Trinity Dip TESOL v Cambridge DELTA. Which should I choose? Part 2.
Opportunities for development in the assessed teaching components
Potential employers and candidates alike place great emphasis on the practical teaching components of diploma courses. Before you embark on one, it’s worth taking a close look at how your teaching will be assessed and what opportunities for development there will be.
“ We each have over a decade’s-worth of training experience on both Cambridge Delta and Trinity Dip courses, so the choice to run one over the other was just that - a choice”
Why we chose the Trinity Dip TESOL over the Delta.
It’s not uncommon on social media to see arguments cropping up saying one is better than the other, or that what you should really be doing is a Master’s. It’s equally common to find that many of the people posting support whichever qualification they took or know most about.
Here at Dublin TEFL we have experience working on various teacher training programmes at both certificate and diploma level. Our choice to run the Trinity Dip over a Cambridge Delta comes down to three key areas where we think the Trinity qualification has the edge:
Opportunities for development in the teaching component.
Opportunities for independent research and development.
Opportunities for professional and career-related development.
In this post, we’ll be focussing on the first of these.
Dip v Delta: the Teaching Component Side by Side
Click on image for your handy pdf.
Different modes of assessment: time spent writing essays
First let’s take the written assessment v oral assessment aspect.
One of the big areas that can cause stress to candidates on a Delta course is the background essay writing. Each lesson has a background essay as its starting point. Champions of this aspect might point to the depth of understanding you can gain by focussing closely on a sub-area of language in written mode. It’s true, this can be a big benefit for many candidates. The danger is, however, that it can lead to a somewhat atomistic view of language and skills, with little scope to investigate how integration of skills might work.
“I’ve had many instances of Delta candidates really appreciating the time spent clarifying what ‘counts’ as speaking skills and what as spoken discourse. And the necessary guidance on how they must be really careful to only write about one or the other depending on their essay focus.
In the real-world, when developing someone’s speaking ability you have to consider both, and you should really be looking at how the system supports the skill and vice-versa.”
Shaun. Delta and Dip Tutor.
On a Trinity Dip, you don’t need to write background essays, so time-wise, you can focus on other aspects of your course and your development. It’s probably worth noting here that lesson plans are not short documents, and your planning choices do need to be fully rationalised and supported with reference to the background literature and principles of good learning and teaching. On the Dip you will also have the opportunity to discuss your lesson with the observer before and after the lesson. These discussions are assessed - you will be expected to cite evidence to support any points you make.
What’s the better starting point for a lesson: the learners or a theoretical essay?
Yes, we know it’s a loaded question. Your Dip lessons should start with a profile of the learners first and foremost. Then consideration of their needs and any language and skills development that would be beneficial for them.
On the other hand, Delta lessons start with a theoretical background essay looking at say relative clauses, expressing hypotheticality and will then attempt to locate that need in the learner group. This can be done, of course, and if you pick a good centre then a skilled tutor will be on hand to help you do so. At the same time, remember that the areas focussed on in the 4 essays (and hence in the 4 lessons) must be 2 x systems, 1 x receptive skill, and 1 x productive skill. What if your learners tell you that they really need to develop their speaking - could you do an essay/lesson on spoken discourse and one on speaking skills? No. One speaking lesson. That’s it.
What about planning a series of lessons for this group? Could you perhaps devise a task-based syllabus based on productive speaking tasks and work on emerging language (both grammar and lexis) in the language focus stage of your lessons? This would be quite hard to do on a Delta course without falling foul of the rules which require skills and systems to be separated out and looked at individually. On a Dip, devising such a syllabus would be much easier.
We’ve just finished the first block of part-time teaching practice where the teachers devised a task-based syllabus working back from target tasks the learners wanted to be able to perform. The majority of the lessons the teachers created were based around productive tasks they had ‘test-driven’ in order to have a possible/likely language focus prepared on their plan. In this way they were prepared to respond and react to the language emerging in the lessons. Most lessons had a mixture of grammatical and lexical components as a main focus, and all had an integrated phonological component.
Student response has been very positive. They can really see their needs being catered for. I’d struggle to provide the students with a similar experience if their teachers were taking a Delta course. It just seems much closer to the kind of teaching we do in real life.
Delta Background Essays: Tutor time
On the other side of the fence, the support in writing and the subsequent marking of background essays can take up a disproportionately large amount of tutor time on a Delta course. Many are the intensive courses we’ve worked on where everyone is stressed and up late into the night - teachers writing and submitting essays, and tutors marking and giving feedback on the same.
When I was writing the Blended Delta course for IH Barcelona, the tutor costings were one of the trickiest areas. To be fair to tutors on a course and ensure they’re not working for an hourly rate below minimum wage, you have to dedicate a good number of hours to the marking of LSAs.
From a course design perspective, this leaves precious little time in the hours ‘budget’ for anything else.
Emma. Co-director Dip TESOL
Feedback and development of teaching.
Feedback on your teaching is a big component of both the Dip and the Delta. It’s usually the area most candidates look for first when they decide to embark on a course. We can draw some useful parallels with teaching here - when we give formative feedback to our students it’s best when they have an opportunity to act on that feedback. If they can integrate new language and corrections into their output in later tasks and lessons, we’re doing a good job and we’ll all notice improvement and development.
Teacher training courses attempt to do a similar thing. Assessment of teaching on both Trinity and Cambridge schemes is portfolio-based, and so should somewhat blur the lines between formative assessment, to help you improve and summative assessment, which gives you a grade. You’re observed, you’re given feedback and then you can implement this in future lessons. From our point of view, the Dip has 2 distinct advantages here - firstly, there’s an extra assessed lesson in your portfolio, so there’s more opportunity to develop. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, you are able to revisit key areas of your practice on the Dip in a way that the Delta scheme does not allow for. For example, you’re new to skills development since most of your teaching has thus far been very grammar & lexis-based. You discover a whole new way to teach listening. You want to experiment with this and maybe teach more than one assessed lesson looking at how to improve listening skills - working on key points from tutor feedback in your later lesson(s). On a Dip this is possible. You do need to show a balance in your portfolio - 5 listening lessons is not OK - but you can integrate listening with other skills and include it as a key focus more than once. On a Delta, you can only teach an assessed lesson on ONE of the receptive skills ONCE. Likewise for grammar - on a Dip, you could include this in most of your lessons, on a Delta, once only. The same is true for any of the systems or skills. The summative feedback that you would receive on each lesson would be just that - summative. There would be little opportunity to integrate tutor comments in future lessons since you would have moved on to a different skill or system.
And so?
What this all adds up to, in our experience, is that Delta candidates can get a somewhat atomistic view and understanding of language and skills. It’s not uncommon for Delta candidates to say it took them a long time to ‘get’ the content of the course. On the other hand, Diploma candidates have had the opportunity to integrate skills and language work in individual lessons in a way that reflects common practice in their actual jobs. The ability to revisit areas and receive formative feedback to improve is also a key area where Diploma candidates have a better, more useful experience.
Look out for more forthcoming posts on why we chose to run the Dip rather than the Delta, based on our years of experience working on both schemes.
In part 3 we’ll look at how the Dip provides more opportunities for independent research and development.
To read more about the Dip we run at Dublin TEFL, click here.
To read more about the authors of this pots, joint course-directors and tutors on the Dip programme, click here.
