Can you Teach a Language Speaker to Speak (or a Teacher to Teach)? If you were to ask a Cambridge CELTA trainee how much support they want to help them succeed on the course, you can expect the following answer: as much as possible. And with reason: the CELTA is a notoriously challenging course. As challenging as it is objectively, though, it can feel even more so subjectively. In spite of consistently low fail rate (across all parts of the world), the course is perceived to

The Cambridge CELTA course is an intimidating prospect for many teachers, in part because of the shroud of mystery that often envelops it. As part of our demystifying efforts, we are publishing a series of articles on the CELTA course, starting with some of its assessment criteria. The CELTA is a criterion-assessed course, and this is part of what makes it so valuable: employers know that the same criteria were applied in assessing all of the teachers who take this course. Wh

From building rapport to time management and differentiation, varying student interactions can completely transform a language classroom. Leveraging interaction patterns—deciding who interacts with whom—is perhaps the most under-sung tool at a teacher’s disposal to successfully manage the EFL classroom. What are Interaction Patterns? The first thing that comes to many teachers’ minds when they think of interaction patterns is pair work, hence the famous acronym TPS, for “thin