Archive for the ‘Teaching academic writing’ Category

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…)

A recent editorial from the Asahi Shimbun gives a perfect illustration of the difficulties of teaching English and American academic writing and debating style to Japanese and other Asian students. First of all it does that great Asian almost zen-like trick of giving two diametrically opposed points of view and never coming down on one side or the other.

The other argument they use that would never make it further than the letter pages of a British or US newspaper is that the reason why Defense Minister Fumio Kyuma was wrong to say he accepted that the Hiroshima bomb was historically inevitable was because it could upset people. If he was right or wrong is seen as almost irrelevant, only the results of his words matter. And I’m not saying that this Japanese use of language is wrong, but seeing words only as an emotional thing not as a way of grappling intellectually and bringing the other person’s argument down like the average British man’s conversation in a pub is a huge leap for me. Not that some Japanese men don’t spend all their time using facts and logic to argue with their friends too. They certainly exist, and they are called ‘otaku‘.

Not that anyone is asking me, but I say as it is impossible to say what would have happened if the A bombs weren’t dropped it is impossible to say one way or another whether they saved or caused more death and suffering.