TEFL Stronghold District Of Columbia

I have gained much more from this course than I initially expected to. The course has gone into a lot more depth than I thought it would, and has comprehensively covered all aspects of efl teaching. I now feel that I have an excellent grounding from which to start my teaching career. I plan to use my new teaching qualification to teach kindergarten students english at my current place of work. I work at an international pre-school in Copenhagen, Denmark. The children at the school are taught in english, but approximately 30% of the children have little or no english when they start the pre-school. Some of the children pick up english remarkably quickly (some are almost fluent within 4 months), whilst others take a lot longer to start speaking english. I intend to offer those children who are learning english as a foreign language extra english tuition in small groups. I will start teaching in November, but I also plan to undertake the ‘Teaching young learners' course in the near future. I have found most of the modules on the course very interesting, particularly some of the modules offering practical teaching advice. The module on lesson planning was very informative, and is one I shall refer back to time and again as a newly qualified teacher. I also found the unit on efl methodology, mistakes and feedback extremely useful. I have referred back to this unit many times whilst undertaking the course, and will certainly be using it as a reference when I start teaching. The unit on classroom management also gave some invaluable tips on how to be an effective teacher (using eye contact, gesture and voice), the pros and cons of the different ways students can be grouped, classroom arrangement, giving instructions, establishing rapport and maintaining discipline. Again, this is certainly a unit I will revise before I start teaching. The ‘teaching' units (Teaching new language, Teaching receptive skills, Teaching productive skills and Teaching pronunciation and phonology) have all been very useful in giving me knowledge about what I should be teaching students and how to go about it. I found the example ESA lesson outlines in these units very informative, and it was also good to get practice at writing my own lesson plans in the accompanying worksheets. I was really interested in learning about the phonemic alphabet in unit 13 (Teaching pronunciation and phonology). Despite the fact that I studied German A-level in school, and later learned Danish after moving to Denmark, I had never been taught the phonemic alphabet before. An awareness of the phonemic alphabet would have been an invaluable aid when I learned Danish, as Danish, like english is not a phonetic language. If I do teach adult learners at any point, I will certainly show them the phonemic alphabet and instruct them in its use. The unit on teaching special groups was also very interesting for me, as it gave good advice on teaching beginners and teaching children. I found the units on grammar very worthwhile, but also quite challenging. I'm glad that these units were so thorough, and that through the worksheets we were encouraged to look at how we could teach grammar in the most enjoyable ways possible. It was very interesting to see two ‘real' lessons in progress in unit 10. In working through this unit, I was encouraged to analyze good and bad teaching practices, and seeing them in practice really helped to illustrate these points. It's always a good thing to take a step back and evaluate one's own teaching practice. I hope that I will be able to look at my teaching practice from the students' point of view now and again to help me to maintain good teaching practices. The troubleshooting unit was also invaluable as it offered excellent tips on how to manage or resolve common problems in the classroom.