Friday 10 September 2010

CELTA is win

I had my CELTA interview today. I passed, though it seemed like you would have had to have given them cause for concern for them not to offer you a place.

We had to do a short test at the start, which tested your sense of the language and also knowledge of the names of tenses. I didn't do too well on that front, but we were told that most people didn't; these were the things we needed to be confident of by the time the course started. There was also some spelling to correct and we had to write a response to the statement, "You don't need a teacher to learn a language, only a grammar book and dictionary."

After finishing our tests we were asked a few questions, but it never felt like being grilled, as job interviews often do. Then we had to do a short teaching session with something we'd prepared. I brought my friend's Perudo set and taught them that. It's a dice game (also called "Liar's dice") and after that we had to assess our own performance.

Finally, we had to spell ten words read out by the interviewer, then write the correct punctuation of ten sentences. I got 19/20 for putting an apostrophe in "1920s" - fool that I was. I knew it felt wrong, but as the lady said, you see it written incorrectly all over the place.

After being given the opportunity to ask questions, we were told we were okay to go on the course if we wanted and so we paid our deposits.

We were warned, however, that the course is very intensive, and in addition to the 9-5 of the classes, we would have between eight and and twelve hours a week planning our forty-minute lesson slots that we would be doing every other day.

Expect much blogging on this subject when the course starts on the 11th of October. At 10am.

1 comment:

Anji said...

The names of tenses, that ties me in knots, also sometimes the names change like 'progressive' and 'Continuous' depending on which book you use.

I'm looking forward to reading about your course