TEFL Institute 120 Hour International Course

The international courses are held over a week length, typically Monday - Friday with 100 hours of course work including role playing, homework, quizzes, tests, lesson planning, with an additional student teaching (practicum) component in a live classroom with English language students for 20 hours. Class times vary by location, typical schedule is 9-5 with breaks throughout the day. Some evenings have homework, other evenings the students are free to enjoy the nightlife. Weekends are free to enjoy the city.

TEFL Institute course topics to be covered:

History of TEFL Teaching and Learning Styles

English language teaching has undergone great changes since the classical training of Greek and Latin. The major thrust of this module is to familiarize you with the history of TEFL teaching, its research and teaching strategies, and to consider how to relate to identifying and applying the best practices of the Post Modern era.

• The Field of TESOL/ELT
• Learning Styles
• The Teacher's Role
• Roles and Qualities
• The Classroom: The Physical Environment

The Classroom Environment

The goal of this module is to familiarize students with the field of TEFL and EFL Teaching. Each teacher has their own personality in the classroom and the ways they like to teach English. This module will help you relate to your experiences as a student and how they relate to your own teaching style and classroom persona. We will also consider the learning styles of students and the significant effect learning styles have on the process of learning and learning. You will study the physical environment of the classroom and consider how something as seating arrangements has a profound impact of the relationship of the student's ability to master content.

• A brief history of Language Teaching
• The "Designer" Approaches of the 1970s and Beyond
• Communicative Competence and The Post Modern Era
• Communicative and Audiolingual Comparison of Major Features
• The Psychological Learning Environment: Teaching and Learning

Teaching Speaking and Listening

This module provides information on the principles and components of teaching English as a language. We'll look at the difference between language items and language skills, as we explore some possible ways to teach them. The fact that teachers spend almost as much time planning lessons outside of the classroom as they do inside the classroom is surprising to some beginning instructors. Lesson plans are extremely important. They provide a road map that shows teachers where they are going, how they will get there, and where they expect to end up at the completion of a lesson. Effective lesson plans planning is a skill that just takes a little time and practice. This course will prepare you to develop and write effective lesson plans.

• Students Needs
• Principles of Learning a Language
• A Framework for TEFL - Presentation, Practice and Production (PPP)
• PPP Lesson Plans
• PPP Conversation sample
• Classroom strategies
• STT/TTT (Student Talk Time/Teacher Talk Time) and Giving Instructions

Listening and Speaking

Have you ever studied a foreign language in school and arrived in a foreign country not understanding others or being understood? This is a common experience for many students of any standard language training program. Unfortunately much language instruction in the past has had very little emphasis on actually teaching listening and speaking for real communication. Many teachers who teach English abroad are non-native speakers of English themselves and may not feel comfortable teaching listening and speaking. For that reason, you may find your students are well schooled in grammar and writing, or very capable of reading in English, yet in need of support and encouragement when it comes to listening and speaking. This module is dedicated to these two skill areas. You will learn that listening is an essentially a repetitive skill, whereas speaking productive. We discuss them together since they are interdependent. Another aspect common to both the areas of listening and speaking is that of pronunciation. English is a complex language and we will provide you with the necessary skills and tools help get you through this process.

• Teaching Listening
• Teaching Difficulties and Types of Activities
• Types of Listening Exercises
• Listening Lesson Plan
• Developing and Conducting Speaking Practice
• Teaching Vocabulary and Forms-Oral Drills
• Open Class or Small Group Vocabulary Drills Procedure
• Oral Vocabulary Production Activities
• Desert Island
• Vocabulary Review Activities
• Pronunciation - Intonation
• Minimal Pairs

Reading and Writing

We will explore really what it means to read and write in a second language, as well as how to teach reading and writing using authentic materials. It includes strategies for preparing students to read and write in Conversational English.

• Reading as Experienced by Many Students
• The Goals of Reading Instruction
• Reading Strategies
• Ten Things To Do Before Reading
• Teaching Reading Skills Chart
• Reading Lesson Plan
• Teaching Literature
• Developing Writing Skills
• Writing Systems Different Languages
• Types of Writing
• The Components of Writing
• Providing Written Feedback
• Writing Lesson Plan: Based on Needs Analysis
• Writing Lesson Plan: Patterned Poetry

Grammar

A large part of teaching EFL is the teaching of grammar. English has an extremely complicated set of rules and exceptions for its syntax, or grammar. Part of the complexity arises from the history of the language itself. Languages are generally not static; they change over time, adding new words and expressions as well as spellings etc. For teachers of English abroad, a general understanding of why the language operates the way it does is essential. We will take a look at how well you know your grammar and how to teach grammar. Grammar will be taught in relationship to the four areas of Listening, Speaking, Reading or Writing. At the end of this module you will have a better idea of what you may need to consider as you plan your lessons.

• More History of English work
• English Structure and Grammar as Compared to Other Languages
• A Functional Approach to Teaching Grammar
• Word Order in English
• Parts of Speech
• General Grammatical Structures for TEFL
• Verbs
• The Twelve Main Verb Tenses of English
• Phrasal Verbs
• Reported Speech
• Conditionals
• Passive Voice

Professional Development

By now in the course you already got a really good idea about the profession and the teaching skills regarding the four skill areas and you have written a lot of lesson plans. We've also discussed with you at length the importance of including a context in which to present new language items and grammar concepts. In this module you will learn to use visuals as a means of providing context and opportunities to develop students' skills in Listening, Reading , Writing, and Grammar. You'll learn just about anything that encourages communication is fair game. That means that teachers should include all kinds of resources for students. Even though there are many textbooks to cover the subject, there are also supplemental resource books, computer software programs, ESL websites, and even great movies that may work well for the class that you teach. Finally we will take a close look at assessments, both formal and informal, and what effective assessments might look like in your classroom. You will cover:

• Visuals
• ESL Textbooks and Supplemental Materials
• Online Resources
• Games for the Classroom
• Assessing Student Performance
• Standardized Testing