Archive for the ‘MA TESOL’ Category

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…)

Hope that headline got your attention, but actually I have nothing to say about the MA today at all…

Right, now to talk about the CELTA. I have decided to trust a whole lot of people I have never met and take the PGCE (standard British 1 year postgraduate teaching qualification) to be totally superior to the CELTA and a whole lotta learning more than a DELTA. The only compensation for me as someone who has done the C and the D but not the P is to imagine that the PGCE powers that be have been ripping off the CELTA as they have introduced classroom teaching earlier and earlier in the course.

Anyhows, as few more people are likely to start using 5000 pounds of someone’s money and two years of their lives to do a PGCE before popping off to Spain for a year I think the only sensible thing to do is combine the best of the two. And here it is:

The Super CELTA (although Advanced CELTA might be a better name!) will be a combination of the CELTA just as it stands now and in-service training once you start your first job, which will be set by Cambridge and admininstered and run by the employers. The employers will be able to easily justify checking up on their first year teachers and making sure they continue their training, the teachers will be able to choose a good school simply by the fact that they offer support for this extended qualification, and Cambridge will be able to use it to spread good practice in teacher observations and what have you.

So that’s decided then. You can disagree with me, but then I will just edit your comment to make it look like you’ve been blabbering on about lobsters invading the earth…. Only joking! Bring it on! And there’s also a similar thread in D’s E C you can comment in as well/ instead.

So, my last thread (of five?) on the Rave’s ESL Au Lait Japan forum has been locked and that is that. There was lots of raging passion, some (but much less) civilised debate, a lot of chest beating and territorial pissing, and two or three people who were just there for a fight and ruined it for everyone. Although you have probably realised by now that I would hardly claim to be an academic, there seemed to be a lot of letters after names on the other side and the whole thing reminded me of a classic academic feud, of which you can see a recent example here:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/22/healthscience/21gender.php

Although the main reason people with more certificates than friends tend to get all het up about these things and keep those feelings for life are probably “they are human”, it amuses me to brainstorm some other reasons. And as this is my blog, that is what I will do! But first of all

Warning: If you have lots of letters after your name and are the kind of person to take slightly tongue in cheek generalisations personally, I would suggest reading no further. Unless all of that is true and you have also indulged in an academic feud or two, in which case this is for you:

Reasons why academic feuds happen more often and last longer than people-who-think-Aliens-was-better-than-Alien-or-visa-versa feuds:

• People with more letters after their name than in their name spend far too much time on their computers or at their desks and not enough moving around, so physical feelings of frustration and aggression build up and come out in flame mails
• They actually set too high standards for their personal behaviour in terms of things like not using offensive language  (being PC) etc. and so the pressure builds up until they burst
• As they were not jocks when they were younger, they never learnt the “have a full-on fight and then forget it” school of conflict resolution
• They got bullied at school and enjoy doing the intellectual equivalent to someone else in revenge
• Their self-image is so tied up with their ideas that any attack on their ideas cannot be seperated from a personal attack
• They spend so much time explaining their ideas in words of one syllable to the dumbed down youth in their university lectures that the last thing they want to do is more of the same in their free time, so any “can you explain that more” question is the snapping point (Stephen Krashen, this means you my son!)
• If they took all those qualifications and got a nice university job to get praise from their families, they are hardly likely to take anything but praise from anyone else
• After all that time and expense doing an MAPHDTESOLEFLSLA, they think they should get a bit of extra respect. If not, what was the point of doing that instead of watching tentacle porn?
• They do indeed usually get that extra respect, so they are about as unlikely as a North Korean leader to understand it when someone treats their opinion as equal to a man off the street
• That’s all for now

If you don’t agree, I would be glad to hear from you. However, please remember the comments policy of TEFLtastic, which consists of just four words: Try to be nice.

It’s an often asked question and I’m getting bored of answering it, so here’s absolutely my last word on the matter*

To CELTA or not to CELTA?- The “final” word

 I have been a trainer on 4 week certificate in teaching english to adults courses (similar to CELTA) where some of the trainees already had teaching experience before they come on the course but they 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).

All said teachers had got into very bad habits teaching without having training first, and most of them looked like they were going to fail the teaching practice part of the course in the first two or three weeks. Most finally came through quite well, but with on average with a range of marks only slightly higher than people with no teaching experience at all (who also often had the handicap of less life experience to help them). Certainly all the teachers would have been better at their jobs having done the Certificate first and then taught for a year or two rather than visa versa- without a single exception.

