Jordan and Israel | March 2012

View from the hostel roof in Amman

I went to Jordan for 10 days in March 2013, the last two days of which i spent in Jerusalem . I flew into Amman with my first night booked, and decided to plan the rest of my route when i arrived at the hostel. I stayed at the Jordan Tower Hostel which i can thoroughly recommend. It's run by some great staff and it's in a great location near some great street food vendors nearby where you can get a falafel for 25p and a meat shawarma for £1. I spent my first night planning the next few days and having a walk about the local area. On my second day i took a day trip to the dead sea with some other travellers, which was organised by the hostel. We paid to use the facilities of a hotel near the dead sea so we could use their showers and swimming pools after we went in the sea. It was a great experience to float about in the sea, getting the very salty water in my eyes wasn't fun, but it was easily washed out.

Getting muddy at the dead sea

Infinity pool at the dead sea

After arriving back from the dead sea i spent the night finding out the best way to get to Petra and Wadi Rum, i decided to get the bus early next morning to Petra. I decided to get a bus with JETT and got a taxi to their station for 6am, the bus was due to leave at 6:30am. After jumping out of the taxi I soon realised the bus was sold out so i had to quickly decide what to do. I got the taxi to drive to another bus station that had buses leaving later on. After arriving and chatting to some other people  we decided to get a large taxi together as it was pretty much the same price as a bus. The hostel i stayed at in Amman recommended i stayed at the Saba'a Hotel in Petra , which was a great hostel. This hostel is run by a very friendly couple who were always happy to help with any questions i had. It was about a ten minute walk from the hostel to the main entrance to Petra.

Petra was big, much bigger than i imagined it would be. I bought a two day pass which cost the equivalent of £48. It would've been hard to explore all of Petra within one day as there's a lot to see including a walk to the monastery which is an hour each way. There were some quiet spots to relax as well which i took advantage of to read and enjoy the view for a few hours.

Petra, Jordan

Petra

View from the monastery Petra 

After two days of exploring Petra i caught a bus to Wadi Rum. I booked a tour around to see the different rock formations, sand dunes and of course the camels. There was some amazing scenery here to see and it was great to sleep in the desert. Me and the others on the tour stayed in tents in a small camp. It was amazing to see the night sky lit up with stars and sleep in the silent desert.

Wadi Rum

Wadi Rum

Wadi Rum desert Panoramas

After two days in the desert i went to Aqaba and stayed in the Bedouin Garden Village just outside of the main town. They were fully booked but i managed to stay on their roof with a few cushions and a blanket. It was a good two days of relaxing by the pool. I then got a bus from Aqaba back to Amman where i was planning on spending my last two days.

 I went back to the hostel i originally stayed at when i arrived where i met another traveller at the hostel who was planning to go to Jerusalem for two days. I decided to make the most of my last few days and decided to head to Israel. It was a long journey across the border but it was worth it. We stayed in the Abraham hostel which was yet another great hostel. We spent the first day on a free walking tour of Jerusalem seeing the sights with a great tour guide and spent the night at a very busy street party. The next day we rented a car with two other travellers we met in the hostel and drove to the Dead sea on the Israeli side. We spent the day at the beach, then me and Hannah got dropped of at the crossing to Jordan by the other two travellers. 

Hannah, the girl i went to Jerusalem with left the next day so i had one day to relax and enjoy the sun before heading home.

Praying Jewish man at the Western Wall

Teaching English in Casablanca, Morocco : 1st – 30th August 2013

The organisation i volunteered with are called CSM (www.csmmorocco.org). CSM offer a range of volunteering opportunities primarily teaching English and French and also an environmental program. I signed up for the program through ICYE (http://www.icye.org.uk/) in the UK, which cost £850, which included some pre departure training,  the flights,insurance, accommodation with the host family and meals each day. 

In August 2013 I spent a month volunteering in Casablanca, Morocco. I taught English to some great Moroccan students, I had 2 classes each day, which lasted 2 hours each, between 8 – 12 in the morning, giving the volunteers the rest of the day to do what we wanted. We covered vocabulary and a range of grammar to help the students improve their English speaking ability. There where six of us teaching english at this project, each working individually with different classes.

