All week, we’re sharing advice aimed at teachers just starting out on their ELT journey. Yesterday, Alastair Horne looked back to his disastrous first day in the ELT classroom, and in today’s post, newly-qualified teacher Rachel Daw shares her experiences of studying for CELTA in Berlin.
There were late nights, there were panicked emails sent to tutors, and there was a lot of chocolate and coffee consumed. But there were also eleven other incredibly interesting people, two fantastic tutors and a sense of camaraderie I haven’t experienced since I played badminton at university. That was my experience on the Cambridge CELTA in a nutshell. And now, after four intense weeks of reading, studying, teaching and writing, I can finally and very happily say that I have passed the course, and am now qualified to teach English as a foreign language to adults!
I chose to do my studying for CELTA at the Berlin School of English, as I have always wanted to live in this wonderful city, and I thought it would be a good starting point for networking and finding work here afterwards. I would certainly recommend doing the same, as you often learn about the particular issues that local people – in this case, Germans – would have when learning English on the course. If you then plan to move to Budapest or Bangkok, those little information bites and the workshop in week four on ‘Working in Germany’ won’t be anywhere near as valuable!
So, what about the course itself? We all turned up nervously on the first day, as everyone had read the reports available online of how intense the CELTA is, how you won’t sleep more than an hour a night, and how it’s all so complicated and full of linguistic jargon. I was perhaps at a slight advantage because I’d studied languages at university, so much of the linguistic terminology was familiar to me, but I would like to contradict these vicious rumours: as long as you stay organised, do the reading and work your tutors suggest, and prepare yourself as best you can for your Teaching Practices, it really won’t be as terrifyingly intense as everyone online has you believe! I still managed to explore Berlin at the weekends, Skype my family and of course eat!
Our tutors were fantastic. After a while, I became aware that they were using all the techniques they were teaching us in our input sessions themselves, so you are receiving both active and passive input in terms of how the tutors managed us trainees in the classroom. For example, we got to discuss our ideas a lot with our partners and work in groups a lot, just as we are encouraged to do with our students within our Teaching Practices. We learnt about the best ways to teach listening, fun ways to improve students’ reading skills and countless ways to allow students more talking time in the classroom. The course is incredibly practical – I taught a lesson to German adults at an intermediate level on Day Two of the course, so you really do get stuck in straight away!
My personal highlight from studying for CELTA was the language immersion class that we did in Polish, to make us appreciate the difficulties both of being an ‘absolute beginner’ when learning a language, and of teaching students with absolutely no prior knowledge of the language. We weren’t allowed to write things down, and the 45-minute session was exclusively in Polish, but I was staggered by how much we all learnt in that time. In addition to the extensive feedback we received from our tutors and peers, I also loved the little feedback notes we received from our students once we finished teaching each level. It’s lovely to be told you’re ‘energetic,’ ‘fun’ and ‘should just keep going like now’ by the students you’ve been teaching. It was those kind of comments which really reassured me I’d made the right decision giving up my job in publishing to try my hand at ELT!
In advance of signing up to do a CELTA, I really would recommend doing your research as regards where you want to do the course, brushing up on your English grammar (if you’re a native speaker, don’t rely on just ‘being English/American/Australian etc!’) and reading as much about the wonderful world of ELT as you can. Something I found particularly useful were the weekly Twitter chats which occur under the hashtag #eltchat.
And what am I doing now the CELTA bubble has burst? Well, I was delighted to have been invited to interview for a position at the school where I did my CELTA, so I am starting as a freelancer there shortly. In the meantime, I have been teaching on an intensive course to cover someone’s holiday, which has provided an excellent training ground to try out all the CELTA techniques!
They were four short weeks, but their effect will be felt for a long time, as I try to find my feet in the world of ELT. I can’t recommend the course enough – good luck for your applications!