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The Ultimate Guide to CELTA: 2nd Edition
Updated version, now with a non-native trainee!
With only 1% of CELTA course participants worldwide failing the course, you would be forgiven for thinking it was just a case of enrolling. However, a quick internet search about the intensity of the course will show that it is not to be taken lightly.
Follow Anxious Ana, Chilled-out Charlie, Fastidious Felicity and Harassed Henry throughout their course and let them help you to make sure yours is one you can look back on fondly.
With only 1% of CELTA course participants worldwide failing the course, you would be forgiven for thinking it was just a case of enrolling. However, a quick internet search about the intensity of the course will show that it is not to be taken lightly.
Follow Anxious Ana, Chilled-out Charlie, Fastidious Felicity and Harassed Henry throughout their course and let them help you to make sure yours is one you can look back on fondly.
121 pages, Kindle Edition
Published July 4, 2018
1 person is currently reading
13 people want to read
About the author
Emma Jones
213 books7 followersEmma Jones was born in Japan and came to the US in her early childhood. Obsessed with books since kindergarten, Emma began penning her own fiction in the second grade when the teacher assigned essays. She enjoys cooking, yoga, and napping. Emma devotes hours to crafting steamy romance stories so hot her family can't look her in the eye.
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December 24, 2021Not an 'ultimate guide', but this worked for me as a companion piece to David Riddell's more polished and professional Get Ready for CELTA - which in fairness was published three years after this book - though the continuous use of character nicknames may grate and make one cringe.
As I read both books near the end of a part-time course (after not doing very much work and then cramming loads into the last 2-3 weeks) I perhaps appreciated Jones & Momeni's stories of a small group of fictional CELTA intensive students' week-by-week experiences more than I would have at the outset. It is fairly cheesy, but if you can tolerate that, in the end it has value in making one focus on the course process and reminding you to do some work.
The major flaw in Riddell's book was its complete failure to discuss or address the famously casual culture around TEFL. This might be more of a thing among Gen X (and therefore a thing of the past, as TEFL is often a short-term career in one's twenties) than it is among young Gen Z newbies more used to knuckling down and working hard in all educational contexts. (In the UK, one of the key attitudinal shifts came with the introduction of university tuition fees in the late 90s. I escaped those by a hair's breadth, and I recall boys from my year saying things like "What are all these first years doing in the library? That's just wrong." Culture was already shifting before our eyes, and now, with over twenty years' perspective, that moment seems like the first signal that we were the last cohort to be fully inculcated with a set of values that came in in the 1960s, some of which are now denigrated or at least disadvantageous.)
But this Guardian comment thread from 2017 shows how the idea that TEFL isn't a proper job - something to do whilst you work out what you're *really* going to do - was still part of the public image of the field recently.
Jones & Momeni sort of deal with this casualness, which in Riddell's book is an elephant in the room - but not usefully enough. Their character "Chilled-Out Charlie" is similar to most of the male TEFL teachers I've been acquainted with over the years and embodies the default culture of TEFL as I tended to think of it. (With the exception of two female friends who have made serious careers of the field.) What the book lacks to be really useful for people who are considering or just starting the course is another student who tries to copy Charlie's work style and - unlike Charlie who gets a high grade - doesn't get away with it because a) they assume Charlie is doing even less work than he is, they see the image not behind the scenes, and b) they don't have the same natural talent and/or prior experience. As it is, the book makes it seem like you can get away quite a bit and do very well (not just scrape a pass), and as if the alternatives are either that, or letting the course take over your entire life. The latter is probably more representative of the intensive version, but it does seem a little excessive.
Whilst the authors revised the book in 2018 to include a character who's a non-native English speaker trainee, the optimistic, very pre-Brexit employment scenarios for their newly qualified TEFL teachers seem like hollow promises now. (It was originally written in 2014.) Though even if they had considered the effects of Brexit, it wouldn't address the bricks-and-mortar language school closures occasioned by the covid lockdowns, and the very recent collapse in the TEFL job market and vast supply of experienced teachers available for work after China banned most online lessons with tutors based abroad. "Teach English to Chinese kids online" used to be one of *the* ways English native-speaker graduates could make money, and the demise of this option has been insufficiently publicised in the general press (i.e. not at all that I've seen, which is a failure to serve the readership) and which is not mentioned by TEFL training providers.
As I read both books near the end of a part-time course (after not doing very much work and then cramming loads into the last 2-3 weeks) I perhaps appreciated Jones & Momeni's stories of a small group of fictional CELTA intensive students' week-by-week experiences more than I would have at the outset. It is fairly cheesy, but if you can tolerate that, in the end it has value in making one focus on the course process and reminding you to do some work.
The major flaw in Riddell's book was its complete failure to discuss or address the famously casual culture around TEFL. This might be more of a thing among Gen X (and therefore a thing of the past, as TEFL is often a short-term career in one's twenties) than it is among young Gen Z newbies more used to knuckling down and working hard in all educational contexts. (In the UK, one of the key attitudinal shifts came with the introduction of university tuition fees in the late 90s. I escaped those by a hair's breadth, and I recall boys from my year saying things like "What are all these first years doing in the library? That's just wrong." Culture was already shifting before our eyes, and now, with over twenty years' perspective, that moment seems like the first signal that we were the last cohort to be fully inculcated with a set of values that came in in the 1960s, some of which are now denigrated or at least disadvantageous.)
But this Guardian comment thread from 2017 shows how the idea that TEFL isn't a proper job - something to do whilst you work out what you're *really* going to do - was still part of the public image of the field recently.
Jones & Momeni sort of deal with this casualness, which in Riddell's book is an elephant in the room - but not usefully enough. Their character "Chilled-Out Charlie" is similar to most of the male TEFL teachers I've been acquainted with over the years and embodies the default culture of TEFL as I tended to think of it. (With the exception of two female friends who have made serious careers of the field.) What the book lacks to be really useful for people who are considering or just starting the course is another student who tries to copy Charlie's work style and - unlike Charlie who gets a high grade - doesn't get away with it because a) they assume Charlie is doing even less work than he is, they see the image not behind the scenes, and b) they don't have the same natural talent and/or prior experience. As it is, the book makes it seem like you can get away quite a bit and do very well (not just scrape a pass), and as if the alternatives are either that, or letting the course take over your entire life. The latter is probably more representative of the intensive version, but it does seem a little excessive.
Whilst the authors revised the book in 2018 to include a character who's a non-native English speaker trainee, the optimistic, very pre-Brexit employment scenarios for their newly qualified TEFL teachers seem like hollow promises now. (It was originally written in 2014.) Though even if they had considered the effects of Brexit, it wouldn't address the bricks-and-mortar language school closures occasioned by the covid lockdowns, and the very recent collapse in the TEFL job market and vast supply of experienced teachers available for work after China banned most online lessons with tutors based abroad. "Teach English to Chinese kids online" used to be one of *the* ways English native-speaker graduates could make money, and the demise of this option has been insufficiently publicised in the general press (i.e. not at all that I've seen, which is a failure to serve the readership) and which is not mentioned by TEFL training providers.
May 1, 2022
Very useful, and I really enjoyed it, thank you!
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews