Is Tefl Difficult

  Another point that students find difficult to understand is that modal auxiliary verbs have no tense. Some modals cannot be used to talk about the past or the futures. Watch this video to find out more about this topic. 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 descriptions and comparisons of the various tests available was interesting and helped me understand how and when each should be used. I didn't know about the many external exams that...  [Read more]

  Choosing a TEFL certification course can be a difficult decision as there is no standardized duration of training or a fixed syllabus for providers to adhere to. This seemingly free-for-all situation means there are a multitude of companies offering a wide range of courses of varying quality. The good news is there are several long established TEFL course providers out there who do offer high quality courses that provide all the skills and knowledge you need to start a new career as an EFL teacher. So what should you look for when choosing the right course for you? The overall length of the course is a good place to start. There are many providers who offer short format online courses of 40 hours or even less, as well as in-class courses that can be completed in one weekend...  [Read more]

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  The idiom "sweet tooth" refers to having a strong liking for sweet foods, for example: It's difficult for me to lose weight because I have a sweet tooth. 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. This lesson is about class management. It provides the techniques and methods to manage class, how to arrange the class for the lesson, teach effectively and keep discipline in the class. The most important is that the teacher should love their job, be...  [Read more]

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  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]

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas There are many potential problems when teaching is considered. With the teaching of a foreign language, especially in a culturally reserved country such as Turkey, the possible issues become bigger or more. I do not believe it would be very useful or beneficial neither for the teacher nor the students to put people with big age differences in the same class, trying to learn the same subject from the same teacher. There are many disadvantages as opposed to weak advantages in doing so. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Nalan F. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT. To begin with, the level of motivation in students differ depending on...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas Abstraction is in essence, the formation of broader, and more difficult and subjective systems from inputs. It is a concept that can be applied to the four language skills: reading, listening, speaking, and writing. As an idea becomes more abstract and subjective, it requires more information and becomes more difficult to answer. Some of the easiest and least abstract pieces of language are simple Yes/No statements and questions. “Do you like ice-cream?” “Yes, I do.” “No, I don’t.” A more difficult question might be, “Who likes ice-cream?” More difficult still would be, “Why do you like ice-cream?” A simple, but by no means an exhaustive list of abstraction moving from simple to difficult...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Alumni Experiences Troubleshooting TEFL is the most interesting, culturally challenging, and socially difficult there is. It is as much a cultural and social exercise in communicating with and managing people, as it is an intellectual exercise in simply conveying language skills to academic students enrolled in an institution of learning. Furthermore, it is more complex and varied due to age differences, cultural diversity, and discrepancies in the motivation of students enrolling in TEFL classes. A teacher who teaches her/ his native language to native speakers of the same language, in her/ his native country will have it significantly easier when troubleshooting problem situations because such a teacher will know what’s...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas In my experience teaching elementary and junior high school level English in Japan, several different pronunciation problems appear frequently. The Japanese phonemic inventory is smaller than English’s phonemic inventory, and the sounds present in each language differ from each other quite dramatically. Because of this, it can be difficult for native Japanese speakers to learn and master English pronunciation, but there are a few teaching techniques that can help students overcome this difficulty. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Vladlena H. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT. Several consonants are difficult for native Japanese...  [Read more]

  In this video, we break down the difference between the usage of "for" and "since". Both of these words are used when talking about time, which is why they often cause confusion for many English learners. However, the difference in the usage of the two words is actually qutie easy. The word "since" is used when referring to a point or exact moment in time, such as in this example: I have been living in this house since 2005. The year 2005 is a point or exact moment in time and therefore, we need to use 'since'. "For", on the other hand, is used for a period or duration of time, such as in this example: I have been living in this house for 12 years; 12 years is a duration of time, and therefore we need to use 'for'. As you can see, all you need to do is figure out whether you are...  [Read more]

  Daisy is from China and is interested in teaching English to EFL learners. That's why she completed her 120-hour online TEFL course. She found it very useful and practical and she is sure that this qualification will advance her career opportunities by a lot. This is her TEFL review. 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. I understand the importance of teaching these receptive skills. I, myself, being a student of a foreign language realize how...  [Read more]

