Archive for the ‘CELTA’ Category

Despite a few encouraging remarks on the Rave’s Cafe Teacher Training forum and from Sandy below, I am still quite suprised that no one else is as outraged as me about Cambridge allowing non-refundable “application fees” etc to be taken off people taking the CELTA course. Maybe I am turning into the “One Foot in the Grave”-style grumpy old man of TEFL…

“I can’t believe it!” is about right, but rather than using an annoying catchphrase, I have decided to wear the resistance of everyone down on this topic with dodgy metaphors instead. Here comes the first one, and they will keep on coming until at least 20 people leave messages of support in the comments boxes of this and similar posts- (more…)

To prove that I am capable of not only the idle speculation of the average post on this blog (but then, isn’t that what a blog is for?) but also of getting down and dirty in the trenches of TEFL, I’ve been given my TEFL Press Card, a rusty old Remington typewriter and a pack of filterless French cigarettes and become what can almost be described as a journalist. Yes, those of you standing around outside the kiosks and corner shops of the world waiting for the latest edition of the EL Gazette hot off the press will have noticed not one, but two articles by Alex Case, direct from war torn Tokyo.

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Hope that headline got your attention, but actually I have nothing to say about the MA today at all…

Right, now to talk about the CELTA. I have decided to trust a whole lot of people I have never met and take the PGCE (standard British 1 year postgraduate teaching qualification) to be totally superior to the CELTA and a whole lotta learning more than a DELTA. The only compensation for me as someone who has done the C and the D but not the P is to imagine that the PGCE powers that be have been ripping off the CELTA as they have introduced classroom teaching earlier and earlier in the course.

Anyhows, as few more people are likely to start using 5000 pounds of someone’s money and two years of their lives to do a PGCE before popping off to Spain for a year I think the only sensible thing to do is combine the best of the two. And here it is:

The Super CELTA (although Advanced CELTA might be a better name!) will be a combination of the CELTA just as it stands now and in-service training once you start your first job, which will be set by Cambridge and admininstered and run by the employers. The employers will be able to easily justify checking up on their first year teachers and making sure they continue their training, the teachers will be able to choose a good school simply by the fact that they offer support for this extended qualification, and Cambridge will be able to use it to spread good practice in teacher observations and what have you.

So that’s decided then. You can disagree with me, but then I will just edit your comment to make it look like you’ve been blabbering on about lobsters invading the earth…. Only joking! Bring it on! And there’s also a similar thread in D’s E C you can comment in as well/ instead.

Just could not think of an interesting title to this post, and as the limitations of this method of teacher training is obvious to most people not financially tied up in the teacher training busines, neither do I think I have anything particularly original or shocking to say on this often discussed point:

Unless it is a qualification to be an online teacher, it is always better to have face to face observed teaching practice as part of your course. This is not possible with a 100% online course; therefore it cannot be as good as, for example, the CELTA- end of story. Whether an online course could offer better value for money, be more convenient or even be the only available option for some people are the only debatable points.

Can anyone argue with that?

Carrying on looking at whether teachers should still teach PPP and therefore whether teacher training courses like the CELTA should still cover it, lets look at some criticisms people could level and/ or have levelled at this approach:

There is little or no experimental evidence to suggest that PPP works

Having not read all the literature since PPP was first conceived I have no idea if this is true or not, but there certainly aren’t a lot of papers around at the moment sticking up for it, that is for sure. A lack of papers on the topic could mean that everyone thinks it is already proved worthless, but anyone who thinks pure scientific results always decide where the funding and interest of researchers go is rather naive and hasn’t read the story of (amongst others) how Stalin’s “scientific” theories set up a mini industry in researchers backing him up. Here are some other possible reasons why there are no professors of Applied Linguistics staking their career on sticking up for a theory well past its heyday:

• It’s unfashionable
• They know the academic rage that will fall down upon them for going against the academic flow
• There’s no funding for it
• No one would publish it
• A PhD student who wanted to tackle it would never be allowed to by their prof

Grammar instruction of any kind is not needed as students can best pick up the language just by using it, listening to it and reading it, so PPP is useless

According to the book I am 3/4 of the way through (Studies in Honour of Rod Ellis- OUP, 2007), most researchers now agree that some kind of form focused instruction (e.g. grammar presentations) improve language learning in both the short and the long term. More quotes and posts on this coming once I finish it.

Students rarely if ever produce the form being taught in the lesson at the production stage at the end of a PPP lesson, let alone accurately.

In my experience, this is true. However, such use can be instantly improved by not having the free production stage at the end of the same lesson as when you present the language for the first time but next week after they have had time to absorb the language a little and do their homework. On a CELTA training course it is not often possible to do this, but once the trainees know how to do all the stages they can easily experiment when they start teaching with seperating them into different lessons- all that needs to be done on the course is point out the fact that they can do so.

