Now I know every CELTA center sets its own assignments for its CELTA trainees but I don’t think they are vastly different from center-to-center. For one, Fernanda, the Brazilian woman who was at St. Giles International in San Fran with us showed us a bunch of assignments that her friend did at the Sao Paolo center, and they weren’t so different.

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!!

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8 Comments | In: CELTA Assignments | tags: CELTA, celta assignment, english, ESL, ESL Lesson Plans, language analysis, lesson plan, teaching. | #

This one has to be the easiest lessons to plan for – along with listening. Reading, listening, speaking and writing fall in the category of Skills Lessons. Often, you will find students, especially adult learners, insist on learning skills rather than formal grammar. Of course, skills are the most important part of any language because they allow one to communicate with others. But ESL learners often do not realize that grammar and vocabulary (which are language items) are as intrinsic to learning a new language as the skills.

A Japanese ESL student who masters the American accent but forms her sentences using the Japanese form of S-O-V sentences (instead of the English S-V-O) is going to comprehensible, but only slightly. You get my point

{{To download this lesson plan, go to the bottom of the post}} Click here to see the other lesson plans I have posted.

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1 Comment | In: ESL Lesson Plans | tags: adult learners, CELTA, english, ESL, esl learners, ESL Lesson Plans, esl student, lesson plan, reading lesson, teaching. | #

This is the third in the series of Lesson Plans I promised to post. This one is to teach Food-related vocabulary to elementary level ESL students. I taught this class at St. Giles International, a very popular language school in San Francisco. We had a cocktail of students from different countries. In this elementary group alone, I had students from China, Korea, Italy, Russia, Thailand, Peru and France.  The classes were even more varied at the upper-intermediate level – we had students from Czech, Germany, Siberia, Cyprus and many other countries.

I was pissed that I had to teach Food Vocabulary.. I mean, why not Clothing Vocabulary, or Road Vocabulary – those are pretty much the same everywhere! A pant is a pant is a pant, as is a skirt, a skirt, a skirt – in Russia or Thailand. But smoked fish.. gosh, what if a certain country does not have a smoked fish dish. Or worse, how does one explain the differences between grilling and barbecue – a concept much debated in the culinary world too.

I was even more aware of these issues because I’m Indian – and we don’t do smoked fish, not in the North at least (I think the South does have some smoked fish and meat dishes). But I was just fretting without a cause, coz in the end, all my students knew all the vocabulary! Easy sailing, it was

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1 Comment | In: ESL Lesson Plans | tags: CELTA, efl, elementary group, english, ESL, esl difficult words, esl food vocab, ESL Lesson Plans, food vocabulary, language school, lesson plan, teaching, vocabulary lesson, vocabulary words. | #

Here’s the first of the lesson plans I promised.

Most people who think of doing the CELTA or similar TEFL/TESOL courses soon find out that a major part of the course involves teaching. And not just dummy students! It’s really daunting to think about standing in front of a classroom of students, all of whom stare at you expectantly, and there’s no way out for you but to deliver. If you think you can wriggle out of the situation without much preparation, you’re either fooling yourself or you’re an experienced teacher. These students will have questions – lots of them. And unless you’ve anticipated their questions and found all the right answers, you’re gonna end up looking like a fool.

So here’s my advice – day one. Just Be. Don’t worry. However much you prepare, the nervousness of that first afternoon facing the students can’t be overcome by anything else.

Since the CELTA is a Cambridge University course and is carefully structured, most schools expect CELTA trainees to present only a simple 20 minute lesson on the first day. You will be given the topic of the lesson the day before. Mostly, the 20 minute lesson is a game like a Crossword puzzle or something similar using the Target Language (TL) which you have to teach your students.

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