Essay

1. Reflections of professional development

The first two weeks of the CELTA training have been a time of productive professional development considering that I have reinforced my previous knowledge and acquired new tools that will transform my teaching practices to be more effective and systematic. This course made me become aware that I need a lot of practice when it comes to deliver concept checking questions because through this type of questions students have a better understanding of the target language that I’m providing. On the other hand, I have noticed that it is not difficult for me to present contexts which are appealing to learners and provide them with clear and simple instructions.

2. My strengths on delivering instructions.

Through this training I have been very careful when delivering instructions due to the fact that my students are in elementary level therefore is remarkably important to provide them with simple and clear instructions. This has been evident after my TP1 when my tutor Linda advised me to be careful with my instructions because I was describing instead of telling students clearly what to do and consequently I raise my TTT. Since that helpful advice I have spent more time in my lesson planning, developing instructions that are as clear as possible and using simple vocabulary that I can use while demonstrating or modeling the activities.

Harmer (2001) state that, modeling the tasks while giving clear instructions is better than just giving instructions alone. This is exactly what happen to me in my TP4, my peers Michel and Ricardo told me that during my post productive task, it was really good that I model the task while I gave the instructions, otherwise students would have had trouble performing this last task of my lesson.

In addition to the previous example, during my TP3 my tutor Liz mentioned that it was a good thing that I script all my instructions in my lesson plan since this made me more aware of how to deliver clear instructions to my elementary students.

3. Reflection on areas of development.

This training has made me realise how necessary is to create and planned thoughtfully my concept checking questions. I noticed that when I do not use the appropriate CCQ’S my students suffer the consequences at the moment of understanding the main items of my lesson. My tutors have encouraged me to create clearer and specific questions and provide them in the right part of my lesson, these advices lies under the fact that I tend to deliver the questions in an unsystematic manner that alters the order of the pre-teach part of my lesson(MPF).

According to Scrivener (2005) being systematic will help me monitor my timing in a better way and hence be able to set all my tasks accordingly. I did the complete opposite to this statement in my TP3 on the grounds that I did not create good CCQ’S and as a result, I jump from meaning to form and back

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