Questions To Ask Tefl Certification

  Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into concise units that focus on specific areas of English language teaching. This convenient, highly structured design means that you can quickly get to grips with each section before moving onto the next. Future tense is the most complex of tenses in the English language. The fact that two present tense forms can also be used to express future ideas requires the teacher to clarify and contrast tense usages. Practice and repetition is useful in enforcing each of the 7 tenses, especially contrasting "going to" future with present continuous, and "going to" future with future simple. Contrasting the usages of...  [Read more]

  So, we'll focus first of all on a speaking skills lesson and perhaps a starting point for this would be to ask a question which is: Why do we speak to each other? The reason that it's important to ask ourselves this question is that whatever answers there are to this should be present in our lessons. So, why do we speak to each other? Well, there are a multitude of answers to that but when you boil them all down to their essence, they probably actually come down to one or two things. We communicate to each other by speaking because of either a need. We need something. We want something or a desire to achieve something. Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into...  [Read more]

  The idiom "old hand" refers to someone with a lot of experience in doing something, for example: If you have any questions, ask Lisa. She's done this job before and is an old hand at project planning. Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into concise units that focus on specific areas of English language teaching. This convenient, highly structured design means that you can quickly get to grips with each section before moving onto the next. Teaching and Learning is the focus of Unit 2. It provides the general theories and development form infancy to full maturation. It talks about how we learn languages, both our mother tongue and other languages....  [Read more]

Take a look at any online TEFL forum and there is a good chance you will come across stories of unscrupulous employers taking advantage of their teachers. Due to the huge number of English language training providers operating in countries all over the world, it is inevitable that there are some that are badly run. The good news is that by asking a few simple questions you should be able to avoid the jobs you don't want and greatly increase your chances of landing the right position to suit you. So what questions should you ask the employer during an interview? Exactly what is expected of teachers varies considerably from one school to the next. You may be expected to complete reports on your students, attend regular staff meetings, consult with student's parents, provide lesson plans...  [Read more]

Being interviewed for a TEFL related position is much like any other interview situation; it can be an intimidating prospect. However, if you do your homework and prepare for some general questions in advance, you can remove a great deal of worry from the whole process. Unfortunately you cannot predict exactly how any interview will unfold but most will include a similar range of questions that are aimed at assessing your suitability for joining the existing workforce. The employer will certainly want to form an impression of who you are as a person, so expect questions such as: What do you like to do in your spare time? What are your strengths and weaknesses? Where do you see yourself in five years? If the job is outside of your home country you can also expect some questions...  [Read more]

France is the most popular tourist destination in the world by visitor numbers, and it is equally popular with those looking to teach English abroad. With so much to offer, from history and culture to fashion and cuisine, France is the dream destination for thousands of ESL teachers every year. If you want to join this number, take a look at the following guide to teaching English in France. As with most countries in Western Europe, employers in France expect their prospective employees to possess a TEFL certificate. If you arrive without one, you are likely to have a tough time in the job market as most of your competitors will be TEFL certified. If you apply for a position offered by the government-run teaching assistant recruitment program, it is possible to make all the necessary...  [Read more]

  Here now is a teaching idea for the present perfect tense. If you remember back, one of the main usages of the present perfect tense is to talk about past experiences at an indefinite time. Here, will be having students work in small groups. Each small group will receive a prompt. This prompt has various past experiences. However, not conjugated into the question. The challenge for the students will be to take one of these prompts and to create a question based upon it. For example here they see 'win' and 'a competition'. One at a time, the students will take turns forming the question. 'Have you ever won a competition?' The other people listening to the question in the small group, will exchange their past experiences, either 'Yes, I have,' and perhaps tell a bit about the...  [Read more]

  Our next main issue is going to be that of giving students individual attention. Here many classroom management and leaving potential discipline problems can be avoided by applying some simple rules to giving your students attention. The first one is to think about the way in which you ask questions. Don't ask questions in a predictable order. If you just go around the class asking questions from one person to the next then the person at the end of the class will know that it's going to be some time before you actually get to them. So try to mix up the way in which you're asking questions. In terms of answers to questions don't allow individual students to dominate all of the answers. One of the things that we can do to help this particular issue is to use the students names as...  [Read more]

