Tuesday 19 October 2010

The Legend of CELTA - Error-cull of Pages

Day 1 of week 2 started with a session on error-correction, and it was like the weekend had never happened. The school is starting to feel like a second home. We went over when it's appropriate to correct students' mistakes and different ways to approach correction, taking into account the target language (vocab/grammar) for the lesson and the feelings of the student. Our second assignment requires us to correct a piece of writing by one of the students from our classes.

The other session on Monday was a return to the phonetic alphabet, and we watched a video of a guy teaching how to teach the phonetic table, focusing on the physicality of producing sounds.
Sounds to the left of the 3x4 simple vowel set at the top-left involve the tongue/jaw dropping as you move down, and the mouth narrowing as you move from left to right. From now on when doing lesson plans we have to write things out phonetically so we have to be familiar with this chart. It's still fuzzy for me.

In the afternoon, those of us who didn't teach on Friday taught the last session with the Intermediate class. This was the first time that someone had a major hiccup during a lesson - they couldn't find their photocopies of a handout which led to delays and confusion and running out of time. Meanwhile, Roger and I doodled on our handouts again.

Last night was spent completing Assignment 1, which involved analysing the use of the present perfect in the sentence, 'He's been to Paris, he's eaten snails and he's done lots of things.' We then had to analyse the differences between future tense forms using 'will' and 'going to' and study the use of 'to fit' and 'to suit'.

This morning we had more on error correction, a session on teaching vocabulary and a bit about different practice exercises. In the afternoon we were in our new classes for the first time. My group has moved to the Upper Intermediate class, and we watched the tutor (Boswell this time) teaching for two hours after we discussed our lessons for tomorrow/Thursday with her. We got a lot less direction in dealing with the task we had been given this time round, which may have been because it was a new tutor, or may have been to make us more independent. This evening I planned my lesson, which is on collocation - the way we use certain words together for no other reason than custom (dependent on, obsessed with, saying 'wreck your chances' rather than 'break your chances'), which counts as a language lesson, but is more complicated than teaching vocab or grammar because it's about many different sets of words. Anyway, it's prepared, I just have some photocopying to do tomorrow and I'm set.

3 comments:

Anji said...

Good luck with all of that. Every time I've taught a rule of grammar there's always been someone to come up with an exception.

Finlay said...

if you're interested in learning more about the phonetic alphabet i could show you a thing or two. you probably aren't, and I'd probably just end up confusing you, but yeah. ;)

Jimijam said...

I kind of feel like I already know too much.