I’m sorry to say that EFL teaching is not going to make you a millionaire! Having said that, most of us do not do it (just) for the money but get huge satisfaction from helping our learners. It seems obvious, therefore, that these learners should be at the forefront of our minds when planning and delivering lessons. Indeed, on the CELTA course, one of the criteria for a Pass A is that the candidate has a very good awareness of their learners but what exactly do we need to know about them and why?
On LinkedIn last week I spotted a series of webinars by Delta Publishing called “Speaking Globally”. The webinars included speakers such as David Crystal, Nicky Hockly and Scott Thornbury so I decided to sign up for what I could fit into my teaching schedule and Tuesday early evening found me sitting comfortably on my sofa with my laptop.
Have you taught a CELTA teaching practice lesson and the grade was not to standard (NTS)? Are you concerned as to what this might mean? Let me put your mind at ease.
The second edition of Learning to Teach English published by Delta Publishing is designed as an introduction to teaching for those embarking on an initial teacher training course such as TKT, CELTA or Cert. TESOL. It inlcudes a DVD and is made up of 18 chapters and 8 appendices. The chapters cover a variety of topics such as Managing a Class or Developing Writing Skills. As I have a session on Teaching Vocabulary coming up on my current CELTA course, I decided to look at this chapter in a bit more detail. Here’s what the chapter consists of …
An explanantion of the importance of words.
Ways of presenting vocabulary. This includes 8 practical classroom examples that trainee teachers could use in their teaching practice. For each method suggested, there is an activity for the trainees to do. For instance, Classroom example 7: The teacher uses the new word in context and the learners try to work out the meaning. For example the teacher says “The dog ran into the road and the driver had to swerve to miss it.”  The activity given to the trainee teacher is “How could you check the learners understood the meaning of swerve?” The commentary at the end of the unit gives the answer: The teacher could ask questions such as: Did the driver stop? No. Did they drive in a controlled way? No. Does “swerve” involve the brake or the steering wheel? The steering wheel. (These are known as concept checking questions)
A checklist of what the teacher needs to include when presenting lexis.
Ways of practising vocabulary with 5 classroom examples that trainees could try out.
Learners’ problems and their causes. This could be useful when trainees write their Focus on the Learner assignment.
A summary of the unit.
Commentary with answers and explanations to the tasks set.
The appendices cover a variety of topics such as basic grammar terminology, an activity bank, a needs analysis form and activities to accompany the demo lessons on the DVD.
The DVD itself contains a vocabulary, a grammar, a reading and a speaking lesson to observe. In addition to the lessons themselves there is a short interview with the teachers, here they give tips about teaching that particular type of lesson. The final section on the DVD is called “Advice for teachers” which includes tips such as:
be natural with your learners
teach with a context
observe colleagues teaching
So coming back to my upcoming input session on Teaching Vocabulary, there are plenty of ideas which CELTA trainees can employ when introducing new lexis in their classrooms, some of which they may not have thought about before. Watkins talks about a word bag which is something I often use for reviewing lexical items at the beginning of the next lesson. As the bag gets fuller, learners really have a sense of accomplishment when they see all the new lexical items they have met during the course. One idea in the book involves giving the learners some nouns from the bag and getting them to brainstorm adjectives and/ or verbs that collocate with each noun- a great way to expand their existing knowledge!
Although maybe not quite as detailed and visually not as appealing, all in all, I would say Learning to Teach English is a worthy competitor to Harmer or Scrivener and will certainly be a useful addition to our CELTA book cupboard.Â
The Ultimate Guide to CELTA author and CELTA tutor Emma Jones was interviewed by CELTA helper recently. Watch the 20 minute video for her thoughts on CELTA …
Listening, like reading, Â is a passive skill but this does not make it any less important than the active skills of speaking or writing. After all, we cannot have a conversation if we can’t follow what the other person is saying. Think about the following questions related to teaching listening skills and then read on for the answers:
What types of listening skills do we use?
Is listening in the classroom more difficult than listening in the real world or vice versa?
We’ve just started a new CELTA course in Munich so instruction-giving is very much on my mind! This is something trainees should try to get sorted out asap but do sometimes struggle with, especially when teaching lower levels. So here are my “golden rules”.
The American athlete, Hank Stram’s philosophy of “Simplicity plus variety” is certainly one that could be applied to introducing new lexical items to students. Some traditional ways of presenting lexis are still very useful, after all, do we really need to reinvent the wheel? Here we have a selection of new as well as old methods for introducing new lexis .. Continue reading “13 Ways to Present Lexis”
In order to teach a specific item of language, for example a tense or a lexical set, it is essential that you, as the teacher, “know” this item thoroughly which is why on a CELTA course you are asked to include a language analysis on the lesson plan. What does this include and what do you need to consider? Here, in this third post in the series on lesson planning, we have the answers to these and other questions all about language analysis. Continue reading “A Guide to Lesson Planning: Language Analysis”
The Ultimate Guide to CELTA 