The A to Z English Podcast improves my English? INTERVIEW

Welcome to another edition of Speak English fluently.

I'm your host, Steve Hatherly. And today I'm very excited because my guests

are fellow podcasters. I think this is the first time I've had the

opportunity to say this. Jack McBain and Kevin Mitchell both come from

the United States of America. Both majored in communication in university.

And both host a podcast called A-Z English Podcast.

They have a shared love of podcasting, as do I.

They have lots of experience teaching English at the university level here in Korea.

I believe they've been doing it for over 15 plus years.

That's a long time. And I think maybe collectively, we have a

shared love of dogs as well, at least I do with… with Kevin.

Let me say hello to my guest today, Jack McBain and Kevin Mitchell.

Fellas, welcome to the show. Thank you.

Hey, Steve. Yeah, thanks for having us. Absolutely, absolutely.

Good evening. Good evening to you, Kevin. Has anyone ever

told you… you look like Neil Patrick Harris? That I haven't heard.

You've never heard that? That one. No, I… I do have a lot of Korean

students tell me I looked like Benedict Cumberbatch. Oh, interesting.

And I don't agree, but I think I see where they get it because I have a relatively narrow

face. Alright, yeah.

And Mr. Cumberbatch does as well. And I think there’s a lot of just, yeah,

foreigner. Foreigner with somewhat similar face structures.

Podcast show idea for you guys, which celebrity do you look like most?

I'm not sure I want to hear the answer to that to be honest.

There's a reason that we are podcasters and not video…

Yeah, right. Right. Video stars.

I will ask you about that in a moments time, but let's talk a little bit about you guys

before we turn our focus to your podcast.

Jack, maybe we can start with you and you can tell us a little bit about yourself.

Yeah, sure. I… I actually came to Asia about 20 or so years ago.

I started teaching at the university level in Korea in 2006.

And I've been at the same school for 17 years. So. Yeah, yeah so.

That's a testament to how good a teacher you are, obviously.

I think so. Well, either that or they're too lazy to try

to find another teacher. Yeah, but yeah, I didn't realize that would

be my forever job. But you know, you… you kind of accidentally

stumble into these things sometimes in life. That is how it goes.

Where in Korea are you located? So I'm in Pyeongtech, but I actually teach

in Ansong which is the next city over, so not far from where I live.

Great to meet you.

Kevin. How about you? Uhm, so similar to Jack I think.

I didn't a plan to be a teacher for forever either.

And here I am almost… almost 20 years into being a teacher - total.

Not all of it in Korea, but it started when I was a student in university and I just did

it as a part time job and I liked it. It was fun.

I enjoy teaching. I like being with students.

And then I moved to Korea and started working at the university here and...

Yeah, I've been doing the same thing for almost 20 years total as… as well.

Korea’s uh, a nice place to live, a nice place to… to teach in some ways.

I completely concur.

So the relationship between you two does it go back to America?

Did you meet here in Korea? Did you teach at the same school?

We do teach at the same school, so yes. Like… like a lot of friend friendships that

develop, uh, after university, our friendship began because we teach at the same university.

He's at the Seoul campus. I'm out in the Gyenggi-do area outside of Seoul.

But yeah, we have… we have been friends for a long time now, so yeah.

Yeah, we've been working at the same uni since… since I started.

Interesting. Years ago.

So when did the idea? Let's get into it now. When did the idea for the A to Z English podcast

begin? Was that early on in your friendship something

that you may be mentioned once or twice, maybe let's do it later?

Or was it one person idea and you decided to start Right away?

Tell us about that. Do you want me to handle this one Kev?

Field this one? Yeah, I think this should be yours 'cause

the podcast really was your idea. It was something that I think we were bored

during COVID and then it went from there. So go ahead, but you've… you've been interested

for a long time in podcasting. Well, right. I mean it, it's kind of like,

you know, you want you go to, uh, a blockbuster movie and you say I want to be an actor, I

want to make movies, you know something, but. The threshold is too high. It's too difficult

to do that. But when I really got into podcasting, I was

like, you know what, it's not that difficult to start a podcast.

