#teaching efl

My answer to: Can you teach with just a TEFL?

Can you teach with just a TEFL?

Enna Morgan, International English/ ESL Instructor and Education Counsellor for 8 years. Answered 8h ago

Thanks for the A2A, Laura.

Definitely!

The short answer: You can teach with absolutely no credentials.

The long answer will depend on where you want to teach, what you are teaching, who you are, what you look like, and a myriad variables.

I…

While teaching some adult students and discussing what’s necessary to put on a resume/CV. One is an older gentleman researcher; the other is a younger doctor.

Researcher: I think it’s important for gender to be on a CV.

Doctor: ...Why?

Researcher: Well, if you hire too many women it’s not good, right? I don’t want to discriminate against women but [B.S. comment that irks me to remember]

Doctor: *Looks politely skeptical, folds his arms over his chest* ...Is that discrimination? Because that sounds exactly like discriminating against women.

The researcher didn’t say a word (to me or the doctor) for the rest of class and booked it once the lesson was done.

In my lessons, there is one rule: English only. It’s an English conversation practice class, after all, so speaking your mother tongue isn’t really encouraged.

Despite that, as soon as the door closes and our little class begins, he immediately wants to share anything and everything with me... in his mother tongue.

“Hey look, Stefanie, the rubber band on my crayon box makes a ‘twang’ sound when I hit it. *Tugs on the band* See?!”

“Check it out, if I shake my bag really hard everything will be all messed up inside! ...Oh, ew, look, Stefanie, I still have breadcrumbs from lunch. Don’t tell my mom.”

He also likes to voice his opinions on the way I teach my class. Not in a mean way, but in a “taking charge” way.

“Look, I know we’re doing the alphabet, but I’d rather play that game where you make me say something in English and then I get to throw a ball into a basket.”

“Hey, so, this game is fun, but can we go over my homework?” (Is this kid even real?)

My class doesn’t have a curriculum or a textbook, so it’s up to me to come up with each lesson. Nobody seems to care what I teach as long as it’s not about Taiwan, so I can talk about whatever I want. While freedom is nice, coming up with two hours of material for a class can be rather daunting, and I steal other teachers' ideas almost as much as my students plagiarize.  Of course, I do it with permission, and nobody is grading me.

My class is supposed to focus on oral English, so I try to think of useful activities and units that will improve my students' speaking ability in a relevant way.  Common activities for an oral classroom are dialogues, which Chinese students like because all they have to do is memorize the correct responses, speeches, which are boring for everyone involved, skits, which really give my students a chance to show how much fun they are, and story-telling, which is a common part of English conversations and gives me a chance to talk about children's stories and fairy tales while learning more about Chinese folklore.

Over the past month, I've been focusing on story-telling with my students. We started with descriptions.  Descriptions are generally the most boring part of stories, so based on a lesson that Johnny taught to his class, I decided introduce my students to similes.  The examples they were given were "busy as a bee," "healthy as a horse," and "tall as a giraffe."  There are also similes in Chinese, so they caught onto this concept fairly quickly and had some fun with it. Based on their answers, I was able to figure out some common Chinese similes:

As small as a cherry (when talking about noses or lips).

As lazy as a pig.

As relaxed as a cat.

Some of my favorite similes that they presumably made up themselves are these:

Claire is as sunny as a sunflower. She is as irritable as a tiger.

He is as flexible as a monkey.

He is as smart as a happy sheep.

Her disposition is as tender as the afternoon sunshine.

Her fingers are as slender as bamboo shoots.

She is as lively as a cricket.

His mouse is as big as a horse (I think this student meant mouth).

His chest is as broad as the sea.

He sings like a hungry wolf which hasn’t eaten any food in weeks.

He is fat like a penguin.

His small eyes are as bright as 100-watt bulbs.

Her teeth are as white as salt.

She has two sex lips like two orange slices.

Her eyelashes are as dense as a comb.

Her eyebrows are as short as hairy insects.

She eats as slowly as a chicken eats rice.

We are as good as mandarin ducks (she was talking about their friendship).

Her temper is as fiery as a volcano.

My father is as fat as a balloon, his skin as black as chocolate, and he eats as fast as a tornado.

He is as talkative as a never-ending flood.

But unfortunately, there are too many zits on his face, making his face like the moonscape devastated by meteorites.

I like that these similes teach me a bit about China—for instance, chickens eat rice (albeit slowly), and mandarin ducks apparently make good friends. Comparing teeth to salt makes me cringe, and calling someone's eyebrows hairy insects seems like it would be a huge insult, except that all of these students are far too polite to write anything rude about their subjects.

After I was done teaching this class, Skylar came to find me in my classroom. She walked by my students leaving the classroom, and one of them, Constantine, was clearly struck by her. He stared at her wide-eyed, and as she walked into my classroom, she heard him say to himself, “As beautiful as an angel.”