Developing writing skills

Reflection:
Complete the following sentence in as many different ways as you can. Use one of the words in bold below in each sentence.

collaborative communicatiate practice process readership

To teach writing .........


FURTHER READING/RESOURCE BOOKS


Writing Tricia Hedge, Oxford Resource Books for Teachers (Oxford)

Teaching English through English Jane Willis (Longman)

Writing Matters Brown & Hood (CUP)

Writing Games Hadfield & Hadfield (Nelson)

Plus Longman, Nelson and Oxford Skills series.

Reading at Home

Hello All

Today I have given you a couple of 'sections' from Harmer, The Practice of English Language Teaching for you to read. These highlight some of the key isues covered in my last two sessions and indicate future useful reading for anyone thinking of moving on to the DTTLES course in the future.

If anyone has any comments on the sessions or any reading - blog away!

Tina

NATECLA offer

Special offer for your trainee ESOL teachers ....................


Training to teach ESOL? Introductory offer of free one year membership of NATECLA

Free one year initial membership of NATECLA for those studying on a recognised teacher training course. Just download and complete the application and standing order mandate. http://www.natecla.org.uk/content/467/how_to_join/

You may also take the opportunity to subscribe to our journal Language Issues at the same time and receive this at the member subscription rate.
The journal is essential reading for everyone concerned with ESOL and community language teaching. As well as discussing pedagogical approaches and research, it addresses the social and political issues affecting learners.

NATECLA National Centre
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The Task Cycle

Hello

We've all (the tutors) spoken and agree this is what we would like to see a 'task cycle' look like. The more of this you can put on your lesson plan the more likely you are to follow the procedure in your lesson!

1. Find some way to demonstrate, give example etc for the activity. Try to avoid 'long winded' instructions.
2. Give timing for task.
3. Check understanding - questions are good here.
4. Group students - think about how and why you are going to do this!
5. Monitor - how the students are doing on the task and any problems they have with the language. Give hints not answers. Do not be afraid to stop the whole group to clarify any common difficulties that are preventing task completion. 'SWEEP & ZOOM'
6. Check answers - usually peer checking or some kind of swift feedback method.
7. Feedback - be selctive here. Base feedback or error correction on earlier monitoring. You could choose some good examples to share with the whole group. Not everyone has to contribute at this point.

If you have any question you can ask any of us. Happy task planning!

Tina

1/2 way evaluation - assignments

assignments
What we might change....


What we liked most(!)......

1/2 way evaluation - TP

TP (prep, feedback)
What we might change....


What we liked most......

1/2 way evaluation - input

Input (content, delivery, etc)
What TWO sessions were the least useful in terms on CONTENT?


What else could be changed....



What we liked the most.....

Summer Task

There are seven links to useful websites. Choose ONE website to examine and give a brief review of what you find. Before you begin please state which site you will choose so everyone can look at a different website.

Multiple intelligences

Try these out for more info and also to test your own intelligences and see which one is dominant.

—http://www.thomasarmstrong.com/multiple_intelligences.htmng each role.

—http://www.bgfl.org/bgfl/custom/resources_ftp/client_ftp/ks3/ict/multiple_int/index.htm

Expressing future meaning- Classroom application

Devise a short grammar presentation contrasting will (for making decisions)and going to ( for talking about plans). Your presentation should include:

• A situation for context, e.g. Dialogue/ monologue
• A task that requires the learners to focus on the contrast
• A way of checking learners’ understanding of the contrast
  

Expressing future tense.

Do the quiz.

1. Does English have a future tense?
2. What are the three most common ways of expressing future meaning in English?
3. Which two structures can be used to make predictions?
4. Which structure is typically used to talk about timetables and schedules in the future?
5. Which of the following factors determine the choice of future form? (You can choose more than one.)

a) the speaker's purpose, e.g. making a prediction, talking about arrangements, etc.

b) the speaker's assessment of the certainty of the future situation

c) the extent that the future situation is seen to be connected to the present

d) the speaker's assessment of how soon the future situation is

e) the degree of informality

Error correction - reading

If you want to find out more about error correction then check out the following books:

Learning Teaching by Jim Scrivener Chapter8, 10
Teaching Practice Handbook (New Ed) Gower & Walters Chapter 7 pp 163-9
Mistakes and Correction Julian Edge
Correction Bartram & Walton

Tense and Aspect Reflection activity

Read these entence beginnings. In each case, think of a way of continuiing each sentence so that its meaning is clear.

