Episode Thirty-two

Interview with Andre Alipio: Training Parents to Join the Team of Teachers During the Pandemic

Show Notes

In this week’s episode, we’re joined by André Alipio. André has been the Director of Studies at GTP (Global Teaching Practice) for 10 years now, but he has been a teacher trainer since 1995. He has worked for different institutes in Brazil, like International House Sao Paulo. As the director of studies, he is responsible for designing and delivering a range of courses for teachers of English, as well as training tutors of such courses. André is an active CELTA and DELTA trainer, and has trained on courses in Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela, and other countries. He is also a local trainer for ETS products like TOEFL Junior. More recently, André has been developing ELT materials and consulting to the educational market in general.

Today, André joins me for a conversation that is certainly relevant to anyone who works with young learners or has children who are currently learning at home. At the time of recording this, schools around the world are temporarily closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. This means that those students are currently learning from home by attending their classes online. In this episode, André shares practical strategies for how we, as teachers, can help train parents to support their children in online learning.

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In this Episode

• How the newness of this situation means that we are all still learning how to deal with it

• Why there has sometimes been tension in relationships between parents and teachers, and how the pandemic has affected this

• How children learning from home can be viewed as an opportunity for parents to understand more about their children’s education

• Helping parents understand what goes on in the classroom

• Giving parents the syllabus: why they need to know how the course is intended to progress

• Presenting lesson objectives in a way parents can understand

• Communication between the parents and teacher/school

• Why it’s not necessary to be technical in our communication with parents- but how to help them have a practical understanding of classroom methodology

• Helping parents understand how to create a set difference between “school” and “home” inside the house

• Creating a classroom environment at home - setting rules and establishing routines/ rituals

• How these routines help change a child's behavior when it’s time to learn

• How small changes can produce big results

• The importance of having a sign or signal to show young learners when it’s time to focus

• What to do when parents are reluctant to be involved in their child’s learning

• How to encourage parents to be part of the teaching team

• How to encourage parents to listen to their children in a different way during learning time

• Advice for coping with parents who might want to be too involved in their children’s learning or are overbearing

• Helping parents understand the purpose of their children’s education activities

• The importance of allowing for some silent time during class

• How to prevent parents from overloading their child with materials

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Quarantined? You can now get CELTA certified completely online. Check it out here.

And don’t forget to sign up for our next free webinar workshop here.

Episode Thirty-one

Interview with Eliberto Salinas: Teaching Learners of Different Levels in the Same Class

Show Notes

In episode 31 of Expand Your Horizons, we're pleased to welcome Eliberto Salinas as our guest. Eliberto has extensive experience as an English teacher and is also a CELTA trainer at International House Mexico, where he is based in Mexico City. Today, he’s joining me to talk about something many teachers find challenging: supporting students of different English levels in the same classroom. join us for our conversation about how to identify and cater to students’ differences in the classroom, including some practical strategies for adapting activities and presenting materials to accommodate students of varying language levels in the same group, even in an online class.

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In this Episode

• The fact that any class with more than one student is heterogeneous: students will differ!

• Ways in which students can differ in a classroom

• Where to start: how to become aware of your students’ differences

• How students’ perception of their own English level can affect their motivation

• How having students of different levels in the same class can be challenging for teachers, and how it can affect the lesson

• Differentiated instruction: what is it?

• What students at lower language levels need in order to keep up with the lesson

• How the way you ask questions can cater to students at different levels

• How to use timing to change the ease of your tasks

• Giving instructions: why this is not the time to teach anything - how to make these simple

• How you can tweak your activity design to cater to learners at different levels

• Pairing: different ways you can pair students to accommodate different levels

• Encouraging students so they know it’s ok to make mistakes

• Individualization: what it means and how to incorporate this principle

• Giving students some autonomy with tasks

• Personalization: how to make the lesson relevant to each student

• Open-ended activities: what these are and how to employ them

• “Tiered tasks:” creating different versions of an activity for different levels of learners

• How to motivate learners with praise

• “Compulsory” vs. “optional” tasks

• Using answer keys

• Making sure all students feel like they’re a part of the group

• Adapting these strategies to online learning

• Using “breakout rooms” in online platforms

• Using the “task cycle” to provide processing time for all students

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The CELTA course can now be done fully online! Check it out here.

