Welcome to Mindful Monday, where we bridge the gap between Second Language Acquisition research and the practical realities of both your classroom and your business. Each week, Leo and I share research-backed insights to help you sharpen your classroom teaching while building the freedom to work on your own terms.
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Happy World Cup to all who celebrate. Canada started with a draw which we’re all relieved to see (better than a loss, of course).
In this week’s Mindful Monday, you’ll see:
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New podcast on TBLT and declining language enrollment with Matt Coss
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Want to share your expertise with our community?
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Upcoming TBLT conference in Montreal
Hope you enjoy this week’s edition.
🎙️ You Can’t Teach a Syllabus (And Why Accuracy-first is Killing Enrollment) – Matt Coss
“People ask me all the time, ‘Are you worried that AI’s gonna take your job?’ and I tell them, no, but I’m worried that you would ask me that question, because it tells me a lot about what you think my job is.”
A new episode of Teacher Talking Time just dropped and it’s a doozy. We chat with researcher Matt Coss.
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Do we do a good enough job communicating the outcomes of learning a language?
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Are there any benefits of learning a language that isn’t English?
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Will AI take all our jobs? [and what asking that question reveals about you]
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Do students view TBLT as non-teaching and complain to others?
We explore all of this and more. Catch the full interview here:
In this episode, we discuss:
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How a childhood happenstance and an adopted aunt bypassed traditional language learning methods completely.
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Why tracking technical language gains as an absolute baseline sets a language program up for total institutional collapse.
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A direct look inside a Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) classroom where a student successfully performed a task but swore their teacher “didn’t teach them anything.”
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Why language classrooms are the ultimate retention machine for universities, outperforming massive STEM cohorts by fundamentally validating student identities.
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How rigid vocabulary lists and zero training in meaning negotiation caused fluent clinicians to completely misdiagnose a critical patient case.
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Real strategies for working inside a strict curricular environment by identifying functional communication gaps rather than forcing artificial vocabulary drills.
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How to bypass structural paralysis by simply asking learners what they tried to say this week but couldn’t.
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Why a student asking for a complex grammar rule is actually a cry for comprehensibility, and how to serve chunks over metadata.
Matt is a professor of applied linguistics in the Department of Modern Languages & Classics at the University of Alabama (USA). A research-practitioner who has taught Mandarin and Spanish across all proficiency levels for 13 years, his work focuses on task-based language teaching (TBLT), assessment, language program design, and student retention. He is also the Interviews Editor for TASK: Journal on Task-Based Language Teaching and a founding co-editor of the Focus on Practice section of Language Awareness.
FOR MORE FROM MATT COSS:
Listen on Spotify here:
🎙️ Want to present with us?
Did you know that we’re once again running monthly CPD workshops?
We started Learn Your English to help teachers build sustainable teaching businesses. That work is still very much the core of what we do.
But we also want to create something else: a space where teachers can share their ideas and reach a wider community.
We’re opening monthly spots for teachers to present. If you’re working on something other teachers should know about, submit a proposal. We’d love to hear from you.
We’re accepting proposals for July onwards.
🎙️ Language teachers and researchers without borders
Want to attend an incredible event around task-based language teaching? The Second Language Research Forum is happening in Montreal from October 2-4 at the University of Montreal.
The Second Language Research Forum (SLRF) is an internationally recognized conference that brings together second language acquisition (SLA) researchers from around the world.
This is one of the leading SLA conferences in North America, providing a venue where established researchers as well as graduate students can present their work on a wide variety of theoretical and empirical issues in SLA, including cognitive, linguistic and sociolinguistic research conducted both in the laboratory and in the classroom.
We migh be making an appearance as well :).
Check out all the information by clicking here.
That’s all for this edition. Talk next Monday,
Leo and Andrew
Want to grab a coffee and strategize the next step of your business?
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