The bus is leaving....
The bus leaves....
The bus has left.....

Review

Following on from last week I am going to make a quick note of the main points that were covered. Tina will add a comment later too.

The main issue for me is that you all understand how fast the course is moving. You can't look into the future and think 'I've got until Christmas to improve my instructions' or 'No probs, lesson plan next time.' This course moves very fast and there is a lot of ground to cover. We want to see steady improvement. In an ideal world after a lesson observation we might recommend that you 'show more procedural detail in your lesson plan' for example. We would then (in an ideal world) find that you had addressed the issue in your next observation and we could then make comments to help you improve in some other aspect.

Once something has been covered in an input session we look for it to be used/ implemented immediately. If you don't use these things then a lesson that got you a 'to standard for this stage of the course' in the beginning might now be ' just to standard'.

Do the maths!

My point is that if you stop developing or put things off you might well find yourself producing lessons which fail. Imagine standing still on a treadmill -you just shoot off the back of it and end up on your behind.

Booklist

These are good books to help you on the course.

How to Teach English, Jeremy Harmer, Longman, 2002, ISBN: 0582297966

Learning Teaching (2nd Edition), Jim Scrivener, Heinemann, 2005, ISBN: 1405013990

The Practice of English Language Teaching (3rd Edition), Jeremy Harmer, Longman, 2001, ISBN: 0582403855

Grammar books that might help.

Grammar for English Language Teachers, Martin Parrott, CUP, 2000, ISBN: 0521477972

Collins COBUILD English Grammar (2nd Edition), ISBN: 0007183879

Collins COBUILD Intermediate English Grammar, 2004, ISBN: 0007163479

How English Works, Swan and Walter, OUP, 2000, ISBN; 0194314561

Practical English Usage (3rd Edition), Michael Swan, OUP, ISBN: 0194420981

Phonology

How to Teach Pronunciation, Gerald Kelly, Longman, 2002, ISBN: 0582429757

narrative

If you were doing an intensive 4 week CELTA you would now be at the end of week one. How does it feel to be a quarter of the way through the course?

This is a useful task if you have just taught or after your session next Monday:-

Write a narrative account of your lesson (Salome - I know you used to like to do this before your session!), sayng what happened.
1. Complare this with your plan (as we are all now using the formal Lesson Plan)
2. Explain any departures to the plan.
3. Draw some conclusions from this experience.

I have also added another link.

Key Event - a reflection task

Think a lesson you have taught or observed in the last week. Think about a 'key event', ie a significant moment that stands out when you recall that lesson.
Why was this event significant?
What did you learn from it?

Click on the 'comment' button below to answer this question.

Welcome to the CELTA blog

As you may know, coordinating the CELTA course is a new role for me, previously I coordinated on the ESOL course, and therefore in the last few weeks my attention has been getting the course up and running.

Now we are 2 weeks into the course I am starting to think about how e-learning can be embedded into the course and how we communicate with each other outside of the classroom.

As Zia and Farida will know, I do like to play with technology (I am NOT technically - minded, but I do love the opportunities for learning that technology provides) and I have used a Blog in the ESOL classroom for a number of years and have found it an interesting resource. If you are interested, here are the links to my student blogs:
esolentry3 - this is the class I taught this year until taking on this new job
level 1 - this is a class I taught a couple of years ago.

Therefore I am interested how we can use a blog as part of an initial teacher training course. This blog will be:
a way to keep in touch
a place to reflect on your teaching and learning
a way to comment on each others' reflections
a place to support each other outside the Monday sessions
a place to add links to interesting sites or articles - I have a 'stash' of gr8 websites that I use within my ESOL teaching and I plan to add 1 or 2 links every couple of week (rather than linking them all NOW) to give you an opportunity to explore them in your own time.

To be able to add a post or comment on someone else's post you will have to follow the link from the invite email, register with Google (if u r not already members) and log in. Then you can complete the poll and add a comment to this post. I am interested in your opinion of the first 2 weeks of the course.

Happy Half Term :}