CELTA Experience (Day 14)

Today, Manuel gave an input session about Phonology 2: sounds, pause and intonation, connected speech. This input session brought me back to my experience in learning English in the past and how even now I sometimes still struggle and feel unconfident in pronouncing certain words. English is super tricky in sounds anyways. Same writings or spellings sound such as ough (tough, bough, cough), ea (dear, fear, bear, pear), and many more. It's interesting how we all could learn and review the phonetic symbols by using pictures, for both vowels and consonants. I'd never thought of that before. I guess it'll be helpful for learners as well in class. Analyzing how each sound is produced in the phonemic chart in the phonemic script reminded me of Pak Soepriyatna, a lecturer in Sampoerna School of Education. Trust me, I had no idea what I learned at that time, but it makes more sense now. We didn't discuss too many terminologies, unlike when I was at the university, such as plosives, nasal sounds, and fricatives. These are the fundamental of all I guess. I can still remember clearly the time when I needed to describe in detail how certain sound was produced in one of the exam paper in the university. Then, the session was getting more fun when we tried analyzing and noticing the differences in pausing and intonation which may affect the meaning. We had a lot of discussion in our group. The session was closed by practicing intonation with Banana Dialogue. Col took some time to get how we did it, but he had a lot of fun once he got it and kept doing it all over again and again to everyone. 

Another session today was about Giving Feedback by Erin. We mostly had discussion in group starting from the purpose of feedback, and problems of feedback such as Teacher Talk Time (TTT) in feedback, dealing with less confident students, timing and pace, and checking students' understanding. I think I still find some of these problems myself. Sometimes I can be out of control in speaking when I give feedback, but it turns out that giving feedback doesn't mean I talk much. I can use any of the feedback techniques introduced to us today. Actually, those techniques were not only introduced to us today, but also been implemented by all tutors throughout this CELTA program, so I can have a picture of how it looks like if I use any of them in my classroom in the future. 

TP 6 was the last thing I did today. It's my first time teaching Writing in this program. I was nervous, but I tried to manage my time and plan the lesson carefully, so the lesson aims could be achieved. I wrote the simple version of my stages and instructions on a piece of paper to keep me on track. I started my class by a warmer swinging hand to the right and left, to the front and back. It's somehow related to the lesson anyway. At the end of the lesson, I distributed two stars for each student to stick on to their favorite writing. Also, students suggest the best title for each writing by sticking a note. Overall, the lesson went really well and fun. You can see some of students' writing below.