Jon ITTT Alumni Experiences Difficulty with pronunciation is likely something that every EFL teacher will face at one point or another in their career. Every language in the world has different ways of pronouncing different words/ letters. In addition to this, most speakers of other languages have heavy accents that can make pronouncing English words very difficult. This can be a challenge when teaching English as a foreign language. It can be especially challenging because not all learners around the world will face the same problems. Students in Vietnam will likely have different pronunciation problems than students in Kenya and students in Brazil will likely have different pronunciation problems than students in Morocco. For this essay, I will...  [Read more]

Linda Dunsmore Alumni Experiences From the 60-year-old successful businessman who has never studied English to the third grader who is learning it for the first time in a school setting, each student has their own motivation and background. Their unique experiences will dictate what they bring to the table and be a factor in their success or difficulty in learning English. Understanding what brought the learners to the classroom, will help a teacher tailor the lessons to be most beneficial to her students. This includes understanding their culture to a certain extent, specifically as it relates to faux pas or misunderstandings that could arise in the classroom setting. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Lindsey D. Beginners...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Alumni Experiences Japan is a country with a long history, deep tradition, and vibrant culture. Within this culture sits the Japanese language. At first, being a spoken language and then adopting the Chinese Writing System, Japanese has grown and changed into what it is today. If you look at all languages, most Western languages originate from a set family, such as Romance Languages (which became today’s Spanish, French, Italian, etc). But Japanese (as most Asian languages) was formed from entirely different roots. These fundamental differences mean that the method of learning these languages has a lot to do with memorization and repetitive practice of the Chinese symbols and the words they represent. Which means it is...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Alumni Experiences Throughout high school and college, I mainly focused on learning how to speak Japanese as my second language. Unlike English, Japanese is a fairly phonetic language. Two of its three writing systems, hiragana and katakana, are phonetic. This makes it easy for foreigners to learn because each syllable, also known as sound clusters in some circles, is almost always said exactly how it is spelled. The third writing system, kanji, is not and, as such, is much more difficult for foreigners to learn because kanji are essentially pictures that describe their meaning. They are much more difficult to learn and use in everyday speech. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Nicole H. Please note that...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas Learning a second language can be difficult and depending on the learner’s mother tongue, it can present challenges unique to a certain group of people. More specifically, there are several unique challenges for Japanese native speakers who are learning English and vice versa. English can be difficult for Japanese native speakers for various reasons such as difficulty distinguishing certain sounds, the use of katakana to teach English words, and drastically different sentence structure. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Justin W. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT. When speaking English, it is vital to be able to distinguish...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Alumni Experiences Regardless of the Japanese government’s efforts to increase the number of foreign tourists to be a tourism-oriented country and to have been retaining compulsory English education for decades, Japanese people still have a reputation of being bad at English. The average TOEIC and TOEFL scores for Japanese are one of the worst among advanced nations. South Korea was also one of the worst in the past, but they are getting better and better these days. However, there are still some obstacles for many Japanese English learners to get over. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate FUTOSHI T. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT. Since Japan...  [Read more]

