From today’s The Independent*
‘“Culturally, China is so different from the UK or any other western country,” says Sarah Wilson, training consultant at Cactus Tefl, which offers tired and pointless comments about TEFL to any newspaper that they publish their adverts in’ (more…)
“Our profession is notorious for exploiting its most valuable asset – language teachers – for financial gain. I remember a teacher recalling taking a summer job where he and his fellow teachers struggled to teach competently in a school with sub-standard facilities and scant resources. He had a vivid memory of the owner arriving in a Rolls Royce and announcing that further cost-cutting measures were necessary. I think that says it all.”
Sounds like TEFLtrade is back on the case… (more…)
Hi, I’ve just read your DELTA experiences and wondered if you could advise me on the best course to take. I’ve been teaching for 12 years (PGCE and Degree in English) - 6 years in Comprehensives in the UK and 6 years in France at a Lycée and University. I’m now back in the UK teaching in a Comp and want to get back into TAL or TEFL……which type of course would you recommend? I’ve been told there are 4 possibilities:
RSA Trinity
CELTA
DELTA
MEd TESOL
I’m going to be in the UK for the next 5 years so I would be teaching here rather than abroad.
Thanks,
Diane
———————-
Any advice for Diane anyone?
Noticing that two of my three nominations for TEFL bad boy of the century have been involved in selling 4 week TEFL courses of limited career worth has made me wonder whether the whole non-CELTA non-Trinity lot of them have been nothing but another nail in the coffin of TEFL being taken seriously. I have motivations for wanting to think otherwise as I did send 100 or so people out into the world to end up cursing themselves, me or the course provider when some of them were inevitably told “We don’t care what your training consisted of, we only accept Cambridge Certs.”
The other disadvantages of the plethora of “equivalent” courses individually are well known, and can probably best be understood as the TEFL equivalent of knock off DVDs-usually cheaper, usually inferior quality to some extent, sometimes nothing like what you thought you were getting. Like pirate DVDs, though, collectively their effect on the whole industry is mainly to stop the “legitimate” providers getting up themselves and charging what they like.
Here some examples of the ways I have seen the changes in the market as a positive response to a bit of law of the jungle capitalist competition:
-More CELTA and Trinity courses available in cheaper countries,something that was lead by other course providers-and in fact quite a few of the ones which are Trinity now started off as such
-More additional services like airport pickup, lifetime job seeking help, accommodation etc
-Advertising in more unconvential places, ie not just the Guardian
- A healthy scepticism about 4 week courses in general-mainly prompted by the seedier, but also keeping C and T on their toes and always having to justify the quality of their courses
-Cambridge has been forced to keep the CELTA as a stand alone practical teaching qualification, whereas their own professional and commercial logic might have allowed them to jump on every trendy methodology or convert the CELTA into an intro to the DELTA
- The fact that the majority of course providers have settled on 4 weeks as the standard (hugely better than two weeks, at which point trainees have usually improved their standard of lessons little if at all, and not much worse than even 8 weeks, at which point trainees have long passed saturation point ). This has provided the idea of a month practical teaching course as an alternative to an (often impractical) 1 year MA with a legitimacy it wouldn’t have had if it was C and T
- The fact that C and T can point at being better than certain dodgy operators takes away the emphasis on being worse than a PGCE
It occurs to me that I’m having it both ways a bit here, but what are blogs for if not thinking aloud… Any other answers to the original question to help me sort my logic out anyone?
“In order to teach English in a private language school you need to be able to speak English fluently and have a certificate from either Trinity or RSA CELTA. These courses are around 4 weeks long and can even be completed online.”
You can’t do much reading about TEFL on the Net without coming across stories of dodgy geezers and their nasty little business schemes, and then you can’t read much more without coming across the nasty little TEFL teachers with their dodgy feuds- and then all kinds of mental confusion breaks out. Who can you believe in the TEFL world? The answer is simple- me!
