Language Awareness
What is the Language Awareness course?
Our Language Awareness course aims to give you a feeling of confidence before starting your Trinity Certificate in TESOL, so that when you start teaching, you’ll be better equipped to deal with students’ questions and support them in their learning.
The course has been designed to give you a basic, but thorough, introduction to different aspects of English grammar and provides plenty of further resources for those who feel they would like even more preparation before stepping into the classroom. It also introduces you to the International Phonemic Alphabet (IPA), which is widely used in dictionaries and coursebooks throughout the profession. Furthermore, the course guides you through some of the more common features of English speech.
About the course
Grammar modules
Parts of speech
Positive, negative and interrogative forms
Timelines
Verb types and modal verbs
Conditional
Reported speech
The passive voice
Functional language
Phonology modules
Word stress
Individual sounds
Sentence stress
Intonation
Connected speech and weak forms
Lexis module
Key terms
The Language Awareness course - your questions
We originally developed this course for our CertTESOL trainees to give them more confidence before starting their qualification. However, the course is open to anyone who wants to improve their basic knowledge of English grammar and phonology.
In the past, many trainees whose speak English as their first language have been apprehensive of this aspect of teaching English, as the metalanguage (verb, adjective, present perfect) isn't taught when they learn at school. Given the intensity of the Trinity CertTESOL course, we wanted to provide a space for trainees to improve their understanding of the English language before they had to start teaching others.
The course is divided into modules for you to work through at your own pace. We estimate it will take about 20 hours to complete the content, although some people may find certain aspects of it easier than others.
The course in itself isn't graded and there also isn't any tutor interaction, although we are available to help with any queries.
However, the content of the Language Awareness course covers most of what you can expect to see in the Unit 2: Language Awareness exam, which is an assessed component of the Trinity Certificate in TESOL.
No. When you pay the deposit for your Trinity Certificate in TESOL course, you'll be given access to the platform to start the course. We recommend finishing the Language Awareness course before the Trinity CertTESOL starts, as it will be quite intense once you start with teaching practice and completing the modular content of that course.
If you have already studied English in your own language learning, you may find that a lot of the grammar modules are familiar to you and you may even be familiar with IPA and features of English phonology which are covered in the course.
There's no obligation to complete the course, though we do recommend taking a look through the content in the run-up to the Unit 2: Language Awareness exam. There are revision sessions the week before the exam - but these are really there to remind you of what you've already learnt, rather than to introduce new concepts.
Absolutely! Contact us at training@activelanguage.net and we'll let you know how much the course costs and how to pay.
Why choose Active Language?
Although the course isn’t interactive, you’ll be hearing from Teresa, Lucy and Kate throughout the course in the presentations in each module and it’s nice to put a face to a voice!
