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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It’s Halloween week which means there are pumpkins, costumes, and diabetic levels of chocolate lurking around every corner. However you spend this week, we hope you enjoy it.
In this week’s Mindful Monday, you’ll see:
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An excerpt from our conversation with Jeremy Harmer
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New research on teachers’ lack of implementation of research.
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Can accent coaching make people less intelligible?
Hope you enjoy this week’s edition.
🎙️ We sat down with Jeremy Harmer
“If you can get students to be emotionally engaged in that way, emotionally invested, you’ve got it. In the 1983 edition of The Practice of ELT, I can’t remember that being such a big issue.”
Some authors become familiar names long before you get the chance to meet them. For many English language teachers, Jeremy Harmer is one of those names.
We were fortunate enough to sit down with him last week for an upcoming podcast episode. We talked about many, many things as you can imagine, but one question we really wanted to know:
What have you changed your mind about since the first edition of “The Practice of English Language Teaching” came out?
Here is part of his answer:
The full episode comes out in the winter.
🎙️ Does research effect change in the classroom?
“We found none of [the 512 different ways of communicating the research] made any difference to teachers’ intentions to use the teaching technique described.”
In one of the more interesting LinkedIn posts we came across this week, Samuel Sims shared a fascinating study he and his colleagues published regarding teacher uptake in implementing research findings in their teaching.
As the title suggests:
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they used 512 ways of communicating the results of the same study
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no difference was observed among teachers’ intentions to implement the research in their classrooms
As you can imagine, this is something close to our hearts as Teacher Talking Time is one avenue where we aim to make research more accessible across our industry.
But what does it take to have research implemented by teachers?
A very interesting question. Perhaps this topic deserves its own podcast episode.
A few links for you:
Question: after you read the paper, what is your biggest takeaway?
🎙️ Can accent coaching make you less intelligible?
In our latest episode of Teacher Talking Time, Dr. Tracey Derwing shares how accent reduction is mostly ineffective (as most of us know).
And as you hear in this clip, the often unregulated world of accent coaching. As Tracey says, one person came out less comprehensible and more difficult to understand.
In our conversation, Tracey emphasizes intelligibility over imitation. Real pronunciation instruction should focus on functional clarity and comprehensibility, not erasing a speaker’s identity or linguistic background.
The full episode is now out on all podcast channels – listen wherever you like to listen!
That’s all for this edition. Talk next week,
Leo and Andrew
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