HOW TO GET A TEFL CERTIFICATION

As the world slowly starts to open up again, it might be time to return to your plans of teaching abroad. If you want to live in another country and experience a totally different way of life, then teaching English is a great way to do it. Being a very international language, English can give you a wide range of locations and settings to teach in. Your school will usually give you support with visas and finding accommodation and your colleagues will help you settle in, showing you the tastiest local foods and the most interesting things to do. Even if you only teach abroad for one year, you may find the friends you make are friends forever. And you might well find you like teaching so much you make a career out of it: either staying in one school for many years, travelling to other cities and countries to teach, moving into other jobs in the teaching industry, or becoming a qualified teacher in your home country.

Despite all the benefits to teaching English abroad, you may be feeling apprehensive if you’ve never taught before or haven’t studied the English language in a while. What if your students ask awkward questions about grammar that you can’t answer? What if you can’t find an effective way to teach a concept or explain an activity, and your students meet your efforts with blank stares? To reduce stress later on, it can be very valuable to learn about the basics of English teaching before you start in your new job. On top of this, you might find that many of the job adverts you are looking at say that a 120-hour TEFL certificate is needed to be eligible to apply but be unsure what these are or how to join a course.

Actually, there are many ‘pre-service’ (i.e. for teachers before they enter the classroom) 120 hour TEFL certificate courses available, most of them online, that can help you grasp the basics of the English language and how to teach it. These courses include key points like:

· How to approach lesson planning

· English grammar, lexis (words and phrases) and pronunciation

· Teacher language (including giving clear instructions, correcting errors and giving feedback)

· Activities that engage your learners while providing lots of practice of the language being taught.

· Classroom management (keeping your students focused and on-task)

· Teaching Teens and Young Learners

· How to teach online (a useful skill these days in case your classes move online temporarily or you want to specialize in online teaching)

With a such a lot of important ideas covered in TEFL courses, it’s not surprising that many organizations will only accept applicants who have at least a 120 hour TEFL certificate. Having TEFL certification can help prove your commitment to teaching and reassure employers that you already know many basic ideas about teaching.

Costs of 120-hour online courses vary, but the average is about 300-500 dollars. Some teaching organizations might even cover the costs of your course, as part of the visa process. EF (English First) in China sponsors all new teachers to take Foundation TEFL to help make it easier for teachers to meet national visa requirements. This can reduce costs and stress during the months before flying to China.

Usually to pass an online TEFL course you will need to demonstrate an understanding of the main points on the curriculum. This will be assessed through quiz questions and perhaps some written assignments too. If you go through the course carefully and pace yourself, making notes on information to help you remember and understand it, then you should have little trouble passing. Here are some key tips:

1. Don’t leave everything until the last minute! Instead, pace yourself over a longer time. For example, 10 hours a week for 12 weeks is far more achievable than leaving everything until the last two weeks.

2. Take notes as you go along. Use a notebook, app or word processing doc to write down key ideas as you go through the course. This will help you a lot when it comes to assessment. Taking notes is an important method for internalizing ideas and understanding them more fully and it can help you make connections with previous learning.

3. Review your learning each week. From your notes, you can review each week what you’ve learned so far. This is very effective for remembering information and linking new information to it. If you only learn everything once, then there is a high chance of forgetting most of it quickly.

4. Visualize yourself in the classroom. Even if you haven’t been a teacher before, it can be helpful as you read new information to picture yourself in a classroom applying the ideas you are reading about. There will always be other challenges you haven’t yet thought of, but this approach will still help the new information feel more real to you.

If you find that some of the assessment is challenging or that there are ideas you don’t understand, there will often be a support channel to ask questions.

Of course, pre-service TEFL courses are not designed to turn you into effective teachers overnight: you won’t be a great teacher until you’ve spent many hours in the classroom, reflecting on and improving upon your teaching skills, and thinking about the particular needs of your learners. A TEFL certificate is the first step in this process, introducing you to the main ideas about what effective language teaching is, that can later help support your reflection. Most respectable teaching organizations will give you a full induction where you observe other teachers first and then get support from a mentor, manager or trainer for your own first few lessons. Already having a TEFL certificate will help you get much more from this induction, since you will understand how what you’re seeing and hearing fit with the key ideas about effective teaching that you studied on your course.

Good luck with becoming TEFL certified and expanding your horizons in the TEFL world!