TEFL

Last Monday Fraser (my brother) and I signed up to do a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) course with TEFL England. The way it works is that we have to do 100 hours online, made up of 50 hours TEFL, 30 hours of grammar and a 20-hour video course, and an intense 20-hour weekend course. The next course in Manchester is on 31st August and 1st of September when I'll be away in France with my parents and Ethan (youngest brother) which meant that I couldn't do it although Fraser could as he's not coming to France with us. I decided to do mine in Sheffield last weekend instead as it's not that far away.

The course ran from 9am until 8pm on Saturday and from 9am until 6pm on Sunday so was long and tiring! I booked myself into a hotel for the Saturday night as if I went home I would have had a late night on the Saturday and early morning on the Sunday. Fraser dropped me off at Stockport station on Saturday morning and I got to the venue without any problems, he then picked me up from Sheffield to take me home on Sunday.

I was one of 8 students on the course with a tutor who guided us through everything for the weekend. She made us to various activities which I didn't envisage doing including making us touch the floor with varying numbers of body parts, throwing a soft toy around and having a lesson completely in Thai. The idea was to put us in the role of the student and learn the different ways that you can teach rather than constantly working out of a textbook.  We were given the chance to teach a couple of lessons ourselves as well, one on each day, which meant that we could practise planning lessons and be given feedback on both lesson planning and delivery (body language, enthusiasm etc. ). This proved the most difficult for me as I'm not always the most confident of people but I'm glad I did it as it helped improve my confidence and watching other people teach gave me some good ideas. The easiest part for me was probably when we looked at grammar. Being a languages student I'm more aware of the names of the different tenses than other native English speakers as we simply do not learn our own grammar at school. When I was in Spain, the girls I looked after had lengua (Spanish language) classes at school in which they did learn how to form different tenses and other grammar rules in their native language.

I'm hoping that this qualification will mean that I'll be able to tutor Chinese students during my year abroad and gain a bit of money and experience before going to a French or Spanish speaking country to teach next summer, I'm not being an au pair again! Just need to get through all the online course now... Would be nice to get it done before China.

Yesterday I got the train across to Norwich to visit my grandparents meaning that I didn't have long at home after Sheffield! I haven't seen them since Christmas though so it's nice to catch up before I go away again. I normally see them every Christmas but I'm not planning on going back to the UK for it this year as it's still term time in China and flights are expensive. My gran took me out for lunch today before we looked through my photos from Spain and had a walk in the sunshine this afternoon with gramps.