It's difficult to build a community of listeners, but, but it was something that was just kind

of eating away at me for a while. And finally, I asked Kevin and another friend

of ours. I said, you know what, guys? Let's start a podcast. And we actually started a

podcast called The Seoul Patch.

Which is up on Seoul and we just talked about Korea related topics.

I've heard of that podcast. Oh, really?

I… I must admit, I must admit, I apologize. I… I… I don't think I've heard an episode,

but I know that I've heard of that podcast before.

Oh, wow. OK, well, that's inspiring. That's that's awesome.

Uh, we what happened was we kind of decided to make a kind of right turn towards something

that was maybe a little more practical for listeners, which was a Language Learning podcast,

which combines my love of podcasting and I think Kevin also enjoys it.

And also our experience as English teachers. And so that's what started the A-Z English

podcast? Pretty much, Yep.

So it wasn't a tough sell I guess for you then, Kevin to come on board and join Jack?

Well, like I was saying a minute ago, it really started at first during the COVID pandemic

when we were all just stuck at home.

And not meeting friends. And not being social. And so Jack got in touch and said, hey, do

you guys want to hang out and talk about Korea and record it and publish it?

And, I was like, yeah, that… that sounds fun because I was just lonely.

I needed friends. I needed something to do.

And there it just started and it just got better and… and it was fun to do. It was

fun just to… to hang out and talk w ith cool people.

So that suggests to me then that the podcast is about two years old, roughly.

Actually, yeah. Yeah, I would say yeah, but we started the

Seoul patch about two years ago and we've been doing the A-Z podcast for about 3 months.

It's still new. The Soul patch is on hiatus, but we plan to

bring that back once a week. Soon.

So the A-Z podcast. If you have to give a description about what it is, then what would

that description be? Kevin, I'll let you field this one.

So and the A-Z English podcast is a podcast for English learners, of course, people who

want to learn English. But it's focused on listening to native speakers

just talk and explain things in a kind of natural conversation with homework attached,

right? So there's, you can listen to Jack and I and our other host, Xochilt, she's not

here at the moment. You can just listen to us talk about different

things or explain some idioms. Or sometimes we get into some grammar too, but grammar

is not as exciting. But it's just us talking about topics so that

listeners can get a feel for what native English conversations sound like.

And like I said, there's homework connected, so it's not just listening, it's listening

and, you know, answer some questions and focus, so there's, uh, a study element for… for

our listeners and the students as well. Well, yes, I did listen to a handful of the

podcast. One of them was grammar related, related to the present voice and the past

voice. OK.

I think talking about it being eaten by a giant sandwich was a sentence that stood out,

stood out to me my first, right? Passive and active.

Yep, passive voice activation. My first thought was, “What kind of sandwich

would I want that to be?” Good question, good question.

Yeah, that's a good question, right. I… I would say ham and cheese if you had to ask

if I if you really pushed me, but yeah. Not… not a bad answer.

Another episode was about everyday idioms. Yeah, so there seems to be quite a variety

of topics that you study but or that you present. But when you do, when you did come up with

the idea initially, it's kind of such a broad spectrum, isn't it to start…?

English. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

And yeah, English and then a podcast about English. So oh, OK, well, where where do we

begin? Where do we go? So that very first episode that you did, if you can remember

back that far, how did you decide what the content would be?

That's a great question. Yeah. So I think probably our second one, the first

one was probably just an introduction for us.

OK, fair enough. Yes. But then yeah after that and that's honestly

topics is one of the hardest parts of… of thinking of new episodes for grammar, for

idioms and… and for our chats. For the chats, it's just things that Jack

and I are interested in.

And… and hopefully topics that our audience are interested in as well.

So we have a lot of young listeners, so we're trying to find more younger topics 'cause

we're not so young and trying to relate. Jack, how do you come up with your… our

topics? Well, I think it goes back to my experience

as a teacher. I think one of the pitfalls that a lot of teachers, they come to another

country to teach English and they go, Today, I am going to teach the present tense and

the present continuous tense. And when I leave, after my one hour or whatever, everybody will

understand completely what I just lectured because…. 'cause I… I know that I organized

my lesson so well.” And then I come back the next day, and everybody

is making the same mistakes that they were before I lectured.

