Before CELTA - Some Frequently Asked Questions
Contents
- Is CELTA right for me?
- What about the required English level?
- Isn’t CELTA for teaching adults face to face?
- Do I have time to do CELTA?
- Is it possible to do any preparation before CELTA?
- Do I need to know about grammar?
- What will have to do to get on a CELTA?
- What’s in the pre-course task?
- What do I do at an open day?
- How do I prepare for the interview?
I assume that since you found this page, you already know what the CELTA is. If you don’t, I give a brief overview of the CELTA here.
Is CELTA right for me?
The CELTA is designed for first time and inexperienced teachers who want to work for language schools in their home country or abroad. It was originally designed for native speakers who were often career changers and therefore had no pedagogical background. Many native speakers also have a limited linguistic background, having only successfully learnt their mother tongue.
While the CELTA was originally designed for native speakers, non-native speakers make up a large proportion of trainees on courses. While discrimination between native and non-natives continues in many places around the world, having a CELTA shows that you have the same highly-regarded qualification. It also does remedy the fact that while many non-native teachers have a degree (or higher) in a teaching-related field, their training may not have included any practical component.
In short, the CELTA is a highly-regarded qualification whether you are a native or non-native teacher. Although I have made some broad generalisations about native and non-native teachers, the CELTA is a somewhat equalising qualification in remediating the major concerns an employer might have about either.
One thing a CELTA will not generally qualify you to do is to be a teacher in compulsory education (i.e. primary or secondary school) or further or higher education. However, if you are already qualified to do one of these, you may find the CELTA is an additional string to your bow, as there are many students for who English is a second language in these institutions today.
What about the required English level?
Non-native teachers should consider their level of English before taking the CELTA. Courses may demand an equivalent of 7 at IELTS (C1 CEFR). I would really advise against taking the CELTA (or any course) if you don’t meet the language requirement. You would clearly be setting yourself up for failure in such a situation, assuming you could convince a centre to allow you on the course.
If you aren’t quite ready, while you are working on upgrading your English, you could instead consider the Cambridge TKT.
Isn't CELTA for teaching adults face to face?
You may have read or concluded that CELTA is aimed at teaching adults in classrooms. Well firstly, since Covid-19, many CELTA courses now happen online. As a CELTA trainer, I have never actually done a face to face course (to the surprise of my fellow trainers sometimes). The techniques you learn online are very transferable to the physical classroom, and vice versa.
The CELTA is admittedly aimed at teaching adults, and you will generally teach adults on the course. However, an increasing amount of language teaching is with children. Cambridge have made previous attempts to address this as they used to offer a Young Learner Extension course which was withdrawn in 2016 and then courses called CELT-P and CELT-S aimed at teaching primary and secondary students respectively which have also been withdrawn. At the moment there appear to be no high-quality options for learning to teach children, and the route that most English teachers take is to do a CELTA, followed some young learner training or learning on the job.
Do I have time to do CELTA?
Before you take CELTA, you need to know that it will consume a good portion of your time. If you are doing it full time, you are going to have a month where you will probably not get anything else done. CELTA trainers and administrators will tell you not to make any plans during the course. Part time you will be able to complete it while studying or working, but you probably don’t want to take it at a particularly busy time e.g. when you have your final exams.
Typically your options are full time for one month, or part time for three or six months. In my experience, there isn’t much difference in the intensity of three or six month courses. You will likely find that as long as you are doing CELTA, you are waking up and going to bed thinking about your next lesson plan.
Is it possible to do any preparation before CELTA?
Absolutely, you can get prepared before CELTA, but you don’t really need to. However, if you are going to, I would recommend getting hold of either Jim Scrivener’s Learning Teaching, or Jeremy Harmer’s the Practice of English Language Teaching.
Do I need to know about grammar?
For native speakers (especially those who are mostly monolingual), getting a firm grasp of grammatical terms is highly advisable. CELTA does not teach grammar, but you are expected to either know enough or be able to look it up quickly. At the very least you should be able to recognise parts of speech and tenses. However, the more you know the better. Getting hold of a good grammar book is therefore strongly advised.
Non-natives typically have more than a enough grammar knowledge for a CELTA from studying the language to an advanced level. However, if you know that you are not that confident on grammar, then working through a grammar resource is recommended.
I would recommend working through Grammar for English Language Teachers by Martin Parrott or English Grammar in Use by Raymond Murphy.
What will I have to do to get on a CELTA?
CELTA course providers want to make sure that the vast majority (98%) of their candidates will pass the course. For this reason they do vet candidates. Typically, you will find they do this in two ways – a pre-course task and an interview. When I did my CELTA, we were also required to attend an open day.
What's in the pre-course task?
A copy of the pre-course task that most centres use can be found here. As you will see, it contains 50 tasks in 5 sections which you are expected to complete. There is no time limit and you are advised to do it in several sittings. The tasks test your knowledge in a number of areas, such as what is important to know about your learners, identifying and explaining the role of different parts of speech, understanding the difficulties students have and professionalism of teachers.
What do I do at an open day?
For the open day, I was told I needed to prepare a 5 minute lesson teaching people to do something. We presented this to a room of around 20 potential CELTA candidates before having individual interviews. My advice if you’re asked to do this is don’t teach English. That might sound counter-intuitive, but most of the other people did exactly that. Out of the 20, only myself and one other didn’t teach English, and we were two of three people that ended up on the course.
I’ll tell you why this happened. The people who taught Englush decided to teach a tense, or an obscure grammar rule, or in one case palindromes (which I believe he made several mistakes with). This meant the 5 minutes was swallowed up by them explaining something. I chose to teach the group to play a 4/4 rock beat on air drums, while another candidate (who worked in a restaurant) chose to teach how to fold a napkin (in a particular way). What was different for us is that we had far less explanation, step by step instructions and much more “doing”. In short, during our 5 minutes, everyone was involved (including the trainers).
How do I prepare for the interview?
After my air drum lesson, I think it was fairly clearly to me that I was going to be on the course. I think I would have needed to give a terrible interview to not get on the course.
That said, the interview is not unimportant. The CELTA provider are at that stage trying to determine if you are able to meet the demands of the course, and you need to show them you can. You can do this by:
- showing you have read about the course and understand that it is a demanding course;
- having some ideas about what makes for good teaching and what helps or doesn’t help students;
- giving examples of times you have accepted feedback or criticism and used it positively;
- having some idea how you might explain something to someone who doesn’t know English;
- having some ideas about how you would correct students.
When having ideas about the above points, it is not necessarily a case of being right. After all, if you know all the answers, what are you going to learn on the course? Simply showing you have some thoughts about what makes teaching effective is likely to be enough.
Finally, don’t underestimate the chance to ask questions in the interview. You will be judged on these too to some extent, and having no questions is generally a bad sign. Some useful questions you could ask:
- What do people find most diffiicult on the course?
- Were there any areas on the pre-course task that I should take another look at before CELTA starts?
- How do you help teachers to find work post-CELTA?
These questions show that you are interested in working out if CELTA is a good fit for you, are open to feedback and have serious intentions to work in this field post completion.
