Cambridge CELTA Written Assignments Evaluation
Assignment 3-Language Skills Related Tasks

1. This article deals with a topic that it is easy to relate to because we all have had experiences in which we have lost something valuable be it money, jewellery, etc. and these personal experiences can provide material that the students can use when working on follow-up tasks. This is an authentic text that we can use to develop students' reading skills because it contains real language that is challenging enough, but not too difficult for intermediate ESL learners to understand and therefore it will not cause student's demoralization at the time of reading (Harmer J, The Practice of English Language Teacher, p 185-187).
2. For a lead-in, I would show pictures of jewellery to the students, ask them to imagine that is theirs and to discuss with a partner where in their house they would store it to keep it safe. Before all reading tasks, we should always have a lead-in activity because "We will not get students to interact properly with spoken or written material unless we ensure that their desire to read or listen has been awakened" (Harmer, The Practice of English Language, 1991, pp. 188-189).
3. I think these are the lexical items that would be necessary to pre-teach:
Scour
Stash
Burgled
Split
Lying around
Triggered
Panicked Ring up

Rubbish tip
Metal detector
Trash
Mates
Will ya
Shut up

4. To provide students with practice in skimming, I would tell the students that they are going to read an article about an Australian couple that had collected pieces of jewellery that were worth lots of money. I would ask them to make predictions writing down their answers to these two questions (one minute):
a) Where do you think they kept their jewellery?
b) What do you think happened with the jewellery?
Then, they will read the text (two minutes) and check