Sponge Chats – Teacher Training with Borja Uruñuela

This blog post is part of the Sponge Chats video series.

A short time ago, I had the pleasure to sit down with trainer, manager, school owner, and author, Borja Uruñuela for the first Sponge Chat. For those of you that don’t know Borja, he is one of the owners of St. James, one of the most well-known language academies in Spain, as well as a prominent figure within ACEIA and TESOL, having been teaching and training for well over twenty-five years. I’ve seen Borja present at various ACEIA conferences many times, and every time I had the ‘that-was-a-great-session’ feeling. Because of this, I felt he was the perfect person to kick off the new video series.

In our talk, which can be seen here on the Sponge ELT YouTube channel or listen to in the podcast below, we spoke about many things from starting out as a non-native teacher and moving into teacher training, to tips on how to become a teacher trainer. A massive thank you to Borja for taking the time to sit down with me – it was insightful, rewarding, and I can’t wait to catch up again!

Check it out and let me know what you think!

If you don’t feel like watching the Sponge Chat, feel free to listen to the podcast on Spotify!

Lara Bryfonski – What we know about the importance of corrective feedback / Focus-on-Form – SPONGE ELT – Bridge the Gap

If you're a true fan of Sponge ELT and Sponge Chats, you'll have seen Lara's name before! She recently co-authored a book with Alison Mackey called the Art and Science of Language Teaching, and she has been on before to talk about task-based language teaching from the teacher education side of things. In short, she was the right person to ask about what we know about corrective feedback and how we should be going about it in our classrooms. You can find more about Lara on her site here, and whole list of things she's been involved in here.

1. Lara Bryfonski – What we know about the importance of corrective feedback / Focus-on-Form 33:57
2. Bridge the Gap – Martin Bloomfield: What do we know about Dyslexia in language education? 01:02:19
3. Bridge the Gap – Geoff Jordan: What do we know about explicit and implicit knowledge and why is it important? 01:00:13
4. Bridge the Gap – Masatoshi Sato: What is the research practice gap? 47:49
5. Sponge Chats – Perspectives on Business Mindset with Rachael Roberts 44:59