The CELTA Teaching Compendium

By Rachael Roberts

This book is for anyone who wants to improve their practical English language teaching skills, but will be particularly useful for teachers who are taking a course such as CELTA or the Trinity Cert TESOL, which includes observed and assessed teaching practice.
This compendium sets out to provide a quick, easy reference to all the key practical teaching skills taught in CELTA. It explains the essential things you need to know, with practical tips and suggestions. Think of it as being like having your CELTA teaching practice tutor available for questions any time of the day or night.
The contents are listed alphabetically, so that you can dip in and out. Whenever another key skill is cross-referenced, there’s a link to take you to that section.
Clearly there’s in fact no ‘right’ way to teach. However, the suggestions and tips in this book are based on years of teaching and training teachers, and should provide you with a very handy set of tools.
The author, Rachael Roberts, has years of experience as a CELTA tutor and assessor, as well as being a widely published ELT materials writer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rachael Roberts
• Release date: Mar 20, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370086917

Rachael Roberts

Rachael is a teacher who lives and works in a rural part of Leicestershire. Since early education she had a keen interest in law, policing and the justice system. After working in the legal profession, she shared her passion and became an A Level Law and Criminology teacher. This enabled her to empower and educate others. Rachael firmly believes that positive changes in society can be brought about by quality education and literature, especially in the early years. Rachael now works as a writer and is heavily involved in her local community.

Book preview

1. Anticipated problems

‘Anticipated problems’ is often a section on a CELTA lesson plan. You’re expected to think about what problems the students might encounter during the lesson, and, very importantly, think about how you might solve them. Note that this is about problems students will face, not things like board pens not working, which you could solve in advance.

Anticipated problems are often language-related (though not always). So, if you’re teaching a grammatical structure or items of vocabulary (or both), you should think about:

1. The meaning of the language. Is the concept something which doesn’t exist in the students’ L1 (first language), or which is expressed differently, or is easy to confuse with something else? For example, if you’re teaching the past perfect simple, an anticipated problem might be that students could think that past perfect shows how long ago something happened (distant past rather than recent past), rather than emphasising that something happened before something else. Some solutions to this might be to make sure that the context is clear and to ask some good concept questions, or use a timeline to check understanding.

Before you go into the classroom, use a good dictionary or grammar book for every piece of language you want to teach. Just because you speak English well yourself, doesn’t necessarily mean that you have a clear definition of every language point in your mind.

Don’t just make up possible problems with meaning. Use your knowledge of the students’ first language, if you have it, and your experience. Especially when you’re starting out, you can also use good reference materials, such as Michael Swan’s Learner English, or the Common Mistakes series from Cambridge University Press to identify possible problems.

2. The form of the language. For example, if it’s a verb, is it irregular, or does it need a particular dependent preposition (e.g. apologise for)? Is it a transitive or an intransitive verb? (Does it need an object?) If it’s a phrasal verb, can the two parts be separated? Is the spelling likely to cause problems because of silent letters or because it’s similar to a word in the students’ first language? If it’s a tense, what are the individual parts that make up the tense?

One way to highlight these points during your presentation might be to use different colours on the board to draw students’ attention to them.

3. How the language is pronounced. You might anticipate problems here with individual sounds, word stress, sentence stress, intonation or connected speech, but try and focus on key issues. Again, some research into typical problems could help with this. For example, beginners are likely to mispronounce would because it doesn’t look at all as if it should be pronounced wood. But also think about level; not many pre-intermediate students would make this mistake because they will have seen, heard and used the word would hundreds of times.

Solutions to pronunciation-related problems might include clear modelling, showing how the sound is formed in the mouth, using the phonemic chart to highlight the difference between two sounds, using your hand to show the intonation pattern, etc.

You should also think about problems which some students might have, which others won’t (see differentiation).

4. Task. This is another area where you may anticipate problems. For example, some tasks are quite complicated to set up. You might need to plan instructions carefully, or think about what you’ll do if you have an odd number of students. Also, think about late arrivals and fast finishers.

5. Cultural issues. In some classrooms, male and female students might not want to sit together. Or the topic of the lesson might be problematic for some students (though in that case, you should probably think about changing it).

6. Practical issues. Examples of the sort of problem you might anticipate that fall into this category might be having to deal with students who are tired and hungry during Ramadan, or students who might have to leave the lesson early. You might want to mix up students from different nationalities so there isn’t too much use of mother tongue.

- Remember that anticipated problems should be student-focused (not problems like forgetting your memory stick).

- Think about the language you plan to teach from the students’ point of view to try and anticipate tricky areas.

- Always try to think of a solution to each problem before going into class.

2. Balance of interaction

A CELTA lesson plan often has a column in which to write the interaction, or focus. This is where you note whether the students are working individually, in pairs, in small groups or whether the focus is on the teacher. This is a useful thing to include in a plan because you can see at a glance whether there’s a balance of interaction patterns, or whether the students are mostly listening and responding directly to the teacher.

There’s no perfect ratio because the amount of teacher-centred versus learner-centred time will depend on the aims of the lesson.