  And so on to the final phase of the ESA lesson, which is called the activate phase. What we have done so far, if you remember, is to engage the students, to get them talking and thinking in English, where possible we've elicited the teaching point from the students and covered any gaps in knowledge to make sure that the teaching point has been fully covered and then we've checked understanding of that teaching point by asking targeted and specific questions. Usually the types of activities that we've done for the study phase will involve using a single word in order to answer those questions correctly this, however, is not how language is actually used. When we use language, we always use it in some form of context. So the purpose of the activate activity is to put that teaching...  [Read more]

  It is very important that whenever we?re doing an activity that we use the students names wherever possible when we're asking for feedback and so on and so forth. There are a number of benefits to using the students? names and they can include helping to actually organize the class itself, certainly to acknowledge when a student has given the correct answer and so forth, to indicate who should respond, rather than just asking a general question to the whole class. By using the names we can ask an individual to respond to that particular question. One point to note here is that if you are going to ask an individual student it is very useful if you put their name at the end of the question. This is useful because if you start with their name then all of the other students know that...  [Read more]

  Moving down our list of parts of speech, we have our verbs. The first big difference between verbs that we need to look at is whether it's an action verb or a state verb. Our action verbs, as the name suggests, mean that we typically can see these things in action. We can see people working and we certainly see people going to various places. Now, we have our state verbs. These are basically indicating a state of being. Two examples would be "seem" and "have" or "own". We have a sentence such as "He seems angry." and "I own my house." You can't actually see the action happening, even though those words are used as verbs. A very big differentiation between the two here as well is, state verbs typically don't take the progressive or continuous form. That form is the verb "+ing". As...  [Read more]

  Now here are some teaching ideas for the future continuous tense. Here, we have an activity where we'll be asking students to spontaneously make some excuses based upon some invitations. We can do this in pairs or small groups. The teacher will have cut these cards up and the students will place them into a pile, randomly picking up a card. So one student might pick this card up and say 'Would you like to play tennis with me tomorrow?' The other student will be challenged to come up with an excuse as quickly as possible, which might be 'No, I'm sorry I'll be working.' Then, we have the next student pick up the next card and we challenge an additional student to make an excuse. Here we have another teaching idea for the future continuous tense and this involves two students trying...  [Read more]

What qualities and qualifications do employers of ESL teachers look for? First we need to say that there are no hard and fast rules to answer this question. There are a huge range of requirements worldwide, depending on the country, type of school, nature of the job, type of contract and so forth. The information given here is therefore general. There are a number of generally recognized requirements that employers are looking for from their teachers. You may need one, two, three or all of the following to get any particular job. It is unlikely you will find a job without any of these: Many ESL teaching jobs worldwide require the minimum of a TEFL certification from this list. As the nature of the job, or country specific employment requirements increase, so the need for other qualities or...  [Read more]

  The next example of a game that we can adapt very easily for classroom use is the game of Jeopardy and in this particular game, what we can do is to have a set of levels for our questions, I'd say one through five, where one is going to be the easiest example and five is going to be the most difficult and then, in each of these sets of boxes, we can have various grammar points, such as tenses, perhaps modals, vocabulary and maybe even conditionals. So what the students can do is they can pick a particular topic first of all and within that topic, they can pick the level of the question that they want and then we can have a set of cards that have been created to fit into these slots and we can ask them that question at that level. So, a very simple adaptation of the game jeopardy...  [Read more]

  This video is part of our ESA Methodology series. The ESA methodology consists of three stages. In this series, we look at the individual purposes of each stage and typical activities for each stage. This second video introduces the study phase of ESA. The purpose of this phase is to cover the actual teaching of the lesson and to check the understanding of that material.The second stage or phase of the lesson is known as the study phase and really the purpose of this phase is to cover the actual teaching of the lesson and to check understanding of that material. Typically in an ESA lesson, the study phase will have two parts. The first phase of the study is to cover the actual teaching component in what's known as the board work and what we try to do in the board work phase is to...  [Read more]

