Jennifer Patience » Blog Archive

Week One: Day One

Well, so there are five us on the course. We all turned up at around 9am at the Language Link school on Dai Co Viet street about 1km south of Hoan Kiem Lake. We have two tutors, Ellen from the USA and Robin from England and to kick everything off we played an ice-breaker introductory activity: on a sticker write an anagram of your name and three numbers that have a significance for you in some way. Then, mingle and try to guess the name and meaning of your partner’s numbers. It was a good way to start off. Not being so many of us, it’s quite easy to remember everyone’s names and we had a chance to get to one another fairly quickly. My fellow course mates are Valerie (from San Fransisco), Mikka (from New York), David (from Australia) and Pronsius (from Ireland).

We went through a bit of course administration. Filling in feedback forms, getting our CELTA folders - with the CELTA 5: a very important booklet which we keep a record of all of our teaching practice (TP) sessions, observation sessions and progress reports. The folder is what the CELTA assessor will use to grade us on.

Because we’re only 5, we’ll stay together and for the first two weeks will have elementary students for our TP. The morning sessions we will have input on various aspects of teaching: language analysis, lesson planning etc and the afternoons are where we will put it into practice. Three of us will teach each day and two will observe. Because it doesn’t round up to 6, we will also each take an extra TP, but it will be unassessed - so good for extra practice without the stress of preparing the lesson plan or being observed.

We had a quick tour of the school and saw our workroom on the 5th floor, which is pretty nice. There are 4 computers and lockers and it’s great that we have lots of space. The teacher’s room on the 2nd floor is full of teaching books and materials. Our input sessions and TP takes place on the 6th floor and on the 4th floor is Robin and Ellen’s office. So lots of going up and down stairs, or taking the lift, but it’s all pretty much self contained and easy to get around. We can make tea and coffee and play on the whiteboard in our room, so who could want for any more!

After a break we had a beginners Vietnamese lesson with Ellen where she taught us some useful phrases. One of the great things about Ellen is that she uses input sessions not just as information sessions, but also as TP sessions - giving us ideas on how to present and practice in the classroom. Without using a word of English, she got us telling and asking about names as well as which country we were from.

After lunch we headed back up to the 6th floor to sit in on Robin’s introductory lesson with our group of elementary students. He was conducting a 1hr lesson (which counts towards our 6 hours of experienced teacher observation) and then we would have 1 hr to meet and get to know them a little before we started teaching. Another reason for us to get to know them as much as we could is that ASSIGNMENT 1 is based around a case study of a student, and we would have to choose one of these students to work with on that.

Over lunch we had planned lots of name games and how we would organise our chats with the students but Robin just got us in the middle of the room with small groups of 3/4 and we had a free chat. The students are lovely. Most of them are university students and they attend Language Link anyway, but signed up for this course for extra practice. For them it is obviously free, as we are using them as English learning guinea pigs. But they seem enthusiastic to speak with us and practice.

After we’d spent time chatting we had our final session of the day - Lesson Planning. David, Mikka and myself were teaching the next day and so we needed to sit down with Ellen and plan out what we would do. For the first part of the course we are given aims and structure for the lesson so we have something to work with. As we get better and more experienced then we should be able to figure that out for ourselves…. Or so the theory goes!

So, finally at around 6pm or so, we headed off. Heads spinning from lots of new information and things to think about for tomorrow. Happy days!