First of all, Happy 2024 everyone!

(I very much doubt it with everything that’s going on, but it can’t hurt to wish it, right?)

We’re starting off the New Year with a post prompted by a very common phenomenon, in my experience: trainees are often at a loss when it comes to how their performance is assessed and what grade they should be able to achieve, based on their performance on the course.

This results in two broad categories of misconceptions, depending on the trainees’ personality, the amount of explicit feedback they get on the course and, of course, their rapport with their tutors.

Category 1: I can’t get it right, no matter what I do

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

These trainees constantly underestimate themselves, are in fear of failing the course and refuse to stop worrying about it, even in the face of very positive feedback from the course tutors. This is not as rare as you might think, especially when it comes to trainees being perfectionists and/or high achievers, either by character or by necessity. This is not uncommon in a labour market that has become very competitive and increasingly insecure! People think they have to be perfect in order to secure a decent teaching position.

Category 2: I deserved a better grade

This is admittedly a larger category, as many tutors can testify! These trainees may have a very high opinion of their teaching skills and language expertise. This is not necessarily unjustified, nor is it solely due to their being over-confident by nature. Some trainees may have achieved high academic grades or have even excelled in a variety of teaching environments, although normally this would entail courses that are either academically focused or traditionally very T-centred, or both. Other trainees may have little teaching experience and cannot understand what is needed in order to pass the course; I have even encountered candidates who believed that paying the course fees automatically ensured their passing.

So, what do you do?

Both of these seemingly very different types of trainees have two things in common:

They can both feel very demotivated and disappointed throughout the course. This is a very real hurdle in their development, as they either try too hard or not enough in some cases. It may also have a negative impact on the other trainees on the course, if there is a constant climate of confusion and uncertainty.
They have not been given clear, explicit feedback as to what the course grading criteria are and how they translate in their individual cases, other than the standard CELTA5 page.

Needless to say, in both cases, it can be useful to clarify the grading criteria during individual tutorials, so that trainees have a clearer picture of where they stand and what they need to do in order to pass the course or achieve a higher grade.

This is post is targeted at current or future CELTA trainees, who enter the course with certain expectations regarding their performance and the grade they should achieve. I would use it during individual tutorials throughout the course to help raise trainee awareness as to how the grading criteria meet their course expectations. In that sense, it may be helpful to tutors as well! So here it is.

In the following table, I’ve tried to break down the performance descriptors - the grading criteria, in simple English – set by Cambridge into more digestible bits by using simpler, trainee-friendly language.

Is this table crystal clear? Probably not!

Is it clearer than the relevant page on the CELTA 5 course record that trainees receive?

I should say yes!

What do you think?

Does it raise trainee awareness of what they need to achieve in order to get the desired grade? In my experience, again yes!

So, if you are/were a trainee, would this table give you a clear idea as to what is needed for a higher grade?

Answer here!

As a trainer, would you find this useful?

What do you think?

As usual, please let me know what you think in the comments , and feel free to offer suggestions for improvement.

I have to admit this is a bit of a misleading title, since no-one else has access to the listener’s head but themselves! Still, it is our job as teachers to try and guess what is going on in there, using research findings based on empirical data to help us.

I want to give a bit of historical background, not because I want to show off my wealth of knowledge – and, incidentally, bore you to death – but because I have seen that certain old-fashioned beliefs still hold sway in both learners’ and teachers’ attitudes towards classroom listening practice.

Most of you have heard of “bottom-up” and “top-down” processing, concepts that attempt to picture what is happening inside the listener’s head and draw useful conclusions for classroom practice. Many of the teachers I’ve come across over the years still struggle with understanding these concepts. This can be because, despite the many diagrams used, it is not very clear what that vertical direction refers to: up/down towards what exactly? From a general idea to specific information? From the phoneme to the whole text? From using lower to using higher thinking skills?

I believe that a linear representation does not necessarily serve better understanding of the listening process. I’ll now proceed, rather cheekily, with two different diagrams: one representing the more old-fashioned serial view of the listening process and another showing a more complex picture of what is happening inside the listener’s head. I’ll call them the line and the circle.

THE LINE

This view believes that the listener processes what they hear starting from the smallest chunk of sound, then adding them together to form words, which are then added to form sentences and eventually leads to the understanding of the whole text. We do not need all the empirical data of studies conducted with both L1 and L2 listeners, young and adult, beginner and advanced ones, to realise that if this were true, it would take the listener forever to decipher the speaker’s message, let alone formulate an appropriate response. Nevertheless, teachers still use recorded texts, paused and replayed ad nauseum, trying to get learners to understand every little thing they hear, all the time believing they are actually helping their learners develop their listening skills.

Unfortunately, this encourages the learners’ natural tendency to begin with processing the smallest amount of information and thus avoid information overload. Of course, this leads to some rather frustrating listening habits, like relying on the repetition of the information many times (never happening in real life listening) and the learners’ need to understand EVERYTHING before they can feel they’ve understood what the text is about (simply not true!).

Most importantly, it demotivates learners since it is an unrealistic and extremely demanding task. All this focus on detail encourages the segmentation of information, not regarding the text as a whole but as unrelated little chunks and relying solely on the acoustic input to decipher the message. No wonder learner confidence is shattered and motivation plummets!

We’ll contrast this with the circle in our next post.

I think you can guess my question for you now:

Have you found yourself following the line model, consciously or not, in your listening lessons?

I’m the first to admit that I have and that I have also found it extremely difficult to retrain learners to focus on other sources of information and regard the text as a whole.

Looking forward to your comments!

Alexandra

Tag: celta

I do not understand my CELTA grade!