CELTA Course
The length of the course is 120 contact hours (6 hours a day over 20 days for the full time CELTA). In order to be eligible for the award of a certificate, candidates are required to:
- Attend and participate in the course
- Complete 6 hours of teaching practice
- Observe 6 hours of lessons taught by experienced teachers
- Submit 4 written assignments
- Maintain and submit a portfolio of course work (i.e. lesson plans, self-evaluations, etc.)
Course Content
The course covers the following areas:
- Language Analysis and Awareness
- The Learner, the Teacher and the Learning/Teaching Context
- Planning for Effective Teaching
- Classroom Management Skills
- Teaching Procedures and Techniques
- Resources and Materials
- Professional Development
- Classroom Observation
- Teaching Practice
Observed Teaching Practice (OTP)
An integral part of the course, OTP is undertaken in small groups of English language learners. A total of 6 hours’ assessed teaching practice is the requirement over the course which may be divided into a number of lessons lasting 40, 45 or 60 minutes. Feedback sessions, led by the course trainer who has been observing you, follow each OTP session and are also a key component of the course. Reflection on your teaching is part of the learning process on the course and you will be expected to contribute to the feedback on yourself and others.
Written assignments
These are the ‘Focus on the learner’ (which encourages you to find out about your learners’ backgrounds, needs and purposes in learning), the ‘Language related task’ (a review of your growing language awareness), the ‘Language skills related task’ (in which you consider how you could use an authentic text in the classroom) and the ‘Lessons from the classroom’ (in which you reflect on your strengths and weaknesses over the course). It is one of the requirements for a pass grade that you pass 3 out of the 4 assignments, but you are allowed to re-submit any or all of them if you don’t get it quite right first time.
Observation of experienced teachers
4 hours of this will be observation of your trainers teaching your TP students. The remaining 2 hours may be made up of video observations of particular lesson types, which are timetabled into the input sessions.
Maintaining your portfolio
Your portfolio will need to contain a lesson plan for every lesson you teach in OTP together with your self-evaluation of it and the trainer’s written evaluation, your completed written assignments and finally, your CELTA 5, a record-keeping booklet in which you record, amongst other things, the times of your teaching practice and observations of experienced teachers and a summary of your progress as discussed with your trainer in your mid-course tutorial.
Trinity Course
Course Content
The main course content is delivered and assessed through five units. The work for Units 1, 2, 3 and 5 is marked by your internal course tutors and moderated or sampled and checked by a member of the Trinity moderators panel at the end of every course. The moderator externally assesses the work for Unit 4.
The units are:
Unit 1: Teaching skills, assessed through:
- Tutors’ evaluation of six hours of teaching with real learners
- A journal including trainees’ own lesson plans, with self- and tutor-evaluation
- A journal covering trainees’ reflective comments following observation of four hours of ESOL teaching by experienced teachers
Unit 2: Language awareness including grammar and phonology, assessed through:
- A test or practical project
- Ongoing use of spoken and written English
Unit 3: Learner profile, assessed through:
- The preparation of a simple linguistic profile and needs analysis, including some basic phonemic transcription, of a single learner
- The planning of, and reflection on, a one-to-one lesson
- The preparation of recommendations for the learner’s future language development
Unit 4: Materials assignment, assessed through:
- Written rationale for the development of one piece of teaching material
- Written evaluation of use of this in classroom teaching
- Interview with a Trinity moderator to discuss the above and the ways in which materials development is beneficial to the development of teaching skills
Unit 5: Unknown language, assessed through:
- A journal covering trainees’ reflective comments on four hours’ tuition in an unknown language from the point of view of the beginner, including an analysis of the key aspects of methods and classroom management that affect the learner positively and negatively
Professional awareness and development are ongoing themes. Successful trainees must demonstrate an awareness of the needs of other colleagues in the team, teaching and non-teaching, and the value of mutual support in the teaching, learning and training environment.
They must also demonstrate an awareness of the need for professional development during and after the course, based on a constructive response to training input and feedback from tutors and peers.
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