For the first assignment on the CELTA course, candidates are required to design tasks that address students’ weaknesses. This means that they need to find ways of of collecting information about their students’ skills and language. Now there are more than one way to do so:
1. Meet up with students and record this interview. This will give you information about their pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, listening and speaking.
2. Ask students to write about a specific topic and collect their answers. This will give you information about their vocabulary, grammar and writing.
3. Observe or teach a reading lesson and see which sub-skills were challenging for your students and bear this in mind for the assignment.
4. Observe or teach a language lesson and pay attention to students’ errors during the practice stage. If you are an observer, you can talk to students later after the lesson and get their permission for snapshots of their answers in the notebook.
Make yourself a good list of students’ errors and prioritise which ones need to be addressed before others.