Ditto people with Primary school teaching experience and MAs in TESOL with no teaching experience

Conclusions:
1) There are jobs you can get without a TEFL Certificate in most countries, but there are more and better ones you can get with one
2)You will do your job better if you get training first, and it will also make your job easier on you
3) If you put off training until later, you will not get as full benefit from it as you could- quite apart from the wasted years of teaching not as well as you could have before that you get round to doing it. Teaching before qualifications will also not count towards the teaching experience that is added up to decide pay rises, becoming an EFL examiner, entering the DELTA/ MA etc.
4) It is expensive, and schools do become training centres partly for financial reasons, but you will soon get your money back if you choose your post-CELTA job carefully and/ or when you start getting promoted. Anyway, it’s much cheaper than any kind of IT, NLP or business training.
5) If you really think it’s such a great money making scam you will need a CELTA to become a CELTA trainer, and so get in on the game yourself

*(Ha, I’ll be lucky! Especially with the bits I sneaked in in the middle bit…)

Sounds a bit like “my first make up kit” or “my first bra”, but no- it’s about the often asked question of how you should start your TEFL teaching career. Here’s my twopennyworth, which I posted just now on Dave’s ESL Mafia Forums and is probably being torn to pieces by a pack of MA TESOL-qualified wolves as we speak (will I never learn??). Here it is:

Should my first teaching qualification be a CELTA or an MA TESOL?

Auntie Alex says:

I think doing an MA before you have any teaching experience could possibly ruin your practical teaching skills for life (depending on your personality etc.). There is a danger that you will analyse too much before you do anything in the classroom and never pick up teaching as a skill rather than as applied knowledge. How many textbooks do you want to read before you get on a bike, or start swimming or SCUBA diving?

I say four week certificate (e.g. CELTA), then at least 2 or 3 years’ experience before you do a Diploma (e.g. DELTA) or Masters. Best of all in terms of developing practical classroom teaching skills, assuming you have all the time in the world.

CELTA, then three years teaching, then DELTA, then two or three years teaching-, then MA that gives you credit for DELTA

PGCE in language teaching is also a good start point, but any other PGCE, especially Primary, needs to be followed by a CELTA or equivalent before you start teaching adults.

My mauling by the Rave’s ESL Au Lait mob has reminded me again of why I dropped out of my MA and have avoided TEFL academia ever since. It’s all so bitchy and territorial and everything is taken personally. My favourite all time “avoid the ESL academics” moment when was Stephen Krashen (yes, that Stephen Krashen) did the electronic version of storming off in a huff slamming doors from a discussion in an English Teachers in Japan group because people kept on asking him questions instead of just accepting what he said. And these were all questions from people who were very respectful (after all we were all Japanese or had been in Japan a while) and genuinely delighted to have a celebrity communicating with them.

(A bit off topic, but Rave Spelling himself is a bit of a prima donna, famously completely abandoning a much anticipated workshop in TESOL Spain with the room already full of punters because the equipment wasn’t set up perfectly)

My own “get me out of here” moment was with Professor Jenkins of Pronunciation of English as an Internationalanguage fame. She told us less than 2% of the British people spoke RP (Received Pronunciation) and so it had no relevance to language teaching. We were surprised and asked her for her definition of RP. It was ill-defined, but different to what any of us had ever heard before. I said “Anyway, if all British people moved towards RP when they “speak posh” on the telephone/ in job interviews etc, then surely it would have some kind of relevance beyond its use by people who speak pure RP”. She blanked my question completely, the only reaction being a look that I interpreted as ”I am Prof Jenkins, who the hell are you?”, and from then on I was the naughty boy of the MA class. Three weeks later all the lecturers set us essay tasks that no one was ever going to read for which no original thought was obviously necessary and probably not welcome, and I dropped out.

I’m not saying avoid people with MAs of course (though you might want to do that, just to be on the safe side*), but avoid people who say, or more often write on a forum, “Listen to me, I have an MA/ PhD/ am a DoS/ have been here for 10 years/ work in a university”. Also avoid people who use correction of people’s grammar or spelling as an counter argument, or who include more than 2 or 3 quotes in a reply.

So who are my TEFL tribe- the people I would employ in my own school or invite onto my own forum? This is who they are:

• Have respect for qualifications, but more respect for good ideas
• Were not originally naturally talented teachers with a calling, but have developed their skills over the years
• Are constantly changing their ideas about teaching and the country they live in, and will quite happily abandon their earlier assumptions
• Are never too proud to ask a question
• Are grateful for any opportunity to think about their teaching, even if what they get out of it was not what they expected
• Treats everybody equally but differently
• More…

Anyone want to join my TEFLtastic tribe?

*joke

So, Thierry Henry finally going to Barca, eh? And in the season when everyone had got so bored of the rumours that they had almost stopped talking about it. So maybe British Council Jeddah really are going to swoop for me, pay the escape clause in my contract and make me a 4 year 8-million dollar offer.

I guess there’d have to be whatever the English teaching equivalent of the medical exam is (get me to teach a lesson from inside a CAT scan machine?) before the signing on live television, and obviously I’d want to know who else they are planning on signing (I hear rumours that Pilgrims might try and cash in on Mario Rinvolucri before he can leave on a Bosman transfer next year and that Jeremy Harmer is looking for a player manager post).

Or maybe I will just continue being paid the same as every other teacher, however good or bad they may be, and just take my extra reward as the number of comments I get on my blog… It’s not like English teaching is the only profession in the world where you get no reward for extra work, and it might not even be the only one where people get paid more just for having an MA. More ranting on the world of the EFL MA coming up…

Come to think of it, I’m pretty much the same kind of teacher as I am football player. Anyone else?