Shanghai Writer

Well, my holiday is over. I spent most of it on my newest hobby, Diablo 3, managing to push to 380^th place in the world for the class I play. I know some people might say why would you care about what rank you get for a video game? Well why does anyone care about being good at anything? Why should we care about if a football team wins a match more than the rank someone gets in an e-sport? Both have zero effect on our actual life.

In any case, I didn’t spend all my time on Diablo 3. I recently decided to teach my wife English. I’d hesitated before, mostly because of the cliché of language exchanges between foreigners and Chinese. It’s not such a cliché as I know a few couples that started out as a language exchange and ended up married but so far I’d resisted actually teaching my wife.

Of course, I correct her English in our day to day life but I have avoided sitting down and teaching her actual classes as I wasn’t sure what effect it would have on our relationship. However, I have finally decided, with her agreement, that she would benefit from having English lessons. I decided that despite the fact that it is me teaching my wife, I would do the class as if I was teaching someone paying me 500 yuan (70 dollars) an hour, which would be the going rate if I were tutoring someone else.

The first thing I did was make a needs analysis spreadsheet. We then went over it together to see what areas of English she wanted to focus on. We also decided that she would work towards passing the IELTS with a good score so her actual classes would be a mix of grammar review and IELTS training. I spent a morning planning her curriculum and first lesson and preparing the materials. The second lesson only took a bit over an hour to plan. In the end, I am hoping to have a twenty class course focusing on grammar review and IELTS preparation which I can then use for future students, if the occasion arises.

I also spent an hour each morning working on my Chinese. I’ve decided to try to pass the HSK level three, hopefully before the end of the year so I’m working on that as well. Now that we’ve settled in to our new apartment, we’ll probably have a house warming party towards the end of the month. The hard part for me is trying to figure out where to fit time in to work on my writing but I am hoping to start that up on Tuesday and Thursday evenings after this week. Despite not having time to write, I have been giving thought to the story for my newest novel and the direction it will go so hopefully when I do sit down to write it will flow smoothly. Once I get everything settled down, I will start looking into Master programs. That should fill up any free time I have quite nicely.

Recently I was reading an article on Wechat, the most popular social media in China. It was one of those articles on how to find work as an English teacher in China. One of the steps that it listed was getting your certificate for English teaching. The article said something along the lines of “you can get a TEFL, TESOL or CELTA, with the CELTA being the best but the most expensive. Since you will have other expenses on the way to getting a job teaching in China, you should go for a cheaper TEFL or TESOL.”

In one of the Wechat groups for recruiting and hiring English teachers, of which there are many, the CEO of Eternitique service (https://eternitiqueservices.com), which is a company that ostensibly places teachers in schools in China, posted a video on why you need a TEFL or TESOL. He didn’t mention CELTA at all. He goes on to say that when he did a TESOL many years ago, he didn’t actually learn anything and that he learnt most of his teaching methodology from other teachers once he started teaching in China.

The implication that you get from reading these articles or from talking to these placement agencies is that the TEFL/TESOL/CELTA is only necessary because it is required by the Chinese government so just pay for the cheapest one you can find and you’re good. Personally, I don’t understand why someone would not want to be as prepared for teaching as possible but that’s just me. My own reasons for doing the CELTA can be found in my previous post but I would like to look at the differences between a CELTA and a TEFL.

If you look at the website of the North American TEFL Academy, which is the TEFL being pushed by Eternitique, you will see a brief synopsis of the course but that is all the information about it you can find until you actually pay the money for the course. For the CELTA, you can find the entire detailed syllabus online (https://www.cambridgeenglish.org/images/21816-celta-syllbus.pdf) showing not only what you will study but for how you will be assessed.

According to my CELTA tutor, the reason why a CELTA is so valuable is that it is both standardized and held to a high standard. You can apply for a job anywhere in the world and a CELTA will be known both for its level and for the content of the course, no matter where you passed it or where you are applying.

A TEFL on the other hand, is an unknown factor, especially with the increasingly common “online” versions that abound. I passed a TEFL course back in 2003 and it was basically useless but it gave me a piece of paper that I needed for work requirements and I haven’t heard anything since then that illustrates how a TEFL actually prepares you for teaching. Last week, my boss asked me to coach another teacher in how to write lesson plans. I assume that this other teacher had passed some sort of TEFL course but apparently it hadn’t taught him how to write lesson plans.

If you want to be a teacher in China, I urge you to try to get a CELTA if possible. It’s harder and more expensive but it is the first step in building a career as an English teacher. Most of the trainees who passed the CELTA course with me already had a TEFL and most of them were there to get their CELTA because their bosses wanted to promote them but required them to have a CELTA to show that they were serious about their teaching. I myself received a raise after I got my CELTA because my passing the CELTA allowed my director to emphasize to the owner of the company that I was a career teacher and thus should be paid a higher salary. Skip the TEFL and get a CELTA today.

Before getting into how to teach English to very young learners in a Chinese kindergarten. I wanted to talk for a moment about how to find yourself a job teaching in a Chinese kindergarten.

The first part is that you want to be sure that you are legally working in China. At this moment you pretty much have to be from a native English speaking country. This sucks for those of us who are non “native” but still qualified to teach English but hopefully one day the rule will be more balanced and based on qualifications instead of what country you were born in. That being said you do need a certain minimum of qualifications. Here is a non-exhaustive list of the general paperwork required. Be sure to double check with your recruiter on exactly what you need:

• Bachelors degree or higher (any field)
• TESL/TEFL/CELTA certificate with 120 hours
• 2 years teaching experience (this is sometimes waived depending on qualification)
• Clear criminal record from your home country. (This is becoming more official due to some incidents between teachers and kids.)

All the above has to be what they call “authenticated/notarized” which is a process by which your home country, or whatever country issued the diploma/certificate says that this is a real diploma.

