CELTA Experience (Day 5)

 It's the first Friday of my CELTA and I can't wait today to be over because I was going to see my boyfriend. Hehe. 

As a start of the day, we had an input session on Phonology: Word and sentence stress (and drilling). Honestly, stress is my biggest problems because I need to check the dictionary most of the time, especially in words. But, for me, word stress in a sentence is less difficult because somehow we can just feel how it sounds like which is right. Teaching stress is important because it impacts on how it sounds and how people listen to it. Nick introduced us to some techniques in teaching or pointing stress in words such as using big and small dots, or a facing up arrow for a stressed part. We also had a try to identify stresses in a sentence. Guess what? It turns out, even Trainees with English as their first language found it super tricky. And, what about me? Well, same. Different from stress in a word, stresses in a sentence may have an effect on its meaning and impression. Is it asking? clarifying? wondering? doubting? And so on. There are some activities for practicing stress, but I guess the most comfortable for me is clapping or using a pen to point ups and downs. And the other most common way is drilling. I'm sure you're familiar with it, too. It's when the learners get to practice saying new words or phrases, focusing particularly on pronunciation. 

After break, we reviewed the FOL Assignment with Manuel. Overall, I'd say that all the guidelines and examples provided by this course for the assignment are crystal clear. I know really well what's expected from the assignment from A to Z. We were given two example essays on learner's profile as part of assignment and asked to analyze the differences, especially which one is written better. See? It made things clear. We were guided in identifying errors of the learner step by step and classifying the type of errors. Further, we were provided with example answers in writing the analysis. Trust me, what more to ask? I'm planning to finish this assignment and submit it as soon as possible, so I can spend my weekend with my boyfriend. I still need to have some fun!

Next is my TP 2. This time is a reading lesson. I grouped students to read different texts glued on the wall. I should have had the text on their table, so they could be more comfortable in reading and writing their answers. After finishing reading their text and answering the questions, they went to visit the other groups and let the group ask them questions to complete their form. Anyways, it's a bit complicated to explain. If you're interested in having a look at the lesson in details, feel free to drop me a message and I'll share the lesson plan to you.