The language skills related task is usually the third assignment on the CELTA. By this point, you have hopefully already had two assignments back with a pass (if you’re following these guides) and are getting into the swing of writing these assignments.
What do you have to do?
For this assignment you need to outline a lesson based on an authentic listening or reading text. Depending on the course provider (and tutors), you may be given a choice of material to use or you may have the freedom to choose any authentic material you wish.
You are required to write between 750 and 1000 words. This does not include the listening or reading material or the tasks that you design.
Choosing Materials
Either your CELTA tutors will provide you with a number of materials to choose from, or you may have complete freedom to choose any authentic material. Remember that authentic materials are those that are not designed for language learners and, therefore, have not been graded for students.
You will need to justify why you are choosing these materials for the particular students at their particular level. The centre may or may not require you to pick materials for the students you are teaching on the course. However, even if this is not required, it is a good idea because then you can actually use the lesson for one of your TPs.
When I did my CELTA, I picked rental classifieds in newspapers (I had total freedom to choose). My justification for this is that I was teaching students in the UK who were likely to need to find a place to live at some point. As upper intermediate students, I felt they could deal with a lot of the vocabulary, but there were certain phrases that were particular to this topic and genre that could cause students problems.
And when I did this lesson as my final TP (as I say, you don’t have to teach the lesson if you don’t want to), despite suffering from a terrible cold, I can confirm it was my strongest lesson on the course. Most notably, two of the students in the lesson were whispering to each other at one point “listen, we need this for when we move next year!”
When choosing the material, keep in the mind the interests of your students and what they would like to do with English outside of the course. You also need to make sure it is of a reasonable level for the students. Of course, what really determines the level is not the text itself, but the tasks that you devise.
That said, for most tasks students will need to understand around 95-98% of the words to gain any benefit. In other words, there shouldn’t be more than one new word in every twenty. It can be a useful activity to go through the text and highlight want you suspect will be new words.
There are also tools that will tell you what CEFR level the words are in a text. You can copy and paste the text here for example and get a breakdown of the level of each word. You do need to take this with a pinch of salt however. Really all this tool does is tell you what level coursebooks typically introduce these words. There are a number of problems however:
- Words have different meanings in different contexts and not all of these tools will pick that up.
- A word may have a simple meaning but be used in an idiomatic way.
- Lexical density may be just as important a measure of difficulty.
- Most authentic texts will contain a range of vocabulary from A1 to C1 anyway. The presence of a few “higher level” words should not rule it out for a lower level.
Introducing the Material
After justifying the choice of material, you will likely be required to say how you would introduce this material. Basically, you need to describe a lead in to the material that will activate the students’ schemata (i.e. their pre-existing knowledge of the topic).
I always tell trainees to deal with this stage last in this assignment, as I also do when it comes to planning lessons. If you don’t yet know where your lesson is heading, you may find yourself constricting yourself through the lead in.
When you’re ready to describe the lead in, you don’t need to re-invent the wheel here. Strong lead ins might include activities like:
- Discussing one or two questions in pairs;
- Watching a video clip and answering a question;
- Ranking some ideas or ordering some pictures;
- Sharing a personal anecdote and having students share their own experience.
Depending on the rubric of the assignment, you may be required to justify why you have selected this particular lead in activity. Think about how the lead in gets the students interested in the topic.
Pre-teaching Vocabulary
Depending on the centre and tutors, the next step of the assignment might ask you about the language you would choose to pre-teach and why. A common belief among teachers is that it is important to pre-teach every word students don’t know. This is actually not the case, and it may even be undesirable.
A very good reason not to pre-teach a word is because we then deprive students of an opportunity to work it out for themselves. As a general rule, when we work things out ourselves, we tend to remember them better, so it is beneficial if students are able to do this.
Look at these two sentences. In each, a made-up word is highlighted. Can you guess the meaning:
- The coach grawled the team in front of the media for not working hard enough.