The in country process is pretty involved to get a “Z” visa and FEC card. A lot of schools/agencies can’t be bothered and try to just let you work on a tourist/business/student visa. Don’t let them get away with it. If they can’t give you an official working visa, don’t work for them, no matter how much they are offering or what excuses they give you. If you are caught, you will be fined and deported while they will get a slap on the wrist. There are incidents of schools reporting their illegally working teachers themselves in order to avoid paying out bonuses at the end of the school year since its cheaper to pay a fine than the bonuses, especially to multiple teachers.

But let’s say that all your paperwork is in order, you are qualified and now you are looking for a school. You basically have two choices. Work directly for a kindergarten or work through a placing agency.

If you want to work directly for a kindergarten, the pros are that you can negotiate your own salary. The downside is that you can easily be fired at any time as there is no job security. If a parent complains about you the kindergarten can and will fire you from one day to the next. If you don’t speak fluent Chinese you might have difficulty communicating with the HR department or even with your immediate superior. This also leaves you vulnerable to having your salary withheld or all the other horror stories about teaching in China which you might have heard of and I can assure you are all true and probably understated as well.

If you work for an agency, your salary might be a bit lower and they place you in a random kindergarten so might not have an exact idea of what you need to do.  Depending on how involved the agency is, they might wash their hands of you once you’ve been placed in the school after which you will have the same issues as if you were working on your own.

A third option is to be directly employed by a company who then contracts you out to teach in a kindergarten for the school year. This is actually quite useful as any orders to you or changes in your schedule have to be negotiated between the kindergarten and your company.

I am currently working under the third option. In my personal opinion, having worked directly for many primary schools and kindergartens, you don’t want to be on your own in China trying to get your Chinese employer to do right by you, whether it’s paying your salary on time or getting your visa paperwork done in a prompt manner. 

You can see different types of adverts online or in social media groups. Here is an examples of a bad advert:

We need two or three foreign English teachers, preferably women. Can sign a contract for two years or more. Foreign teachers need to meet the conditions of work visa. Working place is in Wugang, Hunan.You can consult me if you are interested.

I would avoid this type of advert at all costs.

This is my company’s current advert:

HIRING ENGLISH TEACHERS FOR SHANGHAI:

Kindergarten, full-time, Monday to Friday

Salary:

23,000-27,000元/mth,

 + 13,000元 summer bonus,

 + 5,000元 CNY bonus,

 + Accident Insurance,

 + free 3 days accommodation if required

 + other benefits (explained at interview)

Requirements:

– must have a passport from a native English speaking country, according to Foreign Expert Bureau rules

– must be between 22 and 50 yrs old

– must have a university degree (notarized)

– teaching certificate (notarized) or 2 years experience,

– criminal background check (notarized – if not holding a working visa)

– must be able to pass the government medical, which now includes, a drug test.

If interested, email:

1. resume (CV)

2. copy of passport,

3. copy of visa, and/or clear criminal background

4. copy of degree

5. Copy of TESOL/TEFL certificate

WE ARE A DIRECT EMPLOYER

Legally licensed to hire foreign teachers.

Only applicants who qualify for Category B work permit and working visa are considered                   

If you want to teach EFL in a Chinese kindergarten in Shanghai, I feel my company is one of the better ones (naturally I’m biased) so feel free to contact me through the comments of this post for further details if you are interested. As you can see the current salary is between 3250-3800 US dollars per month and roughly another 2500-3000 dollars in bonuses at the end of the year. It’s not an exorbitant amount but when you consider that the average salary in Paris, my home country’s capital is 2169 euros, it looks better. It can also be cheap to live here if you are careful and I will be doing another article on how to save money while teaching in China and Shanghai specifically.

If anyone is offering you a lower salary, I wouldn’t accept it but contact my company instead J.

Next article will either be on personal finance as an EFL teacher in Shanghai or we’ll be diving into the contents of your lessons as an EFL teacher in a Chinese kindergarten.

Nate peered through the window into the kindergarten classroom. The principal had left him in front of the door while she’d gone in to make sure the kids were ready. Looking through the glass, he could see a row of parents sitting behind the children. He’d signed his contract with the education company two days before. They’d told him he’d receive two weeks of training before he had to teach but this morning they’d called and told him that he needed to do a demo at Happy Dragon kindergarten.

               “What should I teach them?” he’d asked in a panic.

               “It’s a demo. Just do whatever you want,” his boss had unhelpfully replied in her very broken English.

               His hangover from the last night was not helping and the early morning rush hadn’t given him time to shave. In his opinion he was lucky that he’d managed to find the right school on time.             

               As he entered the classroom, three of the children started to cry. It had been many years since Nate had been around children this young and he wasn’t sure what he should do. He didn’t have any flashcards but he’d managed to cobble together a power point with some words on it. Once the power point was open, he began rattling off the words one by one. A few of the kids managed to repeat a few of the words but they soon fell behind.

               After three minutes, Nate was finished with the power point. Looking out over the thirty kids and the forty parents sitting behind them, he racked his brain for a clue as to what he should do next.  What do I do for the next twenty-five minutes?

               Entering the classroom of her third class of the day, Mango 3, Latisha shouted a cheery “good morning” to the twenty-five kids sitting in a horse shoe arrangement who shouted good morning back to her. This was her second year at the same kindergarten and she’d learned how to fill up her class time.

               First she put on a random video from her collection. This morning she went with “Baby shark” since the kids seemed to like that one. Once the song was done, she went through the words the kids were learning that week. The school had given her a curriculum to follow but she’d found it a bit boring so she just came up with her own words each week. After all, she’d thought to herself, she was American so obviously knew how to teach English better that whatever curriculum the Chinese kindergarten staff had put together. After drilling the kids on the words for about five minutes, she put on another random song, this time “Peanut butter and Jelly.”

