THE CELTA TEACHING COMPENDIUM by Rachael Roberts Introduction Who this book is for The short answer is anyone who wants to improve their practical English language teaching skills. However, it is probably going to be most useful for teachers who are taking a course such as CELTA or the Trinity Cert TESOL, which includes observed and assessed teaching practice. Having worked on many CELTA courses, I know that they can be a fabulous way to pick up a lot of skills quickly. However, there is often so much to take in that trainee teachers can find themselves overwhelmed and confused. A compendium is a collection of concise but detailed information about a particular subject and this particular compendium sets out to provide a quick, easy reference to all the key practical teaching skills taught in CELTA. It explains the essential things you need to know, with practical tips and suggestions. Think of it like having your CELTA teaching practice tutor available for questions any time of the day or night. For those currently on such a course, it should provide reinforcement and further explanation. For those in their first few years of teaching, it should provide a refresher course. How to use the book The contents are listed alphabetically, so that you can dip in and out. Whenever another key skill is referred to, there is a link to take you to that section. Clearly there is in fact no right way to teach. However, the suggestions and tips in this book are based on years of teaching and training teachers, and should provide you with a very handy set of tools. Contents 1. Aims and objectives 2. Anticipated problems 3. Balance of interaction 4. Boardwork
5. Checking understanding (including concept questions) 6. Context 7. Differentiation 8. Drilling 9. Echo 10. Eliciting 11. Error correction 12. Fast finishers 13. Grading your language 14. Homework 15. Information gap 16. Instructions 17. Late arrivals 18. Monitoring 19. Nominating students 20. Pace 21. Praise 22. Pre-teaching vocabulary 23. Remembering names 24. Setting up pairs and groups 25. Teacher talking time 26. Timing 27. Using mother tongue 28. Voice 29. Wait time 30. Warmers
31. Whole class feedback [sample sections] 18. Monitoring class activities Done well, monitoring is not particularly obvious, so it can be hard for newer teachers to know what it is exactly that they should be doing. Monitoring to check the activity As students start a task, it s very important to check they know what they re doing and that they are able to do it. So, although you might want to back off in order to make them feel less self-conscious, you probably need to at least subtly look around and see if people are on-task. Listen in unobtrusively, perhaps while doing an admin task like filling in the register, and make sure they re ok. If one pair or group is uncertain about what to do, go and help them. If more than one pair or group is uncertain, I d advise against going round and helping them all. It ll take too long, and waste precious time for those waiting to see you. Just stop the activity and set it up again. And this time, check your instructions. This kind of monitoring is simply about helping things to run smoothly. It s most important at the beginning of a task, but you can also do this kind of monitoring while a task is in progress to see if a group have finished early, if they need more support or more challenge and so on. Especially if you re teaching young learners, you can also assess if they are starting to tire of the activity, and if you need to swiftly bring it to a close before all hell breaks loose. Monitoring to assess language and/or skills The other main reason for monitoring is to assess the language the students are producing (or their skills). This is vital if you want to be able to use your skills to actually help students develop. If you aren t listening or paying attention, how can you possibly have any idea what they can do, or what they still need help with? How to monitor Teachers, especially newer teachers, aren t always clear about the difference between monitoring and teaching. Monitoring should primarily be about listening and noticing, and not getting too involved. If you get too involved with a group, you can t tell what is going on elsewhere, and the rest of the class may feel ignored, get bored, start throwing paper aeroplanes. (Small group teaching might be fine with a longer project-like activity, once you are SURE everyone knows what they re doing and can work independently, but it s not monitoring.) So being unobtrusive is important. You could try sitting at a short distance and looking elsewhere while your ears work overtime. In a smallish class, it can also work quite well to sit on a chair in the middle of the room and lean forward. It signals that you re listening, but isn t too (literally) in your face. If students are writing, you ll need to get closer. Try walking behind as these means they don t have to stop what they re doing and turn their book round to show you. It also helps to learn to read at strange angles.
What should you be listening for? Obviously this depends on what the students are doing. Here are some suggestions. Speaking tasks Are they using the language you ve been working on in class? Bear in mind that if they aren t, it might be because you (or the coursebook writer) hasn t designed the task very well, rather than that they can t actually use it. Is the language you plan to focus on later in the class already being used naturally? If not, that will provide a gap for you to feed language into later- as in task-based learning. Can you identify a gap, or language they need to do the task more effectively? If so, make a note, teach it at the feedback stage, and then let them do the task again. Grammar or vocab exercises Monitoring should tell you which students are finding it easiest, and which are struggling. How many are struggling? (Do you need to deal with this whole class or on an individual basis?) It s also a great opportunity to think about who you are going to nominate at the feedback stage. You don t want to put people on the spot by asking for answers they don t know. It can also be a good idea to give a weaker student a boost by nominating them when you know, from monitoring, that they ve got the answer right. After monitoring As well as carrying out feedback on a task, or conducting an error correction slot (where you write mistakes you heard on the board, anonymised and ask students to try and correct them), you could write down examples you heard of language which was particularly successful or useful. Alternatively, you could choose not to feedback at that point, but to note down what you ve learnt about their needs and plan a future lesson around them. If they haven t used the target language they were supposed to be practising, you could take some examples of what they did say (which was correct), give praise for it, and then try to elici t other ways of saying it which do use the target language. Or you could ask students to feedback on other aspects of the task- such as how well they worked together- and give them your own feedback on what you noticed. If, on the other hand, you ve just been filling in the register while they did the task, you can t do any of these things Be clear in your own mind about whether you are monitoring to check the activity or to assess the students performance. Get a balance between being unobtrusive and showing that you re listening. Use what you hear while monitoring to give feedback, identify what you need to teach next or clarify further, or to decide who to nominate.
