TEFL course diaries - Kate Sutcliffe

It’s been quite a while since I finished the course now – and it’s about time that I started to use my new English teaching skills! Now is, as everybody’s telling me, the best time to look for work in England. It’s just coming up to the summer, which is the time of year when the majority of people who come here to learn English will arrive. There are various residential summer schools (residential for teachers too), which seem like a good way to get experience. (Because most jobs are part time, and therefore the pay is minimal, it’s nice to have a job that provides your food and accommodation).

However, many of the residential summer schools seem to have lessons on Sundays, and I’d rather not have to choose between having a job and going to church. So I decided to begin by doing an internet search for Christian English language schools. I found five or six, and emailed all of them to ask whether they needed any new teachers. At the moment I’m just waiting (and praying!) to see if anything comes from that – otherwise I’ll start applying for the jobs I’ve seen advertised on eslbase and elsewhere.

And that was the last day.

Moderation was nothing to worry about really. The moderator was a lovely lady with a slightly Scottish accent and a manner that put you very much at ease. We had group discussions about the course and how we’d found it, and individual discussions about our materials assignments (yep, that game again…) – then we all went to the pub whilst the moderator talked with our tutors. We came back, collected our work, and that was it, really. I guess that makes us qualified TEFL teachers.

In retrospect, I have enjoyed the course. There were times when I hated it whilst it was going on, and there certainly was a large volume of work. But everyone’s been very supportive and helpful, and I know a lot more about teaching English than I did before! If you have the time (and preferably some supportive family/friends!) then I’d definitely recommend doing an intensive course.

I’ve enjoyed having a blog, too. So much so that I intend to carry on writing (perhaps not so regularly!) at http://asnackate.blogspot.com

So, with thanks to my tutors for all their teaching, my classmates for all their help, support and sympathy when I was ill, and all of the students for suffering so many oddly-conceived lessons – that’s it! Good luck! Wes hal!

I was kind of wrong about there being no more work to do… true, there’s nothing else to hand in, but now we’ve got a very long list of questions that the moderator might be going to ask us in our moderation interviews tomorrow. They’re all about one thing – the materials assignment – but there are a lot of questions…

And another thing, which really irritates me: somebody asked if we need to be smartly dressed in order to be moderated. The answer was a resounding ‘Oh, yes,’ and apparently we’re required to be attired at a suit-equivalent degree of smartness. I consistently fail to understand why people are required to don impractical, unflattering clothes which they don’t like, simply so that they don’t look out of place in a situation where others are wearing similar garments. Obviously it’s not possible to judge our effectiveness as teachers, how well we’re able to learn from our mistakes, and whether we’re actually any good at English, unless we’re wearing the kind of trousers that have fake pockets. Grr!

Reminds me of Patrick Barrington’s Diplomatic Platypus…
“I failed to pass the interview. The board, with wry grimaces,
Took exception to my boots and then objected to my braces,
And Purvis, too, was failed by an intolerant examiner
Who said he had his doubts as to his sock-suspenders’ stamina…”

I think that I might just have finished the last piece of work… a few minutes ago I was happily cutting and sticking, making a bookcase-shaped game board and book-shaped counters for my not very effective game (hey, at least it looks pretty now!) – and all of a sudden I’ve finished it, and apart from reading through some things for the moderation interview on Friday, I think that I’ve done all the work I need to do.

It’s a very weird feeling.

It’s like an eerie silence, when a big noise suddenly stops.


Well, it’s not quite stopped yet. There’s still stuff to do – a session with our games tomorrow, and the moderation on Friday, which involves everybody taking part in a group and an individual interview with the moderator.

But still

It’s pretty quiet around here.

Mmm, pancake day… and only three days of the course left to go!

I’ve spent the whole evening trying to adapt a very far-fetched game I came up with for yesterday’s lesson – part of the course is that we have to use a game in our final lesson, and then adapt it if it didn’t work, and hand it in with a rationale. My game involved students giving reviews in the passive of English books they probably hadn’t read… a pretty difficult thing to do! (I did give them a synopsis, but most of them just read that out, instead of producing any language). I’d far rather just scrap it and invent a new game, but we have to use the one from the lesson.

Oh well. At least I no longer have five million other things I’m supposed to be doing at the same time. Although it is possible that some things will be returned to me tomorrow, to be re-done, if they’re not good enough. It’s nice really, that we get the chance to redeem ourselves if our first attempt isn’t quite right. But it would also be really rather annoying!

Right. Back to being irritated with that game…

Well, I’m tired! It took until half past one this morning to finish planning today’s lesson. The very strange thing is, it’s the last one I have to teach for the course. The time really has gone fast! Can’t believe that by this time next week we’ll (all going well!) be qualified.