               Every couple of weeks, she’d get called in to a meeting between her official employer and the kindergarten’s principal. The principal would invariably complain that she wasn’t following the curriculum but Latisha knew that all the complaints stemmed from the fact that she was African-American.

               “The kindergarten is complaining that you aren’t following the same curriculum that the previous teacher was following,” her director of studies informed her.

               “Well obviously, he’s white and male and I’m black and female so we aren’t going to teach the same way,” Latisha pointed out, ignoring the fact that the question was about the curriculum being followed and not on teaching styles.

               Jack shuffled through his flashcards once more. He’d already perused the lesson plans for the day and was now making sure that the flashcards were in order. Last Friday he’d watched a video on You Tube of a new type of activity and he was planning to try it out today. Since he taught the same kids every day, he was always on the lookout for new games or activities to change things up.

               “What are you doing with your Sun class today?” his colleague Mark asked.

               Jack explained about the new activity he’d found and how he thought it would go.

               “That’s not a bad idea,” Mark replied. “Let me know if it works and I might use it for my Sun class later this week. By the way, I was just told I won’t have my second morning class. Do you want me to sit in on yours?”

               “Sure,” Jack replied. “You know how I love getting feedback. I”ll even give you a checklist to go through.”

               As I mentioned in my previous article, I’ll be doing a series of posts on EFL teaching in kindergarten in China over the next couple of months. Hopefully by the end, if you’re interested in working in China, you’ll know what to expect before you start working. In these three “case studies,” I’ve given true life examples of teachers and teaching styles you come across. What kind of teacher you want to be is a choice you have to make on your own. There’s many types of teachers in China, some do it for the money, others enjoy teaching. Hopefully if you are teaching EFL in kindergarten you will develop your own style and work ethic.

I’m writing this particular article for anyone who is considering coming to China to work as an EFL teacher in a kindergarten and would like to know what it actually entails. The first thing you need to know is that there are currently two types of EFL teaching in a Chinese kindergarten. The first one is what I do, which is to go around from class to class teaching 15 to 30 minute English classes.  The kids are divided into four levels of classes. Usually each kindergarten gives each level some form of cute name, in mine they are called, in order from youngest to oldest: star, moon, earth and sun, but often they are fruits or animals. The second type is more of a homeroom teacher and stays with one class all day. I haven’t actually done this type of teaching but from what I’ve heard, the teacher only gives an actual English class twice a day at most, usually once in the morning and once in the afternoon. The rest of the time the teacher is taking care of the kids like a normal teacher while talking to the children in English and creating an English environment without actually teaching. Since I haven’t done this type of work I will be focusing on the first type of teaching.

My kindergarten follows a four book set of English language books with each book lasting for one year with the curriculum of each year based off of the book for that year. Star class is mostly the basics: ABCs, colors, numbers, some animals. In moon they start to learn more general vocabulary by category: Shapes, family, different types of adjectives and verbs. Earth is where they start focusing on phonics and constructing simple sentences. Sun mostly learns more advanced vocabulary and daily life sentences. Usually by the time the kids graduate from sun class, the last class before entering grade 1 in primary school, their English level is about the same as most native speaker kids of that age, as long as they’ve been applying themselves and keeping up with the curriculum. Some parents also give their kids after school or weekend classes in language training centers and each class usually has three or four kids that are better than the rest. I also do an advanced English class, which my kindergarten charges the parents extra money for, one at the earth level and one at the sun level, where the kids learn grade 1 level English.

Our day, my colleague from England and I, starts when we get to our office around 7:50 in the morning. Officially we start work at 8:00. At 8:15, we go out to the gate and greet the kids, which mostly consists of giving high fives and saying good morning to each kid as they come in. For the teacher, this allows us to build rapport with the children outside the formality of the classroom. For the school, it allows the parents to see that not only does the kindergarten have foreign teachers (it’s a status thing) but that they are interacting with the kids. We stay at the gate till 8:50 then head back to our office. In most Chinese kindergartens, the first class is usually around 8:30 or 9:00. Currently, I start my first class at 9:10. I have four classes in three different levels in a row and finish the first batch of classes at 10:50. In general you have a group of classes in the morning from 9 to 11 and then 1 or 2 in the afternoon. If the kindergarten has a few different EFL teachers then sometimes one of them will have all the classes from a certain level. This year, because of scheduling concerns, my colleague and I have all four years split between us so I’m doing about two sun, two earth, 1 moon and 1 star class. I have a class from 11:30 to 12 after which I have lunch, either from the kindergarten if the day’s offering is edible or ordered in and sometimes occasionally brought from home when I want to feel like I’m sticking to my diet.

My next class is at 2:40 pm so I have a two hours and forty minutes break. Every school has different requirements for their teachers. Some insist that they stay in the school the entire working day. Others allow them to go and leave as they like as long as they show up on time for class. My school is fairly lenient and I could even go to the gym during my break if I wanted to but for the most part I usually use the time to lesson plan or work on personal subjects such as writing blog articles or working on my novels. This break is not official and you can be called on to do things or sometimes one of the Chinese teachers will drop by the office to talk about the lesson plan but for the most part you’ll have the time to yourself. At 2:40 I have my afternoon lesson and from Monday to Thursday I’ll do an advanced class from 3:15 to 4:00 after which I’m done for the day. On Friday I don’t have the advanced class so I finish my last class at 3:10 after which I can head home if I want though again some kindergartens will make you stay till the official end of the working day.

Each kindergarten has its own particularities but the general schedule is two hours of classes in the morning and then one or two in the afternoon. Last year, we weren’t greeting the kids in the morning but this year we are so that too can also change. Occasionally you’ll go on field trips, where you are basically helping chaperone one of the classes or participate in other activities, such as water fights during the summer. Classes can and will be randomly canceled for one reason or another, if the kindergarten has a special event going on in the morning for, example, and then you hang out in your office and have an easy morning. Generally any of the regular daily classes missed because of cancellation by the kindergarten do not have to be made up. In my case, my advanced classes do have to be made up since they are separate from the normal English classes and the parents have paid for a certain amount of hours for the semester.

