Musings of Ms. Volatyle» Musings of Ms. Volatyle

September 23rd, 2009

ESL Contracts: To Go or Not to Go

So what do you do once you’ve finished your TESOL or TEFL course?

Hell man, I’m gonna get a job in China/France/Haiti/Brazil and I’m gonna be gone while you guys clean up the mess around here!!

Uhmm.. wait. Did you sign your contract yet? Did you get the figures right? Are you sure you’re going to have the weekend off? Just some of the questions that your daddy might ask when you’re trampolining and telling him all about your new job.

So what are the loopholes you should look out for in ESL contracts? What are the benefits you must insist on? Find out.. Read More…

No Comments | In: ESL Musings | tags: CELTA, ESL, ESL contract, ESL jobs, ESL schools, questions about ESL contract, tesol. | #

September 15th, 2009

Project Write Well: ESL Tips for Good Writing

Most ESL students (and their parents) lay an inordinate amount of emphasis on conversational skills and gloss over the need to learn how to write. It’s true that conversational skills are the most important ones to teach. If immersed in an English speaking environment, students pick up conversational skills sooner or later (which is why I don’t think using L1 during lessons is a smart move). But once the student is past the stage of grappling for words, it becomes quite important to focus on writing skills.

Since English is a non-phonetic language, there is often no correlation between the way words are written and spelled. And if you thought that’s the hardest bit to learn about writing well, think again. With the multitude of writing style sheets floating around in this world, it can be incredibly hard for students to even realize what they’re up against when they embark out on ‘Project Write Well’.

September 13th, 2009

ESL Lesson Plan: A, An, The

This is a lesson plan for teaching articles that was requested by a reader. Articles are possibly the simplest, yet the most most arbitrary grammar rules to learn. Most languages apart from English do not have articles, and I know most ESL students are completely flummoxed by their need. But well, strange is the English language

Presenting a lesson on articles is not the most difficult of things, anticipating your particular students’ problems is. Considering that there are no articles in Latin, Sanskrit or Persian – the mai-baap (roots) of many modern languages – English teachers, at least the ones interested in etymological mysteries, may wonder where the articles in English language crept up from. I haven’t found a meaningful explanation yet, so if you can give me a clue, fire away in the Comments section.

August 20th, 2009

ESL Lesson Plan: Present Perfect Tense and Present Perfect Continuous Tense

This had to be among the most challenging of all the lessons I presented while I was a CELTA trainee. But it was the one lesson that helped me develop a solid understanding of all the tenses. In fact, just last week, when I had to explain the differences between perfect tenses in the present, past, and future to a new student, I was able to do it without once referring to a grammar book. Aaah, score! You can download the lesson plan at the bottom of this post.

The differences in the usage of present perfect tense and present perfect continuous tense are so many that it can sometimes be daunting for both the ESL tutor and ESL student. In fact, though native English speakers can almost always use the correct tenses during speech, they often fumble while constructing written sentences using these tenses. A lot of writers try to do without these tenses as much as possible, which really constricts their writing.

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 14th, 2009

CELTA Assignment: Language Analysis

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!!

August 10th, 2009

ESL Lesson Plan: Reading

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.

August 7th, 2009

ESL Lesson Plan: Listening

This is the fourth in the series of lesson plans I promised to put up after my CELTA course. Listening lesson are generally among the easier kinds of lessons we have to teach. Listening is part of the ’skills lessons’, along with speaking, reading and writing. The other two kinds of lessons – Grammar and Vocabulary – fall into the Language lessons category.

{{To directly download this message, go to the bottom of the post}}

Generally, Skills lessons are far easier to plan and execute, mostly because students need to do a lot of work themselves and do not need to depend on the teacher for the most part. Of course, the ESL teacher still has to do their part in ensuring the lesson interests the students. Especially in the case of children and teenagers, if the topic of the lesson is not interesting enough, students begin to fidget pretty soon.

I was presenting it to the Upper Intermediate level ESL students at St. Giles International in San Francisco, the same place I did my CELTA course (Read why I chose the CELTA and not one of the hundreds of TEFL/TESOL courses available).

July 30th, 2009

ESL Lesson Plan: Food Vocabulary

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

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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