And what you have to… to realize is that, if you create a lesson for the classroom,

or a podcast episode or something, they're just listeners are going to take away maybe

if you're lucky 1 little piece of something that they hadn't put together.

But this idea that we're going to kind of solve the problem of tense or whatever is

I… I mean, it's a trap a lot of teachers fall into, especially new teachers.

But for us, we don't, we try not to worry about, you know, them understanding everything.

If they can just take out one or two key points during that… that lesson, I would consider

that a success. In my mind, yeah. Yeah, I guess that's a great point is that

if there's something, because everybody learns differently, also everybody has their own

agenda to write about what they need to improve or what… what they want to learn in the

first place. So yeah, designing an episode where you can

take away one or two or three things, then, yeah, that has to be considered a success.

So, let's talk, let's talk about the… the structures of the episodes. Do they follow

a similar breakdown each time you do it? The… the way that we have been organizing

it lately is that we try to do, we try to evenly distribute the types of episodes that

we are recording. So, we have what we call Quick Chats and those

are just conversations.

And what we do is we just kind of freestyle a conversation between the three of us or

two of us. And then we go back and we kind of cherry

pick vocabulary and put that into a study guide, provide a transcript for the students.

But in essence, it just gives them an opportunity to listen to a real time conversation between

two native speakers. Yeah.

The other ep… two types of episodes that we have our where we we'd have 3 idioms and

we just explain the meaning of them because, you know, idioms can be very difficult to

understand. Some of them are…. I don't even know the

genesis of, a lot of you know idioms like they're so old, you know, like talking about

like a horse, you know, lead a horse to water or something.

Right. Uhm, the other type is the… the grammar

episode that you listen to, and we're trying to kind of go through different grammar points

and provide examples. And I think those are maybe the hardest to

translate through a podcast format. Because you don't have a whiteboard. You don't

have, you know you can't draw a timeline and things like that. So, but those are the three

basic types of episodes that we have been recording most recently.

Which ones, Kevin, are your favorite ones to do?

Oh, the… the quick chats are the most the… the easiest and the most fun.

Because, I mean, like we said, it's we started this podcast just to hang out with friends

and that's what that is. The quick chat is just hanging out with…. with Jack or Xochitl

and… and just talking about something, so those are fun. I would say that the grammar

and the idioms ones though are kind of interesting to do as well, because, Jack and I's relationship

for the past many years has just been a friend relationship.

We didn't teach together. But in those episodes, it's much more teaching, right? It's like,

here's a grammar, here's an idiom, how do you do it? And it's very interesting to see

his style of thinking of ideas. Or my style of thinking of ideas and how those translate

into audio and into podcasts. And so even though they're not as fun necessarily to record,

they're equally interesting just to do it with someone else.

You get to feel what it feels like to be a student in Jack’s classroom and conversely,

in Kevin’s classroom when you sit back and listen on the podcast how each of you might

explain a different grammar point or an idiom. And I'm guessing that helps because you can

take that to your own classrooms in your university and apply those things there.

Yeah, it's amazing what you can learn from other teachers as… as well.

Oh, absolutely. And the, you know, the analogies that he'll use are some that I had never thought

of. Yeah, right.

It's same for you of course. And you know, well, yeah and I, you know,

you tend to lean into the same ones over and over again every year after year.

And it's… it's nice to just watch someone else do it and it opens up a whole, you know,

new world for you. So yeah, it's really useful. So you mentioned you mentioned homework. Is

that homework given at the end of each of the podcast, regardless of whether it's a

grammar episode or an idiom episode or a quick chat episode or a Jack’s chats episode?

I didn't bring that up, but we're going to talk about that in a moment too. Is it…

Does it follow that format? There's homework at the end of each and every episode?

Yeah, yeah. Kevin, do you want to talk about? This there is different types of homework

at the end of each episode. For each episode, we do ask questions for everyone. So the…

the most basic style of homework is simply asking our listeners to come to our WhatsApp

group. We have a WhatsApp group for anyone to come and and just talk to us in practice,

which is very helpful. Tell us what that…. Tell us what that is,

please. So WhatsApp is just a chat program. Of course,

I'm sure all of our young listeners know it better than I do. And we just have a WhatsApp

chat room for A to Z English and a couple of other ones as well where any listener can

just come and talk to us and other teachers as well in there.