I hope this gives you a little bit of an idea of what teaching English in a Chinese kindergarten entails. In future articles, I’ll be going over the lessons in more detail so come back to this blog soon. If there’s any subjects you’d like me to touch on in the context of teaching English in a Chinese kindergarten feel free to leave a comment.

               Now that I’ve got my provisional Pass A for the CELTA (spoiler alert), I’m not quite sure what to do next. I can’t really change jobs at the moment and my current job, teaching English in a kindergarten, while paying quite well, doesn’t lend itself to the kind of research wanted by a Masters. Then again, it hasn’t been that long since the CELTA finished and I’m not going to jump into anything until the end of the year so I have time to think about future plans. My main preoccupation at the moment is applying what I’ve learned from the CELTA to my teaching, even in a kindergarten.

               Having passed the CELTA, I feel I have more to contribute when talking about teaching so I’ll be doing the occasional blog on the subject. During my week’s holiday before returning to work, I did a “needs analysis” for Chinese very young learners. This isn’t the needs analysis itself but just some thoughts I had while writing it. I did the analysis in two parts. The first part was about L1 interference for Chinese very young learners in the language system and the second was on the development of Chinese very young learners’ language skills in a kindergarten environment. This analysis concerns English as taught in a kindergarten and not in a training center.

               For the first part, I went over the section on Chinese learners of English in Learner English (Swan, M. 2001, CUP) and considered if Chinese very young learners have the same problems and if so how they can be countered. Chinese adult learners have a lot of Chinese language or L1 interference, mostly because of the difference in the languages. It seems to me that Chinese very young learners don’t have the “active” L1 interference that Chinese adult learners do. For example, in Chinese there is no /v/ sound so Chinese adult learners will often say /w/ instead, simply because they have no practice using the /v/ sound in their daily life. Another example would be the problems Chinese adult learners often have with correct grammar, like using articles in the correct way. Chinese very young learners don’t have the same “active” L1 interference because when they start kindergarten at the age of 2-5, they haven’t actually learned to speak, read and write their L1 fluently and they don’t have years of experience using a different language system. They don’t speak English using Chinese grammar rules because they haven’t learned them yet. What Chinese very young learners face is a “passive” L1 interference in that, left to their own devices and their daily Chinese language environment, they aren’t going to learn English phonetics and will eventually move on to an “active” L1 interference when their Chinese level gets fluent enough.

               The role of an English teacher in kindergarten is thus not to train them out of using L1 sounds but to train them into using L2 sounds they do not hear on a daily basis from their L1, before they’ve had a chance to let their L1 fluency interfere with their learning of the L2. To build upon the previous example, Chinese very young learners will not automatically substitute /w/ for /v/ because of language memory but will use /w/ because they don’t know the sound of /v/. You are probably saying they are still pronouncing /w/ as /v/ so what’s the difference? The difference is in the reason for their error in pronunciation. The job of their L2 teacher is therefore to introduce them to the L2 sounds that are not present in their L1 and model and drill them so that the L2 sounds become as natural to them as the L1 sound. This actually requires less effort than with adult learners as the very young learners will accept the new sounds as just another sound amidst all the language sounds they are learning in both their L1 and L2. If taught correctly, the L2 sounds will be acquired by the very young learner in parallel to their L1 sounds and in the future they will have a much easier time of speaking the L2. They also don’t have a problem with false equivalents like adult learners as very young learners don’t have the lexis knowledge to replace one word with another but will simply use an L1 word when they don’t know how to say a word in the L2. While this presents a different problem, when new lexis is introduced they will automatically use the new lexis.

               For the second part of my needs analysis, I looked at the language skills that are taught to Chinese very young learners. Most of the focus is on listening and speaking. For listening, most of the teaching is focused on the sub-skills of listening for gist and listening for details. Most of the listening practice comes from songs, teaching instructions and learning lexis. Speaking is probably the most developed skill, though usually only the sub-skill of accuracy is generally emphasized. Students will generally develop their speaking accuracy as they learn lexis or the words to songs as modeled and drilled by the teacher. Speaking fluency is occasionally developed for the older classes by either singing songs or using lexis in sentences and through simple dialogues. This is where most of the modeling and drilling will take place and while the teacher will not be writing out the meaning, form and pronunciation for the students to see, the teacher should be aware of it and have done a language analysis of the lexis being taught to see what sounds or other language issues could be difficult for the very young learners or should be emphasized in order to avoid future L1 interference.

               Reading and writing skills are generally not taught at the kindergarten level or if they are, as only an optional choice. Most Chinese very young learners will not do any reading in the classroom. If they have an advanced English level compared to their classmates, mostly from taking after-school English language classes, they will have developed some reading sub-skills of reading for gist and scanning for details. Writing will generally not be a main aim of a lesson for very young learners as they often have not even started their L1 writing. However, a syllabus can occasionally be based on a book whose exercises the very young learners will occasionally do.

               The L2 teacher in a kindergarten should therefore, on the one hand, focus on developing the usual listening sub-skills of listening for gist and listening for details and speaking skills of accuracy and fluency but on the other hand, they should also be on the lookout for occasions to develop the student’s reading skill, at the very least by the lexis being taught, and writing skill, possibly through their course book. Another option is to give optional graded listening, reading and writing tasks for the children to do at home, should their parents wish for more English language training.

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Now that my holiday is over, I’ve had the time to get back into writing. I’m still waiting for my beta readers to get back to me about the rewrite of “Daughter of Barra” so I’ve started writing my second novel, a dark fantasy. I was as surprised as anyone when the first chapter basically turned into a horror story but I’m looking forward to see where the story goes. I’m currently working on the third chapter and I hope to manage about two chapters a week, depending on real life.

