Category: Professional Development

Six ELT talks raising important questions

In my previous post on education-related talks, I selected six videos dealing with topics directly associated with teaching. Of course, there is much more to discuss when it comes to the ELT industry, so I would like to share more talks I found thought-provoking. When you work as an English teacher, it’s easy to say that you focus only on teaching the language and the rest is irrelevant. However, I believe that it’s important to be aware of some issues in our profession even if you aren’t directly affected by them.

Six ELT talks raising important questions

Nicola Prentis & Russ Mayne: Where are the women in ELT?
The speakers point out that while women represent the majority of English teachers around the world, most speakers at ELT conferences are male. In fact, I was guilty of overlooking women in my previous article because I focused on the most visible names in ELT, who happen to be men from English-speaking countries. Prentis and Mayne explore reasons for this phenomenon and provide some potential solutions. I recommend that you visit their blog Gender Equality ELT for more information on this issue.

Silvana Richardson: Professionalism in English Language Teaching
This talk deals with the fact that ELT isn’t always considered to be a serious profession. Richardson provides relevant examples of threats to professionalism in the industry and states that English is often taught by people who should be nowhere near the classroom. The main problem is that it’s extremely easy to get into TEFL because some employers feel that a £49 certificate from Groupon represents a sufficient qualification to become a teacher. As a consequence, they hire native speaker conversationalists without pedagogical skills or teachers whose own English is not good enough. The speaker emphasises the role of CPD in tackling this issue.

Charlotte Williams: Diversity and inclusion in an ever-changing world
Most published ELT materials are rather bland and don’t accurately depict what happens in the real world. Some topics are simply ignored by the majority of coursebooks. Charlotte Williams highlights the importance of making the classroom an inclusive space and suggests ways of promoting diversity in a workplace. She says that we can do much more than some standalone lessons on one narrative. The speaker also provides tips for handling prejudice and microaggression in the classroom.  

JPB Gerald: Decoding and decentering whiteness in the ELT classroom
This topic isn’t easy to discuss, but it’s something that needs to be done. At the beginning of this talk, Gerald defines relevant terms related to whiteness. The issues of race and language are inextricably linked, which leads to individuals’ ethnicity playing a bigger role than it should. The talk includes suggestions for dealing with the subject on both structural and individual level. In addition, the speaker addresses tokenism and the problem with images in published ELT materials in the Q&A part of the session.

Jo Krousso: Paperless teaching
According to the speaker, ELT is a backwards industry when it comes to using paper in the classroom. The pandemic forced teachers to digitalise their materials and teach without the use of paper, but the question is whether we can learn lessons from that when we start teaching in the physical classroom again. Krousso argues against going back to piles of worksheets and other paper-based materials. She provides a lot of useful tips for paperless teaching, which is beneficial not only for the environment, but it may also lead to more engaging lessons for the students.

Vijay Ramjattan: What does an anti-racist pronunciation teacher do?
This talk focuses on the topic of prejudice associated with speech accent. Listening isn’t just a passive activity, and we sometimes make stereotypical assumptions based on someone’s ethnicity. Ramjattan points out that even some native English speakers are perceived as foreign-sounding just because of their appearance, which affects their employability. Ramjattan also criticises accent reduction services and the way intelligibility is defined. He suggests that teachers make students aware of these issues when teaching pronunciation.

RIP Cambridge Train the Trainer

This blog post was originally written in 2021, right after I had finished the Cambridge Train the Trainer course with IH Lima. ELT professionals interested in courses leading to certificates issued by Cambridge English probably remember the following framework of teaching qualifications that previously appeared in the Delta handbook.

Cambridge Train the Trainer FAQ

In the original post, I mentioned that there wasn’t much information on this qualification available online, which I found a bit surprising. I felt that Cambridge English didn’t show much interest in promoting it. The course was retired in 2023, and since I don’t want to provide misleading information to those who stumble upon this article, I decided to update this post and describe what that means.

In short, the Cambridge version of Train the Trainer was a course aimed at teachers interested in becoming teacher trainers. It took approximately 30 hours to complete (either in-person or fully online) and comprised the following six modules:

● The training class focused on the main differences between teaching students and training teachers.
● Analysing and designing training sessions showed you how to plan a variety of input sessions.
● Delivering training sessions was the most practical part of the course. The participants were asked to plan and run a mock training session.
● Observing teachers consisted of watching a recorded lesson and analysing it as if you were the observer.
● Managing feedback helped you identify various ways of giving oral and written feedback to teachers. You analysed a recorded feedback session as well.
● Course planning and trainer development went beyond thinking of standalone sessions and taught you how to plan longer courses. You also received advice on further development options for trainers.

If you want to read more about the course, I recommend reading James Fuller’s series of eight blog posts with information about each session and Rachel Tsateri’s reflections. My own experience was pretty similar, and I thought it was a useful introduction to teacher training.

The trainees who completed the Train the Trainer course became eligible to train teachers on the CELT-P and CELT-S courses. Those two qualifications have been discontinued as well, which is probably one of the main reasons why Cambridge decided to retire the Train the Trainer course.

Now that the Cambridge course isn’t offered anymore, what exactly does that mean? According to Cambridge, ELT professionals interested in teacher training are encouraged to buy Matthew Ellman and Peter Lucantoni’s book From Teacher to Trainer. The practical element of actually preparing and delivering training sessions can’t be replaced by reading literature, so there is still a lot of demand for courses like that, and you can actually find many Train the Trainer courses offered by various institutions around the world.

Peter Lucantoni clarified the situation in this Sponge Chat: the Train the Trainer course is no longer an official Cambridge product, but teacher training centres are welcome to run their own versions of the course. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing since those institutions can update the course content and provide more training in dealing with the challenges of the online environment, which was not really addressed on the original Cambridge course.

However, the lack of standardisation now means that there are numerous versions of the Train the Trainer course available, so potential trainees don’t know what to expect from the particular course they decided to attend. Another disadvantage is that course providers now have to issue their own certificate, so even if the course itself is very useful for the attendee, the qualification has nothing to do with Cambridge, which may affect the way it is perceived by other educational institutions.

I’d be interested in hearing from those who have attended the non-Cambridge version of the Train the Trainer course. If you’d like to talk about your experiences, feel free to leave a comment below this article.