Dear Readers,

This is the 4th issue of the electronic newsletter intended to inform you of news, activities and course dates at CELT Athens. In this way, we hope to keep in touch with students past, present and future. Please send some feedback about this e-newsletter if you have a minute or send your own news.

In this issue:

MARY SPRATT TO COLLABORATE WITH CELT ATHENS ON FUTURE TKT COURSES
Many of you were there at the launch of the Teaching Knowledge Test, the TKT for short, at the Grande Bretagne and heard her talk of this new assessment scheme offered by Cambridge ESOL.

Mary Spratt is also one of the three co-authors of the new course published by Cambridge University Press, "The TKT Course". Few know what a great lover of Greece Mary is and how often she has been as a visitor on her own.
The great news for CELT Athens is that she has agreed to teach on TKT courses offered by CELT on an occasional basis - she is of course very heavily involved in travelling round the world on behalf of Cambridge and has heavy seminar commitments.

But it was not very difficult to entice her to teach in Greece and the first course she is going to be co-teaching with Marisa Constantinides is going to be held in Crete during the last week of August. 

Those of you who would like to combine learning with a short Cretan holiday, do send an e-mail and let us know or go to the TKT course page and send in the application form you can download from there.

Top

FREE CLASSES AT CELT FOR CTEFL, CELTA & DELTA TEACHING PRACTICE
Current trainees on the Certificate in TEFL course, DELTA courses running at the moment as well as the CELTA trainees in February, were at first terrified at the prospect of teaching a full class of complete beginners, all refugees from Afghanistan who were recruited with the kind help of the Greek Council for Refugees. They came in fast and strong and we quickly filled the beginner course, to capacity, as we had been told that they are rather erratic in their attendance, they tend to register but stop coming very quickly, etc. 

Well, two months later, they are still coming - and they like the course so much that they keep trying to bring their friends in to attend as well. They were first taught by the CELTA trainees in February and then were taken under the wing of other trainees who had just begun or had just completed their courses at CELT.

They are real beginners, some of them not even literate  in their own language. They come in at the end of a long day working on building sites, in shops, wherever they can find some work, and they are exhausted. But their gaunt faces light up in the lessons; they need to learn English to find a better future - most of them dream of going to some other country to join relatives and the English language is the key...

Two months into the course, despite their great difficulties with the script and the strange to their ears and lips sounds of English, they are dead pleased with themselves - they are communicating!

At CELT, they have a name and a face again and the teachers are genuinely interested in helping them learn! This is a novelty for most of them - people who came in persecuted and risked their lives to get out of their country only to find themselves in a city which has become harsh and unfriendly to such as they.

We would like to thank Oxford University Press very warmly, and especially Mrs. Agapi Tsiakiri who responded to the request for free coursebooks with lightning speed, and donated Headway Beginners to ALL the learners in the group. The learners themselves sent her a collaborative letter of thanks - writing three or four words each - their first real letter in English!

The second free class is a pre-intermediate group of adults most of them Greek but with a few students from Afghanistan as well. More on them on the next issue of this newsletter.

Top

COLLABORATIVE TEACHING PROJECT AT CELT
A very interesting collaborative teaching project is under way with the two free classes being taught by  a variety of teachers both from our current DELTA courses as well as for current and past Certificate in TEFL courses. Different teachers have taken on the teaching of these classes on different days - and more and more students are coming in to do peer observations, or Practice teach these groups themselves. A web based syllabus has given everyone the opportunity to watch what is happening, to share out ideas, materials and even lesson plans!

It has also been a great pleasure to watch teachers who are new in the field of TEFL hold their own against their more experienced colleagues attending DELTA courses! Some excellent lessons have been delivered by these trainees and some lesson plans worthy of diploma level work have been produced and shared out!

BBC LANGUAGE LEARNING ON SITE ON GREECE
The following message was recently received at CELT and here it is for you to share amongst your learners who might be motivated to do some writing to be published on the BBC web site or to pass on to colleagues who are planning to organise some class projects.

Top

MODERN GREEK SUMMER COURSES AT CELT ATHENS
And since we have been thinking of Greece and talking about language learning, do remember that this summer, CELT Athens will be once more offering intensive Modern Greek summer classes. If you are an English native speaker teacher and would like to begin or develop your Greek, what better place to come to than CELT Athens so that you can experience the methods you have learnt about first hand! Click here to view course levels and dates.

SPRING & SUMMER COURSE DATES
I am resposting the dates for forthcoming courses as there were a couple of small mistakes in the previous chart which some of you may have received via e-mail.                                 

PT=part time  FT=full time/intensive;  all full time courses run Monday-Friday except for the off-site TKT course at the end of August running Monday-Sunday.

WHERE ARE THEY NOW - PROFILE OF THE MONTH

Michael Vince - ex colleague at CELT  - Macmillan ELT  Author

Michael is, of course, a very familiar face in Greek ELT. He lived and worked in Athens for many years, first for the British Council and later for CELT. Many of our past trainees will remember him as a tutor on the RSA Diploma courses and many more from the courses we ran for the PALSO federation - one in Kalamata, and two more in Athens - attended by more than 150 foreign language school owners and their teachers. Then, he turned ELT author, first for Heinemann ELT now Macmillan ELT.

Michael is now already a well established and extremely well-known author and has a lot of publications to show how seriously committed to ELT writing he has become. Many of you will have used Winner 1 &2, Highlight Intermediate and Upper Intermediate. His more recent publications include:

Smart  - Prospects  -  Elementary Language Practice - Intermediate Language Practice - First Certificate Language Practice - Advanced Language Practice

Michael now lives in Cambridge and travels all over the world to research and promote his books.

Recently he paid CELT the compliment of some good words to his son who wanted to train as a TEFL teacher, so we are delighted to have Alexander Vince currently attend our Certificate in TEFL course and here he is on the right, just as nice as his dad, keen to become a competent EFL professional, looking uncannily like Michael and sounding like Michael even more than Michael does. He, too, like all the other members of the course he is attending, will soon be looking for work in a foreign language centre interested in trained and very talented TEFL teachers!