This post is a lot longer than usual so feel free to read it section by section as you have the time.

So here I am at the end of my CELTA course doing a 5^th assignment. At least this one is self-imposed and there’s no word count. I won’t be going into the exact scores I received for my classes as that is personal information. This is what my CELTA tutors call a hot evaluation to the CELTA. Everything is my personal opinion or experience and the way I saw or felt things and I make no claim to know what other people thought or experienced.

Why a CELTA?

Back in January, I had been studying towards passing the IELTS when I had a sudden urge to take a TEFL course. There were a few reasons for this. I’d thought about taking one for a few years but hadn’t had the time or the money. Now I had the money and I figured I could make the time. My main reason was to get a legitimate TESL/TEFL certificate that could be recognized worldwide in case I ever wanted to work in another country. I had passed a TESL course back in 2003 but it had really just consisted of a bunch of reading material and my signing a paper to the effect that I had three months teaching experience. There had been no training, no assessment and the company that had issued the TESL certificate had gone out of business in 2008 and I was pretty sure they hadn’t been accredited to start. Another reason was that after teaching for many years I wanted to start working towards actual teaching accreditation and a real TEFL certificate seemed like the first step. The last reason was that while I was comfortable working with kids, I felt my teaching adult learner skills were lacking and if I ever applied for a job teaching adults, I wouldn’t feel confident in myself.

I had two options for passing another TESL. For timing reasons, I had to take the course in  July so I had a choice between the SAFEA course which is mostly online with one week of “training” in the last week of July and the CELTA, a one month long intensive course backed by Cambridge which I knew from past research was held in Shanghai in July. I decided to go with the CELTA as my first choice and filled out the application form. I also contacted SAFEA but wasn’t impressed with their response which basically consisted of “pay us money and we’ll let you do some stuff online.” Before applying to the CELTA, I did a little research, enough to fill out the application form without sounding like I’d never heard of the course. When setting up my pre-application interview I asked to do it after the Spring Festival holiday which they agreed to. I didn’t know what to expect as the only thing I could find out about the interview was that they asked some grammar questions so I spent a week reviewing a grammar book.

The interview itself went fairly smoothly with my open grammar book right next to me and a chart of verb tenses for the verb questions. I don’t think they really expected us to know it all and in any case, I was planning on doing a lot of grammar reviewing before the course and I figured if I didn’t know my grammar perfectly right now I’d know it by the time the course started. A day or two after the interview I received an email from Language Link informing me I’d been accepted into the July CELTA course so I informed my boss I would be taking the first two weeks of July off from work in addition to my usual two weeks of holiday at the end of July. With all the arrangements made, I put the CELTA out of my mind for the moment, concentrating on finishing the first rewrite of my novel. My goal was to get the rewrite out at the end of April and then start focusing on preparing for the CELTA. After the May holiday, with my rewrite sent to my alpha readers (shout out to all of you, you know who you are), I settled down in earnest and started studying.

The first week of May I did the CELTA pre-course task. Some of it was easy, some I had to scramble and research to answer but it gave me a rough idea of what areas I needed to focus on. I started a daily routine of reviewing phonemes and verb tenses every morning. From what I could gather online, it seemed to me that the CELTA used the British IPA system so I focused on learning that even though I generally speak a more American sounding English. I found out later that you can use the American IPA just fine for the course. I bought a few books online: Learning Teaching by Jim Scrivener, one of the recommended grammar books and Teaching Essential Grammar also by Jim Scrivener, who, I was beginning to gather, was one of the names to know in the EFL universe. I spent the rest of May going through the grammar book and then in June switched to Learning Teaching. I read through it once and learned a lot, mostly about how much I didn’t know when it came to teaching, and then a second time doing all the exercises and watching all the videos on the accompanying CD. I began trying out techniques mentioned in the book in my advanced English class at my kindergarten and I was happy to see that they were working and that I was already learning teaching.

June 28^th was my last day of work so Friday afternoon I started a weekend of intensive CELTA preparation. I’d already watched quite a few videos on the CELTA, most notably the CELTA web diaries (celtadiaries.com) which had given me a good idea of how the course would be and the general outline of the course. I’d also read a literal ton of blogs and articles, mostly from Sandy Millin’s blog (https://sandymillin.wordpress.com/2015/03/23/useful-links-for-celta/) but I had been saving something for this weekend. The website, www.elt-training.com, had a whole series of free videos covering about every topic and class in the CELTA and I spent the weekend watching each video and taking notes. By Sunday June 30^th, I was ready for the CELTA to start the next day and looking forward to a month of training and discussing teaching with like-minded people.

And we’re off…

      The CELTA officially started on July 1 at 12:30 pm so naturally I woke up at 6:30 am. I spent the morning watching some last videos then headed off to the school location at around 11:00 am. When I arrived there was no one there. The classrooms belonged to a local language school and were being used for HSK classes so I hung out in the hallway. Eventually one of the rooms opened up and some random foreigners started to drift in one by one. By the time 12:30 pm, our scheduled daily starting time rolled around, there were twelve of us in the room and we met our CELTA tutors.