And so a lot of our homework is, you know, today we're talking about the weather. Come

and tell us about your favorite weather. What season do you like? Or just some simple questions

at the end? Some of our episodes like the idioms, for example, that's a little bit more

structured and we have a PDF file connected with those where they can download the PDF.

There's some questions that they can fill out and they can come to the WhatsApp group

again to share their example sentences using the idioms or using the grammar points. And

then we will comment and reply and say, oh good job or oh fix this or things like that.

So it'…s it's a lot of self-study, but those WhatsApp groups do give us some interaction

and allow us to work with students after. As well.

Yes, absolutely. It's… it's very, it's a great resource actually for us as well as

the students. So for example, If we're brainstorming an

episode idea, we can bring that to the WhatsApp group. Students will give us feedback. They'll

tell us what did you like about this? What is not working for you? Soemthin that we I'd

be remiss if I didn't say we make a transcript through you know AI technology you can you

know punch it into… Uh, Microsoft Word and it will spit out a.. a whole transcript that

we can add to the… the study guide. And so, you know, there's just a lot of different

ways that students can interact or interface with our content that doesn't just require

listening. But they can also read along. UM, they can

make their own sentences and upload those to put them in WhatsApp.

Get some feedback from us in real time. So I just uh, this is what's different about

the A-Z English podcast then our Seoul Patch podcast. The Seoul Patch Podcast was more

entertainment. This is more educational. So it does require a little more effort on the

back end as far as marketing and things like that.

And so, but it's it really pays off when you get positive feedback from students in the

WhatsApp group. And that's… that's a beautiful thing about

podcasting in general, is that everyone, all of our listeners, can do what they want. If

they just want to come and listen, great, just come and listen. If you want to do the

homework, the PDF file by yourself, check our web page. It's there and do that. If you

want to come and talk to us, come and talk to us. Now, if you want to do all of it, do

all of it as well. It's, it's up for them to choose how much they want to.

You can be as active or as passive as you would like to be in terms of you being a learner.

Exactly. Very much so. So why podcasting as opposed to doing something

in front of a camera, I wonder? Uhm, again, I think the barrier to entry is

much lower for a podcast. All we had to do was purchas some microphones.

And I just had to go in and figure out, OK, what platform are we going to use to upload

our podcast. And I… I love podcasting. I… I… I also

enjoy audiobooks. But I've kind of transitioned into just listening to a lot of different

podcasts. And I don’t know, it's just I just love

that medium so much. And I… I think YouTube kind of requires your, you know more of your

attention. But you know, I can do chores around the house

and vacuum and mop the floors while I listen to a podcast.

But that's a little harder to do while watching a YouTube video and so, and I'm 45 years old,

so I kind of missed the boat when it comes to.

No, no. Right. No, no. You don't get to throw that card down. Not, not, not with this audience.

I'm sorry. You can keep that for your for your classroom students.

So what does the future hold that in terms of content, maybe you can tell us about the

most recent episode that you did and maybe some something that you have coming up soon.

Well, actually, Kevin doesn't even know about this because I just created something called

Jack Chats and yeah. I'm looking at oh OK yeah, yeah.

Steve here mentioned that a second ago and I was like, what is that?

This is new. Jack shot.

News for you, Kevin, I… I was watching your facial expression when Jack said. Actually,

Kevin doesn't know about this. And you, you had this wonderfully blank stare. A wonderful

blank stare on your face. So wait, now I'm curious.

I knew more about the podcast for a brief moment than Kevin did.

So it seems. Jack, what is this? What is this secret?

OK. So, OK. New project of yours. This is great.

Well, we it because we have three members of our, you know, 3 hosts of our show.

One actually lives in the United States. Kevin and I are in Korea. We're all busy and

our schedules are crazy. But we're trying to build up more content.

And so something that I wanted to do was to try a solo podcast where I'm just created.

I just do like a… it's almost…. it's almost like, a confessional kind of thing where I

just share some of my ideas, things that are happening in my life, uhm, things that might

be happening in the World News or something that somebody mentioned in the WhatsApp group.

