Job Discussion Forums

[KatyaGooner]

I asked this in the teacher training forum but as most of the Russia experts are here, I thought I'd ask here as well.

I know how most people feel about taking a teaching position at BKC in Moscow but what about studying for the DELTA? I'm thinking about doing this course in summer 2008. I know Russia and the Russian language pretty well, so I'm asking purely about quality of teaching, course content, general reputation of BKC as a DELTA provider, etc.

What do people think? Thanks.

[jonny_harman]

Hi Katya,

I just completed my DELTA through BKC-IH in 2007. I work for BKC in a freelance capacity, but not as a contract teacher nor as a senior teacher, so I'm in a fairly impartial position to offer a review.

I'd say, if you want to do DELTA through BKC, go for it. For a start, IH is only accredited to run the courses, but they're still 100% Cambridge. As such, the people who train you operate under Cambridge rules and regulations, and BKC really has little to do with it. They just help out with admin and that kind of thing (which they did very well in my opinion).

One or both of your trainers may come from the BKC teacher training department, but if they do, they're approved DELTA trainers and they know what they're doing. In my case, both of them came out from the UK and they were excellent. If you get Beth Grant or Mali, I fully recommend them. I was very impressed with the amount of time and work that they put into the candidates, which was far beyond what Cambridge pays them to do. I wasn't trained by Sue Collins, who may also be the trainer at BKC in Moscow, but I have met her quite a few times, she always left me with the best impression, and I have heard wonderful things from those who trained with her also. BKC-IH Moscow has an excellent team of trainers.

So, the quality of teaching and training was excellent. As far as I know, the course content is regulated by Cambridge, so I can't imagine that it differs very much from school to school. However, the programme we followed seemed perfectly sensible to me. They placed a lot of emphasis on what we would need to know to pass the exam, but we were also given input according to what might help us with coming assignments. I thought it was quite a good idea that we got a lot of the theory out of the way in the first five or six weeks so that we could have time just for exam practice (and for preparing for the final externally assessed lesson observation) in the last weeks.

As far as I know, BKC-IH Moscow has a good reputation as a DELTA provider. That's why I went through them.

If you're planning to go through BKC, they normally only run the DELTA once every two years, which means that you may have to wait till mid-2009 for the next one (but check with the school about this).

Also, you probably already know this, but if you're serious about the DELTA, make sure that you do your homework before the course even starts. Before you even start the course, read and take notes from:

Scrivener
Harmer
Richards (Language Teaching Matrix)
Thornbury (all the books he's written that you can get your hands on)
Willis (Task Based Learning)
Lewis (about Lexical Approach)

BKC also has a list of material that is well worth reading (not so much books, but extracts from books).

I spent about three hours a day every day for four months reading all this stuff before the course started, and I found that it really helped. It was also very helpful that I had taken notes and references on everything interesting. Eg, whenever you read something interesting about (say) grammar (and I don't mean rules of the past perfect, etc, I mean actual bits of knowledge), make a note of what it is and where you can find it. When you read something about the Lexical Approach, make a note under that heading also. Other headings I found useful included all the skills (reading, writing, listening, speaking), all the major approaches and methods (eg, TBL, Lexical Approach, Audiolingualism, Communicative Approach, etc), vocabulary (very useful), discourse analysis (very interesting), vocabulary vs grammar (contrasting the two), language acquisition, course planning, and there are many more. I found all this extremely helpful when it came to writing my assignments, as it saved me from doing a lot of searching during the course. Basically, if you find yourself coming across various gems of knowledge that could be categorised together, write up a general heading and take notes and references. It helps for those assignments, and I think it also helped me to get more out of the course generally.

The DELTA is not one of those courses where you want to be spending most of your energy just figuring out what's going on. It's nice if you've already read most of what they can tell you, and in this way you can spend all your energies on writing the best essays and doing as well as you can with the observed lessons.

I hope this is what you wanted and that it helps.

All the best for 2008,

Jonny