ELT Podcast - The Teachers' Lounge

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 school uses a speaking test produced in England for the first year, and a TOEIC test for the second year. The speaking test has students look at some pictures and tell a story into a tape recorder. Robert's school uses a test that Kurume University developed in-house. Up to 8 teachers contribute items, and they have meetings to determine the test content. Ideally, a school will have a trial period, to see if there are students who stand out as being either well above or below the level that they tested into. At some schools, though, this is difficult to do. Also, sometimes the administration may insist on an equal number of students per class, even if your testing shows that the upper and lower levels should be smaller than the middle-level classes.

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 large room. Classrooms with students bunched up at the back indicate that either the students do not care or the teacher does not care. Since learning a language is an emotional thing, students have to be more engaged by being up close. A large physical distance is also a psychological distance; when there is a spatial gap between the teacher and the students, it is difficult to bridge that gap to reach the students. Listen to this episode and / or view our online summary (www.eltpodcast.com/archive/lounge) to see how we address these problems. The solutions we discuss should help you in your own teaching situation.

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 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 variety of accents of English; he couldn't remember the name of the site at the time, but here it is now: International Dialects of English Archive, http://web.ku.edu/idea/

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 for dealing with disruptive students.