I might talk about that. And it's just me basically in front of my

mic. Just kind of… stream of consciousness for 10 or 15 minutes. A nd I just wanted to

upload that and give students something if they're craving content in between our three

episodes that we release during the week, because we release episodes basically Sunday,

Tuesdays and Thursdays. But if they were looking for something just to kind of satiate that

urge to listen, I'm going to throw up on Monday, Wednesday and Friday Jack Chats.

And of course, it could be a Kevin chat or a Xochitl chat or a Jack and Kevin chat. It's

a… it's not just mine. A Steve Chat is that may be in the cards in

the future? I'm sorry, one more time.

A Steve chat? Is that a possibility? Absolutely, Steve, you. You are always welcome

to. Do not give me a microphone. That is your

biggest mistake. I'll talk for hours. Well, that's the great thing about A-Z Podcast’s

is that S is between A&Z. So Steve, Steve fits right in.

Perfect. There… there you go.

So we're talking, then for the students, for your audience, you're talking. It was three

episodes a week, but now we're looking at upwards of four or five, possibly more episodes

a week in the future? What I'm hoping to do is to do 3 Jack chats

or you know, solo chats. And then three of our regular episodes.

And that will give students six days of content during the week and you know just to keep

that momentum going as we're… we're s young podcast and I mean. The… the market is saturated.

Sure. I mean it's just you, you work so hard and

you kind of hit this this glass ceiling and trying to break through any way you can. You

have to kind of throw everything, including the kitchen sink, you know, at it on in order

to try to, you know, break through to the next level.

So that's kind of where we are right now. And so we're just trying, trying everything,

yeah. And I think I'm going to have to listen to

some of these Jack chats as well. I knew, I knew, I knew there was a passive

aggressive comment coming in the very near future.

I'm just curious. I want to know what Jack is thinking. He's a friend of mine, so get

some more insight into… into the mind of Jack.

Hey, there you go. Stay tuned, stay tuned for episode one of

Kevin Chats coming up in the near future. The rebuttal chats.

Yeah, well, Jack, did you know actually? Now, have you introduced this to your students

in your in your university classrooms? Have they given you any feedback? Any ideas on

what they think about this project? As a matter of fact, I actually just did last

week. Uhm, I framed it in a way that it, to be kind of diplomatic about it, you know,

I wasn't like, if you want an A in my class, you have to download, you know, 10 podcasts.

Right. Listen to my podcast.

Wink, wink. Yeah, exactly.

But I do think that what we are doing is creating useful content that students could find very

helpful. And so I just put it up there on the on the

whiteboard for my students to say, hey, if you guys are looking for, you know, some supplementary

material. We've got these episodes, they're easy to

listen to, you can stream it right off of our website and it's very much related to

what we are studying in our… in our book. So I do put it out there, but I'm very careful

to say, Hey this is just another opportunity for you to do self study but because I think

it can get it can get a little dicey eat if you if you're too pushy with it.

Yeah, right. Well, that's kind of the way it goes in Canada,

where I'm from – buy my book. That’s par for the coarse.

Yeah, yeah. My book, but that's par for the course. Kevin,

what are some ideas maybe that you've had for… for future episodes? Some… some content

that you'd like to introduce. You do the idioms now, you do some grammar

episodes now. Any other avenues you'd like to pursue?

Well, so I'm not really big into social media very much, but our third member, Xochitl,

who isn't here, unfortunately right now she's very into social media and she was saying

that she wants to start a TikTok for us. Oh, dear.

Yeah, and I'm not into. Yeah, quick, tell Jack what TikTok is.

It obviously has something to do with the clock, right?

So I know. And I don't do TikTok. I don't do social media. So I want to leave that up

to, but I was thinking I could still record videos and send that to her and she could

upload them. And one thing that many of our listeners have

said is that I speak very quickly. Right now, I'm trying to remember to speak slowly for

all the listeners tonight. And so I was thinking it could be very fun

for me to record some Yongue Twister TikToks. That's oddities.

OK. Basically where you know 'cause, uh, TikTok

is a short 10-20-thirty second video of me just doing some English tongue twisters as

fast as possible and then challenging our… our audience, our listeners to… to mimic

me. So I was thinking that could be fun.

