TEFL courses

[flyingcloud]

Hi there, can anyone recommend a good TEFL course than can be studied online/by distance?
TIA

Tbh no because any decent course will involve a practicum element. Cambridge are introducing an online version of the CELTA but if you really want to teach it's unlikely anyone will take you without either the CELTA or the Trinity TESOL certificate.

Online CELTA but no news on dates for introduction as far as I can see.

Will you be arranging your own practical element? Or are you an experienced teacher in another field?

Got to feed baby but will come back with some links for you.

Cambridge CELTA

Trinity TESOL

This is a really good website and the forums are full of very experienced TEFLers who will happily give you the benefit of their wisdom.

www.eltworld.net/

I did a 4 week CELTA course in Greece as that's where I wanted to teach at the time. I can only urge you to thoroughly research any courses you find. As frak said, CELTA and Trinity are the most widely accepted and valued qualifications and no school worth it's salt should accept a teacher with no practical teaching experience.

There is also the City & Guilds teaching Cert but you have to arrange your own teaching practice. I think I looked into that course and they like you to already hold a teaching post and it's aimed at giving existing practitioners a recognisable qualification. I don't know how widely it would accepted outside of the UK.

You should also know (if you don't already) that to teach in the public sector in the UK, you must be a qualified teacher, eg, BEd, PGCE, otherwise you can only teach in the private sector language schools. If you want to teach outside of the UK, then you'll be fine in language schools with a CELTA or Trinity certificate. It may also be worth doing a young learners qualification as well.

Good luck. I loved teaching TEFL and wished I could have continued to do so in the UK.

Thanks frak, was going to smoke you out, if you didn't find my thread!

No experience whatsoever, I am considering a career change and as I live abroad (in France) I thought this would be a good qualification to have. I am purely exploring options at the moment.

Ok so there is a practical element involved...

What else do I need to know?

Gallicgirl, thank you! I started to post and then got distracted cooking dd's supper.

Initially I would say explore your market. Depending where you live depends on what qualification would be needed. Talk to existing language schools if you can to see what they would look for. Also, approach your local schools to see if they would give you experience as a language assistant - just chatting to students in English rather than formal teaching.

Good advice above! I used to recruit and manage EFL teachers in a private language school in the UK. British Council Accredited schools should consider you qualified if you have taken a course such as the CELTA / Trinity cert mentioned above, which is externally validated (ie not just an in-house course), has a minimum of 100 hours input and has 6 hours of observed teaching practice. There are many expensive qualifications which are not recognised by good employers as they do not meet these criteria.

Some relevant experience, even if was just volunteering, would help you to find work, and will help you decide if this is the job for you before you spend the best part of a grand on a course.

The advice about researching your market is very important, eg will a YL (young learners) element be important where you're going to teach, or are you likely to be teaching business, EAP, ESOL etc. This can vary a lot from city to city as well as between countries.Good luck - it's a great job!

As you probably know it depends where/what you want to teach in France. A specialist language school will probably want a CELTA for a base, private business lessons where you go into companies will want that plus experience of a specific area (could be a sector like banking or a particular job like HR), however some have their own training programme. That's fine if you only ever want to teach for them but Inlingua's programme means nothing to anyone else. Teaching children it depends on the company - someone like Les Petits Bilingues who want to control every aspect and treat you like a human tape machine won't care but equally they're not reputedly great to work for.

You can't teach within the state sector without training as a teacher and even getting into schools is tough without being an official language assistant. I offered to do mock orals for a friend's lycée class - it was a lovely theory but the bureaucracy involved was ridiculous and I work for the education national in any case..

Private tuition will be purely on the basis of you being a native speaker, bonus points for having a degree from a prestigious anglophone university. In fact you probably would find a job without doing any qualification whatsoever if you have native speaker plus business experience/aptitude for working with children, but if you're going to train (and if you're making a career out of it then better to get good habits from the start) then go for one of the recognised certificates.

flyingcloud....apart from agreeing with what everyone else has said, if you are somewhere with a fair smattering of language schools, they will probably snaffle you up at least for odds and ends on the simple basis of you being a native speaker.
There would certainly be no harm in offering yourself to them...I've known schools recruit Sth African barmen and a "girl from Cambridge, the students will like that, Cambridge"
But yes, do get a valid qualification if you want a hope of decent money and/or prospects.

Thanks all, clearly I have to research a lot before I do anything. I really had no clue about this before I posted. However you all are very positive about it. We may be moving soon (to another part of France) which may mean I have to give up my job, and that was part of my reasoning.

Another good start (and a way of being able to say you have some experience)is helping kids with their homework.....here we have people even with just a smattering ofEnglish advertising themselves to "help with homework" especially with kids 11-18.

The other thing I would add is you do have to have a good understanding of grammar. It's not enough to get by on being a native English speaker.

If you want to PM your email address to me, I can send you a couple of documents which will give you an idea of what you will need to learn.