And don’t forget to sign up for our next free webinar workshop here.

Episode Thirty

Interview with Andrew Watson: Differences in Teaching Adults and young Learners and Strategies for Teaching YLs Online

Show Notes

In this week's episode of Expand Your Horizons, we're talking with Andrew Watson about strategies for teaching young learners online. Andrew has great insight on working with young learners as well as extensive experience in the ELT industry. He got his first teaching job in South Korea in 1994, and since then, he’s held a variety of EFL jobs including teacher, IELTS oral examiner, young learners’ coordinator at the British Council, CELTA and ICELT teacher trainer and developer. He holds a DELTA certification and an MAEd in Applied Linguistics.

In our conversation, Andrew and I discuss the key differences between working with adults and working with children in the ESL classroom, and Andrew shares a wealth of practical tips for teaching YLs both in the physical classroom and online.

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In this Episode

• The key differences between adults and young learners

• The fact that most teaching around the world is of young learners

• Attitudes and motivation of adults vs. children

• The factors that influence young learners in their learning and development

• How developmental differences, even in the same age group, may affect young learners in the classroom

• The division of young learners into age groups: how they’re typically categorized

• Differences between main age groups of young learners

• How very young learners who are still learning their first language may start to learn English

• The learning history that adults bring to the classroom vs. the “blank slate” of young learners’ educational experience

• The difference in the speed of progress between adults and YLs

• The importance of incorporating other learning (social skills, critical thinking) with language learning

• Areas in which children are superior to adults in their language learning ability

• The importance of giving young students lots of input and clear models

• Advice on bringing creativity to your YL classroom

• How to reduce your workload: getting mileage out of your material

• A helpful resource for teaching young learners: Carol Read’s site

• What the abbreviation “SOS” means in terms of teaching strategies

• Fun activities to try with students in online classes

• Further tips for teaching children in online classes, including giving them options, dealing with shorter attention spans, and scaffolding activities

• A very helpful tip on balancing activity types and aims in your lessons

• Bloom’s Taxonomy

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Interested in more in-depth teacher training? Check out the fully online CELTA course at IH Mexico.

And sign up for our next free webinar workshop here!

Episode Twenty-nine

Conversation with Orlando Delgado: Taking ELT Online in the Time of COVID-19

Show Notes

We’re kicking off Season 2 of Expand Your Horizons by welcoming a returning guest, Orlando Delgado. Orlando is the Director of Teacher Training & Development Operations for IH Mexico and has been a teacher trainer and CELTA and DELTA assessor for over 10 years around the world. Orlando is very knowledgeable and enthusiastic about online teaching and training in particular – and this week, we’re talking about what’s going on in the world right now and how that affects the ELT industry. We’re currently in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, which is impacting how we’re thinking about teaching, learning, professional development, and communication in general. In this episode, Orlando joins me for a less formal conversation in which we reflect on what all of this could mean for our industry and bring you some general insight and advice on teaching online.

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In this Episode

• A special announcement: you can now take the CELTA course completely online through Ih Mexico: find more information here.

• Our free webinars are back! Register here to save your spot.

• Orlando’s initial thoughts on how the Covid-19 pandemic has immediately affected the ELT industry

• How teachers and professors around the world have had to adapt to remote teaching

• How this situation has made us reconsider how things might change more permanently

• The potential long-term effects of our adaptation to online teaching

• What some teachers are finding stressful about online teaching

• Different generations of teachers and coping with online teaching

• The new apps popping up for online teaching and tutoring

• How our view of online teaching is shifting from a “backup plan” to the first choice for a learning method

• Our predictions for how online teaching and learning will increase

• Whether there will still be a desire to travel to physical classes even after it’s safe to do so again

• Whether online services are actually superior to in-person options

• Benefits of remote learning - what’s possible online

• “Flipping the classroom” - what this means and how it works online

• Homework as an afterthought to a class vs. homework as preparation for the upcoming lesson

• How flipping the classroom can motivate the students and promote learner autonomy

• Teacher training and professional development opportunities online

• How you can still make classroom management techniques work through technology: monitoring, interaction patterns, student talk time, etc.