What? What would the first tick tock tongue twister video be then? I'm going to put you

on the spot right now. Right, right now. Well, I mean, one that I

always practiced as a kid, of course, is Robbie rubber baby buggy bumpers. It was a fun one.

Or fuzzy wuzzy was a bear. Fuzzy wuzzy had no hair. Fuzzy wuzzy wasn't very fuzzy wuzzy,

was he? Are… are very fun ones and I think it could

be interesting 'cause every language has unique sounds.

A nd in English we've got those Zs and the Vs, which I know other languages don't have.

And tongue twisters are a great way for people to practice pronunciation. I mean, I practiced

English tongue twisters when I was a kid. And it helped me in my English pronunciation.

It could help anyone as well. So if I could give examples of saying it slowly, kind of

fast and then very fast, it could be fun for me, fun for them. And something that people

could… could copy. You mentioned uh. A Facebook page or a Facebook

group a few moments ago. Could you elaborate on that a little bit please?

Yeah, so before Xochitl joined our… our podcast team, I was kind of handling the social

media poorly, I would say. I did the best I could, but we do have a Facebook page called

the A-Z. I'm sorry, I'll say that a little bit more slowly. The A-Z English podcast and

I try to upload all of our all of our videos like we have a video for, we have a YouTube

channel. And we also, so we do make videos, but we don't put our actual video on

Gotcha. Yeah. So some people like to listen on YouTube and

that's a… a large segment of people that are just, you know, that just don't aren't

into the podcast thing. And so we put that into Facebook as well. And, um, we Xochitel,wWe

have an Instagram as well.

And… and our Twitter is not yet up and running. You know, I'm still waiting to see if Elon

Musk purchases it or not before I decide. Sure, well if, if, he said, he would, he'd

probably back out and, you know, maybe a couple of weeks later.

Right, right. I… I'll, I'll just wait. I'm, I'm holding off on that one.

But yeah, so we're… we're really trying to do more social media stuff. But you can

watch or, sorry, you can listen to the podcast on Facebook, YouTube. Uhm, but I think the

best places to go to our website and just stream it there. Because that's where the

study guide is, so, yeah. But we're on all the major platforms, so you

can find us on Apple Podcast. Spotify, Apple…

You have Spotify, S titcher, all those. Very good. Alright. So give us the big sales

pitch before we wrap up our conversation today. Why should a student of the English language

listen to the A-Z English podcast? Kev, you're the… the com major with a masters

degree. Knock it out. So you should come and listen to A-Z because

we love podcasting. We love what we do. We've been teaching for

a really long time and we have a p retty good idea of how to share how to explain the ideas

that we want. And we're here to listen to your ideas as well, and your comments and

your feedback. So A-Z English is good practice for you to listen and to interact with us.

And where else can you? Where else can you do that for free on the Internet?

Right. As someone who's worked in media for a long

time, I can tell when I'm listening to someone who is really into what they are doing and

someone who is just kind of mailing it in and so to speak.

Yes, so that said, when I listen to… to your podcast, the two of you with your partner,

I can tell, I can hear it. You really, really enjoy what you're doing. And that is enough

for me to make me want to listen to it. If I… if you're into it, that's going to make

your students into it. And… and… and… that's… and that's a good place to start.

So well done. Congratulations on the three months that you've done.

Thanks, Steve. So far, yeah.

Thank you very much. Absolute ly.

Jack McBain and Kevin Mitchell. You can find their podcast A to Z English podcast. So that's

atozenglishpodcast.com, right? And that's all one word put together?

That's right. Yeah, very good. You can also use that as

a kind of a doorway over to their Facebook group. You can join that. You can also join…what

am I missing here? The WhatsApp group Link is right there on

the website as well. Perfect, so just go to the website and all

the information you need is right there. One stop shop.

Fantastic. Once again atozenglishpodcast.com. Jack McBain and Kevin Mitchell, thank you

so much for joining me on Speak English fluently. And once again, congratulations on your success

so far and I wish you nothing but more success in the future.

Oh, that's great. Thank you very much, Steve. Awesome, guys.

Yeah. Thanks for having us. Have a great night. Bye, bye.

OK. Bye.