      Despite being a non native speaker myself (though with a native level), I was still surprised that the majority of the class was also non-native speakers but I figured they had all passed the application and interview as well so they must all have the required English level. Four of the non native trainees were Chinese, one was Swedish, one was Russian, and one was Iranian, and then me from France. We had one native speaker from England and two others, a married couple, from Canada and one from Zimbabwe. Our tutors explained the general administrative details of the course and then split us into our teaching practice groups, with six trainees in each group. We would be observing our groups’ classes and working with each other. Each trainee in my group was given a letter from A-F. I was A. Our tutor announced that A-C would be teaching the first teaching practice or TP the following day. Joy!!! We started our input sessions but of course my mind was on how I was supposed to teach the following night. I knew from my research that CELTA tutors often taught their classes by trying to make it more of a discussion and despite being naturally shy, I had decided I would get the most out of the CELTA course and jump into the discussions on the various aspects of teaching whenever possible. I quickly got the reputation as someone who always had something to say but the reality was that having done so much research and preparation I felt I could contribute to the conversations and I would get bored after ten seconds of waiting for the other trainees to contribute. That night was the only night in the CELTA course I stayed up past 1:00 am working on my lesson plan. It wasn’t that I’d never made a lesson plan but I’d never made one the “CELTA” way. I knew from reading the pre course material how they wanted us to do it but knowing the theory and actually writing it out is not exactly the same thing. Our tutor had given us notes for the first week on who was teaching what and very detailed outlines for the stages of the lesson and the content. My first class would be a listening class. Looking back, my listening class went fairly smoothly, especially for first teaching practice, as from Learning Teaching I knew the general stages for a listening class and I had no problem with teaching a class. What stressed me was my tutor in the back of the room writing out her observations. Since I generally work with large groups of kids, I often have to project a loud voice when teaching so I used my teaching voice, as I think of it, and apparently hurt a lot of innocent trainee ears. After the class I had to write my first self-evaluation. Before the CELTA started, I had been worried that after a class I wouldn’t have anything to say about why I was unhappy my teaching. Fortunately, this was not the case and I literally filled a page with self-recriminations.

      The fact was that I knew what the CELTA wanted from a teacher by week 4 and I had been trying for that on my first TP and I felt I hadn’t achieved that. Despite my preparation for the CELTA, there was a lot I hadn’t learned yet that would be covered in future input sessions and by the teaching example of the tutors. I felt I hadn’t lived up to my expectations of myself as a teacher and was quite depressed. My tutor told me I was being too hard on myself. The first week of the CELTA is about teaching the trainees classroom management. We had to teach a class too of course, and if you could do a good one then so much the better but the focus was on getting classroom management skills. After my first TP I decided to, while of course doing my best to teach each class, focus on what the current weekly criteria was or what my tutor said I should focus on. For my 2^nd TP on Thursday night, I had to teach a grammar lesson on second conditionals and I focused on classroom management. I felt more comfortable now. As a side note, the CELTA is not about being the perfect teacher at every class, that’s saved for the final TP 8 and even then they don’t expect you to be perfect. The point of the CELTA is to show that you are improving in every teaching practice and integrating the feedback from your tutors and the techniques learned in input sessions into your next TP. Once I had that figured out, it became a little less stressful as for each TP I would just focus on what the tutor had pointed out needed to improve from the TP before and work on that while keeping the rest of my teaching at the same standard. Of course you also have to teach the right content for your class and keep your stages in order but that too is a skill they teach you as the course progresses.

      Towards the end of the week we received the first two assignments. The closest deadline was the assignment were we had to make a language skills lesson out of an authentic material so I chose the main page of Jiashan Market’s website as my text. That one was due on Monday night. The second assignment was a grammar analysis and that one was due next Friday night. I was also slated to teach a reading class on Monday and a writing class on Wednesday. I wasn’t too worried as I had all weekend to prepare and I’d given up writing and gaming for the month so I had nothing else to do.      

To paraphrase Dwayne Johnson’s character from “Central Intelligence”: It’s easy to pass the CELTA; all you have to do is focus on the course fourteen hours a day for twenty-six days. Anyone can do it.

 A group of us also decided to start meeting for a few drinks every Friday night to relax a bit before the weekend grind, or that’s why I was doing it anyway.

Getting my grind on…

As a long time gamer, I’m especially good at grinding which means doing the same thing nonstop over and over for hours on end. I had felt this skill would come in handy for the CELTA and I wasn’t wrong. On the first weekend of the CELTA, I was at my computer by nine a.m. and worked all day till six p.m. I didn’t work in the evenings as I felt I would have enough time to do my assignments and lesson planning working 9 to 6 both Saturday and Sunday and I wanted to spend some time with my wife as she wasn’t seeing much of me throughout the week. My general goal every week for the CELTA was to get any major writing or lesson planning done on the weekend and spent the mornings tweaking them as I had ideas or got suggestions from the input sessions. Since the first assignment was on planning a reading class and my next class was a reading class, this went nicely together and I finished both on Saturday. On Sunday, I planned my Wednesday writing class and finished my first draft of the grammar analysis assignment.

Monday morning, I handed in my first assignment and my 3^rd TP went smoothly enough and while things were pointed out that I needed to improve on in the feedback, I was happy with my teaching progress so far. The input sessions by the tutors were interesting. A lot of it I had either heard beforehand from my CELTA prep or it was things I had noticed during my own teaching but hadn’t really been able to put a name on it so it was nice to see things spelled out. A lot of the CELTA training is modeled by the tutors during their own sessions so you have to watch the tutors and their actions almost as much as you listen to what they are saying.  

My 4^th TP was a writing class. After the first twenty minutes I was in trouble. The time to teach the lexis (vocabulary) had taken twice as long as I had estimated and I could tell I didn’t have the time to go through all the stages of my lesson. The students were supposed to have ten minutes of writing before going on the next stage and having another ten minutes of writing but there was only ten minutes left on the clock. I gave the students five minutes to write their first task then pushed them on to the second one for another five minutes. I hadn’t realized that it would take the students two or three minutes to actually start writing so in the end, instead of the paragraph of writing they were supposed to do, they had only done a few sentences twice. I was angry with myself as I had been hoping to get in a good writing class and get the writing samples that I knew the other group of trainees would need for an upcoming assignment as no one had been able to have the students finish a writing task so far and I had failed. In the end our tutors came to our rescue and got us some writing examples during their demo lessons.

