Wednesday, March 16, 2011

An interesting thought about the need for KAL in CELTA

Dear colleagues,
Rick Ansell has beat me to it and raised the ugly issue of the whole criteria system. I'm  fine with having a criteria-driven training course but find the number and balance of criteria rather frustrating.
Call me old fashioned but isn't there something about Language Teaching in the name CELTA ?
Which makes it a nonsense to have all the focus on language MFP condensed into our friend - criteria number  2e.  It's something like a trainee AA man having just one tick box for 'starting broken down vehicles ' among all the others for keeping his van clean and filling in little forms etc. Although,  like trainee teachers needing to have rapport , the AA man does need to be cheerful and friendly I guess!
Having worked with the award for over 20 years, I appreciate how it has become much tighter and we no longer give B's for  being vaguely stronger in language awareness , but the revamped 44 ( yes I counted when they first came out ... and lost the will to live in those first tutorials) criteria are totally unwieldy and to large extent irrelevant / unmeasurable as Rick and others have pointed out.
Most of you will remember the old CTEFLA criteria which broke down language into conveying  / checking meaning , focussing on form etc which made the new, all-in-one ( 2 e ) criteria  even more annoying . As an assessor and a tutor I find that the key area which makes a candidate a pass B rather than pass is the area of dealing with LANGUAGE , both in the planning  and teaching stages. It may be unfair, but surely this is what the certificate is very much about. Candidates with weak LA can and do learn about language on the job but I'm not convinced they they should get the pass B grading and the implication that they will be more independent in their first posting.
It's a huge issue - as the number of contributions to the debate on LA work has shown - so maybe we should focus energies on getting the criteria made more user friendly and with language as a key element.
Not sure if I'm a cat or a pigeon but with all this dialogue between trainers, perhaps it's time to convince Cambridge that it's time for a fresh look at the criteria !
Bill Harris

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