez & Nick Gryniewicz!  The Orlando Magic trade for Markelle Fultz at the NBA Trade Deadline. The guys break down the deal for the Magic and what it means for the organization.  0:00 - 5:00 - Recap of the Fultz deal and what to like and not like. 5:00 - 7:30 - Looking at the deal from a Sixers  7:30 -17:00 - The guys ask what can be expected from Markelle Fultz 17:00 - 25:00- Can the Magic go on a playoff push now that they've kept Vucevic & Ross? What is Vucevic's future in Orlando?  25:00 - 26:30 - Does it make sense for the Magic to try to push for the playoffs?  26:30 -31:00 - Will we see Markelle Fultz this year? And some final thoughts on the Markelle Fultz deal.  31:00-END - What to expect from this podcast (it is our first episode).    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

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

David and Fabrice answer five intriguing questions submitted by listeners: Joshua: How can I cope with panic attacks during job interviews? Dan: I feel traumatized by criticisms from my boss at work. what can I do? Susan: How fast can you taper off of anti-anxiety drugs and antidepressants? Ross: What if a patient who's been the victim of trauma or abuse asks for a male therapist? Isn't this a form of avoidance? Should patients be matched to therapists based on gender? Isn't it best to avoid the situations that trigger you? Sumit: I think I have "endogenous depression." Can TEAM-CBT help me? Or will I have to rely on medications? What is endogenous depression? If you have a question, make sure you email david and we will try to answer your question on an upcoming Ask David Podcast!

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

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

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

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

No. 65“近来如何？” – 邀你说英语经典台词【句子】Ross: What&`&s new? 【Friends】S1E2【发音】[wɒts] [nju:]【翻译】怎么样？近来如何？【适用场合】Ross和前妻Carol分手后第一次见面。Ross问：What&`&s new? 字面翻译是：有什么新鲜事。意译过来就是：最近如何？也可以说：How&`&s everything going? What&`&s going on with you? How are you doing? What have you been up to?欢迎加瑶瑶老师微信：teacheryaoyao 邀请你进入全英文微信群，每晚免费纠音。1月零基础音标班已经可以开始报名，网络授课，小班授课，作业一对一批改。

In a 24 hour period there were terrorist attacks in Baghdad, Beirut and Paris by suicide bombers and shooters in what are being attributed to the work of ISIS terrorists. The world is reeling. Countries are debating closing their borders to refugees, communities are dealing with the strains of fear, and we are all left with hard questions. What is going on? What are we going to do about it? What do we do when peace eludes us? And in this episode, listeners weigh in with questions of their own. LISTENER QUESTIONS FROM FACEBOOK   Well, i do have a couple questions in regards to the paris tragedy. First... would you condone the waterboarding of 5 people if it were to prevent a terrorist attack like Paris? Second, If someone was caught for a terrorist attack on a scale of this size, does the death penalty get enacted? Third,,, With the refugees from Syria being a pipeline for terrorists to move into locations, do you stop the syrian refugees from coming in to places, or do you develop another solution. Perhaps set up a temporary refugee camp in an isolated area? Perhaps greenland? Is it fair to jeopardize our own country by exposing ourselves to a known terrorist threat? Sorry if these questions seem harsh, but i know that people are going to be responding to these events in a variety of ways. -Tommy What do you feel is the best way to discourage the xenophobia that results from terrorist attacks like these? Also, the go-to response seems to be retaliation. As followers of Christ, do you feel this is an acceptable response? -Ross What are the costs of non violent response? How do we react in ways that both engage the pain and suffering of the victims while acknowledging the imago dei, even in those branded our "enemies?" -Adam What are your thoughts on the French cartoonist asking people to stop praying for Paris? In situations like these are some forms of compassion or empathy inferior to others? -Mia RELEVANT LINKS Beirut, Baghdad and Paris: how 24 hours of Isis terror unfolded around the world (article) How to Break a Terrorist (book) Bush Directly Authorized Use Of Waterboarding, Still Rejects 'Torture' Classification In New Book (article) Believe Me, It’s Torture (article about voluntary waterboarding of reporter) Kafka Comes to America (book) Shunning refugees is no answer to terror (article) Why Syrian refugee passport found at Paris attack scene must be treated with caution (article)On Paris (Culturemakers article) Xenophobia – Nothing to Fear but Everyone – 030 (irenicast episode) Muslims Against Terrorism (website) Words matter in ‘ISIS’ war, so use ‘Daesh’ (article) Beyond Jihad (excerpt) Paris: You Don’t Want to Read This (Peter Van Buren article) Why ISIS Attacked Paris (article) Ethics (Bonhoeffer book) Paris & Peace (Storied Theology article) What I Discovered From Interviewing Imprisoned ISIS Fighters (article) Charlie Hebdo cartoonist doesn’t want you to pray for Paris (article) Letter From Birmingham City Jail (excerpts) Beirut, Baghdad, Paris and selective grief (article) Dunbar’s Number (wikipedia article) Russell Brand Has The Solution To Terrorism. Everyone Needs To Hear This. (youtube video) Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (book) THANK YOU Thank you to Mike Golin for our intro and outro music.  Check out his band Soulwise. WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU Thank you for supporting the podcast!  Your ratings, reviews and feedback are not only encouraging to us personally, but they help others find the show.  If you appreciate the content we provide please rate, review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes and Stitcher.   Join our conversations on faith and culture by interacting with us through the following links:   Read Us on our blog An Irenicon Email Us at podcast@irenicast.com Follow Us on Twitter and Google+ Like Us on Facebook Listen to Us on iTunes, Stitcher, SoundCloud and TuneIn Speak to Us on our Feedback Page Love Us