With less than a month to go before release of our level 3 TESOL course, I managed to persuade William to release a page early so I could share it with you and give you a flavour of what to expect.

Designed to add another 2 modules (100 hours of study) onto the ACTDEC accredited level 2 course, our level 3 programme will provide in-depth analysis of English phonetics, phonology and linguistics. You’ll learn phonemic script, understand why different nationalities struggle with English pronunciation, how sounds are produced in the vocal tract, different approaches to teaching language, the importance of intonation, stress, language and power – and plenty more. We link out to some of the best audio and video around today to bring the course to life and illustrate key concepts.

Few TEFLers have an in-depth understanding of these concepts, as they aren't covered extensively at Level 2 or CELTA/Trinity Certificate level. So upon course release, you’ll have the chance to develop your knowledge by digging deeper into our language. You’ll also gain the prestigious ACTDEC TESOL level 3 certificate once the course has been accredited.

The course options if you are already a Global English student – or if you’re not yet

If you already hold a level 2 course with us, it will be really easy to upgrade to the level 3 by taking the additional 100 hour element. Similarly if you hold a 4 week CELTA or 5 week Trinity qualification or equivalent. Otherwise the level 3 course will be 250 hours in total to incorporate the full ACTDEC accredited syllabus.

Take a peek at a sample page

To see a sample page,click on the link at the top of this article to view an extract from the Phonetics and Phonology section.

Quiz - how is your knowledge of the English language?

So what do you know about the language already? You might surprise yourself:

1)      English is known as a stress-timed language. What does this mean?

2)      What is etymology? (not what Grissom did on CSI – which was entomology)

3)      The most common sound in the English language is the ‘schwa’ vowel sound as underlined in ‘sofa’  which occurs in unstressed (weak) syllables.

Which 2 words normally contain the schwa sound in their final syllable from the following:

banana                 courses                    sister                     sleazy                   

Answers are at the bottom of the page – with more detail in the level 3, of course....

The next step

We believe that informed teachers who continue to learn and develop their skills themselves make better professionals. It is at the heart of everything we do so we’re really excited about the level 3 release.

 If this is you, email us your interest and we’ll add you to our ‘early bird’ list to ensure you get to take advantage of the introductory discount when the course becomes available.

Enjoy.     /ɛnˈdʒɔɪ/

Answers to the quiz

1)      English is known as a stress-timed language. What does this mean?

This means that stress in a spoken sentence generally occurs at regular intervals and so we will ‘swallow’ some syllables in order to keep the rhythm. Since key words are stressed, we swallow the less important words or syllables. Here’s an example:

In ‘I like eating in the pub’ we spend longer and stress the key words ‘I/like/eat/pub’ and say quickly or swallow ‘ing/in/the’. This swallowing of words can make English difficult to follow for our learners.

French, by contrast it is syllable-timed, where each syllable occupies the same amount of time and is generally given equal weight. More on stress-timed language here http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/think/articles/english-sentence-stress

2)             What is etymology?

Answer: the study of the roots and history of words  

3)             The most common sound in the English language is the ‘schwa’ vowel sound as underlined in ‘sofa’,
/ˈsoʊ fə/, which occurs in unstressed (weak) syllables.

Which 2 words normally (although slightly depending on accent) contain the schwa sound in their final syllable from the following:

banana                               courses                                 sister                     sleazy  

Answer: banana and sister (we tend to say sistuh rather than sister)  

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