Some of the younger students at the school

Me with my 8-10am class

Me with my 10-12pm class

I stayed with a host family in a great suburb of Casablanca; the area was full of little cafes and lots of places to eat. The area had lots of families and there was always children playing in the street. The host family I stayed with were extremely welcoming. Three of the brothers that I stayed with were involved with CSM and helped in the running of the project, signing up students and making sure everything ran smoothly.

Staying with a host family i sometimes got some extra guests wandering into my room.

My room for the month, shared with one of the brothers in the house.

CSM organised trips each weekend to show us a wide range of what Morocco has to offer, we spent one weekend in the city of El Jadida relaxing on the beaches and staying in a nice apartment together. We spent one weekend exploring the souks of Marrakech staying in a hostel with it’s own pool and we spent the final weekend at the aquapark and the beach in Casablanca.

The majority of the students really engaged in the classes and had a great interest in improving their English communication skills. For anyone interested in the program I would suggest taking a book such as English Grammar in Use , as each day after we taught we gave the people running our project a few pages to photocopy for the next day, and having a book to get teaching ideas and topics from can make the experience a lot easier. Some days I just had notes written down and worked the class around a grammar point, or covered a few pieces of functional language or vocabulary.

On the last day the best three students from each class were awarded a certificate 

I would suggest people thinking of applying to the program do some research on teaching methods and have a look at some teaching materials before departing (If you haven't taught before, or had any training). What you teach is entirely up to you, and you have to plan everything you want to teach yourself and as there is no training so you need to have some idea how to teach before you arrive, as you get straight into teaching within the first few days.

I would recommend the program to anyone who wants to get a taste of what teaching English as a foreign language is like, and anyone wanting to experience another culture at the same time.

Jemaa el fna square at night, Marrakech

A souk in Marrakech

CELTA - Assignments guide

Assignments

You get two submissions for each assignment so if you fail the first time you submit you have extra time to fix any errors or add anything you missed. The course tutors will tell you exactly what you need to change for the resubmission.    For each assignment there is a submission deadline, if you don't submit on time that counts as your resubmission used so you only have one chance to pass. Knowing that, even if you've only written half the assignment by the deadline it's better to submit as you'll get advise on exactly what else you need to include, and feedback on what you've written so far.

There is a 4500 maximum word limit for all four assignments combined. Each assignment should be between 750-1000 words with the maximum word limit being 1500 for any one assignment.

1 - Language related tasks 

The first assignment i did was analysing four sentences (one of which was a phrasal verb). Each of the sentences needed the following covered:

- Meaning/use : explaining when the sentence is used e.g talking about a future event, talking about an event that happened regularly in the past.

- context for presentation: Showing how you would present the structure, such as using the sentence in an example sentence and using a timeline.

- concept checking questions : What questions would you ask the students to check the understand. The questions shouldn't be the sentence rephrased as that's giving them the answer so they still might not understand. e.g for the sentence "she used to drive to work" i wrote the following questions :

Did she drive to work? (yes) More than once? (yes) Does she drive to work now ? (no).

A timeline can also be included in this section of the analyis to check they understand. I said i would draw a timeline on the board and ask the student if she used to drive to work can you mark when that was.

The multiple stars show the event happened multiple times in the past.

- Form : This is breaking down the structure into the different parts of speech such as nouns, verbs, adverbs etc. E.g Subject (Third person singular pronoun) + Used + Infinitive OR article + subject + verb.

- Phonology : This is showing the sentence using the phonetic script. There are multiple ways of doing this including:

- Using a dictionary to get the phonemes for each word.
- Using the british council chart online (Click here to view)
- Using an online translator, i would still advise checking the script afterwards as it might not be 100% accurate. (Click here to view)

- The phonemes can be typed using an online phonetic typewriter and copied into a word document, or if you are writting the assignments by hand you can just copy them. (Click here to view)

- Potential problems with form/meaning/use: Explaining any issues learners may have with the structure such as pronunciation, confusion with similar words. False friends (the word may be similar to one in their own language, but have a different meaning)

2- Focus on the learner 

coming soon...