Hello all,
I'm bewildered by the array of TEFL courses to choose from! My husband and I are planning to spend about a year in Chile and I'm looking at possibilities for certification to teach english, to fall back on in case I am unable to find too many freelance gigs in my field while we're there. So, with that said....

It seems that the quickest option is one of those online certifications done through a particular company, and the most time-consuming (and expensive!) option is the Cambridge course (I believe it is called a CELTA certificate.) Is the CELTA an absolute must? Have people found positions with an online certificate only? Is a certificate necessary at all for private tutoring?

And, last but not least...has anyone had any experience with specific language schools in Chile? Good, bad, indifferent? I would love feedback.

Thanks much!!

I think the main advantage of an on-site course is that you get actual teaching practice as well as feedback on your teaching from teacher trainers and classmates. I have a CELTA, and while I don't believe there is a big difference between many of the different on-site courses, the CELTA is very widely known and internationally recognized (and actually monitored by Cambridge to ensure courses in different locations meet their standards). But, if you are only thinking of teaching in one country (and only for a year and only as a back up plan at that) a course at a local school that is well-regarded might do just fine.

If you are just thinking of tutoring individual students on your own, being able to tell them you have a certificate might help a bit, but it's certainly not a requirement (though it may be for a work permit in Chile but you're not likely to get that easily anyway as a self-employed tutor). I don't know about Chile, but I have heard that in some places in Asia - generally where the demand for teachers is great - employers don't require a certificate or may not really know the difference between them.

The other reason for doing a course though is just that the communicative, task-based methods that many modern language schools use or claim to use nowadays are in fact pretty different from traditional language learning methods in the US, at least in my experience. You need to get students to talk and often are supposed to guide them through questions about the grammar so you aren't just lecturing on it. So a course can at least point you in the right direction - while a four-week course can hardly be said to be throrough preparation for teaching, I can't imagine teaching classes, alone, without it.

Guy Courchesne is a teacher and teacher trainer in Mexico, and may have further advice. TedKarma (who is also a Bootsnall member)is based in Thailand but has some good info on TEFL training at TEFLDaddy. Dave's ESL Cafe is a great resource for EFL teachers and my own writing on TEFL is here in the form of a bootsnall logue.

How to Choose a TEFL Course is a good review of things to consider.

Online just can't compete with an in-class program for reasons mentioned above.

I have seen a few schools offering the TEFL course on Saturday's for a full month, and then they say after that you are fully certified and are able to head off to the respective country that you choose. Is this true? If I took the course and found a job, would I be able to leave right away, or is there more to it then that?

The short answer: I can't think of any definite reasons why you wouldn't be able to go directly from a course to a job...but a lot depends on the type of course/certificate and the visa regulations and job market in the country you'd like to go to.

The longer answer: It's a hard question to answer because so much depends on the type of course (there's not just one universal course, there are many - a good one will include some actual teaching practice and what exactly makes a course/certificate well-recogized internationally is not totally clear to me) and also the place you'd like to work in.

Your best be would be to contact a few jobs/schools in the country you are going to and find out if they recognize that certificate (they may not even require a certificate but it's sure good to have anyway). You can also ask about a typical time frame for securing visas, whether this can be done from outside the country or not, and when they are actually hiring. I wouldn't recommend getting into a long discussion with a school you aren't interested in working for just for your own informational purposes, but if it seems like a real possibility there is nothing wrong with emailing some questions.

Lots and lots of job ads at: Dave's ESL Cafe and Tefl.com

A lot depends on where you want to teach. I have seen schools that will only take a CELTA and others that don't require any sort of certification whatsoever. I was involved in the hiring process at one of the schools I worked at and unless we were desperate, we'd want people who had taken courses that were at least 100 hours in length and involved hands-on training. Anything that had a name like "Teach and Travel" was considered suspect.

One thing to consider is that in many countries you need to have a 4-year degree to get a visa. The teaching cert will get you the job, but the degree allows you to work legally. The degree can usually be in anything, but it must be a four-year one. I've seen people who completed their degrees in less time have trouble getting approved by immigration.

My first job didn't ask for any documentation at all. I was in Istanbul, they needed a teacher and I needed a job. Desperation all around meant they got an untrained teacher and I got a low-paying job that included a crappy apartment in a bad neighborhood. The second school used to be certified by the government to issue CELTAs and still had the certificates hanging around, so they gave me one. Later I decided to take the International House CELTA and it was well worth it. It gave me a better understanding of why I was doing what I did in the classroom and the ability to make educated decisions about whether or not to follow their methodologies.

Now that I consider EFL/ESL teaching to be my career (10+ years in four countries), I take it a bit more seriously and somewhat resent it when people with no training or qualifications think it's okay to turn up and teach. A lot of students are studying English to improve their lot in life and make serious financial sacrifices to be in the classroom. They should be getting a decent education for their buck (or lira, quetzal, dong, etc) from someone who has some idea of what he/she's doing. Think about how you'd feel if you were paying hard-earned cash to learn something from someone who had no idea how to teach it -- for example, learning auto repair from a teacher whose only qualification was that he knew how to drive.

I also think training and qualifications are important, and as I understood the last post, he was in fact asking about getting a qualification.

Certainly, an MA or DELTA will give someone an even better background to teach, but the fact that there are entry-level jobs for people with Bachelor's degrees and intro TEFL certificates - like the CELTA - is just a fact of the TEFL world. Schools benefit from this (they don't have to pay for teachers with advanced qualifications), and in a very real sense so do students (there are enough teachers to go around willing to work the split shifts at an hourly wage etc).

I think there are some teachers who take advantage of their native speaker status and just walk in without preparation or training, but there is still quite a difference between this group of people and people who may want to teach for a year or to and make an effort to train and prepare.

I did a CELTA a few years ago before I started teaching, and while this type of preparation (many different courses, not just the CELTA) is probably as good as it can get in a month-long intensive course...much comes from experience, as it does in many jobs.