Before wanting to teach English as a second language, I had a background in teaching Maths GCSE mainly face-to-face to secondary school students. I had a lot of success doing this, so I wanted to continue this but with a different subject: TEFL. This is because although I am quite passionate about Maths, I don’t do anything to do with Maths in my free time; rather I enjoy learning languages which has been my main passion for a few years.
As such being a language learner myself, I can understand the ups and downs, lows, and highs of learning a language and the challenge that it brings so hopefully I will be able to help others except that they will be learning my native language – English. This means that hopefully, I will be able to help others learn English as a second or foreign language.
The TEFL course that I did:
I did a TEFL.org 120-hour premier online course which was recommended to me as I am a native speaker from the UK, have a bachelor’s degree from a university and have prior private tutoring experience. I thought it was a very good course and quite comprehensive and gave me a good foundation to teach English as a second language. I will go over each of the modules in order and discuss what I thought of them.
Grammar module:
I thought that this module was quite interesting to me. This is because native English speakers including myself grow up acquiring and learning English naturally as children. This means that we instinctively know the grammar yet when we try to explain why something is the way it is in terms of grammar, most native speakers who haven’t been trained in grammar won’t be able to explain why something is the way it is in the English language.
This is why I believe that this module was presented first and is the longest module being 50 hours’ worth. To teach the English language which includes the vocabulary and grammar you need to get training in this area. This is an important aspect of teaching English.
Most surprising to me I found was that each tense: past, present, and future tense, can be split up into multiple tenses for example there is the past perfect, past participle etc which was not taught to me in schools in the UK I think because this is away a second language learner learns English – it’s not necessarily the best way in an English-speaking environment.
TEFL Methodology module:
I also thought that this was good too. Here we learnt more about how to teach English and the methodology behind it. One of the most surprising facts to me was that you should teach your English class entirely in English.
This is because a lot of people think that to teach English to someone you will need to know the language that they speak. This is false and unnecessary. This is because I feel the best way someone can learn a language including English is to immerse themselves in that language. The best thing to do is to make the classroom an immersive experience by just using English and explaining everything in English.
I also learned the different lesson plans such as the PPP, ESA, skills, and before-during-after lesson plans which I will talk about in more detail here:
PPP Lesson plan:
Here, this is an acronym for the following: Presentation – practice – production.
The PPP lesson plan is designed to teach vocabulary/grammar and functions and is very good for doing so. In this sort of lesson plan you are expected to have a target language you want to teach for example adverbs of frequency.
Lead-in: A warm-up for the lesson, here no new language is taught.
Presentation: Here the target language is taught in three parts: meaning, pronunciation and form. Often concept checking questions are used to check understanding and pronunciation drills are very important as well.
Practice (controlled): This could include exercises that help the student to consolidate and practice the target language being taught. This could include sentence jumbles or gap-fill worksheets etc.
Practice (free): this will be a freer activity to practice the language but to focus more on fluency rather than accuracy. This can be things such as role-plays and other scenarios.
Other Lesson plans:
As well as the PPP lesson plan, we have the skills lesson plan which is important to teach the skills of language learning such as speaking, listening, reading & writing.
The before-during-after lesson plan is good for 1-1 lessons and telephone lessons where the learning doesn’t just take place during the lesson but also before and after the lesson.
Lesson observance module:
This was a useful module that helped me observe how other teachers teach specifically experienced EFL teachers. This was good as it allowed me to observe how good teachers teach good lessons and what makes a good lesson compared to a bad lesson.
As well as this I managed to cover all aspects of a PPP lesson as well as a skills lesson and how to deal with difficult students. This gives me a good grounding in aspects of these lessons as well as how I could personally deliver these sorts of lessons.
Telephone teaching module:
This module was very useful for me as this is essentially the module for those who would like to learn how to teach online. This is because one of the reasons why I took the course is so that I could try and teach English online.
I think that this is quite a good grounding in teaching English over the telephone or online and includes aspects such as doing a needs analysis as well as the before, during and after lesson plan which is helping me become a more confident online English teacher.
Large classes module:
I found this class to be mostly non-applicable to me because I don’t see myself physically teaching a large class in another country although it could be useful in the future, I just don’t see it being useful right now.
In conclusion:
Overall, I feel that the 120-hour TEFL course over at TEFL.org is a great course for those who want to get into teaching EFL, and they give you a great foundation in this. What about you? Have you ever done a TEFL course before and how did it go?
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