Joking aside, I’ve been trawling through hundreds of posts about TEFL ripoffs and DoSs with personality problems over the last 12 months and although I remain sceptical about most of the claims made on such forums, there are three people/ organisations that I get a particularly bad vibe about. As what I’m doing is trying to judge someone’s personality through the internet, it is obviously subjective- and if you don’t trust my opinion on most things, then of course please ignore me here too. Still, here is my opinion for what it is worth. If it was me, I would avoid these three:
Paul Lowe’s Windsor TEFL/ Windsor Schools
Mark Smith’s Smith Schools of English Japan
Bruce Veldhuisen’s TEFL International
My criteria for inclusion is simple and beyond reproach, I think you will find. The evidence I have on their business dealings is limited but they strike me as three examples of the less pleasant kinds of people that TEFL occassionally attracts. I’ve met a few unpleasant characters, and the usual pattern is that if you catch them on a good day and they need something from you, you might be charmed. If you have no dealings with them and a good person who has got trapped in their web is the person you deal with you might have a good experience. Get on the wrong side of them, though, and you will find yourself a victim of every vindicitve and manipulative tactic known to man, with the idea that there is a line they shouldn’t step over in order to get their way not popping into their heads. Paul has shown on this site that he is exactly like that. People who have had direct communications with Mark Smith that I trust have told me that he is even worse. I don’t know how involved Bruce is in the day to day running of TEFL International, but someone’s ambition is making them step over the line of what I would call gentlemanly business practices.
Which leads me onto my philosophy of TEFL life. The system to have a good time in TEFL and not give more influence to the bad guys is simple- find nice people, avoid nasty ones. It’s worked for me- made me choose Spain, Italy, and Japan rather than Austria and Switzerland (though my nicest students ever were from Columbia, where I haven’t been yet), made me get out of DoSing and teacher training and back into the classroom, etc etc. So far, it’s worked- or not worked, depending on whether not being bitter is turning into a TEFL blogger handicap or not…
As I said, take several large salt mines when reading about any TEFL dodgy dealings, especially as many people have been known to place false information (both good and, for some strange reason, bad) about themselves on such sites, but here are some links anyway:
The TEFLtradesman on TEFL International
The TEFL Blacklist on Smith’s School of English
Usingenglish on Smith’s School of English
The case for the prosecution starts with exhibit A, Intelligent Business, the newish series of textbooks from Longman.
First, a mea culpa. At first glance Intelligent Business seemed like such a good concept that I recommended it to my school-a business series where the bits about marketing that are useless for accountants are left to another book where the teaching of business concepts are implicit for once,leaving the separate series of skills books to deal with the nitty gritty of telephoning etc.
Good concepts don’t cost publishers money, however, and the rest of the process was obviously done on the cheap- cheap production values, obvious skimping on proof reading and classroom testing, filling of page space with waffle and instructions etc etc.
And cost (and corner) cutting is not the only example of economics at play here- we also have The Economist magazine tie in, The Economist magazine being owned by Pearson, who also own the ELT publisher…(I’m sure you can guess). And then there is the classic having it both ways of designing it clearly for a market niche and then hiding that fact in the hope that people it is less suitable for will buy it and so make it a bestseller.Either I’m turning into the grumpy old man of TEFL well before my time or there really was a halcyon time when the evil magic of the ELT publishers’ marketing departments was not so strong.
I’m not suggesting that the advent of real market forces in ELT publishing in the UK has entirely been a bad thing. The publishers have at least started producing materials suitable for the budgets and abilities of real schools, teachers and students. One good example of this is the Oxford Basics series, where we can perhaps forgive the proofreading and other basic errors pointed out in a recent MET review because the budgetary restraints that probably caused those problems seem to have resulted in a book that is much more accessible for the real world than the stuff the big boys produced until a few years ago.