  Before we move on to the planning of a lesson for speaking skills, something that we need to look at first is the idea of the accuracy versus the fluency of speaking. Accuracy relates to the correct usage of grammar and vocabulary, whereas fluency relates to our ability to continue speaking without any interruption. Now, ultimately within a whole ESA lesson or within language learning itself fluency and accuracy are equally important. Within an ESA lesson, however, depending upon which stage we're at in that lesson, then we're either focusing on accuracy or we're focusing on fluency. Remember in the ESA lesson, in the study phase, this is where we're looking at the target language where we're doing our language learning, so it's very important in this stage that we focus on the...  [Read more]

  Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into concise units that focus on specific areas of English language teaching. This convenient, highly structured design means that you can quickly get to grips with each section before moving onto the next. Course development is one of the most important issues in a teacher's career. It's essential to make a complete procedure to start working with business students. The first step is to ask typical questions concerning interests, previous experiences and preferences. The second step is to do the Placement test. The next step is to do needs analysis. The final step is to make a course plan and to describe the...  [Read more]

  This episode of Chantelle’s TEFL course video diary looks at unit 7. Unit 7 deals with techniques for teaching new language whether this is grammar, vocabulary or functions. The unit provides different ways of teaching new language with sample lesson plans and suitable activities. Chantelle provides a good tip for potential students of ITTT’s online courses, which is to print off the course units as you access them and keep them in a folder so that you can easily go back to previous units and refresh your memory on what you have previously studied. Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into concise units that focus on specific areas of English...  [Read more]

Once you have completed your TEFL/TESOL course and gained certification to teach English as a foreign language you will be eligible for TEFL/TESOL jobs in countries all over the world. With our reputation as a world leading English teacher training institute, you could be teaching English as a foreign language in the location of your choice in no time at all. Many graduates of our courses worldwide have secured English teaching positions before completing their training program. The highly regarded training you receive during the course gives you a head start when applying for TEFL or TESOL positions worldwide. Our teachers are required all over the world, so it's never difficult to find a job that will suit you perfectly. There is a continued growing demand for qualified English teachers...  [Read more]

  In this video we explain the difference between 'compliment' and 'complement'. Both used as a verb and a noun, 'compliment' expresses something nice about someone, for example: I complimented my brother on his delicious cooking. In this example, the word 'compliment' is used as a verb. Let's take a look at a sentence where it is used as a noun: I gave my brother a compliment on his delicious cooking. The word "complement" on the other hand is used when two things go well together, or complete each other. The word is especially often used to indicate that two foods go well together. It is also often used in fashion, such as here: 'Her black dress complements her red hair,' or 'That wine complements the fish very well'. This should clear up any confusion. Below you can read...  [Read more]

  "Now let's take a look at the future perfect continuous tense. This tense is used to talk about how long an action had been taking place up until a certain point in the future. Our examples are for the positive sentence we have our subject "you" and three auxiliary verbs "will have been" and then our main verb in the present participle form again that's the verb plus "ing". For our negative form, again, we're simply inserting the word "not" between "will" and "have" and to ask our question, we invert "will" with the subject here we're using "you" and we come up with a question "Will you have been watching?" and the rest of our sentence. As with the other future tenses the word will can be substituted for other modal verbs. These modal verbs would indicate very levels of certainty...  [Read more]

  Our next consideration is that of giving instructions to our students. In order for those students to effectively carry out an activity, we need to make sure we have given clear and unambiguous instructions. It's also very important to check that the students understand the activity before you start. If you've done that work correctly then the teacher shouldn't need to say anything once an activity has started because the students are very clear about what they're supposed to be doing. So some ideas when giving instructions. As we've mentioned use simple language. Secondly, rather than trying to explain an activity, then do a demonstration which is visual. Thirdly, try to use wherever possible common words that come up within every activity. These would be things like ?look?,...  [Read more]

  So, now we're going to fill the actual procedure of the lesson plan out itself. We mentioned at the start, the first thing we do, is to get some general information about the class that we'll be teaching and then, in order for someone to be able to cover our lesson, we need to present enough information in our lesson plan that they can actually carry it out. What I'm going to do is for each stage of the lesson, I'll indicate what I'm going to do in the lesson and then, we'll cut away from that to have a look to see how that will actually be achieved. So, our lesson is going to be based on a 45-minute lesson and the first phase is going to be the engage phase and it's going to be a straight arrow ESA lesson. I'm going to take approximately five minutes on my engage phase and in...  [Read more]