  This is Chantelle’s video diary entry after completing unit 16 of her online TEFL course. Unit 16 covers conditionals and reported speech. Both language points can cause difficulty for English language learners and teachers alike. The unit outlines the structure and use of the conditionals and also provides some useful teaching ideas that can be used in your own classes. It also goes into detail about when we use reported speech and the changes that occur when changing direct speech into reported speech. You will also find teaching ideas to help you understand how this language point can be taught in the classroom. 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...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas Most researchers agree that the learner’s first language influences the pronunciation of the target language and is a significant factor in accounting for foreign accents. So-called interference or interference from the first language is likely to cause errors in aspiration, stress, and intonation in the target language. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Vesna A. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT. Some Chinese students tend to have difficulty with English sounds because they are deeply influenced by similar Chinese sounds. However, they are very different from each other. A particular sound which does not exist in the native...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Alumni Experiences A global language is a language spoken internationally, the most popular one being English. It is learned by many people as a second language. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Damian B. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT. A big part of the lexical units in the English language was taken from German, Latin, French, and other European countries. People think that languages have a strong relation between dominance and cultural power. Also read: What to Watch Out for Before Signing Your TEFL Contract in China To have a common language is important because it's one of the main ways to communicate and interact with other people...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas The most difficult and important aspects of becoming a teacher are learning how to motivate your students. Students who are not motivated will not learn effectively. They will not absorb the information, they will not participate and some of them may even become disruptive. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Vagia Nikoletta K. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT. A student may be unmotivated for many reasons. Some of those reasons might be that they have no interest in the subject, find the teacher’s methods un-engaging or be distracted by external forces. Also, a student who appeared unmotivated he/she might have difficulty...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Alumni Experiences In everyone's life, there is at least one person that can be called a teacher, and it doesn't matter who is it — our older neighbor living next door or the person standing at the blackboard in a classroom for hours and trying to give you a piece of knowledge in some way. Anyway, we get something in the result. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Ivan S. The teaching profession is very difficult. Teachers are people who play a big role in the formation of personality. Any teacher needs to realize what a huge responsibility he has. He can reach out to every child, pass on his knowledge, and even become a good friend. Trying to find the answer to the question «Who is a teacher» I would...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas Learning is always hard especially learning something new such as English learning. English is a different new language compared with Chinese, so when we are learning, definitely we will meet all kinds of difficulties in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate XIAO J. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT. Due to the lack of vocabulary, beginners can not get the main idea of a story. They usually expect to know every single word and if they miss some words, they will become extremely nervous so that they lose their confidence at all. The best way to avoid it is to pre-teach some potentially...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Alumni Experiences Learning a second language can be difficult, and this is especially true when the learners L1 and their target language are completely different in structure, sound, and tones. An English as a second language student who speaks French, German, or any other European language will have an easier task than one who speaks a language that is not of European origins. One such language is Mandarin Chinese. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Ashley L. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT. The areas that native Mandarin speakers most often run into difficulty are pronunciation, tones, tenses, and sentence structure. A Chinese speaker might...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Alumni Experiences Experiencing stress in a classroom can be inhibitory to the learning process of a student; however, stress can originate from many causes and cannot always be avoided as the cause may be an integral part of learning, especially in the case of new languages. Students learning English will have to learn to accept and overcome stress as part of the process if they hope to not allow stress to inhibit their learning. Understanding when and why difficulty is being experienced may help a student overcome these issues, and it can help a teacher support his or her students through difficulty. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Christian F. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas A teacher’s job is to teach pupils. While that sounds straight forward the question arises what makes a good teacher. If a teacher teaches all day, the outcome of the work lies in what was being taught. Pupils are taught what the teacher teaches. Now an easy thing to say is, that a good teacher should provide good teaching. But what would be, if the majority of students would not learn anything in a specific lesson, that would be regarded by other teachers as good teaching? The answer, of course, is, that all students are individuals and respond differently to the teaching. Making it dependent on the students, a more practical definition of good teaching is: Good teaching is, which makes the pupils learn and...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Alumni Experiences Throughout the world, different countries have difficulty pronouncing other sounds from different languages. For many native English speakers learning Mandarin, pronouncing the “x”, “sh”, “q”, “ch”, and “z” sounds are not easy obstacles to overcome. Based on my own experience it takes plenty of repetition to master how to pronounce each of these sounds. Chinese students have a similar problem when trying to pronounce certain sounds in English. The three sounds that come to mind are “th”, “v” and the difference between “r” and “l”. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Jonathan A. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs...  [Read more]

Mark Crocker Alumni Experiences As a native Russian speaker I was worried about pronunciation from the very beginning of my English studies in primary school. It so happened that in my family my grandmother was an English teacher in high school who had worked in this position for more than 50 years. Naturally, I began my acquaintance with English much earlier than most of my peers. And the first step in the work of my grandmother in teaching me a foreign language was the formulation of pronunciation, something that most Russians have problems with. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Tatiana M. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT. A distinctive feature and...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas Teaching can be a very fulfilling and enjoyable occupation. It is, however, also filled with a lot of challenges. The workload can be high, the hours long, the course material may be difficult, and the students themselves can make a lot of difficulty for the teacher. As most teachers will attest there will be students who are difficult to deal with. They can be unmotivated, distracted, tired, or even purposefully disruptive. Many teachers have quit the profession because of unruly classes. Many more teachers have lost their temper and ruined a class because of this. There are, however, many ways to manage unruly students. Sometimes, they even become the very best students. This post was written by our TEFL...  [Read more]