So, no real answer to my question so far I’m afraid, but at least that proves that the post title was a real question and not a lead in to a slagging off I guess… We can all see if things get a bit clearer in Part Two, in which I will list things that have got better and worse over the last few years.
According to an article today in the Korea Times, of the 10,000 people who applied for the 70 new recruit jobs available in the Korea Exchange Bank this year, “Twenty-nine applicants scored full marks in TOEIC, and 1,086 scored over 900 points.” 900 points is impressive, but a perfect score is something a native speaker would rarely achieve- although due to your attention wandering for a second during the listenings (which you get to hear once only) or a pen slipping into the wrong multiple choice box rather than to obscure grammar questions, which TOEIC doesn’t have.
Although I’ve had a poke at people comparing countries by TOEIC score before, here goes with my attempt. I can confidently predict that no job in Japan ever had 29 people with perfect TOEIC scores apply for it, and it has nothing to do with the differences in education systems (not sure what they could be anyway- not enough beatings in Japanese schools?) and all to do with motivation. In Japan, no one needs a perfect TOEIC score, and as the supply of graduates shrinks as the population shrinks and the remaining motivation of the post-post-post war generation to make their lives even more comfortable dies away, the world can globalize all it likes without affecting English language learning in Japan one little bit.
In other TOEIC News, ETS are looking for raters for the TOEIC speaking test- they pay 15 dollars an hour but you need to be resident in the US and according to this Usingenglish forum thread it leaves a nasty virus on your computer. Odd if true…
And to finish with TOEIC (I only mean to finish with it on the blog, unfortunately, although to wipe it off the face of the earth would be better), a lovely TOEIC metaphor involving trees. Not something you hear everyday, and I don’t just mean the word “lovely” used on TEFLtastic without sarcastic intent…
In other TEFL news, something else you don’t hear everyday- a school in India is specifically looking to recruit an English teacher from Cumbria. Even dating ads in Japan don’t get that specific.
I’ve finally sorted out my links page which I totally messed up in my initial enthusiasm in the heady days of all of a year ago when TEFLtastic started. You can find it here:
http://www.tefl.net/alexcase/links/
Unfortunately, I made such a mess up of it first off that the only way I could see to deal with it was to delete every link and start again, so it’s looking a bit sparse now and I’m sure I’ve forgotten some of the ones that were once there. If anyone would like to suggest a relevant or semi-relevant link, yours or someone else’s, please leave a comment here or link to TEFLtastic and have a click on your link.
The bits that were messing it up were the links to my stuff, which have all moved to my Publications and Writing Work Full List with Links here.
The other change is that the Japan page above is here in fact but not in spirit as the content has now completely moved to my two Japan blogs JapanExplained and QuoteJapan.
Might just be the physics graduate in me coming out, but I seem to find myself teaching numbers in my classes all the time- be it shouting “seven Eight NIne TEEEEEEN!” at the top of my voice in my kindy classes or bringing my tape measure into my Technical English classes to liven things up by measuring the table and people’s noses.
Here’s a selection of games ideas and worksheets on teaching everything from “How old are you?” “I am three” to kids who are actually two but have been trained to say “I am three” by overambitious Thai parents to get them into class to “one billion seven hundred and two million point one” and the difference between “zero”, “nought”, “nil” and “oh” to Financial English students who need to learn something from you for once rather than teaching you about the weaknesses in your financial portfolio as usual.
So here they are, starting with a brand new article on the TEFL.net Idea Thinktank page:
The fifteen stages of teaching numbers with possible problems and game ideas for each stage
Business and ESP first lesson lesson plans with a number review including pairwork
Fun for all the family 1- 22 games for teaching numbers
Numbers practice idioms and proverbs
On the TEFLtastic worksheets page (easy to rip off, difficult to print out)
Technical English Japan by numbers pairwork game
Japan numbers trivia Elementary team game
And stuff you have to pay for on Onestopenglish.com:
Medical English numbers trivia