• Ideas for making online activities collaborative in a group

• The benefits of getting trained to teach online specifically

• How CELTA online can work and the unexpected upside to conducting teaching practice online

• Why employers may jump at the chance to hire a candidate who has received training for online teaching

• Our predictions for the future of teacher training

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Episode Twenty-eight

How to Write Lesson Aims (and Why They Matter)

Show Notes

"By the end of the lesson, students will be able to..."

Does the phrase above look familiar? If you're a teacher, chances are you're aware of the practice of writing aims or objectives for your lessons. Maybe you learned about this in a training course, or maybe you work at a language school where your boss looks over your lesson plans. For many teachers, sitting down to write out lesson aims can feel a little like a pointless chore. If you have a sense of what you want to do in the lesson, do you really need to write it all out? Is the wording REALLY that important? In this episode, we talk all about lesson aims and why they're actually a lot more important than you might think. We'll give you some tips for making them count, tell you exactly how to determine the right main and sub aim for different types of lessons, and discuss why having a clear aim is the main thing that can make or break your lesson.

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In this Episode

Main Aims

• What lesson aims are

• Why lesson aims are actually for the students, not for you

• How to write your aims from the students’ perspective

• Why we say, “By the END of the lesson…”

• Why adding “better” to your aims makes them more achievable

• SWBAT

• Why lesson aims matter: how a lesson aim is like taking a taxi to the airport

• How the lesson type determines the lesson aim

• An example of how to word an aim for a reading lesson

• How detailed to be in the wording of your aims - you can even mention the specific sub-skills students will practice

• An example of how to word an aim for a speaking or writing lesson

• An example of how to word a grammar or vocabulary lesson aim

• Why the wording of your main aim matters- how this can make your aim achievable or not

• Why the aim should be focused on the use of language, not just the knowledge of language

Subsidiary Aims

• Why your sub aim should focus on a different skill or system than your main aim

• Example sub aims for a reading lesson

• How many sub aims you should include in a lesson, depending on the length

• Why the sub aim you choose determines how you spend time in your lesson (after the main aim has been achieved!)

• Why the sub aim is about something incidental that students will also gain in the course of a lesson

• Why the aims determine what you extend or cut in your lesson to manage your timing

Choosing Lesson Aims

• Why the main and sub aims need to be different

• Why it’s not common (and probably not a good idea) to have a systems (grammar or vocabulary) main and and a systems sub aim

• A good trick for determining your sub aim in a grammar or vocabulary lesson

Stage Aims

• Where to review the lesson stages: stages in general, for reading lessons, for listening lessons, for speaking lessons, or for writing lessons

• Why you need stage aims in each lesson

• How stage aims help you determine which activities actually belong in your lesson

• An interesting way to think about timing and the value of activities in your lesson: is an activity “too expensive?”

• How every stage in the lesson needs to contribute to achieving your main aim

• Why aims are important even when you aren’t being evaluated as a teacher

Aims Achievement in General

• The problem with having a mentality of “Oh, I’ll just finish whatever we don’t get to today in the next class”

• Why an amazing activity idea doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a perfect activity for THAT spot in THAT lesson

• Frameworks: how more structure can actually be freeing

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Get our free Aims Writing chart! It’s a clear, helpful guide for choosing and wording main aims depending on the lesson type. Download it and print it for an easy reference when planning your lessons.

Episode Twenty-seven

Teaching Skills Lessons: Why Every Lesson is Not About Grammar or Vocabulary

Show Notes

In this week's episode, we're doing an in-depth review of teaching skills lessons, starting with how they differ from systems (grammar and vocabulary) lessons. It's tempting to think that every lesson should involve teaching students new words and grammatical structures, but it's equally important to focus on developing students' skills: reading and listening comprehension and speaking and writing fluency. So we're discussing exactly what makes skills lessons different from systems lessons, and giving you practical strategies for how to plan and deliver different types of skills lessons for your classroom.

