Preparing for the Delta

Yesterday I gained access to the Delta website and consequently downloaded and printed the materials for Module 1.

At first I was overwhelmed especially in terms of navigating the site and the amount of paper there were. I know it’s going to be a hard slog for the first few weeks just getting familiar and achieving what’s required.

Luckily, I did some initial prep work and this blog post by Sandy Millin was extremely helpful.

I feel quite confident about this. I think it’s just a matter of managing my time (along with work and play), and getting on top of the course work.

Through working hard and working smart, I sure hope that I get that pass with distinction!

Sandy Millin

There’s a lot I wish I’d known before I started studying for my Delta, and I thought I’d put it all into a post for anyone else preparing for the course. If you’ve got any tips you’d add, feel free to put them into the comments.

1. Take a holiday

Before you start the course, make sure that you’ve relaxed as much as possible. However you do it, the Delta is incredibly intensive, and if you go into it already tired, like I did, you’ll regret it.

2. Get reading

Start reading a few general books to get you in the zone. This will also give you a starting point when you are doing the course. Reading is something you probably won’t be able to take the time over during the course, so the more you can do before you start, the better. You’ll definitely return to the…

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Webinar: Leading a horse to water and making it drink!

Reading for pleasure has big benefits – vocabulary growth, expanded knowledge you get from different text types, and of course the sub-skills of reading itself – skimming for gist, scanning for details, making inferences and so on.

My students are all migrants so I try to motivate them to read by choosing materials that they can relate to. I choose texts that would connect them to the community. For example, I take stories from the community paper which would raise awareness about their own locality and neighbourhood. They are free so they are easily accessible to the students.

Easter Courier is a free community paper distributed in East Auckland.

But I know I need more tools.

So I’m looking forward to this webinar. It has always been a struggle and a dream for me to motivate my students to read English material on their own. For my lower level and older students who are relatively new to New Zealand, it’s even a stretch for them to be aware of reading English signs.

Looking at the original post, Olha asks the following questions that are pertinent to my students’ needs:

• What strategies can students employ to get a ‘feel’ of the text when they first meet it, putting into to context, to make reading easier?
• What can we do before looking at the text to increase motivation to read and to prepare students for potential difficulties like a lot of new vocabulary?
• How can students deal with new vocabulary within a text?

I want to pick up more techniques that I can employ to my multi-level classes. My students fall on a different range in most aspects – reading skills, comprehension, vocabulary knowledge just to name a few. It’s definitely a challenge to deliver lessons on receptive skills.

This webinar should give me fresh ideas and tactics to get all of my students’ reading skills to improve.

Signing up now.

OUPELTGlobal

Olha Madylus, a teacher and teacher trainer specialising in both primary and secondary education, introduces her upcoming webinar entitled ‘Leading a horse to water and making it drink‘ on 5th and 7th March, where she will explore ways to motivate students to read and enjoy doing so.

How do we motivate our students to read long texts in course books and how do we ensure that students understand and enjoy what they read?

To our students a long text in a course book can be very off-putting. Not only does the length put them off but it may contain a lot of vocabulary they are not acquainted with and the tasks they need to do, e.g. answer comprehension questions, may seem too difficult.

Using examples from the Insight series, my webinar on reading aims to address these issues by answering the following questions:

1. What is reading?
2. What…

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The Spur to Blog

I recently gave a presentation at our Hui-a-Kaupapa. In Maori, hui means meeting and kaupapa means topic or agenda. Essentially, it was an in-house professional development seminar where I shared my activities and insights with my colleagues from different branches across Auckland.

The presentation was called SaLE: Activities & Insights. SaLE is the name of the programme I teach. It’s short for Speaking and Living English.

My preparation for the presentation spurred me to create this blog. I found that I had an abundant lot of activities and ideas on English Language Teaching. It was fantastic sharing with my colleagues but I also realised that I wanted to share with the world.

So here I am.