Preparing for the CELTA: A Pre-reading Guide

Getting Started
Perhaps the most difficult thing about pre-reading for a first teaching qualification is picturing and forming opinions about what happens in the classroom before you actually get there. You can make a great start in preparing for an ELT course like the CELTA, however, by learning about what is all around you- the language itself. The parts of language you can usefully study, namely:
-grammar
-pronunciation, and possibly

-vocabulary
are also things that it is nice to have ‘under your belt’ so you can just concentrate on the actual teaching during the course.

Grammar
The best book to test and expand your knowledge of your own language’s grammar is Discover English , as it is specifically designed for teachers and future teachers. Questions will almost certainly pop into your head while you are doing the exercises, and good reference book such as Practical English Usage will serve you well for such tricky questions through the whole of your teaching career.

Pronunciation
The main problem trainees have with pronunciation is not so much understanding it as learning a whole new ‘phonemic’ script. Probably the best thing to do is simply to treat it as a code and transcribe things you want to write such as your shopping list, checking it with a good learners’ dictionary (see below)- the dictionary being another piece of reference material that you will need on a daily basis! Otherwise, the start of Teaching English Pronunciation is an easy read. Like all the other specialized books listed below, it does go deeper into the subject that you will need to at this stage, but the golden rule is to follow what ever interests you most, keeping the book to finish later on in your teaching career.

Vocabulary
The is perhaps the final area that is as much about the language as teaching, and Working with Words provides a practical introduction that in the whole could even be of interest to anyone who’s ever tried learning vocab.

Looking Ahead
Finally, if you’re feeling a little nervous you might want a little taster of what you’re going to see and do in the classroom. Although the recently updated Practice of English Language Teaching is used on many courses, the same author’s How to Teach English is a much gentler introduction, and perhaps the only book apart from ‘Discover English’ in the list that is easy and useful to read cover to cover at this point. Teaching Practice Handbook has a ‘level’ somewhere between those two. If you then find you have an interest in a particular area, you can then follow it up with reading one of the books below. 

Originally published on the Keltic bookshop site