Whether you are teaching solely online or managing to combine your online lessons with some socially distanced, face to face teaching as I am, technology is where it’s at. My top five ELT tools change regularly depending on what I’ve read/ heard about recently but in no particular order here are my top 5 at the time of writing …
Many of you will have seen that Cambridge is offering the CELTA course fully online during these strange times, something which has never been possible before. So what are the advantages and disadvantages or is this a purely win-win situation?
I often read or hear from trainees that their aim is to achieve a Pass A when doing CELTA. So what exactly is the best way to go about this?
Do everything you can to get ready for the CELTA course to ensure it is a good experience.
We often get asked by CELTA candidates what they should do to prepare for the course. This was one of the reasons we decided to write The Ultimate Guide to CELTA so of course our first answer is to buy the book but for those of you who can’t wait for the book to arrive here are some pointers to help you get started.
Continue reading “How to prepare for your CELTA Course”Imagine the scenario… You’re in class, checking answers to a gap fill activity on gerunds and infinitives.
Teacher: Sergio, number three please,
Sergio: He suggested going to the cinema.
Teacher: Yes, he suggested going to the cinema.
“What’s so wrong with that?” I hear you ask … Continue reading “Checking Answers and Giving Feedback”
Looking for help with CELTA written assignments? You’ve come to the right place.
Written assignments form a major part of the CELTA assessment process and are a compulsory part of the course. There are 4 written assignments in total but some centres conflate two of them to make one larger assignment. In this series we will look at each individual assignment and provide you with some advice and guidance as well as highlight some of the common pitfalls.
Disclaimer: All centres create their own written assignment rubrics, make sure you check with your centre exactly what is required. We can only provide general information here, rather than specific. With this in mind, do you think it would be wise to pay for other peoples’ assignments to help you write your own?
Continue reading “CELTA Written Assignments – Language Related Tasks (LRT)”
Further to my review of Bringing Technology into the Classroom by Gordon Lewis, I thought it would be good to share some applications/websites that we have been known to use in our centre:
On a CELTA course, you are expected to show you can reflect on your lessons; what went well as well as what you would do differently if you were to teach that lesson again. In fact one of the criteria Cambridge expects you to achieve is just that. As a CELTA tutor, I think there tend to be 4 types of self-evaluations – I wonder which one you would write?? Continue reading “Reflecting on your own teaching”
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”.
Continue reading “Giving Instructions: The Golden Rules for CELTA Trainees”
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”