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In This Episode

• How skills are different from systems: how to distinguish them

• Receptive Skills vs. Productive Skills

• The receptive skills: reading and listening, which involve comprehending a written or audio text

• A reference to our previous episodes on teaching a reading or a listening lesson for more information

• Why the texts students read or listen to should be similar to texts they’d encounter in their daily lives

• Why it’s important to give students a task before they read or listen

• An example of a reading text and a task you could assign students to help them focus their reading

• The structure of reading and listening lessons (they follow the same stages)

• Starting with a more general reading or listening task before moving on to a task that requires a closer read/ listen

• The productive skills: speaking and writing, which involve producing a written text or practicing speaking fluency

• A reference to our previous episodes on teaching a speaking or a writing lesson for more information

  Skills that Work Together

• Putting a productive task at the end of a receptive skills (reading or listening) lesson

• How to choose an appropriate productive task for a reading or listening lesson (it depends on the text students read/ listened to)

• How receptive skills work comes into play in a productive (speaking or writing) lesson

• An example of a receptive (reading) task in a writing lesson: having students read an example of a travel blog for gist before writing one

• An example of a receptive (listening) task in a speaking lesson: having students listen to a demo of the speaking task before they do the task

• Why combining different skills work is authentic: we don’t usually practice individual skills in isolation in real life

• Why the focus and main aim of the lesson determines how much time should be spent on which skill

  Bringing Systems into Skills Lessons

• Why systems lessons are often referred to as “language” lessons

• Why systems should never become the main focus in a skills lesson

• Integrating vocabulary work in a receptive skills lesson: a vocabulary pre-teach

• The difference between a vocab pre-teach in a receptive skills lesson and a whole vocabulary lesson

• How to determine whether vocabulary is “blocking” in a receptive skills lesson

• Why you shouldn’t try to pre-teach every word in the text

• Doing a “useful language input” in a speaking or writing lesson

• An example of what useful language would look like in a writing lesson about a travel blog

  Dealing with Errors in Skills Lessons

• Monitoring and noting errors for a delayed correction stage

• Determining when to correct on the spot and when to wait until later

• How a fluency focus differs from an accuracy focus in a lesson

• Dealing with errors you don’t know how to explain

• Giving students suggestions for higher-level language as opposed to only correcting errors

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Do you have any questions or thoughts about teaching skills lessons? How do you help students with fluency and comprehension in your classroom? Let us know by leaving us a comment below.

Episode Twenty-six

How to Teach Writing

Show Notes

How do you approach teaching writing? Do you actually give your students writing exercises in class, or do you just assign writing tasks as homework? In this episode, we look at the benefits of working on writing in the classroom, and we go through exactly how to structure an effective writing lesson. We discuss why the writing task itself is the most important piece of the whole thing, and we describe the practical process that allows you to turn your students into better writers.

Want a free reference chart outlining the stages and advice for an effective writing lesson? You can download it below!

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In this Episode

• Do you think writing in class is a waste of time? Why many teachers give writing exercises as homework

• Why it’s actually helpful for students to practice writing in class

• Making sure your writing lesson is more than just the students coming to class, writing something, and then leaving

• Why not just any written work in class counts as an actual writing exercise

• Making your task authentic: what we mean by an “authentic” task and examples of what this might look like

• Why “write ten sentences about…” or “write a paragraph about…” is not a good writing task

• How to make sure the writing task you set is achievable in the amount of time you have in the lesson

• Why everything in your writing lesson stems from what the writing task is

  The structure of a writing lesson

• The first stage: the lead-in - why it’s not necessary to start by saying, “Today we’re going to do some writing…”

• How your writing task informs the context you set in your lead-in

• Why you want to give your students a “model text” as an example of whatever you want them to write in the lesson

• Why the model text should look as authentic as possible

• Why students first need to read the model text for gist (the main idea) before doing anything else with it and how this helps support them later on in the lesson when they start their own writing

• Why you should adapt the model text if you need to- and how to know if you need to

• How to help students notice and use the structure of the model text in their own writing

• Why it’s helpful to give students “useful language for the task” and how to choose what kind of language this is

• Why those useful phrases should be planted in the model text you give students earlier on in the lesson and how this makes for a smooth transition from one stage to the next

• How to help students brainstorm before writing and why you don’t want to skip this stage

• The actual writing stage: why it can feel a bit strange to sit in silence while students write… but why it’s necessary!