In my first self-reflection, I had listed every single thing that I felt I had done wrong. For my 4^th TP reflection, l limited myself to only talking about the things I knew for sure I had messed up and that were relevant to the 2^nd week, like the timing of my stages. My tutor gave me some feedback for the lesson and I had plenty of material to pick for my personal aims for my 5^th TP. Despite the fact that I felt bad about how my TP 4 went, I actually learned more from it then any other TP thanks to all the feedback about my errors.

With my 4^th TP done, I handed in first assignment on Thursday and on Friday we received our next assignment. With the second week done, my group of trainees would be leaving the intermediate students and our current tutor and moving over to the elementary students under the other tutor while the other group would be taking our place with the intermediate students. Compounding this movement was the fact that we were given our next assignment, a needs analysis of the learners, and told that the object of the assignment would be the new group of students we were transferring too.

On Thursday night I observed three of the trainees from the other group teach the elementary class and Friday night my group of trainees observed our new tutor teach a class and met the elementary students. While we were supposed to be observing the teacher in our new class environment, most of us were busy noting down any and every mistake the students made as well as their learning styles of our upcoming assignment. On the 2^nd Friday of the course, I had a good talk during my tutorial session with my tutor and I was happy to hear she thought I was doing well. After our usual Friday night drinking session, I worked Saturday and Sunday from 9-6 on my assignment and my lesson plans for the next week. For TP 5 and 6 I would be teaching another writing class and a lexis (vocabulary class). By Sunday night I was feeling happy with myself as I felt I had done a good first draft of the assignment and both lesson plans were done.

Under pressure …

      Despite the fact that I’d been feeling good about things Sunday night, I started to stress again Monday morning for various reasons. I’d be teaching a new level of students with a new tutor watching. I’d enjoyed the style of my first two weeks’ tutor and I didn’t really know how my new tutor would be. She’d given us input sessions but I hadn’t really talked to her at all. I think my group was quite nervous as we sat down with her. Her first question about who wanted to say something about the observation task from the Friday night demo made everyone panic as none of us had done it. We had been given a booklet of observation tasks at the beginning of the course but nothing had been explained to us about doing them for the lessons other than that they weren’t mandatory to do. Observation tasks hadn’t come up at all during our daily feedback sessions on the previous day’s TPs in the first two weeks with our previous tutor so we didn’t really know what to say other than to come up with a few general observations we’d made. Our new tutor’s next question sent my group into even more of a panic: Who wanted to show their lesson plan? With our old tutor we’d never shown our lesson plans and staging before doing the actual class unless we were asking for her help to plan the stages so again none of us knew what to say. We hesitantly went one by one through our plans and when it came to mine, I found that I hadn’t understood at all what I was supposed to be doing for the class and had to completely rewrite my plan, rendering all my planning on the weekend useless. My tutor suggested I have a look at the staging lesson done by one of the other group’s trainees but then we had to spend an hour and a half learning a foreign language from scratch to show us how beginner students feel. If I hadn’t been agonizing over the work I knew I had to do on my lesson plan it would have been interesting but knowing that I needed to write my stages all over again kept me from focusing on the lesson. Fortunately part two of the two-week tutorials was scheduled for the rest of the afternoon and I had already done mine on Friday so I had an extra ninety minutes to work on my plan. With the help of another trainee, I finished writing the lesson stages and language analysis sheet in an hour. TP 5 itself went off fine and when I saw that the new tutor was judging off the same criteria as the first one, I was less stressed and able to focus on just doing the TPs as they came. Of course the tutors had told us that they all used the same criteria and while I would not say I didn’t believe them, I will say that I wasn’t completely convinced until after the feedback from the 5^th TP. One of the comments on the feedback for the 5^th TP was that my plan had been a well-written plan which just goes to show you don’t have to spend hours on a plan as long as your stages are correct.

      During the 3^rd week I also had to resubmit my LRT (grammar analysis) assignment. When you get told at the beginning of the CELTA that if you fail an assignment you have to resubmit it, the image you get in your mind is of your tutor ripping your assignment in half and telling you to rewrite the whole thing. This is almost never the case as most trainees have put effort and research into writing their assignments and the tutors point out exactly what they think is wrong and what you need to fix, often to the exact wording they don’t like so it is really more a case of fine-tuning and a few little fixes. My LRT had a few errors and it took me about an hour to fix them and have it ready for resubmission. My 6^th TP went by and even though I was always nervous before each class, once they got going my teaching experience would take over and I wouldn’t stress that much. The fact is, it was never the teaching part that stressed me out but the fact that I knew there was my tutor in the back of the room making notes about everything I did. My goal for each TP was always to address whatever had been pointed out to me during the previous TP’s feedback and to integrate any new techniques or suggestions that had come up in the input sessions.

      Our tutor was also pushing us to work together and help each other. I was hesitant for several reasons but mostly because I didn’t want to give bad advice to the other trainees but I still tried to give advice or help when I could. On Wednesday of the third week, our tutors gave us our fourth assignment which was basically talking about our personal growth as a teacher during the CELTA. I’d been expecting this assignment and I managed to get my first draft done Thursday morning and by Friday I had it turned it in and received a pass. My third assignment received a pass on Friday as well so I now had all four assignments done and could concentrate on preparing my last two TPs for the final weekend. For my 7^th TP I had to teach functions and my tutor suggested that we make a video to use for the class. I wasn’t incredibly enthusiastic about this idea, mostly because I knew a lot of the trainees were busy working on their fourth assignment or resubmissions but a suggestion from a CELTA tutor is an order for a CELTA trainee so I got some volunteers together and shot a few different scenes and edited it on the weekend with the help of another trainee. I planned TP 7 on Saturday and TP 8 on Sunday. It only took a few hours for each, including the language analysis, so I spent the rest of the time giving advice to other trainees or watching movies.

