We also had the choice of picking reading material straight from the book or choosing an authentic text (text that has actually been published – online or on paper – and not been graded to the reading level of the ESL students). I definitely wanted to an authentic text.. I was bored to death with the awfully boring stuff in the ESL textbooks, and I thought students must find authentic texts more interesting, even though it can be more challenging and may contain words they haven’t come across.

I scratched my brains for a little while, surfed the esl sites looking for some ideas, then hit upon a brilliant one. Yelp.. savior of the indecisive, of the lost and forsaken. I quickly searched for reviews of the restaurant downstairs (in the same building as St. Giles International, SF) and found a few perfectly suited for my elementary group of students.

The rest was easy.. just devised a few gist questions and detailed tasks and wrote how I would plan and execute the lesson. This was really an easy assignment. I did get a resubmit on it, but it was a minor point of conisderation – My gist tasks seemed to be too detailed to our CELTA tutor, so I just rewrote those.

Here goes.. .the lesson plan and the accompanying tasks. Has some cool pictures too. Enjoy!

Click to DOWNLOAD the CELTA assignment on Language Skills Task –>

If you’re a current CELTA student looking for help with your assignments, you might want to peek and see what I wrote in my CELTA assignments. They’re all available for free downloads. Drop me  a line if these were useful. Cheers!

Oops, I did it again.. the digressions – I think I would really make a fantastic stream of consciousness writer, considering my stream of consciousness carries me away ever so often. Virginia Woolf, my mai-baap.. he he!

Anyway, so this assignment, the second we had to do during the month-long course, was a hundred times more interesting than the first, which if you’ve seen it, you’d know was dry as a rehab doll This assignment, which our trainers called ‘Focus on the Learner’ was more my style, i.e. journalistic.

All of us (co-CELTAtians) had to interview one of our ESL students and evaluate how much English they have learnt, what their most significant strengths and weaknesses are, and how they fare in the 6 defined areas of language learning… reading, writing, listening, speaking (Skills) and grammar and vocabulary (Language Items).

We had a lot of guidelines to go by and as long as we made sure we had covered every aspect of learner issues in our assignment, we knew we could pass. And yet, so many had to resubmit this assignment too!! I told ya, the trainers are really annal about following the guidelines to the T.

I interviewed one of my favorite ESL students in the elementary group at St. Giles International. Maryanne (name changed) was in the elementary group – very sweet, very pretty. She had the typical mellow (typical among the Japanese girls I’ve met) style of speaking. She was almost deferential, in the way many Asian students are towards their teachers. She wasn’t sure how to say my name, so she often called me ‘Teacher’. I had to coax her a lot to call me Pulkit.. but in the end we became really friendly. I took her to Santa Cruz too after the course was over, but that was a flop trip, thanks to the awful traffic in Santa Cruz.

There I digressed again.. Anyway, so that first day when I asked her if I could interview her, she looked really nervous and I asked her why. She pounded her chest softly and said, ‘”Interview. Very scared.” I burst out laughing.. I hadn’t realized I hadn’t clarified to her I was doing this as part of my assignment. She thought it was an actual evaluation of how well she had been doing at school.. Hahaha…

Once we got that out of the way, I gave her a few questionnaires from Multiple Intelligences and Language Learning, 2005 Alta Book Publishers (thank you, Jason) to evaluate her learning style, and another one I Jason shared with the whole class. I’m going to upload the latter document here. This can function as an easy guide to learner assessment too.

So here’s the assignment and the learner assessment questionnaire.

Click to DOWNLOAD the Assignment now –>

Drop me  a line if these were useful. Cheers!

You can download this assignment with the link below. I haven’t posted it here for two reasons – it’s a really long assignment (like 5 pages in MS Word), and I’m too lazy to post it here!!

Of course, if you’re a current CELTA trainee, you could just take these assignments, make a few minor tweaks and present them as your own. But the assignments are usually so easy (and interesting) that it’s fun to apply your brains and get them right!

Of the four assignments we had to do, only the first was seriously boring. The CELTA trainers are really annal about the guidelines set by Cambridge. It’s best to talk with your co-CELTA trainees and ensure you have understood the guidelines in the same way you have.

This assignment was really helpful in giving us an idea of how to do language analysis in our lesson plans too (and all CELTA trainees must do the language analysis for every grammar and vocabulary lesson they teach, which is more than half the lessons you would be teaching during the course)

For this assignment, we were given phrases for language analysis. Everyone in my class had to resubmit this assignment because none of us really understood then how annal our CELTA trainers – Maureen and Gabi – were going to be.

The four phrases we had to analyze were

1. Used to
2. Get over
3. Would you mind
4. To ‘get’/'have’ something done

We had to analyze the language items by presenting its basic meaning and use, an illustrative context, a marker sentence, pronunciation features, concept checking questions (CCQs) and the grammar form/pattern.

Anyway, check it out. If nothing else, it will give you a great template to analyze language items for your lesson plans.

CLICK TO DOWNLOAD –>

If you’re a current CELTA student looking for help with your assignments, you might want to peek and see what I wrote in my CELTA assignments. They’re all available for free downloads. Drop me  a line if these were useful. Cheers!