June 12th, 2007
Hi all to my faithful readers. I am just going to give you a renewal of faith on the purpose of my entering this contest. Let us not forget that this is a competition. I would really love to win the cash whenever it is rewarded. I am a past TEFL trainee from a course taught in Bogota during 3 months. I received a certificate from the teacher in name of (very important) the company she directed, Teacher Student Network. They have since gone through some corporate changes. let us hope all is well and they’ve made it through. I am now working for a company here in my hometown of Bogota and teaching a few classes and helping out with a curricular project as I call it. I am basically helping the owner to create a plan of studies for a three and half years program. I invite you to continue and stay tuned with me and the other teachers at ESL base TEFL diaries so you can get the juicy insights into the TEFL world and to create community for the ones coming ahead so we can remain updated always.
Cheers and a big hug
Fernando AÂ
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
January 25th, 2007
Well I just wanted to share with you that today is my listening practicum. I´ve had to choose an appropiate theme and topic to teach to my classmates. I have choosen a text from The ESLBase website and it is about teaching in Spain. Yesterday 5 of my other classmates did what I´m supposed to do today. I really enjoyed the variety of topics they choose and all the practice exercises they decided to use for the comprehension checks in their lesson plans. I am more comfortable this time and not as nervous as the time I had to share part of my grammar lesson plan in front of the class.
Posted in practicum, listening | 2 Comments »
January 19th, 2007
Well, during the last few days since we returned from Christmas break we have focused on two subjects related to the listening skill. We were introduced to the lesson plan directly focused on the listening skill. Pardon the pun. So today, is the fifth day since we returned and we have gone over all the steps that you have to include in the listening lesson plan. Initially we discussed which were the types of music that grasp and engage the students attention. Then we talked about which were the artist that enunciated their words more clearly so we could use their music in our classrooms. And finally, we have had the opportunity to go over some very fun exercises to do with music in the classroom. One of them was to change the lyrics of a Celine Dion song to our own version .We listened to a song from Elvis Presley, and a famous song called, It’s a wonderfull world. We did a resequencig exercise with the Elvis’ song where we had to get up from our seats and stand in the order that we heard the lyrics sheet we had in our hands, the song was, Im all shook up. We did a similar exercise with the song Its a wonderful world where we got the song cut out by its lines and we ordered it as we heard it. I really had a blast with the Celine Dion song. Another thing we did was to do a cloze exercise of one of the songs from the movie, Mouline Rouge,( pardon my French), then we sang to each other in a gender war. The highlights of the day, were my two classmates Eugene and Neve who got up and acted out a vey famous Aretha Franklin song in front of the class, right after we had figured out its contents from a multiple choice cloze exercise.
Posted in listening | No Comments »
January 17th, 2007
So, here it is. The reason I ended up taking a TEFL course. About eight years ago I decided to return to Colombia from The United States. I had been living there for many years. I was around fifteen when I got there. I hadn´t pursued a career path, and I was willing to do pretty much anything while I was living there. I had taken a few classes in college, but nothing outside the required English classes. When I returned to Colombia, I worked initially for some friends in their restaurant since I had a little experience in that from the past. But the Good Lord had other plans for my life. I went into a church led by North American folk and they pointed to an opportunity with a language institute here in the city of Bogotá, Called ICL. There were three teachers in this institute who wanted to lend me a hand and offered to show me the ropes. Show me the ropes for the ones not familiar with this expression means to teach a certain way of doing things in a job or any other event. So I trained with them for around Three months and was offered a job at a school. My experience in the school was bitter and sweet at the same time. I experienced many interesting aspects of teaching but I didn’t know enough about teaching English to have success. After that the years to follow would be filled with similar learnig experiences, but never a complete success. During the year 2004, I had many life changing events happening in my life. I had to return to The united States because of an illness in my my family. I spent a year there, and was able to take a certificate course in early childhood education. I took the course inspired by a new friend who was teaching young children of low income backgrounds here in Bogotá. I returned to Colombia to be with the rest of my family and recently became familiar with the TEFL scene through a free seminary I found in the paper. I was very interested but set the idea aside. Finally I was introduced to a gentleman who would became one of my employers. He interviewed me and told me that he had some pre-requisites for me if I was to be employed by him. He asked that I take the TEFL course and he would provide the work time for me to earn the money and pay for the course. So I enrolled for a TEFL course , to start on November first of 2006. Here I am more than half way done with the course and I would like to share with you, my experience and the results form this experience. I am going to write in this blog as much as I can remember and can share with you.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
by RSS
by email