Researchers have moved onto the Task-Based Approach, so it’s about time teacher training caught up

Again, what researchers focus their attention on can often be taken with a pinch of salt. “After all, currently discredited methodologies such as audiolingualism or the cognitive code approach once had widespread support from researchers and theoreticians” (Jack C. Richards, ibid). Tasks happen to be something that are tailor-made for classroom-based research. Whether they are also tailor-made for classroom-based teaching is still yet to be proved, I believe. Also, in this case even pro-TBA researchers have even yet to agree on what a good task, good task-based classroom approach and good task-based syllabus might be.

While all these questions remain up in the air, I don’t see how someone can be taught TBA in a four-week training course. When I was a teacher trainer on a TEFL course I was quite happy to admit the unfashionability of PPP, show Cutting Edge and tell how it is (was?) the latest thing and how it was supposed to work. I was not prepared to let them have a go at it in the classroom instead of PPP, and I should point out that even people who had read their Harmer and knew the holes in the PPP theory did not exactly ask to try out a method they knew was more complicated for the teacher. Anyway, if you know how to do TTT in all its variations it really isn’t that far off from TBA.

If they get trained in PPP, it is so rigid that they will never be able to break free from it and try other approaches

This might be true for some people, but most of the people using approaches like TBA now were trained in PPP.

Conclusion

On an initial teacher training course teachers need to learn how to teach grammar (as well as skills, functional language, pron etc.), and the quickest, easiest and most practical method for them to pick up first is PPP (and its variation TTT). However, they should be told about the theoretical and practical problems with the method and about the available variations (e.g. spreading the 3 stages over weeks not over 1 lesson) and options (e.g. TBA). Exceptional trainees who have PPP down the pat over the first couple of weeks (very few!) should be allowed to experiment with other methods.

Following up my breaking news story on the school in the British Midlands that takes a 50 pound “interview fee” just for the pleasure of seeing what a real whiteboard looks like before you are accepted or rejected as a CELTA candidate, the Cambridge ESOL reply (received today) is basically “they can charge what they like”.

So starts my first TEFLtastic campaign. TEFLtastic says: not only is this a rip off that affects people who are new to the industry and so don’t know any better, it also sounds so similar to actual criminal scams that have occured in TEFL that the whole industry suffers from a supposed keeper of standards like Cambridge being connected to it. This has to stop, full stop.

Thanks to Appy Linguist for mentioning the PPP approach while talking about the CELTA because I’ve been meaning to write about it for a while. The question is: should teachers still be trained to teach PPP and it’s offshoot (or bastard offspring, depending on your point of view) TTT? First of all, to recap what they mean:

In PPP (presentation, practice and production), you present a language point, students do some controlled practice of the language and then they are given a freer speaking task to do where they can produce the language you have presented and practiced if they wish. TTT (test, teach, test) is similar, but you test the students on their knowledge and ability to use the language you want to teach first, see where the hole in their language is and then do the stages in PPP. The possible things you can do at each stage are:

Presentation

1. Write an example of a grammatical form up on the board and translate it into the students’ language
2. And/ or write an example of a grammatical form up on the board and explain what the name of the form is, how it is used and what it means (in English or in L1*)
3. Do the same as 1 or 2, but eliciting the translation or explanation from the students
4. Do the reverse of 1 or 2, providing a sentence in L1 for translation or giving the name or meaning of the form and getting students to provide an example sentence
5. Do the same as 4, but eliciting the form with a cue such as a picture, a story, a gapped sentence or a timeline*
6. After a listening, reading or video watching activity, pull examples of the form you want to teach out of the text and do the same as 1 to 5 above
7. Do the same as 6, but providing the explanation, translation etc. as asking students to find examples in the texts
8. Students do any one of 1 to 7 above, but individually or in pairs from their textbooks or a worksheet. Check answers as a whole class.

Once you are sure that all the students understand the meaning and construction of the form you want to teach (this stage usually includes a few concept check questions to make sure that is in fact the case), you are ready to move onto the practice stage

Practice

1. Students are drilled on more sentences similar to the one used in the presentation, making sure their pronunciation is okay 
2. Students translate more sentences with the form in to and/ or from English
3. Students complete multiple choice, gap fill etc. written tasks including the form being taught
4. Students produce examples of the form based on prompts provided by the teacher or textbooks (e.g. book- I like reading books, flower- I like picking flowers etc.)
5. Students produce examples of the form to answer questions by the teacher or in the textbook (When did uyou have breakfast? I had breakfast at 8:15), either their own real answers or based on cues in the textbook
6. Students ask questions with the form being taught to match answers given by the teacher or in the textbook (I was walking down the street- What were you doing when you last met your best friend?- That’s right)
7. Countless other speaking and/ or writing games that involve a limited range of language
8. Any of the production activities below, but with students being told to use the form being taught or even to only use the form being taught

It is possible to use two or more of the practice activities above, often moving from very controlled (e.g. drilling) to freer (e.g. language games).

