After receiving your completed pre-interview task answers, you will be required to attend an interview with one of the course tutors.
If unable to attend a face-to-face, Skype or Zoom interview.
MESSENGERS & SKYPE
It is sometimes much more convenient (and economical for the candidate) to be interviewed via MSN messenger or Skype using voice and a webcam. Telephone conversations are fine but being able to have face contact with your interviewer may alleviate a lot of anxiety.
This is a much better solution because it is always more confortable and useful, for both interviewer and interviewee, to be able to see each other.
QUESTIONS YOU WILL BE ASKED
Different centres follow different scenarios in their interviews but what they need to find out about you during the interview is not just what you have written in your application form or CV.
Your interviewer may wish to doublecheck all or some of the following - whether you are a native or non-native speaker of English:
- that your knowledge of grammar and vocabulary is in place
- that your spoken English is at a high enough level
- that you have good personal communication skills
- that you have an awareness of the demands of the course
- that you are not going through a difficult time in your life which might prevent you from being successful on the course
- that you are open to learning and amenable to criticism as the course is high on critique of one's teaching
- that you are well-organised and disciplined
- that you do not have any biases which might prevent you from offering equal opportunities to your learners
Your interviewer - who will usually be a CELTA tutor - will also give you a lot of information about the course, the number of assignments, teaching practices, about the workload and the resources available. Feel free to ask any questions which will help you understand how to organise your study time so that you can maximise your chances of success.
At some point during the interview, some centres might also ask you to do a quick writing task - something related to language or teaching which should take no longer than 10-15 minutes. This might be done in order to see if you can express yourself clearly, correctly and fluently when you have to write under pressure as some centres will not time you while doing the pre-interview task.
Above all, the interviewer will want to see if you
- are aware that teaching is a demanding profession,
- have very high or very low expectations of yourself,
- have the kind of personality that will allow you work well with others in your group (trainees collaborate in Teaching Practice groups)
- have an understanding of what it takes to be a teacher.
So, all in all, being accepted on a CELTA course can be a great thing but if you are not accepted, this will usually be done because the interviewer believes that at this particular stage, your chances of being a successful candidate are not very high - which not a bad thing, as following a CELTA course involves a great commitment of time, money and personal work during course hours and after hours too!
Having an idea of what it is that centres look for may help you prepare better and be accepted next time round.
Comments (1)
Marisa Constantinides said
at 12:34 pm on Sep 6, 2020
So is that all the pre-interview tasks aim to do?
Over and above mere language assessment, this task/series of tasks aims to serve another purpose which will be useful to the course provider when it is time to make a decision whether candidate A is more likely to do well on a CELTA course than candidate B.
We do also want to know something about how you learnt languages, your expressed or unexpressed philosophy of what makes a good teacher, your ability to work with other people, your self-esteem and many other personality traits, as much as is, of course, possible to understand in one hour of a candidate's time.
Your learning background, your language learning background and your experiences of teaching so far are all things that will be major influences in how you process content on your course, how open you are to criticism and much more which, in reality, would take a full on personality quiz to identify properly!!
Perhaps this might be a topic for a future blog post.
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