Teaching English in china: Starting TEFL

 I arrived here in china October 2009. So I’ve been here almost a couple of months. This trip started was   back in may this year. Nearing the end of my dissertation which was about how to teach programming I decided that I needed a break from computing. I love traveling so I looked at jobs where I could go aboard. I remembered thinking about teaching but I didn’t want to teach in a school in England or spend a year training to find out that I didn’t like it. The solution was simple I decided to teach English as a foreign language. 

The first step was to find a cheap enough company to train with. I looked on the net and came across the advert for i-i a company providing online TEFL training on the STA. (student travel agency) I had booked with them a cheap open flight to New York so I knew they were reliable. I booked before I finished my dissertation and completed a unit.  I also booked the intensive training course in Bournemouth a couple weeks after my hand in date of dissertation. I had to pay a month extra to stay in Bournemouth so I decided to stay behind in Bournemouth and get some space while looking for work and doing TEFL.

After rushing to put the final touches on the dissertation I went and relaxed on Bournemouth beach. Then the next day I began working on my TEFL qualification. At first I went through the topics quite quickly but then distractions came along e.g. barbecues.

The topics were interesting they were about how to teach vocabulary, video and audio lessons etc.

The certificate I struggled on was grammar which took me 2 weeks.  A lot of grammar is simple however there was some grammar which was really tricky.

When it came to doing the intensive course I found this really exciting. The tutor went through how to do warm ups, present target language, pair work, mingling etc. She had a lot of enthusiasm, which was really catchy and gave you the confidence that you could do this yourself.

On the final day we were doing demonstration lessons ourselves. The first lesson I did was teaching the time. We did this in a group. The group I was in did a lesson on quarter and half past an hour. We demonstrated this using paper circles and a clock we had drawn on the white board.

 The next lesson we did by ourselves. This time I decided teaching English to English people is silly so I taught them 1-10 in English. My nerves got to me so I forgot to show the number in romanji (Romanized Japanese). I worked a lot on teaching the pronunciation of the numbers. However while doing so I came over as being aggressive. Despite this I did feel encouraged and felt that I will be able to teach effectively in the future with a lot more practice.   

So the next task was to find a job teaching English aboard. I applied all over the world. This was still difficult due to having only done entry level qualification and having no experience. So I decided to focus applying for jobs in china. One job fell through because of problems of getting a work visa。 I was lucky the next time and flew out on 7^tth October to Beijing。 Then I went on first ever overnight journey on the train to the company in Yuncheng.