www.eltpodcast.com In this episode, language teachers talk about what they do when faced with a new group of students in the classroom on the first day of classes in the new school year. Visit the Teachers' Lounge archive on our website for a full summary of this and other episodes. ELT Podcast Teachers' Lounge is for language teachers.
Streaming, or tracking, involves dividing the students up into different ability levels. The goal is to have a set of classes comprised of students of similar abilities and / or aptitudes, so that teachers can provide more suitable class contents and teacher instruction. The first question is how students are placed into their levels. Dominic's school uses the TOEIC Bridge Test. Dominic says it's easy to administer, and the students' mark sheets are sent to the test company for marking. Kevin's ...
ELT Podcast - Teachers Lounge We talk about various technology-related presentations that we attended at a conference held in Tokyo June 2-3, 2007. For extensive notes and links to the content discussed, please visit http://www.eltpodcast.com/archive/lounge
www.eltpocast.com Conferences for language teachers are an important opportunity for professional development. Today's episode is intended for teachers with little to no conference experience. We discuss why we like attending conferences, and we offer some advice for "novice" conference-goers to get the most out of the experience. Listen to this episode and / or view our online summary (www.eltpodcast.com/archive/lounge).
www.eltpocast.com We have all probably seen large classrooms that are two-thirds full, with the front third of the seats empty. Or, when the number of seats is about the same as the number of students, you might have seen students rush in to grab the seats at the back, then watch as the classroom fills up back to front. However, when the students are closer to the teacher, it is easier to watch their faces for feedback. Also, teachers do not have to strain their voices to reach the back of the l...
For more extensive notes, please visit http://www.eltpodcast.com/archive/lounge Dominic's basic policy is to mark students absent if they are over 5 minutes late, and 3 absences will earn the student a failing grade. But what if the teacher is late? Listen and find out.
Today we discussed information gap activity, a familiar type of exercise found in communicative textbooks and teacher resource books. An information gap activity requires as least two different versions of the material. Students work together in pairs or threes, and each have different information on their pages, so that they have to talk to each other in order to complete the information. For more extensive notes, please visit http://www.eltpodcast.com/archive/lounge
www.eltpodcast.com This week we discussed what to do with the dialogs that are commonly found in language textbooks. First, we outlined a basic procedure that was popularized through textbooks such as Streamlines Departures in the late 80s. We discussed follow-ups and alternatives.
www.eltpodcast.com Welcome to the sixth episode of ELT Podcast, the Teachers' Lounge. In this episode, we discuss student expectations. What do students expect our classes to be like? What do they expect to get out of the classes? How are their expectations sometimes at odds with our own expecations of how the class should go?
www.eltpodcast.com Welcome to the fifth episode of ELT Podcast, the Teachers' Lounge. In this episode, we discuss student evaluations, including continuous assessment, final examinations, and other aspects that go into deciding a final grade for our students.
www.eltpodcast.com Welcome to the fourth episode of ELT Podcast, the Teachers' Lounge. With the winter holiday approaching, we discussed a topic that, while outside the scope of educational topics, is nevertheless relevant to a teacher's life as a teacher, long holidays. We discussed the various conditions under which we have worked, including contact hours, office hours, research days and more.
This is our third episode, and our topic is attendance. We started with a CNN news story with the title of "Students with good attendance can win a new car." We talked about how many classes students were allowed to miss. We raised the question of what constitutes attendance. Also, we talked a little bit about rewarding participation, and this seems to be a topic worth returning to in more concrete detail in the future. For a more detailed summary, see www.eltpodcast.com/archive/lounge
www.eltpodcast.com Welcome to the second episode of ELT Podcast, the Teachers' Lounge. Today we discussed accents, starting with a look at an online quiz that can accurately place your accent to a region of the USA with only 13 questions. There are two URLs for this quiz; as far as we know, both give the same results: www.gotoquiz.com/what_american_accent_do_you_have www.gotoquiz.com/what_accent_do_you_have During the conversation, Bill mentioned a website that has compiled recordings of a wide ...
www.eltpodcast.com This is our first episode of ELT Podcast, the Teachers' Lounge. We started with an article from the Japan Times, "Reform panel eyes teacher improvement" (see our website, eltpodcast.com, for links to the article). We also discuss the Michael Richards incident (in which during a comedy stand-up routine, the actor best-known for his role of Kramer on Seinfeld began hurling racial slurs at two members of his audience), relating this to how we as teachers should develop strategies...
