TEFL Hayden Colorado

Main skills gained with this course: • english Language structures and teaching methods It felt really good to return to the ‘essentials' in terms of grammar and structures. As a non-native english speaker, I felt that it was probably easier for me to explain grammar points; whereas for a native speaker some grammar points are so “innate” that it can be trickier to really explain. At least, that's the way I would have felt if I had taken this course to teach french as a foreign language. I did learn some good ways to explain structures in a simple way. • Good variety of teaching activities applied to efl teaching The course gives a good panel of activities related to learning another language which was much appreciable. Some activities brought back some old memories about english courses when I was in Secondary school. But most of the others I either discovered or had forgotten, so it was good to go through them all within one course. The activities shown on the DVDs were also a good initiative. • Teaching techniques and teaching tips - different groups of students, group size and seating arrangements. Through my previous experience as an IT trainer I only deliver training to adults not any young learners nor children. Therefore this course help me gained some good overview of how to deal with younger learners. Additional soft-skills gained with this course: • Patience / accuracy • Curiosity / Interest • Enthusiasm During the course I realised that teaching requires a good deal of patience, enthusiasm and motivation! Preparing worksheets and lesson plans gave me the opportunity to consider other sources of information. I appreciated the fact that I could take my time to prepare, to do some research work, my curiosity increased as I went along… each unit was used as a pretext to build up my interest to read more about the subject. The most important benefit gained is that I can picture myself as an efl teacher; whereas before the course I could not imagine that I could teach english as a Foreign Language. I do realise that the work has only started but I feel that I have been provided with the right tools to make further progress in this field. Next Steps : Ideas to put into action what I have learned: Few months ago I offered my help to provide some support to young students, who had difficulties with their english studies. Both students are french and just started to learn english (4th grade and 6th grade). Even though, I am not so much at ease with a young audience. I accepted to help them out. But I decided to enrol for this course to get more comfortable. Before the course, I only considered teaching business english to my IT colleagues, now I would consider teaching to different age groups and both general english and business english. • My immediate next step is to put into action the different techniques / tips / activities learned in the course with both young students to support them as much as I can during the coming year. • My secondary step(s) will be to pursue efl learning with the study of business english module(s) • And to explore within my company any potential needs to teach efl (i.e. provide in-house english support).