CELTA debriefing

aim is to encourage development of a database of commentaries on CELTA

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• celta
• cambridge
• esol

[richardmullins44]

21.8.2011 The suspicion is that we learn by generalising from examples. Some VR version of Rosetta Stone or Sims would suffice to learn a language. This would be the same as real life with sympathetic interlocuteurs. This is the way that infants learn.

We could talk about theory of grammar. But is there any need to talk about this to language learners? Couldn't we wait until it came up in conversation, i.e. perhaps never?

[richardmullins44]

previous post: "(1c) Try out CELTA ideas in learning another language. It could easily take 1000-5000 hours to do this". It could, but we could try out particular ideas in as little as a few words of dialogue - 5 minutes or even much less.

[richardmullins44]

Possible ways to review the CELTA course. (1) Use CELTA material in future "lessons". (1a) Discuss the selection criteria, perhaps translating the discussion to and from other natural languages. (1b) Discuss documents, or transcripts, from a previous CELTA practice teaching lesson.

It could easily take 1000 hours to do this.

(1c) Try out CELTA ideas in learning another language.

It could easily take 1000-5000 hours to do this.

[richardmullins44]

erratum. In a previous post I had meant to write "Last night I saw a post on the net - a Ph.D thesis on the grammar of Shona".

[richardmullins44]

I don't disagree with the idea of developing scripts in advance. This is what I did for some of my classes.

However, students were not required to follow the script. Variation from it, for those who wanted to, was encouraged.

[richardmullins44]

12.8.11 Part of a "communicative method" is to respond to what the other person says. So it is not possible to write out everythign that might be said - in comparison it would be easier to write out all possible chess games in advance.

You get a bad mark for not following your lesson plan . Maybe the tutor would be satisfied if I wrote out a small number of good scripts, and used some of this material. This suggests that for the lesson plan we need to develop scripts in advance.

[richardmullins44]

For the CELTA course, we had to plan a lesson. The tutor asked me to "write out every thing I would say in the lesson" in the lesson plan. Lessons went from 20 - 60 minutes.

I think it could be more useful to study a transcript of what had been done before, and make changes that suggested themselves. E.g. one might decide to say something differently next time.

[richardmullins44]

Last night I saw a post on the net a Ph.D thesis on the grammar of Shona. They collected a milion words of text in 4 weeks by having about 40 interviewers collect data. We might imagine that in the future, we will have access to billions of words of phone discussion transcripts in many languages available free on internet.

What I might focus on for the next year is language learning, where we prepare a "lesson" by studying the transcript from the previous "lesson".

[richardmullins44]

"Don't copy what the student says". We can't expect agreement on what the right way is. There might be very good ways, and very bad ways, of copying what someone says. But what I think is very bad someone else might think is very good.

[richardmullins44]

11.8.2011 If you know some of the language, you may only recognise a percentage of what you hear. So repeating a piece that you hear may be an important strategy. It also allows the speaker, or the listener, to change what is being said, e.g. to give more details at this point. Also it is a way of slowing down the speaker- if the listener cannot keep up they might be repeating the last phrase they have heard clearly.