Doing CELTA assignments? If you’ve got to the Focus on the Learner Assignment and you want to know how AI can help with it, keep watching…
I’m Jo Gakonga, I’m a teacher educator and I’ve been a CELTA trainer and assessor for over 20 years. I’ve also got a website at ELT-Training.com where I make video based support material for English language teachers at all stages of their careers. Check it out and if you like this, give it a thumbs up and subscribe, I make a new video every week.
Before you go any further, as with any of these videos I’ve got on CELTA assignments and AI, MAKE SURE you check with your tutors before you use AI in any way- different centres have different rules for this and you don’t want to fall foul of them!
As well as that, as I’ve said in previous videos, there are always two important things to keep in mind:
Firstly, using AI is the same as using any reference material- you need to be transparent about what you’ve used: to cite it and in order to show how you used it. To do this, make sure that you begin a new search and copy the share link, or take screenshots, to show your prompts and how you adapted the material you got through the chat.
The second thing is that, again as with any reference material BUT EVEN MORE SO, you need to make sure that you’re engaging CRITICALLY with whatever AI gives you. You can’t just take it all at face value because sometimes it’s WRONG. So use your intuition as a fluent speaker of English and do your research in other places too.
With those caveats and provisos out of the way, AI is a helpful friend and will be in your teaching life, so it seems to me that it’s a good idea to learn how to take best advantage of it. Here are some ideas on how AI could help you with the Focus on the Learner assignment.
This is the one where you do a needs analysis for a learner or a group, then look at what some of their language problems are and give some ideas to help. You can see a walk through of this assignment
here- it might be helpful to watch this first!
OK- are you ready? Let’s look at the case where you interview a particular learner. In part 1, you give some background about the learner that’s relevant to their language learning history and needs. You really need to do this on your own – I can’t see how AI could help very much.
In the next part, you are looking at their linguistic strengths and weaknesses so you need to observe them in TP to see how strong their different skills are- reading, writing, speaking, listening and what kind of activities they prefer. You’re also going to record a short interview with them and get them to do some writing so that you can analyse their language strengths and needs.
One thing that technology can really help with here is in transcribing the interview. Having it written down isn’t mandatory in most centres, but it’ll make it much easier for you to spot the errors they’re making. There are lots of speech-to-text apps such as otter.ai and https://turboscribe.ai/ that will give you a good approximation that you can then edit. Remember that this WON’T help you to identify errors in pronunciation though- you’ll have to listen for those.
When you have the transcript, or the learner’s written work, you could put it into AI and ask it to identify the most important language errors. It will do this, but be careful that it isn’t always very accurate and it doesn’t always prioritise what would likely be the most important errors. So again, treat what it tells you with caution. Check against your own intuition and against other reference books such as Learner English.
While we’re on the subject of Learner English, this book is the one that’s usually recommended for this assignment and it’s great but it doesn’t have every language in the world in it obviously, so another way that AI could be helpful is, if your learner’s language isn’t in this book you could ask what are the biggest difficulties for people learning English coming from that particular language.
AI does a useful job of this- this is what it gave me for Italian- and will also give you ideas for how to address these BUT make sure that you are not blindly parroting what the AI has told you. You need to look at the issues that YOUR learner has, not just that any speaker of their first language has.
In the final part of this assignment, you have to choose some material that would be useful for your learner based on the issues you identified. You could ask AI to suggest some activities here, but a lot of centres ask you to specifically find published material and I think that this is more useful because it’s what you have to do in the classroom and getting more familiar where to find things like this is super-helpful.