19 Nominating students Nominating simply means saying the name of the student that you want to answer a question. Many teachers feel awkward about this because they don t want to embarrass the students (or less forgiveably because they can t remember the students names) So teachers often just take answers from those who shout them out. This tends to mean that the same few students are answering all the questions. It can also lead to the teacher assuming that everyone in the class understands or can do something, when it fact only a handful of them do. The others are just keeping quiet. When teaching younger students, they may put up their hands if they think they know the answers. This is less usual with adults, but even if they do put up their hands, it isn t a great idea to only ask those with their hands up. If you only ever ask those confident students, the others may become disengaged and even less confident. And even the more confident students will only put their hands up when they are sure they know the answers, which means they won t have the opportunity to get things wrong. Yes, the opportunity. If feedback just consists of students giving correct answers, there is very little opportunity for learning to take place. If students are aware that any of them may be nominated (and, importantly, that it is OK to get something wrong) it makes for a much more engaged class. It can also actually take some pressure off, as students don t have to make themselves stand out from the group. As a general rule, ask the question and then nominate who you would like to answer it. To make it feel less personal, you could try a random method of choosing who answers a question. For example, each student could write their name on a piece of paper that you pull out of a box. Or you can get students to pass a ball around and the person with the ball answers (and cannot be passed the ball again). And you can also note while monitoring who is likely to be pleased or potentially humiliated if you nominate them in feedback. Nominating is more learner-friendly than letting students shout out answers Establish that everyone can learn from wrong answers. Ask the question and then nominate. 20 Pace
Good pace is not about speeding through the lesson as quickly as possible. That s exhausting for the teacher, and will probably leave students feeling like they ve been run over by a steam-roller. Simply put, good pace is about keeping everyone s energy up, keeping everyone engaged with the lesson and making the time fly by. It isn t at all simple to achieve that, but there are some key things to think about Variety Variety is the spice of life, and of lessons. Think about varying the patterns of interaction- pairwork, groupwork, whole class, individual and also the kind of activity. With younger learners the advice is often to follow stirring activities (running to the board, games) with settling activities (copying from the board, drawing) and broadly the same principle applies to working with adults (though with probably less colouring). If students have been sitting working quietly for a while, an activity where they can move around and talk to each other will work wonders to pick up the pace. Transitions Pace often drops as the teacher transitions from one stage to the next. This is usually because they haven t sufficiently thought through what is going to happen or how they are going to explain it. Especially as a new teacher, it is really worth planning any complex instructions in advance. Try not to give too much information at once, and think how you can make your instructions as clear as possible. A demonstration is usually more effective than a long explanation. Time limits Teachers sometimes feel uncomfortable about setting time limits for activities, because it feels bossy and perhaps doesn t take account of individual needs. However, students generally find it helpful to have some idea about how long they should spend on an activity. Many activities can expand to fill the time available, and it s frustrating to have spent a long time discussi ng the first question in depth and then be stopped before you have a chance to start on the second and third questions. Setting a time limit (and giving warnings when the time is running out) allows students to manage themselves. And if you don t set time limits, and wait until everyone has finished everything, you will lose the attention of the majority of the class. It may seem harsh to stop when not everyone has finished, but you can always note who hasn t finished and help them individually later if ne cessary. Danger zones There are certain points in the lesson that are well-known pace danger zones. Be very careful about lead-ins or warmers. These can be a great way to start the lesson off in an energised way, but if they go on too long, the students can start to feel that the lesson has lost its way (plus you will end up rushing through all the more important stuff later). Also watch out when you are monitoring group work. Try to avoid getting pulled in for too long by any one group, or you will look up to find that everyone has finished and that they are looking bored (adults) or climbing out of the window (teenagers). Giving whole class feedback is another danger zone, as it can easily become tedious and teacher centred. All the tips above should help you to improve your pace, but, when in doubt, don t forget to get feedback from students about the pace of the lesson. You will discover that everyone s perception is
different, but you might also get some very useful tips about certain parts of the lesson or the way you set up activities and so on. Set time limits and give warnings Watch for transitions and danger zones Aim for variety 31 Whole class feedback When you look at the key stages in your lesson plan, the moments where you go through answers with the whole class may not seem very important. As a result, newer teachers often underestimate how long this will take, and it is easy to get bogged down. However, while whole class feedback on an exercise may take up time, it is certainly important, and may even provide more valuable learning opportunities than the exercise itself. Perhaps the key thing to remember is that it should be about more than just going through the answers. If that s all you re doing, you might as well give them the answers on the whiteboard (though sometimes that can work fine if the work is pretty straightforward and you ve already seen through monitoring that most people have grasped it). Using feedback to find out how much students understood. Generally speaking, monitoring is the best way of doing this because you don t really get a clear impression of how many students got each right answer, or who found which question difficult. However, nominating effectively can help with this. Using feedback to fill in the gaps As you elicit the answers, encourage students to explain why they chose a particular answer and take the opportunity to really check understanding. If students have got something wrong or not quite understood something, feedback can be the magic aha moment when it finally becomes clear. However, taking the opportunity to check, clarify and explain has to be balanced with spending so long on feedback that the pace drops and the class becomes too teacher-centred. A good way to put the focus back on the students is to get them to peer correct first, in pairs or small groups. If you monitor while they are doing this, you can easily see which questions are causing the most difficulty and then have a brief but useful teacher led discussion on just these questions. When teachers don t manage to get through half of what they planned, it is often because they haven t allowed a realistic amount of time for feedback. So don t rush through it, but equally try to make sure it is using precious class time well. Think about feedback stages as you plan the lesson Don t just elicit answers, check understanding Don t spend too long on whole class feedback- be selective