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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Welcome to October! In Canada, this means beautiful colours, Thanksgiving, and new Teacher Talking Time podcast episodes! We’ve got lots of great things coming over the next two months, so stay tuned for that.
In this week’s Mindful Monday, you’ll see:
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SLRF pre-conference webinar recording
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Tracey Derwing on pronunciation teaching
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We interviewed Rod Ellis – what a privilege
Hope you enjoy this week’s edition.
🎙️ Missed the SLRF Conference? We got you
The Second Language Research Forum concluded over the weekend. Maybe we’ll see you there next year!
If you missed the conference or couldn’t attend and you’d like some more TBLT talk, we held a pre-conference session with two SLRF presenters, Matt Coss and Lara Bryfonski.
Check that out here:
We hope to be posting a few conference recordings on our YouTube channel shortly, so subscribe over there (@teachertalkingtimepodcast) to catch them when they come out.
Big thanks to the entire SLRF team for making this happen; it’s a wonderful event, and we look forward to the 2027 forum.
🎙️ Tracey Derwing on accent & intelligibility
“If you can’t be understood, your identity can’t be expressed.”
If you’re interested in pronunciation, accent, and pronunciation teaching, our next podcast episode is for you.
Dr. Tracey Derwing is our guest and this is a fantastic listen. Tracey is a professor emeritus from the University of Alberta’s TESL program, and an adjunct professor in Linguistics at Simon Fraser University. Her research interests include improved communication on the part of L2 learners and their interlocutors (especially in terms of pronunciation), immigrant and refugee settlement issues, and citizenship education.
Here, she touches on accent and intelligibility:
The full episode comes out on October 19 and is a great one. Catch it wherever you listen to Teacher Talking Time.
🎙️ We sat down with the legend Rod Ellis
“I developed the idea of consciousness-raising tasks, which provide learners with data which they can look at, and it guides them in the analysis of that data so that they can arrive at some explicit understanding of how the grammar rule works.”
We can say that of all the years doing our podcast, the opportunity to sit down with Rod Ellis is a moment where we needed to pinch ourselves. We’re first and foremost grateful to Rod for giving us his time.
The episode will be released in January to kick off our 2027 podcast season, but we wanted to share a snippet of our conversation so as not to keep it all to ourselves!
Here is Rod discussing consciousness-raising tasks:
Rod Ellis has just published his final book as well, “Issues in Task-based Learning,” which you can grab wherever you get your ELT books.
That’s all for this edition. Talk next week,
Leo and Andrew
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