Musings of Ms. Volatyle » esl students

August 18th, 2009

ESL Lesson Plan: Writing formal letters

This was among the last of the lessons I presented during the month-long CELTA course. I was the first in my group to teach a writing lesson, so I had had no exposure to these before. And the tutors did an input session on writing lessons the morning of, so my afternoon class could not have benefited much from it

Yet, this was also among the best lessons I presented, if I may say so. I think this was primarily because I relied on my own common sense (rather than resorting to looking for sample plans.. ) and my experience as a journalist in outlining the basic rules of succint writing. At the very least, the attached lesson plan is a good guide to teaching letter writing.

I decided to teach cover letter writing to my group of upper intermediate ESL students because a lot of them had told me they would soon be applying for jobs. Once I started analyzing the form of the cover letter, I found that it could easily be divided into the same categories as any decent journalistic report/story – who, what, why, where, when, how.

August 16th, 2009

CELTA Assignment: Language Skills Task

The third assignment we did during CELTA was also fun. We had the choice of doing the assignment on either Reading Skills or Listening Skills. Since we also needed to reproduce the materials for the assignment, everyone obviously chose to do it on Reading Skills. Much easier to just copy, paste text from somewhere than get listening material. I wonder why they even give us a choice.. haha!

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.

August 15th, 2009

CELTA Assignment: Focus on the Learner

So here’s the second in the series of CELTA assignments I decided to post on this blog. It almost seems like the number of posts in the CELTA category are going to exceed the total number of other posts in different categories! Shame, considering I started this blog more than two years ago. Stupid internet addiction has overtaken life, sigh.. I barely write anymore, I should I should. Promise to write more beginning next month (am harboring a huge secret inside me that’s just waiting to burst out.. when I can’t hold it in any longer, I’ll write it down here).

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.

August 5th, 2009

Find Someone Who: Fantastic ESL game

Waiting to be written

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July 26th, 2009

ESL Lesson Plan: Present Perfect Tense

Here’s the second in the series of lesson plans I promised to post. These are all lesson plans I made during my CELTA course, which I did at St. Giles International in San Francisco. You can see the rest of the lesson plans here. If you want to download the lesson plan, there is a link at the bottom of this post.

So this was the second lesson I presented to my group of ESL elementary students. I didn’t know it then, but I would grow really fond of some of the students in the weeks to come. But on that day, I was a nervous wreck. I was teaching the Present Perfect Tense. I’d heard of the dreaded thing before but I hadn’t really examined it in my life, never having needed to teach it to anyone before!!

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