      TP 7 went off as planned and the students enjoyed the video and had a good lesson. For TP8 we had only been given the general context and I knew what grammar point I had to teach, the rest of the lesson was mine to plan. Most of us trainees shared our stages back and forth and since I was confident in my plan, I spent most of Wednesday morning helping other trainees get everything together for their last TPs. On Wednesday, the trainees who weren’t teaching didn’t have to observe and we only had four students out of our usual 6-7 so the room felt a lot emptier than usual but I enjoyed myself teaching the last class and then it was over. I sat in on the Thursday night class and then the majority of the trainees and the tutors went out for drinks. This morning (Friday of the fourth week) we finished up administrative details and most of us went out for a lunch together and now the CELTA is officially over.

Did I achieve my main aim?

      Is the CELTA worth it? As a course and as an experience I would have to give a resounding YES!!! It was hard and stressful and reading back over what I’ve just written it might sound like I had a plan and knew what I was doing but it only looks planned with hindsight. In the heat of the moment, it was absolute chaos, with lots of bumbling from deadline to deadline and always another deadline. I only slept 6 hours a night for twenty-six days, I did nothing but think about the CELTA for twenty-six days. I had nightmares about my TPs. Most of the time, I only had a vague idea of if I was doing things the way they were supposed to be done. I used up all my summer vacation days and lost half a month’s salary to take the CELTA and it was worth it. I learned so much both about myself and about teaching English and even better; I learned what I don’t know about teaching and what I need to do to keep learning

      The tutors were awesome. During our last week there was an exercise where we had to talk about the best teachers we’d ever had. I told my partner that the tutors on the course were the best teachers I’d ever had and that is the truth. I was homeschooled as a kid and pretty much self-taught my last four years of high school. In university, my professors were all researchers not teachers and when not downright insulting, they were usually indifferent to the students. My CELTA tutors were the most enthusiastic teachers I’d ever met and you could see they genuinely loved their subject and wanted all the trainees to do well and they were definitely the best examples of teachers I’ve ever met and I’ve been around teachers since I was sixteen.

      So what do you need to do to pass your CELTA? Just do exactly what your CELTA tutors tell you to do. Prepare and study beforehand. Clear your schedule of all distraction and be ready to put the CELTA before everything else. It is an intensive course and you’ll have to do a lot of things at the same time, especially in weeks two and three. Make sure you know your English grammar and language already so you can focus on the teaching when you’re doing your CELTA. You don’t have to do everything I did to prepare for the CELTA, many of the other trainees didn’t prepare as much or even maybe at all, but it helps.

If you’re about to do the CELTA, my advice would be to focus on each day at a time, always read the feedback from your tutor and take it into account when you’re planning your next lesson and work with your fellow trainees from the start.

      Despite all the work and stress, I would say this is the most useful vacation I’ve ever had. Maybe not the most fun but it’s definitely the one that I’m the most satisfied with now that it’s over. I made new friends that I hope to keep in the future and most of all it’s made me excited about teaching again in a way I haven’t been for a very long time. I hope if you take the CELTA you’ll have as awesome an experience as I did and that you too will pass the CELTA!!!

Starting in the beginning of May, my writing has gone on a hiatus due to the fact that I will be taking an intensive work-related course in July so I’m getting ahead on my studies for it in May and June. Despite the lack of news on this blog, I’ve been busy writing since my last post, mostly with rewriting my novel, now called “Daughter of Barra” from a first person point of view. Initial feedback was positive on the change in point of view so I’ve sent it out to my trusty circle of beta readers and hope to get their reactions to it by the time the end of July comes around. I feel this rewrite is a lot better than the first draft with a few major changes to the story and I feel this new point of view reflects better the personal sense of the story in that it is really about one character. Some people think that writing in the first person should be messy or disjointed as if the character is putting down random thoughts on a paper. I don’t know if this is true or not but I do know that I feel this novel works better in first person then third so I’m going with that for now. If my beta readers feel it is horrible then I’ll get to work changing it back.

I was recently going through some files and I found my initial synopsis of my novel from before I wrote the first draft. It was interesting to see how the story had changed and evolved. The very first idea I had of the story was more of a “three musketeers set in space” and I suppose from a certain point of view it still has similar themes but it’s not exactly that anymore. My biggest takeaway was that when plotting out the initial storyline, there’s no need to get too bogged down in details because there’s a chance it will all change so once you have your main ideas down, just start writing.

The most annoying part of my hiatus is that as the days go by, I get ideas for stories, either for the novels I have planned or for new ones and I have to content myself with simply noting the ideas and not taking them further for now. Once August comes around, assuming all things stay as they are, my four main projects will be going over “Daughter of Barra” again with the intention of starting to send it to publishers for rejections 🙂 and moving this blog over to an actual “writer” website from which I could potentially sell my novels eventually if I go the self-published route. From the writing point of view I will be working on the sequel to “Daughter of Barra.” I say sequel but it will be a larger story with more characters while Daughter of Barra is really the origin story for one of the characters. You could say Daughter of Barra is the prequel for a story not yet written. I will also be working on my first fantasy novel. I am trying to be very careful with fantasy as its a very busy field and the thing I don’t want the most is for someone to think that my work is derivative (Hello Eragon). I feel I’ve come up with an original enough opening first act and then I’ll see where the story goes. Well that’s all the news for now and I probably won’t get an update on this blog till the end of July.

Have a good summer everyone!!!

Well this year has been pretty full and I am looking forward to the next one. I’ve been quiet on my blog the last few months as I’ve been working on a personal memoir which was occupying most of my writing time. Since it is for private use only, I could not really talk about it. With the new year, I am planning to focus back on my writing, with my first big project being the redraft of my novel. The rewrite of the first chapter to a first person point of view was well-received so I will be working on rewriting it to first person as I feel first person works better for the origin story and less space opera feel. I also hope to continue to post articles on the blog as they arise. I am not going to commit to a set schedule but I will try to put something out every week or so.