Preparing for the DELTA: A Pre-reading Guide

The Good News
There is no list of 12 books that you must read through cover to cover to do the DELTA. You will find the handouts you are given on your course and dipping into books for specific information will be more than enough for the coursework you have to do. Obviously the more you read, and the earlier you start reading, the more you will find the course manageable and rewarding. The good news is that the most useful pre-reading for you is whatever interests you most.

Where to Start
A great place to start is with the study skills book Use your Head. This explains how to get the most out of all the books you use. You can then put this book into practise as you pursue your interests. If you don’t know what those are yet…

A Little Bit of What You Fancy
“About Language” (Scott Thornbury) is a great introduction to many of the areas you will cover on your course, and so a good place to find out which areas interest you most. This is also the one “must buy” for the DELTA, as it is a great help when revising for the exam.

Two areas which are popular for pre-reading are:
-Looking deeper into aspects you already covered in your CELTA
-New developments in teaching

Going deeper
One cliche about TEFL courses is that on the CELTA you find out what to do, and on the DELTA you find out why you are doing it. A fascinating (if controversial) example of this for a central part of grammar is “The English Verb” (Michael Lewis). There are also less polemical but very interesting books on other familiar areas such as Listening and Writing.

New developments
If you are looking forward to or dreading changing how you teach as a result of doing the Dip, an inspiring read is “Challenge and Change in Language Teaching”. This covers two of the most talked about ideas in ELT in the last few years:
-the Lexical Approach
-Task-Based Learning

Other interesting areas you might like to explore by reading about them and/ or trying them in the classroom are:
-NLP
-Multiple intelligences theory

As well as reading about methods like these in more detail, before the Dip starts is a great time to experiment with using materials influenced by them in class. The “Cutting Edge” series of textbooks are the most ambitious attempt to have a task-based textbook, and all the books published by LTP are strongly influenced by the Lexical Approach. “Knowing Me Knowing You” (Delta Publishing) has lots of practical ideas for exploring learning styles in the classroom.

The Bad News
The bad news is that all those things you struggled through in your Cert and have avoided as much as possible since then can be avoided no longer! The two most “popular” areas are:
-The phonemic chart and pronunciation
-Complex grammar points
The solution for both of these is simply to avoid them no longer. Working your way through the activities in “Pronunciation Games” will be useful and fun for you and your class. If you need more confidence with the phonemic chart first, “Sound Foundations” takes you though step-by-step. “Skills plus: Grammar and Speaking” makes you and your Advanced students tackle those bits of ‘awkward’ grammar in a thoroughly modern way. Like any of the books mentioned above, pushing yourself by using books like this gives you a great feeling that you really know what you are doing and so boosts your confidence- which is also one of the reasons why the DELTA itself is such a rewarding experience.