Input Sessions – Language Awareness

We have sessions on the main areas of grammar, lexis and phonology (the sound system of English) that you will need to know before you go into the classroom. Most course participants – especially the native English speakers – rate their prior grammatical knowledge as very low. In a way this may be correct – certainly people often can’t name and describe the meaning of tenses; they lack explicit knowledge.

In another way though, any competent speaker of a language must know the ‘rules’ at some  level, otherwise they would not be able to speak properly. They have implicit knowledge. A major aim of the Language Awareness section of the TEFL course is to help you begin to develop the insight and awareness of how you use language and be able to reflect on this as your primary source of language knowledge.

Just to be clear, we do not push any particular variety of English (North American, British or other) as being more correct than the others. English has a variety of accepted forms and we will focus on their commonalities and note some differences.