Archive for the ‘CELTA’ Category

“My first two years in Japan were spent teaching English… The students… studied English- or should I say, English was taught in their presence. Nothing ever seemed to sink in. Years of classes and endless tests and still they couldn’t master the intricacies of a simple ‘How are you?’ When I tried to have the most elemental of English conversations with them they looked at me with blank expressions, shrugged their shoulders, and said ‘Wakaranai’ (’Huh?’) They did this, I believe, just to annoy me. Don’t get me wrong, these teenagers were polite and studious and well-mannered, but they were still teenagers, and teenagers are pretty well insufferable anywhere you go on this planet.” (more…)

“Harder than grad school, more nerve wracking than exam time, more warping than a CIA-experiment-gone-wrong.” (more…)

…Why does no one ever listen to me??

Rather than a complaint about how your friends back home ask about your experiences abroad for 10 seconds and then get back to gossiping about Britney, I’m talking here about students who meet your top-spec up-to-date grammar explanations (gathered through nightly use of the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English for alternate reading and weights practice) with skeptical looks, “my other teacher said…”, “Yeah, riiiight!”, “No, that’s wrong” and/ or spitting out of chewing tobacco. Reasons include: (more…)

You really do learn new stuff in TEFL all the time. Only a week ago I wrote an article on The Advantages and Disadvantages of Setting Up a TEFL Course  (something I did twice back when I was ambitious), and it never occured to me that one of the disadvantages might be having to spend hours on the internet every day defending your reputation until it drives you nuts (see recent comments on the right for an example).

Should that not have put you off, I have written another one on How to Set Up a TEFL Certificate Course as well.

My usual desperate scratch around for some TEFL-relevant news has turned this month into a desperate attempt to deal with it all. If it carries on like this, our grandmothers might even get to be proud of what we do… (more…)

‘There several pieces of research showing the negative effect of teaching several unknown words at the same time that are members of a lexical set. Learning several unknown words in such sets made learning 50–100 per cent more difficult.’ (more…)

As much as I try to defend TEFL as a serious profession (for some), I’ve got to admit that most of us have it well easy compared to a secondary school French teacher:

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I was a trainer on 4 week certificate in teaching English to adults courses (similar to the Cambridge CELTA) where some of the trainees already had teaching experience before they came on the course, mostly because they had decided it was still worth the money to work in better schools and/ or work legally (in Turkey, for example, you need a teaching qualification to get a visa). Having seen such people at the beginning and end of their training courses and having been able to compare them with TEFL noobs, and also being totally out of that end of the business now and so able to give my completely honest opinion, here are my two Turkish lira on the matter: (more…)

Despite a few encouraging remarks on the Rave’s Cafe Teacher Training forum and from Sandy below, I am still quite suprised that no one else is as outraged as me about Cambridge allowing non-refundable “application fees” etc to be taken off people taking the CELTA course. Maybe I am turning into the “One Foot in the Grave”-style grumpy old man of TEFL…

“I can’t believe it!” is about right, but rather than using an annoying catchphrase, I have decided to wear the resistance of everyone down on this topic with dodgy metaphors instead. Here comes the first one, and they will keep on coming until at least 20 people leave messages of support in the comments boxes of this and similar posts- (more…)

To prove that I am capable of not only the idle speculation of the average post on this blog (but then, isn’t that what a blog is for?) but also of getting down and dirty in the trenches of TEFL, I’ve been given my TEFL Press Card, a rusty old Remington typewriter and a pack of filterless French cigarettes and become what can almost be described as a journalist. Yes, those of you standing around outside the kiosks and corner shops of the world waiting for the latest edition of the EL Gazette hot off the press will have noticed not one, but two articles by Alex Case, direct from war torn Tokyo.

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