  So, let's have a look at a typical receptive skills lesson. The main focus of this lesson is going to be reading, although there will be some listening involved as well and it?s going to be a patchwork ESA lesson. As a patchwork lesson, it will start off with an engage and this engage what we're going to do is to play an extract about Elvis Presley and it's going to be an Elvis Presley song and we can ask the students if they know who it is and if they know anything about him can help generate the interest in this. We can also ask them what they'd like to know about it. What we can then do is just to introduce them to the text but they're going to read the detail later on but just at this stage we'll do a quick skimming or scanning exercise to find some information from that...  [Read more]

  Here's a teaching idea that focuses on two very specific aspects of the present simple tense, one of which will be making statements about a habit and a routine. The other will be conjugating the verb into the 'he', 'she' or 'it' form. Here we'll present students with a picture. They will see various objects in the picture. Based upon the presence of these objects in someone's room, the students will have to make an observation such as 'She drinks coffee,' 'She plays the guitar,' 'She watches television,' 'She doesn't smoke.' Again, it's very specific used for the 'he', 'she' or 'it' form and habits and routines. At the end of the activity, the teacher will have the pairs or the small groups report back their various findings. Another idea for the present simple tense will be the...  [Read more]

  This video is part of our series on the past tenses in English. We start off the series with the past simple tense. In this video, we show you how to execute a mill drill activity for this tense. Here, the teacher provides the students with a survey or questionnaire with statements in the past simple tense. The students then go around the classroom and ask other students about their past experiences. Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into concise units that focus on specific areas of English language teaching. This convenient, highly structured design means that you can quickly get to grips with each section before moving onto the next. The basics...  [Read more]

  Now we'll have a look at the teaching ideas for the future simple tense. As we said earlier, the future simple tense can be used for threats or promises or, in this case, for predictions. Here, we'll have a pair of students working together. One has a prompt to say something and the other will begin it with a certain comment and then make a sentence using the future simple tense. Here, 'I'm taking my driving test tomorrow' 'Good luck. You'll pass for sure'. 'I lost at tennis again.' 'Cheer up. You'll do better next time,' so on and so forth. Of course, having a bit of feedback at the end. Some additional ideas for the future simple tense include things like horoscopes. Here you'll divide your class up into groups, provide them with zodiac sign, they'll create a horoscope for that...  [Read more]

  Here's an idea for teaching the present perfect continuous tense. However in this activity what the students will be doing, is comparing and contrasting this tense with the present perfect tense. This is something that a teacher will want to do after they've explored both tenses and because both tenses are quite confusing, we'll ask the students to compare and contrast the two, making sure that they can tell the difference. In this activity, the teacher will have cut out each individual card. The teacher will distribute the cards to the students and after a minute has gone by, the teacher will then ask the students to fold their cards over and get into a pair. One student in the pair will then present a certain result and ask the student to form the question. Here, with the...  [Read more]

  This TEFL review is from Will from the United States. After doing a lot of research, he decided that he wanted to follow a new career path in teaching English as a foreign language. Since a TEFL/TESOL course is one of the most common requirements for EFL employers worldwide, he decided to take our 120-hour online TEFL/TESOL certification course and enjoyed it a lot. Will chose the tutored version of the course and was able to ask a professional ITTT tutor any questions he might have during the course. After completing the course, he was also offered an additional 50-hour course for free and received excellent post-course services such as resume and interview preparation and access to job offers worldwide. Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of...  [Read more]

  The dynamics of classroom interaction is often dictated by the arrangement of the classroom itself and the way in which the classroom is arranged could depend upon a number of factors and they might include things such as the age of the students, so for example we're unlikely to have the same arrangement for adult learners as we would have for young learners. It could also depend upon the actual physical space available. The physical space may determine how we have to arrange our classroom to maximize the opportunity for interaction and so forth. It will also depend on what material is available and by material in this case we're talking about the actual desks and chairs and so on and so forth. Perhaps the final thing we might put here is that it could also depend upon the...  [Read more]