Now that students are capable of making some correct sentences with the form being taught, they are ready for the next stage. In the practice stage above, even when the tasks are, in the best of cases, genuinely communicative (that is, students learn some real information about each other they didn’t know before) they still use an unrealisitically limited amount of language. Hopefully, the students are now ready to try to use the same structures in a situation where a lot of other different language could also come up.

Production

1. Roleplays
2. Writing longer texts like stories, letters etc.
3. Problem solving and logic puzzles
4. Many many more which don’t spring to mind at the moment

I’m going to deal with the criticisms of PPP in PPP RIP? Part Two, but before I forget a point that has just occured to me, I would like to say that modern so-called PPP classes, textbooks and teacher training courses tend to include just as much emphasis on skills development as on items of language taught through PPP- a point often forgotten by both critics and defenders due the fact that the name is not PPPPS (PPP plus skills) or such like. It’s amazing how much a snappy acronym* can change history

*L1- The students’ first language, e.g. Spanish

*Timeline- A picture of wiggly lines, straight lines and crosses that is supposed to show the time connections of different tenses

* Acronym- Strictly this is not an acronym because it is not pronounced like a word (like NATO), but I don’t know what it really is, so on this blog an acronym it remains

After getting illuminating, intellectually piercing responses to this question on Rave Spelling’s ESL Au Lait Japan forum like “because no one cares” (Only possible response- okay, so why does no one care!) from self-proclaimed well-qualified and experienced “real teachers” before they started throwing around personal insults and got the topic locked, I have no choice but tackle this point on my own. Here are three ideas below:

• Because the managers from most schools haven’t gone through the Cambridge teaching qualifications system themselves, they are unlikely to demand a CELTA of their teachers. For example, if you see your CELTA or DELTA as a proof of your own professionalism you are more likely to demand the same of your teachers or see the value of it on their CV. It is noticeable that chains of schools with overwhelmingly British management are more likely to ask for CELTA, and this seems to me the man reason why.
• In a similar way, because no schools in Japan sell TEFL teacher training courses like the CELTA (because of reasons like the cost of living here making it cheaper for people to do one in Thailand or at home), they don’t need to demand it of their teachers to boost the status of their own training courses.
• In Japanese companies there is a tradition of taking on new graduates without specific qualifications for their job in order to train them into the company’s own way of doing business while they are still young and impressionable, and being trained in someone else’s way of doing things might even be seen as a negative. In government and other Japanese-owned schools it seems possible that that attitude stretches also to the English teachers. In a similar way, you can see from the link below that MBAs are much less popular in Japan than in Europe or the USA.

www.referenceforbusiness.com/encyclopedia/Int-Jun/Japanese-Management-Techniques.html 

More ideas please from my TEFLtastic tribe:

I hope this is not true, or I might have to swallow my words about the CELTA in record time…I just found out a few hours ago that one UK based CELTA course provider is charging a 50 pound “interview fee”. That’s right, 50 pounds for the chance to have them quiz you on grammar for 5 minutes and then show you the classrooms. Are they having a laugh? Is someone else having a laugh? I am in contact with Cambridge ESOL at the moment and all will be revealed in real time here- don’t go away!

It’s an often asked question and I’m getting bored of answering it, so here’s absolutely my last word on the matter*

To CELTA or not to CELTA?- The “final” word

 I have been a trainer on 4 week certificate in teaching english to adults courses (similar to CELTA) where some of the trainees already had teaching experience before they come on the course but they decided it was still worth the money to work in better schools and/ or work legally (in Turkey, for example, you need a teaching qualification to get a visa).

All said teachers had got into very bad habits teaching without having training first, and most of them looked like they were going to fail the teaching practice part of the course in the first two or three weeks. Most finally came through quite well, but with on average with a range of marks only slightly higher than people with no teaching experience at all (who also often had the handicap of less life experience to help them). Certainly all the teachers would have been better at their jobs having done the Certificate first and then taught for a year or two rather than visa versa- without a single exception.

Ditto people with Primary school teaching experience and MAs in TESOL with no teaching experience

Conclusions:
1) There are jobs you can get without a TEFL Certificate in most countries, but there are more and better ones you can get with one
2)You will do your job better if you get training first, and it will also make your job easier on you
3) If you put off training until later, you will not get as full benefit from it as you could- quite apart from the wasted years of teaching not as well as you could have before that you get round to doing it. Teaching before qualifications will also not count towards the teaching experience that is added up to decide pay rises, becoming an EFL examiner, entering the DELTA/ MA etc.
4) It is expensive, and schools do become training centres partly for financial reasons, but you will soon get your money back if you choose your post-CELTA job carefully and/ or when you start getting promoted. Anyway, it’s much cheaper than any kind of IT, NLP or business training.
5) If you really think it’s such a great money making scam you will need a CELTA to become a CELTA trainer, and so get in on the game yourself

*(Ha, I’ll be lucky! Especially with the bits I sneaked in in the middle bit…)