CELTA Experience (Day 6)

 Yeay! I finished and submitted the FOL Assignment last Saturday, so I just chilled this morning. No rush. 

Next, we learned Teaching Writing with Erin. As always, we started it with a teaching demo where we, the trainees, are the students in a writing lesson. One time each of us was asked to write on our own, then to write in a group. Then, we discussed how different it was from students' point of view. One has more pressure than the other, of course. Anyways, there are some different opinions about teaching writing, some pros and cons. However, it turns out writing task can be in some different forms and it doesn't always have to be so serious with so much pressure to students. Some types are fluency writing, writing a lone, collaborative brainstorming, and collaborative writing. Another types of writing in terms of its purpose are such as personal writing, public writing, creative writing, social writing, study writing, and institutional writing. Each has its plus and minus to consider. In teaching writing, there might be some problems come up and that's why we discussed them and thought about how we could help our learners be more confident with writing. For examples

Lack of understanding of the task -> Model it/ demonstrate it/ provide examples
Lack of ideas -> Provide stimulus/ brainstorm ideas as a group
Lack of vocabulary -> Pre-teach some vocabulary/ use Thesaurus for synonyms
And so on. 

In planning a writing lesson, the stages would be: Lead-in, Analyze the model (gist/detail), Preparing to write, Writing, Peer editing, and Error correction. In peer-marking, a structured peer feedback can be used for learners, so the feedback is more directed and constructive without discouraging any learner. Overall, writing tasks should 

- have a clear communicative purpose
- aim to produce whole texts (not isolated sentences)
- imitate a real-life task (e.g. writing an email)
- have a clear readership in mind
- be adequate for students' level

After break, we had a review of LRT, particularly in Language Analysis Form and Meaning. We were given a list of advice when completing the LRT: Research, Focus on Meaning, Clarification of meaning, Focus on form, Focus on pronunciation, Appropriacy, Problems and Solutions, and Submitting the assignment. Guess what? Even in class, we all gave it a try to do an analysis on grammar and lexis and were given the answer key after that. Trust me, it helped me so much in understanding the expectations and requirements of the assignments. Again, crystal clear. Another great thing was that Nick gave us ways of checking meaning. It's not always CCQs all the time after all (Concept Checking Questions). Another simple way is using Timelines, especially to show a visual representation of (sometimes complicated) grammar points, such as tenses. I've become more confident now in doing the assignment. 

Then, I had my TP 3. I'm starting to get familiar with the lesson plan template used during this course and able to complete it before the lesson. Good job for me! This time was Vocabulary lesson. I had learners do a matching activity of the words and their definition, and showed them some pictures on the board to identify which one is which. As a controlled practice, learners filled in blanks of some sentences, and as a freer practice, I assigned one word for each number on the dice (1-12, 2 dice) for learners to roll and ask a question using the word. It went really well!