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Discover teaching English abroad with i-to-i TEFL.
We’re TEFL experts with over 27 years’ experience in making teach English abroad dreams a reality!
We start by helping you qualify as a confident TEFL teacher, before pointing you in the right direction to our TEFL Internships in epic locations such as Thailand, Vietnam and South Korea.
Here at i-to-i TEFL, we’re proud to say we’ve trained over 182,000 TEFL graduates. And because our courses are English-Government regulated, once you’re qualified, employers prefer candidates with an i-to-i certificate.
I bought the 300-hour online course package when it was on sale for around $200, and finished the entire 120-hour course, including the homework, in 7 hours. They claimed the final exam would take 3 hours but it took 30 minutes. I bought the course package because I’ve been unemployed for 6 years and was told by a teacher from an English school in Japan that the TEFL counts as a “teaching license” so I could then teach in Japan etc (previously I’d assumed you had to go to school for 2-7 years to get a license!). In general if you have highschool aged kids or something, I’d tell them to get this certificate in order to guarentee a back-up job in the future. Overall, if you “just need a job” or want to boost your resume/CV I highly recommend buying the 120-hour course and passing it, then reading other people’s advice for lesson planning etc. If you don’t actually need the certificate but want to learn how to teach, I’d recommend to just read a few books on teaching and then go out and teach someone.
I thought extra course sections (such as “Lesson Planning”) bundled with the 300-hour purchase actually taught the same subjects better than the basic 120-hour course did. The courses are clearly meant for people who haven’t been to school for a while, who haven’t studied a foreign language in a classroom setting, haven’t ever taught English before, and/or who can’t remember what was good/bad about their own teachers and classes. I’ve studied 6 languages, have been in university for 5 years, lived in 3 foreign countries and my wife is ESL so I breezed through it all except for the specific terminology for English tenses, which type of lesson plan/activity is what (what is PPP or induction method, for example) and a few things on which ESL test is for what kind of person.
The quiz questions were sometimes worded confusingly, including a couple points where a term wasn’t explained at first and was then explained later on, so I’d answer wrong because ex. I thought “drill” mean any kind of repetition where they only meant ex. pronunciation drills. The quizzes were more about if you 1. had common sense, 2. could remember exactly what they said about certain points such as certain ESL test names or grammar points.
If you want to learn grammar in order to teach English, I actually recommend learning Esperanto (it’ll take 2-3 months of hard study) before you try reading English grammar books. If you want to teach in one specific country, I also can’t recommend enough that you start learning that country’s language and reading up on its grammar as fast as you can — that language is what causes almost all the mistakes your students will make in English, and if you don’t understand WHY they make a mistake you can’t easily help them fix it. As other people have mentioned, TEFL doesn’t actually teach you grammar and doesn’t explain the kinds of mistakes people make in English due to different aspects that are in foreign language (ex. in some languages, present and past tense are the same).