The Roving Rapporter Podcast: Recent Episodes
The Roving Rapporter
The podcast for teachers of and in English in search of valuable and practical tips on classroom management, educational technology and learner-centered methodology. Writer and presenter: Stephan Hughes
Introducing some of the characters from the novel. Their names sound like superheroes of mutants.
Here are two top tips on how to overcome that fear of recording your voice in English. And as a bonus, take a look at Marianne Williamson's poem to get you more revved up and motivated to keep learning - https://www.personalgrowthcourses.net/stories/williamson.ourdeepestfear.invitation
This episode was made with those attending my course Better Speaking for Teachers in mind, but anyone learning English can use these sentence starters when they have to answer a question or talk about a topic that they have little knowledge about. Listen in to get those SEVEN GEMS!
What does 2021 have in store for us teachers? Here are three things we need to bear in mind as remote, blended or distance learning will become the norm for almost all of us.
For more of this, you can read the post here.
Two things teachers should consider when dealing with controversial or hot topics in the classroom.
Here are two super practical tips on how to deal with prepositions in English teaching.
1. Prepositions as part of the noun phrase
2. Prepositions as content words
Maybe it's time we moved away from trying to explain why we use one preposition and not the other, especially when the explanation does not seem to make follow a logical explanation,
Change before you have to. Jack Welch could have as well said, “Change before it’s too late”. But what DOES he really mean by that? This is the Roving Rapporter Podcast episode and I’m your host, Stephan Hughes. Our topic today is Wilful Change
It is common knowledge that change is the only constant thing in the universe. Doing something differently, adopting a new mindset or analyzing things from a new perspective is still a tough call for us, the difficulty scale ranging from person to person and moment to moment. I decided to propose the quote as a prompt for a speaking task in the online asynchronous program called Yes we can speak English, a project aimed to provide professionals in the areas of language teaching with oral practice and feedback. I thought I would share a few of the ideas these students had to say about it
Changing before you have to can spare you the consequences you might have to face as a result of your misbehaviour, for example. What drives us to change is that in an ever-developing world, new ideas and perspectives have to be embraced so as not to get lost in the interest and in the approach of new ways to teach the same content and more.
What Welch is probably saying can be summed up in ONE word – COMPLACENCY. If you are constantly rethinking and seeking to improve the way you do what you do, there is no room for being complacent!
If there is any piece of advice that we should all listen is that one, regardless of the amount of kind words and suggestions we hear on a daily basis. We have to be able to tell the difference between useful and not so useful advice, and apply the former to everything we do
Lessons learned? Change does us heaps of good. Like a lot of other things that work in our benefit, it requires a concerted effort. This is the Roving Rapporter Podcast episode 04.
Read the blog post
http://dablog-dablog.blogspot.com/2020/10/day-298-did-we-fail-to-prepare.html?m=1
Reflections about what it means to get students spark their creativity in the classroom.
When you are learning a language as an adult, one of the biggest concerned is being to establish minimal communication with more proficient speakers. This concern materializes in ERRORS related to grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation, out of fear of making these inaccuracies, students ask if the way they express their ideas in the language is not what is possible and accurate but what is appropriate. Is the word frequently used? Is that phrase formal o informal? Do the words normally go together?
This episode brings a quick tip on #errorcorrection, which heightens learner awareness of how to avoid misunderstanding. The difference between the phrases LET me take my book and LET me get my book is explored.
All it takes is a prompt - an idea to get students going. Provide them with a prompt, which can double as a model or a scaffold and let them do the rest. In this episode, I give two examples of students' recording their answers to a prompt based on the idiom "Keeping up with the Joneses".