Tuesday, January 13, 2009

CELTA and TESOL Comments

Over a year ago I wrote an article called CELTA or TESOL for Private Tutoring. To this day, I continue to get comments from readers criticizing CELTA teaching centers and CELTA in general. Some of the emails have been quite strong and people have taken a significant amount of time to write their lengthy comments.

This blog and my site, Teaching ESL to Adults, are primarily for the benefit of ESL/EFL teachers and tutors, so I suppose this information from people who have studied for CELTA certification is useful to pass on to others. And the decision between CELTA and TESOL certification is an important one for the potential new ESOL teacher.

While the comments submitted have been critical of CELTA courses, I'm certain that there are many, many people who have had good experiences with their CELTA training. However, it seems to be human nature (or at least MY nature) that we take less time to praise something and more time to criticize.

Noteworthy to me is that there have been no complaints submitted against any TESOL certificate training programs. I know for myself, my TESOL training was some of the best training I've ever had and it thoroughly prepared me to start teaching English to speakers of other languages.

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3 comments:

Lucy said...

Hi. My TESL certification has been of great value to me as well. Thanks for this post.

John Campbell said...

I love teaching ESL and have enrolled at the Oceanside ESL Tech program. It has opened my eyes to technology and its benefits for ESL students. http://sites.google.com/site/studycorp/ These are great resources I have discovered.

Carissa Peck said...

I did the CELTA last year in Amsterdam. My CELTA training was intense but effective, we did have one student drop out, but it was due mainly to personal reasons. My tutors were amazing and worked well together one was more type A while the other was more like me. It was nice to see that both types can be effective teachers.

We were also given the chance to evaluate our tutors (this is built into the CELTA course).