I am in the last couple of weeks of my CELTA in Australia, and I am doing my last assignment, Focus on the Learner. One part asks me to identify a specific problem from each of the following areas: pronunciation, language, and skills. Now the first and second parts were simple, but after a series of student interviews done by the member of my group, we have identified the only problem area as speaking.
The problem is, my tutors have told us in the past that things like the inability to speak with good grammar is actually not a skills issue. So, what do I have to work with? Would it need to be something like fluency? We are supposed to supply documented evidence, but how to you document an particular example of poor fluency? Should I be using things like “used short sentences, no conjunctions, over-use of conjunctions” and things like that?
Any thoughts would be nice. I have gotten a few above standards and according to my tutor will probably get one. I just don’t want to mess it up on such a small thing. Thanks in advance for any help.
In designing a proficiency test some years ago, we took into account the following domains which might give you some ideas:
[quote]1. General competence: knowledge, characteristics, personality traits, skills and ability to learn.
Communicative language competence: linguistic, sociolinguistic and pragmatic competence. While linguistic competence includes knowledge of phonological, morphological, semantic and syntactical relations, sociolinguistic competence deals with linguistic variations caused by social/cultural factors, such as politeness, formality and social class. As for pragmatic competence, it involves language functions, coherence and cohesion and text types.[/quote]
[quote=“Charlie Phillips”]In designing a proficiency test some years ago, we took into account the following domains which might give you some ideas:
[quote]1. General competence: knowledge, characteristics, personality traits, skills and ability to learn.
Communicative language competence: linguistic, sociolinguistic and pragmatic competence. While linguistic competence includes knowledge of phonological, morphological, semantic and syntactical relations, sociolinguistic competence deals with linguistic variations caused by social/cultural factors, such as politeness, formality and social class. As for pragmatic competence, it involves language functions, coherence and cohesion and text types.[/quote][/quote]
Well, after looking into some of that, I went with issues AFFECTING oral fluency. Most of my students are Russian, Korean and Japanese, so I looked at issues particular to native speakers of those languages when learning English. One interesting factor affecting Russians in particular was how they use punctuation to achieve similar effects intonation in English. So the placement of a punctuation mark can achieve the same effect as a raise or drop in intonation. When I looked at reasons like that for affecting English fluency, it was pretty easy to write about, although designing a task around it is still a challenge.
So this is the question – the course is demanding that you “produce” a problem where none exists. Very much old old traditional language teaching and not student-focused at all. I really wonder when these certificate courses are going to embrace the bigger picture of what’s going on in language teaching and the progress that has been made. Not to mention the real situation teachers face every day, no matter what methodology they embrace. This assignment is so terribly “I’m on a course”, they should really think about what message they’re sending.
Have they divulged how you are supposed to do this task in the real world, with multiple students and classes? I’ll be they haven’t. It just doesn’t make sense.
[quote=“ironlady”]So this is the question – the course is demanding that you “produce” a problem where none exists. Very much old old traditional language teaching and not student-focused at all. I really wonder when these certificate courses are going to embrace the bigger picture of what’s going on in language teaching and the progress that has been made. Not to mention the real situation teachers face every day, no matter what methodology they embrace. This assignment is so terribly “I’m on a course”, tthhey should really think about what message they’re sending.
Have they divulged how you are supposed to do this task in the real world, with multiple students and classes? I’ll be they haven’t. It just doesn’t make sense.[/quote]
I agree, but what I came up with was deemed acceptable by my tutor, who also said that I could use a hypothetical problem. This course has taught me a lot of good, practical things that I can use, but I just wish it would cover more in terms of - as you put it - real situations that arise every day. Still, that why I learned to read. At least I can research in my own time. I just have to find out which books have what I need.
I have never done a CELTA. in fact, I have no teaching qualifications at all.
Maybe I can help though. Would students using the incorrect from of the word count as ‘skills’? I often hear my students say things like; ‘You must be bravery’ or ‘It was a very danger situation’.
I have never done a CELTA. in fact, I have no teaching qualifications at all.
Maybe I can help though. Would students using the incorrect from of the word count as ‘skills’? I often hear my students say things like; ‘You must be bravery’ or ‘It was a very danger situation’.
It doesn’t count as skills on my course, and is more related to lexis. Fluency seems to be a skill issue related issue, and the overuse of short sentences that can be linked with conjunctions seems to be a cause. The issue earlier with punctuation seemed to be less of an issue that conjunction usage, so I rewrote my task with the testing phase being a cloze paragraph that checks how much they have understood (following a demo of course).