Teaching the TKT Course

My late evening pre-int students have asked for more ‘energy’ in their lessons (I suspect that means games). On Friday evenings at least, for the next few weeks, I’m afraid they’re going to be disappointed. With a 9am-9.30pm split shift, they’ll be lucky if their teacher is still awake.

It is, however, my choice to do this. After endless postponements, the TKT course is finally up and running, and I’m team-teaching it with another teacher from our centre. Hence the 9am start for the morning session at centre 3, followed by my regular evening shift at centre 1. The break in the middle isn’t really long enough to go home, so lunch in Backpackerville…

So far, it has only been a week but I am loving it. The TKT (Teaching Knowledge Test) is a modular test run by Cambridge aimed mainly (though not exclusively) at non-native speaker teachers of English. There are three main modules, which we are teaching, each consisting of eighty-minute tests containing eighty multiple choice and matching questions, covering everything from grammar and phonology to classroom management, learner motivation, assessment and language acquisition.

It is, as this suggests, all theory and terminology (the glossary provided by Cambridge runs to forty pages), which must represent quite a challenge to the intermediate+ level students we have in the group. In my post-lesson feedback last week the training manager and I both agreed that they are going to need a great deal of review and recycling. Last week’s introductory lesson saw them go quite quiet during what should have been fun quizzes introducing some of the terminology! But they are a lovely, friendly group, and clearly very motivated – two of them travel eight hours overnight to come to the class!

With no previous teacher training experience, it could be quite daunting. But the training manager has said he wants it to be a training experience for us too. So he’s asked us to send him post-lesson evaluations each week, and later in the course he’ll observe us. And teaching a truckload of terminology to non-native speakers isn’t so very far from what we do normally – they just happen to be better at it than my beginners! Road-testing materials on Adrian and Phil in the staffroom has been fun too!

And it finally gives an outlet to all the stuff that’s been washing around in my head for the last 3 years of Masters and Delta. It kind of confirms my thought that in the future I want to be a Delta tutor, and, when I finally go home, a tutor on the Open University’s linguistics courses.

Postscript:

It seems trivial to be writing about anything other than Japan right now. However happy things are here, the situation there is constantly in my thoughts.