TEFL Courses + Travelling

emmerrrrr

Hello there,

Hopefully this is in the right section of the forum?

Im looking to travel the world over the next couple of years. I plan to volunteer/work in some countries and would quite like to teach English for a short while in South America or maybe some other countries.

Groupon currently has a deal on, for a TEFL course. (£49.99 for the 150 hour online course, RRP £275)

I was just wondering if this would be sufficient to do a bit of teaching here and there? (There are SO many online courses for this!)I've been reading up on it and a few people have mentioned the more intensive CELTA course. I'm not looking to make a career out of it or anything, but does anybody know if this is worth my while? It's such a good deal!

The link for the Groupon deal is here if anybody is interested: http://www.groupon.co.uk/deals/national-deal/gg-learn-tefl-1/45971894

Thanks,

Emma

System

Yes, that is sufficient. My daughter did a 150 hour course and is currently teaching in Spain

benjus

Depends what you call "sufficient". It may well be enough to get you a job.

However, being able to speak a language does not in itself make someone good at teaching it. In places like South America you will come across people investing a huge proportion of their income to try and improve their prospects by learning English. They will probably pay a premium to get a native speaker teacher and expect them to be better than a locally-trained teacher. I would not want to take their money and deliver a substandard service. So I would recommend preparing yourself as well as you can. I don't have experience of online courses; I'm sure they can cover the linguistic and theoretical side, but I'd question how complete a course with no assessed classroom practice can be.

System

My daughter didn't do this but one with another company and yes, you do need the classroom practical as a lot of language schools expect to see proof that you have done, normally, at least 4 practical assessed classroom sessions

ETA

Daughter did the 140 hour course from http://www.tefl.org.uk/courses/tefl-courses-and-fees/tefl-courses-with-a-weekend-module/.

emmerrrrr

Thanks guys.

I can't see any mention of any practical work on this Groupon course. (Which I guess in short, is why I was querying if it was good enough.)

It's a very good offer, but I'm not sure if it's worth having just because it's the qualification (if it classes as one?) or whether I should look into doing a more expensive one.

agrinnall

I think if you're intending to do TEFL in a classroom setting then it would be worth doing a course that has a classroom component. However, there are other ways that you can teach English where it wouldn't be so important, such as offering 1 to 1 tutoring, and probably having a certificate would help to get those sort of jobs.

danandjens_worldtravels

It also really depends on where you want to teach as each country has different standards. Some will accept a degree (with native English speaker) as a teacher and some will insist on TEFL. I've met several people travelling and the more well paid jobs/countries insist on the better qualifications and experience.

You will get classroom experience really quickly, so I suppose it depends on how skilled you are at converting the theory into practice. Personally, I'd like some practical experience in the UK before trying it out in a different country, not knowing exactly what was expected of me in a foreign country for me would be very difficult (am I doing it right doubts).

Mr_Wang

emmerrrrr wrote: »

Hello there,

Hopefully this is in the right section of the forum?

Im looking to travel the world over the next couple of years. I plan to volunteer/work in some countries and would quite like to teach English for a short while in South America or maybe some other countries.

Groupon currently has a deal on, for a TEFL course. (£49.99 for the 150 hour online course, RRP £275)

I was just wondering if this would be sufficient to do a bit of teaching here and there? (There are SO many online courses for this!)I've been reading up on it and a few people have mentioned the more intensive CELTA course. I'm not looking to make a career out of it or anything, but does anybody know if this is worth my while? It's such a good deal!

The link for the Groupon deal is here if anybody is interested: http://www.groupon.co.uk/deals/national-deal/gg-learn-tefl-1/45971894

Thanks,

Emma

My partner did the course (though with a different company) and is currently teaching in India.

martindow

I did a TEFL course about 20 years ago so this may be well out of date. At that time there were a lot of organisations offering what appeared to be similar qualifications. However many of these were not acceptable in many places so you could easily spend money on 'qualifications' that turned out to be virtually useless.

trailingspouse

CELTA is the way to go if you actually want to teach. With the lesser qualifications, you may well get a job, but it's likely to just be conversation classes (where you are helping people to practice what they've already learnt, not actually teaching them anything new) - and these obviously don't pay as much.

indonesia

I have been teaching and recruiting in ESL for 10 years and we have had teachers with online, taught CELTA, PGCE and even masters in TEFL. The TEFL/CELTA course gives you a small introduction to teaching, however, it is all about the first 3 months of teaching. This is when you really learn how to plan a lesson, use resources, set up activities, monitor students and present language points.

The only consideration about what TEFL course to do is what will future employers require of you. Have a search on the numerous TEFL jobs websites for countries that you are interested in and see what they typically ask for. If you are not sure where you want to go, then take the CELTA as that will definitely be accepted everywhere.

Let me know if you have any more questions and good luck!