Transcript
If you're doing an online CELTA course and you want some top tips for teaching practice, then this series is for you. I have 10 videos, and this one is number seven.
I'm Jo Gakonga from ELT training.com. I'm an experienced CELTA tutor and assessor, but I also asked a whole lot of other CELTA tutors for their best tips and these are what I got. This video is all about drilling online. If you find it helpful, don't forget to like and check out my site for lots of other resources.
Drilling is really helpful for all sorts of reasons - and if you want more information about drilling, I've got a great video about it here that I did - but online, you might feel it seems a bit odd and it can be a bit difficult. You certainly can't do choral drilling with the whole class in quite the same way as you can do in class, it's a bit more of a cacophony online than it is in the physical classroom! But drilling is still important. It's really useful for getting people's mouths around the words for checking pronunciation and also to help them to remember vocabulary and structures.
So how can you do it online? A really good way is to do it on mute. You can get your learners to say the same thing three or four or five times on mute. In the class, I would ask them to do it quietly under their breath (a mumble drill) but online, it's easy, nobody has to hear anybody else. They can say it, they can practise saying the thing several times on mute before you listen to them. After that, you might then want to listen to individuals to check that they have got it right.
Obviously, you can also still do chain drills online. Ask one of your learners to say it, they do that and then nominate another learner, they say it and nominate the next and so on around the class.
Another way of sort of drilling except that it's not oral is to do things in the chatbox. So for example, if you want to do transformational drills where they have to change something every time, you could ask them to put the change in the chat box. Maybe I want to practice the Present Continuous for arrangements, so I say ‘I’m going to the cinema’ and then I say ‘park’ and they write ‘I'm going to the park’ I say ‘she’ and they write ‘she's going to the park’. You can see how this can work.
So don't be afraid to do drilling even online. It's still an important part of the process. I hope that was helpful and I'll see you in the next video. Bye.