- She put the book on a monpurain.
Probably, you can guess that the first word means something like criticised, since this is what a coach can be expected to do if his/her team doesn’t work hard. The second is much more difficult; it could be an item of furniture, but it could equally be something else. Of course, another sentence could reveal this meaning in a text, not just the particular sentence it first appears in.
However, based on this limited data, the second word is a better candidate to pre-teach since students wouldn’t be able to guess it from context. But before we commit to that, there is something else we should consider.
The other important consideration for pre-teaching is whether a word is necessary to complete the task you want students to do. Of course, you won’t know that until you have designed your tasks.
So, to summarise this into a three-question test for deciding to pre-teach words, we have:
- Does the student know this word? (If yes, why teach it at all?)
- Does the student need it for the task? (If no, teach it when they need it)
- Can they guess the meaning from the text? (If yes, give them that opportunity – you could plan to post-teach it instead!)
Designing Tasks
The real meat of this assignment is devising some tasks to do with the materials. You will need to have at least two tasks and these should focus on two different “sub-skills”.
The sub-skills you may cover are reading or listening for:
- gist
- specific information
- detailed information
You need to make sure you understand what these three sub-skills are and that you use these labels correctly within your assignment. You are advised to read about them in more detail in the recommended books. However, in short:
Gist concerns the overall meaning of the text. A gist task therefore tests whether students have understood this correctly. For example, a gist task could be to listen to a conversation and say who the speakers are, where it is taking place and the broad topics that are covered.
Specific information is about key points of information such as a price or a fact. Such tasks test the students’ ability to distinguish these. An example could be finding the prices in a menu to price up a meal, or to listen for a reference number.
Detailed information concerns more nuanced information such as a person’s opinion or reasons. Such tasks require a deeper understanding of the text to distinguish these. Such a task could be to listen to a complaint from a customer and pinpoint the reasons why the customer is upset and what they want to happen.
When choosing tasks, we would ideally try to emulate what we really do with such texts. However, this isn’t always possible and so our tasks often end up being somewhat artificial.
Two things that you certainly shouldn’t do are:
- Plan to have students read or listen to the text without any task at all. Always ensure students listen or read and do something. This might just be answering a question.
- Don’t plan to have students read the text aloud. They can read the text to themselves.
Whatever tasks you decide to do, an important part of this assignment is justifying why the tasks you have chosen are suitable for the text and the students and how they will improve the students’ reading or listening ability.
Post-Reading/Listening
You will also likely be expected to say what you will do after the reading or listening. This can be either writing or speaking. It is often expected that listening will be followed by speaking and reading will be followed by writing, but there is no reason that it has to be. Listening to a phone call, you may decide that writing a letter is a sensible follow up task. Conversely, after reading a letter, a telephone call role play could be a sensible speaking task.
As with other parts of this assignment, you will need to justify why this task is applicable to the text, and to the students.
Justifying your Choices
In my experience, the comment that I end up writing most on the feedback for this assignment is that a trainee hasn’t sufficiently justified their choice. This shouldn’t be that difficult, and can look something like this:
- description of activity
- quote from published author
- why quote relates to the activity selected
Without me using an actual quote, this could look something like this:
For the lead in, I will have students tell each other what the worst hotel they have ever stayed in was. Walls (2025, p. 27) says that a lead in can be as simple as a question that provokes discussion. I believe that this question will generate a lot of discussion, as I know that many of the students are well travelled, and while a bad hotel experience stays a long time in the memory, it is usually an experience that we can look back on with a sense of humour.
This is not a very imaginative piece of work, but it gets the job done in terms of explaining the task succinctly, referring to a published work and then explaining how that quote is relevant.
Unfortunately, something I commonly see is what I call “quote-dumping”. I’m sure you can guess that not just from context, but for anyone who is in any doubt, quote-dumping is where one or more quotes, which are often quite lengthy, are inserted into a paragraph and no attempt to explain their relevance is made.