• How to make sure you leave students enough time to actually write in the lesson

• A tip: give students time warnings as they write

• How to conduct a peer editing stage: why it’s helpful to give students instructions for what to look for in their partner’s writing

• What to have students do with their writing after they write it: “publish” it!

• How to conduct a successful publishing stage

• Why students need a task for reading each other’s work- and how to make this authentic depending on what your writing task was

• Getting content feedback on students’ writing

• Why you shouldn’t ask students to read their writing out loud to the class

• Delayed error correction, or language feedback, at the end of a writing lesson

  General Tips for Writing Lessons

• Managing timing: shorten the task itself if you need to save time

• Alternatives for just “write a paragraph about…” - how to turn this into a more authentic task

• How to deal with students writing different amounts or taking different lengths of time when writing

• Fast finisher tasks: what you can ask students to do if they finish writing early

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Download your free writing lesson reference chart to review instructions for each stage of a writing lesson.

Episode Twenty-five

Interview with Jackie Bolen: Teaching in Korea and ESL Games

Show Notes

In this week's episode of Expand Your Horizons, our guest is Jackie Bolen. Jackie taught English in South Korea at private institutes and universities for over ten years. She now lives in Vancouver, Canada where she does some teaching, writing, and various online things, including running her two websites, eslactivity.org and eslspeaking.org. She is both CELTA and DELTA certified and believes in the value of communicative, interactive language learning. She’s particularly interested in using games in the ESL classroom, and she’s published several books of games and resources for ESL teachers. In her spare time, Jackie is usually on the hunt for the most delicious kimchi she can find, which she says isn't that easy in Vancouver! She joins us on the show to discuss teaching in Korea and share tips for finding a job, and she offers some great advice on how to make the ESL classroom more fun.

“I’m all about student-centered teaching. I think anytime I can take two minutes to set up an activity and then students are interacting and talking with each other for 30 minutes, I can think, ‘I’ve done good work here.’ (. . .) So that’s always my goal.” ”

In this Episode

• How Jackie decided she wanted to teach English and got her start

• Why she decided on Korea as her initial teaching destination

• How requirements for teaching in Korea were different in the past than they are now

• Why university jobs in Korea are coveted and what qualifications a teacher needs to apply

• What a “hagwon” is, and the pros and cons of teaching at one

• What to look out for when applying for a job- potential red flags

• Questions you should ask (and where you should look) to make sure the job you’re applying for is legitimate (https://www.waygook.org/)

• The importance of using Facebook groups as a resource for checking out jobs

• Checking out hagwon black lists to avoid scams/ unpleasant working situations

• What daily life is like for a teacher in Korea

• The expat community: activities and clubs

• Saving money in Korea

• Why Jackie decided to get CELTA certified after teaching for five years

• Her experience on the CELTA course

• How her years of teaching contributed to her success on the course

• Her advice for prospective candidates: brush up on grammar!

• Why knowing the grammar terminology makes the CELTA course much less stressful

• Her experience on the DELTA course - how the DELTA exam helped her solidify her confidence in language analysis

• “Pragmatic competence” (the term I couldn’t remember in our discussion of the DELTA exam)

• The benefits of using games in the ESL classroom

• Balancing the use of a textbook in class with time to play games

• How to motivate students by getting them moving around

• Why less teacher talk is an indication of a successful lesson

• The feedback Jackie got on one of her first CELTA lessons and how this changed her teaching philosophy

• One of her favorite interactive classroom activities: a class survey, or “find someone who” (you can download an example of it below!)

• Why activities with a communicative goal are effective

• How Jackie gets inspiration and ideas for her ESL resource books

• Why she started two Facebook groups for ESL teachers: English Teachers Abroad and Resources for ESL/ EFL Teachers

• Her favorite thing about the ELT industry

• Why she spent most of her teaching career in Korea, and why she moved back to the United States

• What she doesn’t love about the ELT industry

• Her favorite travel destinations in Asia: Hong Kong, Laos, and Thailand

• The resources Jackie offers, including her websites: https://www.eslactivity.org/, https://eslspeaking.org/, and her books on Amazon.

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Want to try out a version of the “Find Someone Who” activity Jackie referenced in this episode? Download it by filling out the form below.