A new episode of TEFLology (link HERE).
At the end of my TEFLology Podcast review, I committed myself to doing little mini-reviews of each subsequent episode.
I'm beginning to wonder if that was a wise idea, given how little I have to say about most episodes.
I mentioned in my original review that although I found the series as a whole to be quite useful and informative, there were many individual segments that I found less than useful. This was probably an example of the latter. I'm not sure what information I gained from this podcast.
This podcast had a different format than usual. It wasn't just one interview, but it was a series of mini-interviews with conference participants.
This had the potential to be interesting, but many of the interviewees just talked about how wonderful the conference was, and at times I felt like I was listening to an advertisement for the conference.
Many of the topics had been already covered in previous episodes. The experience teaching the blind student had already been a segment on a previous episode. The native speaker teacher/ non-native speaker teacher distinction has been done several times already on this podcast.
The sound quality was particularly bad. There was a lot of background noise which sometimes made it difficult to hear what people were saying. (There have been several episodes in the past where the TEFLologists have apologized for the audio quality of the recording, or the background noise, and then when I actually listened to it, I thought, "Huh, that wasn't bad at all." Here, it actually was pretty bad.)
On the positive side, there were a few interesting stories. I liked David Paul's story about playing Shogi at a business meeting. (It was a very typical story about how business relationships operate in Japan).
Tats Paul Nagasaka had some interesting thoughts about the perspectives of people under 40 versus the perspectives of people over 40--something that made my ears perk up a little bit since I'm just a couple years away from 40 now. Although after listening to him a bit more, I figured out he was using 40 not so much as a magic number itself, but as shorthand for whatever age you settle down and have a wife and kids, and have to support your family.
The entire idea of having a conference that is focused on the teacher's experience is an interesting one, as Mike Ellis explains in the opening interview, since current rhetoric is always about making schools more student centered.
Mike Ellis's example of how his former student fondly remembered his class because he was funny is slightly self-serving, but perhaps a good example of how the student's mind really works. My favorite high school classes were also all the classes in which the teachers were comedians.
Although they never discuss it, there's another discussion to be had about whether the classroom should be focused on input (something traditionally considered teacher-centered), or on production (something traditionally considered student-centered).
At least insofar as student centered is interpreted as "students produce the majority of the language in the classroom", there is potentially a danger. Both Krashen and Michael Lewis have warned that forcing students to produce before they are ready will cause problems, and that in the early stages of language learning, the receptive skills should take priority.
Unfortunately in many schools the obsession with reducing teacher talking time and with increasing student talking time can lead to beginning students being forced to produce before they are ready.
But that is just my own digression, and not a focus of this actual episode.
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