My Experience of Taking a TEFL Course
This is not to say that I thought lightly of teaching English but when I just started considering becoming an English teacher, I thought what I would need for starting my career was passion and enough English skills for the level of students. That I could gain the other necessary teaching skills one by one through experiences in the classroom. Or maybe by reading some course books or from watching Youtube videos concerning teaching English.
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This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Youngku K. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT.
Teaching Practice
The only teaching experience I had was independently tutoring middle school students for 6 months and I didn't have any educational background in teaching English until I finished this course. Hence I felt the necessity of testing myself to find out what I need to learn and improve. After days of searching online, I came across its 120 hour TEFL course.
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Course Content
One of the things I had learned at the beginning of the course was that there is so much more to know about in teaching English than I thought. After I finished about half of the units, I got a better understanding of what teaching English in the classroom is. It reminded me of my English classes back in high school and how my teachers’ teaching was. I realized that teaching a foreign language as a nonnative speaker is not as easy as it looked and it wouldn't be an easy job for me.
Most of the content was covering skills and methods I haven't even heard of. Some units were easy to comprehend but most of them were quite difficult for me to understand. However, it was still more motivating than discouraging to me. It was a challenge but I was fascinated and excited to find out what it means to be an English teacher. The vague things about teaching English were becoming more clear as I finished each unit and It felt like I was becoming more of an English teacher every time I study through a unit especially when I finished a difficult one after hours of struggle.
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Course Result
When there was only the couple last units left, I could imagine myself managing a class using many different skills from the course like a prepared English teacher. Even though My test score was lower than I expected but I tried my best not to refer back to the units while I was taking the course so I'm quite proud of the result I got.
I found the entire course helpful and informative but as for an unexperienced novice, what I liked the most was how the content covers many different possible classroom situations and ways to deal with them. I also enjoyed studying the section about teaching grammar and tenses which I needed to brush up.
Do you want to teach English abroad? Take a TEFL course!
Now I feel I've learned many teaching skills and methods throughout the course and it helped me with not only English but become more confident in teaching. But above all, I think the best thing it taught me was what I need to learn more and what I need to improve from now on to be a successful English teacher in the classroom.
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