logo ELT Concourse teacher training: The Bridge
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Index to The Bridge

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What is The Bridge?

Bridges, as you are aware, are designed to allow people to get from one side to the other.
The Bridge on ELT Concourse is designed for two purposes:

  1. To fill the gap between initial training and diploma-level training.
  2. To provide a resource for people who want to know more about English and English Language Teaching but don't want to take a formal training course.

Copyright

You may not use this material for commercial purposes.  The material may be used with fee-paying learners of English but may not be used on fee-paying courses for teachers.  Small excerpts from materials, conventionally attributed, may be used on such courses but wholesale lifting of materials is explicitly forbidden.  There is, of course, no objection at all to providing fee-paying course participants with annotated links to materials anywhere on this site.  Indeed, that is welcomed.

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Who needs The Bridge?

If you are about to take, are taking or have taken an initial training course, you will be aware that such courses are initial.  That means they will equip you with some techniques and a few concepts but that they are not designed or intended to make you the complete English language teacher.
Officially, on their respective websites, the Trinity College CertTESOL, for example, is described as:
    an essential starting point
and the Cambridge Assessment English CELTA as
    an introductory course.

Of course, if you have been foolish enough to take one of the cheap (and not so cheap) non-recognised courses that infest the web, you'll also be aware that you are just at the beginning of your journey to proficiency.

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What's on The Bridge?

The contents of The Bridge are listed here.  There are some things to note:

  1. The units in the Bridge are only a starting point for courses such as the Cambridge Delta or the Trinity DipTESOL.  For more, you'll need follow the guides in the in-service training sections on this site.  Links to relevant guides appear in each unit of The Bridge.  The left-hand menu will also take you to areas of further interest and study.
  2. The units contain a little more than is in the guides in the initial-plus section of the site – those are designed for people who have not taken, are about to take, are taking or have very recently taken an initial training course.
    The assumption, throughout The Bridge units, is that you have covered the essentials of each area so, for example, you do not need to learn about basic word classes, what an auxiliary verb is or that a text is usually longer than a sentence and can be written or spoken.  If you find any area difficult or confusing, there are links in each unit to the essentials of the area.
  3. Only major ideas are covered on The Bridge so you will not find reference to some background theory or to more advanced areas of methodology or language analysis.  They are covered elsewhere.
  4. The units on The Bridge are training exercises so they contain quite a lot of tests and tasks to complete as you go along.  You can, of course, skip the tests and tasks and just work through the materials as you see fit – that's up to you – but you will learn a lot less and probably forget what you've seen.  One of the ways, theory has it, to move data from the short- to the long-term memory store is to rehearse, repeat and recycle.  That's what the exercises are for.
    When you see this symbol, take the test or do the task to see how you are getting on.
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  5. You can do the units in any order you like – that's up to you, too.
  6. The contents list is below.  More may appear from time to time.
Structure and Meaning Lexis and Meaning Texts and Meaning
Tense and aspect Modality Clause patterns Verbs Nouns Adjectives Deixis
Phrases Word order Conjunction Adverbials Prepositional phrases Determiners Cohesion vs. coherence

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