There’s nothing tomorrow apart from the grammar test in the afternoon. I have to confess that, as the family grammar fiend, the concept was not a particularly daunting one. Not, that is, until I learnt that it’s not really testing our grammatical knowledge, but our ability to teach grammar, and that in two hours tomorrow afternoon we’re expected to come up with the basic idea for about nine lesson plans. It normally takes me an entire day just to think of one…

Actually, we’ve been given a very comprehensive-looking ‘hints list’ for the grammar test. I wouldn’t be very surprised if it turns out to be the questions. My plan is to answer them all now and then memorise them in the morning. I’m not sure if that will make me a better teacher, but I think it’ll help me pass the test!

They weren’t wrong when they warned us that we’d have a lot of work to do this weekend… so far I’ve been working on the profile – that is, the analysis of the language of an individual student, with suggestions for ten hours of remedial teaching. I think the worst moment was late last night when I took in for the first time the sentence saying that we had to analyse our student’s grammatical competence and explain any errors with reference to potential L1 interference. Basically that meant I had one evening to become relatively competent at Italian grammar in order to explain why my student might be making certain mistakes. In the end becoming competent was not necessary – I used an Italian grammar book and the internet, and I hope that my answers are correct!

Yesterday morning I taught a 75-minute, one-to-one lesson to my profile student. This was good fun. It’s very different from teaching an entire class. It’s good because you feel that you can be of a lot more use to the single student, concentrating on his/her needs, going at exactly the right speed for him/her. On the other hand it makes preparation much more difficult. Not only do activities take less time (so you need to think of more of them), but you also need to be really precise, making sure that your lesson is at exactly the right level for the student you’re teaching. Or at least that it’s easily adaptable whilst teaching.

Once I’ve finished the profile, I have to start work on making a communicative game for the advanced class, and planning an entire one and a half hour lesson to go with it! The task is made all the harder by the fact that no topic for the lesson is ascribed to us – we can teach whatever we like. Deciding where to begin can be the most difficult thing!

On the whole, all of this work is quite fun – I just wish that I had more time to do it. But then, it does seem to be the type of work that would expand and expand to fill whatever time was available, so maybe I should be grateful that I only have one weekend. And anyway, it was me that chose to do an intensive course…

This TEFL course thing is hard work! And not just for me – I was amazed to discover that my black ink cartridge, which I installed new in my printer just before the course started, is about to run out. My paper supplies are looking distinctly low, too… poor trees.

I think I’ve finished planning tomorrow’s lesson. Hope I have, anyway! It was all going so well – until I read the bit I’d missed, saying it had to be a primarily oral lesson, and realised that I’d have to replace 25 minutes’ worth of reading and writing activities with speaking and listening. Planning out the lesson isn’t so bad – but then you end up working late into the night drawing pictures of elephants or people called Emily who like travelling, cutting out printed words and sticking them onto bits of card, and persuading harrassed members of your family that they really do want to star in the tape-recorded dialogue for your listening exercise…

I did begin to see, yesterday, how all this could be quite fun really. It’s still a lot of work. But it does seem that, with each lesson you teach, you add a little bit to your store of ideas and resources. Perhaps it may even, eventually, be possible to be a teacher and to engage in extra-curricular activities!

I actually enjoyed today’s lesson! I think that was partly because I’d chosen a subject I find interesting (the story of Grace Darling), but also because the language was at the right level for the students (it could have been harder, but it wasn’t too easy), so they weren’t bored. Everyone was very grateful to have their errors corrected. The class was even pleased when they didn’t have time to finish the final task and I set it for homework! For the first time since starting the course I’m thinking that English teaching is something I might actually be able to do – that it might even be quite fun!

We went straight home after teaching today (at lunchtime), supposedly giving us plenty of time to start planning our one-to-one lessons for Friday. In fact I managed to waste most of the afternoon. I’m not quite sure how, but it got to about 4.00 and I hadn’t really done anything. Amazing how easy it is to procrastinate, even when you know that you have a lot of work and not really enough time to do it in.

I think that everyone on the course is finding it hard work. We’re all tired, most of us have been ill, and everybody’s finding that lesson planning takes a very long time. It’s kind of nice to know that it does affect everybody in the same way – that it’s not just me stressing all night about practice tasks, working almost every spare moment and still feeling that things aren’t done to the standard I’d like, and sometimes being rude to family and close friends who happen to be nearby when things get difficult…

But I think we’re generally enjoying it too (or at least will in retrospect!) and one of the nicest things is the group feel. We all help each other out, be it with tape recordings, lesson ideas, providing teabags, or explaining the structure of the past continuous passive. We get a lot of help from our tutors, too, who are very keen for us all to do well.

On the whole, I’m definitely glad that I chose to do an intensive course. It’s pretty hard work for these four weeks – but it’s only four weeks, and at the end of them we’ll have a qualification we can use. Apparently people doing the part time course, with jobs to do as well, find it equally stressful – but in their case the stress lasts four months. Poor part-timers! I know it depends on your situation, and a lot of people simply wouldn’t be able to do the intensive TESOL course. But I’d recommend it to anyone who had the time/money/resources. Just warn all your friends and relatives in advance that you may be somewhat preoccupied for the next month or so…