Canterbury English in Madrid

This is an internet based Canterbury English review. Detailed information about Canterbury English in Spain is needed by teachers around the world. Canterbury English is a language institute in Spain and it’s in need of ratings. Ratings and comments will help other teachers learn more about Canterbury English. If someone was interested in teaching in Spain, would this school be a good place to start? Is Canterbury English a great place to work or is it in need of improvement?

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Realities Of A TEFL Course

Many TEFL course providers evoke images of carefree travel, adventure and exploration into their advertising and entice many young college leavers to sign up for a TEFL course and sign up for adventure. The Guardian has a cautionary tale about one adventure minded school leavers who took the plunge and found out that there is more to adventure in a TEFL career.

I found myself at a loss of what to do for one hour lessons. Halfway through most of them, which took place late in the afternoon, the children were tired. Now if it had been like a nursery when the children, under supervision, can play and paint in a relaxed environment, it would have been manageable. One hour trying to enforce games was too much for kids with an average attention span of two minutes.

It does take training and knack to pull of this. There’s a reason why many TEFLer’s do not like teaching young children.

Obviously as experience grows, knowledge and skills increase and toddlers lessons did become slightly easier. Yet there were other aspects of the job that were starting to outweigh it. If I thought I was clueless on teaching young children, I felt more of a charlatan in the business classes I ‘led’.

A 22-year-old graduate, whose knowledge of finance was drawn from the yearly trip to the bank to discuss the next installment of a student loan, should not be teaching business. However, with Tokyo being such a finance-orientated city, business learning adults are the second major source of income for private language school.

This is a problem for schools who are unwilling to pay a decent salary for someone qualified to fulfill the service they are selling.

Everyone with grandiose ideas of adventure and travel should read the entire article to get a clearer idea of the realities of TEFL.

KEI TEFL

Normally we do not get into the business of assessing TEFL programs. We were approached by KEI TEFL to take a look at their program and give them feedback on it. In the interest of teachers we decided to take a look at what they had to offer and share it with teachers. In the interest of transparency, we do not accept any advertising revenue from this school and have no interest in this course provider, we just offer this opinion to help teachers in their search for a TEFL course provider.

I was asked by Nemesis to have a look at an online TEFL program from KEI TEFL - www.koredinco.com - based in South Korea. First of all I have to point out the position I was coming from as I have always been a bit cynical about ‘on-line’ TEFL courses. I’m sure there is a huge potential market for such courses all over the world. I have always believed that for something as practical and ‘hands-on’ as TEFL it is essential to have practical, ‘hands-on’ experience as a large part of the training.

It seems that KEI TEFl are aware of this point too, in addition to their online TEFL course (19 units in the 100-hour web-course which can be completed in as long as three moths or as quickly as the student wishes) they offer a practical weekend including teaching practice and feedback as well as other practical experiences for their students. How valuable the 100-hour certificate would be without completing the practicum in terms of qualification I guess would be largely down to the criteria imposed by employers. How much value you’d take out of it as a student I’m sure varies from person to person as well, the experience of a full-time course pits you in a group which also adds to the experience as far as I’m concerned.

Anyway I put my prejudices aside and had a good look at their offering.

The 100-hour course is a reasonable $250 and the content seems very well put together. I’m not really qualified to evaluate its content thoroughly, but it is certainly comprehensive and includes all the components I would expect to see in a TEFL course: basic theory and introduction to popular methodolgies, classroom management, lesson planning and advice on teaching all the skills and evaluating students. The individual units are well presented and each includes a number of tasks in order to complete the unit, as far as I can see this generally means doing a bit of web-based research and then submitting an evaluation or criticism to the online forum area which is one of the website’s features. There are tests, one mid-term and one final and also a 500-700 word ‘professional paper’ on one of a list of subjects to complete before passing the course.

All-in-all it looks a very good site and certainly looks like it is professionally put together. How often we see websites packed with TEFL-based adverts and links pages full of garbage and dead-links, not so in this case the links page is very well stocked with interesting sites and articles. The forum seems to have only a few users at the moment, perhaps the student list is small just now, but seems to have some interesting content. Most importantly the website seems devoid of silly ads for employers, schools, agents and the like - there are no flashing banners promising to find you a job and it seems to me that the whole experience would be a useful and pleasing one.

My own belief that a TEFL course should have be a practical experience is unlikely to change, but I’m sure it’s just not possible for some folks to take a month or two months out of their career to do that and I suppose for such people then this certificate is ideal. If taken with the 20-hour practical component (at $375 for the intensive weekend) then it is hard to see why it shouldn’t be just as worthwhile as a full-time TEFL course taken at one of Asia’s many TEFL training schools. Clearly they don’t carry the same standards as a CELTA qualification but, refreshingly, they don’t claim to carry ‘International Accreditation’ (which in most cases is a very empty claim anyway!) and at $625 for the certificate and practical component it seems like very good value.

I guess the proof of a pudding is in the eating so it would be good to hear from any of KEI’s graduates - I only spent an hour or so looking over the website and content myself.