funinthesun

Does anyone on here teach English. I am interested in teaching English in nursery schools. Does anyone have any experience of this as I would appreciate any advice. I have been looking at online courses. Which courses are the best and which are the best value, which have you done and which would you recommend or not recommend. What did you pay for your course. What is the absolute minimum that is acceptable, I would probably take a course then work my way up depending on how it works out. Thank you.

bxpuser24710519

Hi, if you type teaching english into the blue line search box, on Spain forum ( this one) it will bring up about 40 pages on the subject :-)

Cazzy1

I start a new job teaching English at an academy on Monday, they are still looking for part time staff.

chrisjolly

You can teach English privately without any qualifications but you need to be clued up on the books you use to do it. Getting a TEFL qualification online is possible but do check what they are offering you; that it is fully acredited and no more than 300 pounds for the course. Good luck.

SheilaW

The problem with online courses is that learning how to teach really needs to be a 'hands on' approach. There's only so much you can learn in a classroom.

I did my TEFLA (now called a CELTA - it's a Cambridge exam) in the Netherlands, so maybe they do them out here, too, although you'd need a course aimed at teaching kids. My course was very intensive, over 12 weeks. We studied in the classroom for 3 hours on Friday evenings, taught on Saturday mornings, then back to the classroom in the afternoon for the post-mortem and more learning, then lots of homework and preparing for the next week's lessons. Some of the trainees were working full-time, too!

Something like that is ideal. That "learn it, do it" approach really consolidates the techniques, and it also helps you to decide whether teaching is really for you.

If you can't find a course like that, maybe the best thing would be to do an online English grammar course and see if you can get some experience as an assistant at a nursery school. Don't do an English for foreigners course, there are plenty of courses for proofreaders and copy-editors that would be useful. You won't be teaching grammar as such in a nursery school, of course, but you won't half look stupid if parents/colleagues start questioning you on 'the uses of the present perfect' and you haven't a clue what they're on about! Anyway, once you get the teaching bug, who knows what it'll lead to.

The really important thing to do is what you're doing: get some training! Just because we can all speak English here doesn't mean we can just go out and teach it well!