My Anki flashcard decks for the Trinity DipTESOL and Cambridge DELTA

I rebuilt the flashcard decks that got me through my DipTESOL.

I’ve made something, and I’d like to give it away.

If you read this newsletter, you’re probably either teaching, training, or somewhere in the thick of a Dip or a DELTA. You’ve stuck around through a lot of posts about methodology and classroom craft, and after doing this for as long as I have, I wanted to give something back. So here it is: a set of flashcard decks for the Trinity DipTESOL and the Cambridge DELTA, free to anyone who wants them.

A bit of history. I built the first version of these about fifteen years ago, while studying for my own DipTESOL, because nothing purpose-built existed and I needed the terminology to actually stay in my head. They did their job. They carried me through the Dip, then a Master’s, helping me to remember and use concepts.

I came across the old deck recently and decided to do upgrade it properly. I checked it against the current syllabus, added hundreds of cards, updated hundreds more, re-sourced the lot, and extended it to cover DELTA as well. When I finished, I considered selling it, but decided to offer it on a ‘pay what you want’ model - and that includes free.

What you’re getting

Two Anki decks, one download. The DipTESOL deck has 1,100+ cards organised into the five Trinity units. The DELTA deck has 1,120+ cards organised by Cambridge module. They overlap heavily, so if you take both you get one combined body of around 1,120 unique cards rather than double.

Every card was built and audited by hand, one clear question at a time, and properly sourced from the standard bibliography - Parrott, Swan, Yule, Carter & McCarthy, Quirk, and the rest. There are even image occlusion cards for phonology, so the place of articulation finally sticks.

Who I’m hoping it reaches

Mostly I hope it helps the people already studying a Dip or a DELTA, since that’s who it was built for and who feels the pain most.

But it’s wider than that. If you’re thinking about studying for one of these qualifications and want to see the shape of the knowledge before you commit, the deck is a fair map of the territory. And if you’re not doing either, but you want to keep your own terminology sharp as ongoing CPD, you’ll get good use out of it too. The core knowledge here is just good teaching knowledge.

One thing worth saying about how to use them

These decks are for remembering what you’ve already studied, not for learning it cold. Spaced repetition only works once you genuinely understand the material - the cards keep it retrievable, they don’t teach it from scratch. So read the source, understand the concept, then let the deck help you remember it. Study first, drill second.

And if you’ve never used Anki, start now

A quick word for the uninitiated, because this is worth it even if you never touch my decks.

Anki is a free flashcard app, but that undersells it. The clever part is that it decides when you review, not you. It schedules each card to come back just before you’d otherwise forget it, then stretches the gap wider every time you get it right. A card you find easy might vanish for weeks. One you keep fumbling turns up again tomorrow. It runs on desktop, Android, and the web for free, with a one-off cost on iPhone and iPad, and it syncs across all of them.

What this means in practice is that you stop wasting time. You’re not re-reading the things you already know, and you’re not letting the hard things quietly slip away until the week before an exam. You spend your effort only on what you’re about to lose.

Honestly, I’d recommend Anki to any teacher for anything you want to remember long-term - vocabulary in a language you’re learning, the framework you read about last month and have already half-forgotten. Once it clicks, you wonder how you managed without it. See here for a simple setup guide.

Take it, and pass it on

It’s pay what you want, including free. If it saves you hours and you’d like to throw something in the pot, lovely. If you’re skint and studying, take it for nothing with my blessing. Either way you get the full decks.

And please do share it. Send it to your study group, your colleagues, the person on your course who’s drowning in the reading list. There’s almost nothing built for these qualifications, and I’d far rather it got passed around than sat in a drawer.

That’s it. Fifteen years in the making, and it’s yours. I hope it helps.

Good luck with your studies!

Dave (the BarefootTEFLteacher)

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