(upbeat music)
- Hello TEFL trainees my name is Wayne Walker,
I'm one of the instructors at
the international TEFL academy.
And I want to welcome you to your
international TEFL academy course.
In this video I'm going to give
you an overview and briefly discuss
the progression of the course
and some of the things that are available to you.
The first half of the course is
a little bit more theoretical than the second half,
we start in the first chapter discussing
the history of the english language
and the all important role of
the teacher in the classroom.
This is followed by chapter two,
which discusses how to create a classroom
that's centered around the students
via experiential learning and also
how individual students in every classroom
differ in terms of learning style
and multiple intelligences.
Chapter three is about culture and cultural sensitivity.
Most of you are planning to move abroad
to teach English as a foreign language
and you need to start considering
the different cultures of dimension,
how those relate to your personal culture,
and how the culture might be different
in whatever country you'd be moving to.
Chapter four starts to get into
the nuts and bolts of language teaching
still at the macro level,
it discusses methods and approaches,
it's important that you know the history of the field
and the different methods and approaches
that have been developed over the years
and what those look like.
It's important because chapter five
will introduce lesson planning and assessment
and in that chapter your task will be to create,
one of your tasks, will be to create
a complete lesson plan for the first time in the course,
and that really marks the halfway point of the course.
Second half of the course moves into more detail.
It better prepares you about how to fill your
lesson plans with specific language skills
and ideas for the classroom.
Chapter six discusses the language itself,
in terms of lexis and grammar,
what you're going to teach in terms of language
and some practical ideas for
how you can teach those things.
Language teaching isn't just about
the language that you're teaching,
it's also about the skills that you're
practicing in the classroom.
To that and chapter seven will cover
the receptive skills of listening and reading,
the different types of listening and reading
that you can do and some things that you
can do when you're practicing those skills.
Chapter eight moves on to the productive
skills of speaking and writing and the tasks
for those chapters, you'll create activities that
help you fill in your lesson plans
with skill based activities.
Chapter nine is about the use of
visual aides in the classroom,
something very important in language teaching,
as well as different ways that you can
use technology to assist you in your language classroom.
And the final chapter, chapter ten, is about
classroom management, something to get
you thinking about what you want
your classroom to look like,
and how you want it to proceed on a day to day basis.
In terms of course work, there are three regular
assignments you should complete every week.
First one is a peer participation question.
In the peer participation forum there will be
a question listed every week and
you should respond to that before midnight on Friday.
You also have to complete some online quizzes.
Most chapters have one to two of these.
The grammar and lexis chapter has a few more.
Those are completed online and graded online.
You also have forum tasks every week.
Those are digitally written assignments,
digitally submitted, and every chapter
has one to three of those.
All the tasks, both the quizzes and the forum tasks,
are due every Sunday, by midnight.
Your final project will be to
create a week long thematic unit
consisting of three complete,
thematically related lesson plans
and including all of the materials related to that unit.
It's important that you explore
and become comfortable with the website.
First there are the live lectures,
each instructor will give several live lectures,
over the course of each section that they instruct.
These are over different topics that
are meant to be supplemental to the course materials.
These are not obligatory, but there is a wealth
of information and experience in the ITA instructor staff,
and I encourage you to take advantage of that.
Check out the live lecture calendar if
you want to be invited to those.
If you're unable to attend any of them live,
but are interested in the content,
instructors record their lectures
and leave links to those in a document called:
Previously recorded lectures.
You can look for that on the website.
You also need to know that there is
job search guidance available via student affairs.
You can contact them if you have questions about that.
And let's get started with the course
and get on the road towards
teaching English as a foreign language.
(upbeat music)