BOSTON 2015 C3 CELTA MARCH 16TH - APRIL10TH

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Comment by Stephen Kamunge on April 4, 2015 at 1:52pm

Thanks Matt!

Friends... Hope you all have a blessed Easter!!

"All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

"The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts."
―C.S Lewis

Comment by Matthew Noble on April 4, 2015 at 9:03am

Hey gang,

A few announcements/reminders...

The Cambridge course assessor is coming on Monday morning. I was under the (mistaken) impression it'd be Tuesday, but it's Monday. Therefore:

1. Please put any resub assignments in our folders before/at 9am on Monday morning. Thank you!

We need to get them into your portfolios for the assessor to look over while they are there throughout the day. I'll check that all completed assignments are in your portfolio and that sign off on the assignment submission record in your CELTA 5.

2. On Friday I forgot to have you survey your CELTA 5 and make sure everything was up to date on Friday. Ideally everything in there is 'up to date'.

When you come in you'll find sticky notes on your CELTA 5s with notes to complete all signatures and/or entries that might be missing, including aforementioned assignment record page.

3. The assessor will spend 15-20 minutes with you guys before input in the morning - this is a time you can ask any questions, voice concerns, give feedback etc. Then the assessor will disappear into a room to pore over our written feedback and TP grades, etc. On Monday afternoon he'll be in the TP Classroom, but not to assess your lessons! So for you it's really no different than the usual. He's more concerned about making sure my feedback is reasonable against the TP classes it's for. He'll probably hang in the back during TPFB as well.

So that's Monday.

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A reminder about TP8s and TP9s:

You chose the lessons, you found the materials. With these lessons in particular, you're absolutely allowed to tweet and adapt what you find in the books (but it's not necessarily expected/required). If it's a functions lesson, for example, and you think some other exponent is better (more 'real', more useful, more up to date, etc.) than one of the ones in the book, go ahead and change it!

These are lessons where you're expected to employ whatever effective methods and techniques you've learned and practiced during the last 3 weeks that work best for your lesson...and these lessons are also more *yours* from inception through the planning. So, I'd just like to say that I hope they're really enjoyable for you.

One trainee has checked in about recording the final TP. This reminds me that, if you'd like hard evidence of this epic journey!, you might want to ask a colleague if they could take some pictures of you teaching in TP. Nothing wrong with that! I bet your friends and family would get a kick out of them if nothing else...but they could also go into an eventual 'teaching portfolio' kind of thing. ;)

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PS - If there are any questions that really need sharing I'll be checking back in here on Sunday afternoon at the latest.

Have a good weekend!

GO SPARTANS! ;)

PPS - someone asked about looking for worldwide TEFL jobs online. Here are two useful resources, to start: 1) JOB POSTINGS, the link to the TH jobs board at the top of this very page 2) http://www.tefl.com/.

(During the second input slot on Monday morning you will still be writing your LFC reflection papers (basically you've got all morning...people usually finish long before long and have free time/long lunch). During this time we'll also be pulling you one-by-one into our office/extra room to chat for 15 minutes or so about plans and ideas for post-CELTA jobsearching and answer questions looking ahead, etc. We can talk about resume edits and stuff like that, too, and give you more specific advice based on your personal situation).

Cheers

And again: GO SPARTANS!!!

Comment by Matthew Noble on April 3, 2015 at 8:42am

(in case you're wondering, they have 'unassessed/unobserved' TP time because of the course numbers...we basically suggest lessons/activities and leave them to it).

Comment by Matthew Noble on April 3, 2015 at 8:41am

[cut n' pasted from the p/t groups wall]

Comment by Matthew Noble yesterday
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Erika was asking about recommended websites for unassessed lessons/activities and I'd like to share a few here:

For fun/well designed listening activities:

http://www.esl-lab.com/

Great short film-based lessons:

1 http://film-english.com/
2 http://lessonstream.org/

Really good downloadable lessons here: http://elt-resourceful.com/

A million 'games' that *can* be productive: http://iteslj.org/games/

Lots more, but that's enough for now.

Enjoy...

Comment by Stephen Kamunge on April 2, 2015 at 6:41am

Thank you for the directions

Comment by Matthew Noble on April 1, 2015 at 7:09pm

Somehow the pic of the trainees didn't make it onto the last post. Here is it, I hope:

Comment by Matthew Noble on April 1, 2015 at 7:08pm

Attached here is a PDF of directions to the CES Embassy school for tomorrow morning - it'll just rehash what's in the email, really.

Also, promised pic of former trainees out front.

To wrap up, three words:

DON'T. BE. LATE.

And don't forget to find the observation task in your binder. It's the one specifically for the external observation.

Emb%20CES%20Address%20%2B%20Directions.pdf

Comment by Matthew Noble on March 27, 2015 at 6:11am

Thanks for both of those links, Hannah & Erica! A brief note from the frozen north (actually the weather is quite mild!) and the 2015 TESOL Convention.

As usual, it's big and busy! Lots of the authors of the ELT books on our shelves are around (though I don't think Jim Scrivener is here this year) and most of them are totally approachable. It's really nice to be able to chat and share and ask questions of them!

(That's the amazing, passionate, and super-friendly Diane Larsen-Freeman!)

Been to some excellent presentations so far. One reporting on a pilot study investigating the effect of actually training students to notice teacher's error correction moves, one reporting an in-service training to help teachers integrate pronunciation instruction more into their classrooms, another about vocabulary (French/Latinate vs. Germanic words in English - did you know all phrasal verbs are the latter?). That session was led by one of my favorite ELT folks, "Lexical Leo", whose fantastic blog is here: http://leoxicon.blogspot.ca/

I met up with some of my wonderful twitter ELT #PLN (personal/professional learning network) - including Lexical Leo ;) and this was the result:

(Boston, Seattle, Israel, Canada, NYC, Czech Republic represented there)

Our Teaching House booth has been busy with interested teachers and others. Erica just posted a link from UPenn - their MA TESOL booth is right next to ours. Nice folks!

I was thrilled to see a former Boston CELTA trainee, Sergio Munda, in attendance (he did the course last summer). He's a teacher in Cincinnati but thinking of going abroad soon. Here we are!

Have a great CELTA Friday!

Matthew

Comment by Erica Miao on March 25, 2015 at 10:31pm

Haha, this is a great video. Here's a nice explanation of how it works over at the Language Log: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3514. The nonsense song that the blog post mentions is also a great example of English phonology with no content!

Comment by Hannah Nation on March 25, 2015 at 8:34pm

Hey all! Here's the video we were talking about - how English sounds to non-native speakers. I've always wondered about this! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt4Dfa4fOEY&feature=youtu.be

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