TEFL A LA CARTE

These pages offer an approach to in-service teacher training that I have found satisfying and successful with a wide range of national and cultural groups and which works, with modification, with both relatively experienced and barely trained teachers. The materials have been used in various forms on short courses for teachers in secondary schools, further and higher education colleges and private language schools, in Europe, South America, Asia and Africa.

The underlying methodology explored in these materials emphasises interaction, communication and participation. It follows, therefore, that interaction, communication and participation is what participants should experience during these seminars.

A typical session will begin with participants being presented with questions and examples to discuss, or problems to work on, in small groups, followed by interactive plenary feedback sessions with the presenter, and ending with a practical workshop session.

This approach aims at ensuring that participants think about and question ideas and beliefs about language teaching, both those taken for granted in their teaching contexts and those that they may be meeting for the first time.

For each unit I have included a Commentary containing notes on the activities. These Commentaries are personal and opiniated. They present views which I think are reasonable, but which may occasionally appear extreme to your course participants. I feel that this is a good thing on this type of in-service programme. The participants don't have to agree with all the opinions that I express or the comments I make (any more than you do!), but in order to argue against them they need to have thought about them and reached supportable and sustainable arguments for their own proposals. This programe aims to stimulate argument and discussion and the participating teachers, therefore, have to have things to argue about.

Qualified EFL teachers who attend conferences, keep up with the journals and have regular refresher seminars organised for them often forget that in most parts of the world most English teachers are relatively untrained or badly trained and are working in situations with large classes, few or no resources and under the stifling control of rigid, old-fashioned examination systems policed by teams of Inspectors who know less about language teaching than they do. TEFL a la Carte is aimed at these teachers. You cannot make up for the lack of training and resources with a few in-service training sessions, but if you can get teachers to think about what they are doing, to question some of the assumptions under which they are working and to introduce one or two new things into their teaching then you have succeeded. You may have planted a few seeds that will eventually grow and prove to have a greater significance in the future.

A lot of good work is being done with teachers in the less well-off parts of the world by professional organisations such as the British Council, but they can only scratch the surface of the enormous need that exists for in-service training. Much of the work that is being done day-by-day is carried out by volunteers with organisations like VSO and the Peace Corps. Volunteers may be very experienced and highly qualified teachers and they might also be untrained and relatively inexperienced people straight out of University. Few of them have any experience of teacher training, yet it is practically inevitable that at some time during their assignments they will be asked to work with teachers in some form of in-service training. I hope that TEFL a la Carte will be of some use to these volunteer teachers, as well as to more experienced teachers and trainers who simply do not have the time to create effective materials for themselves.

In most of the places I have worked there have been either limited, or a complete absence of, teaching aids. For this reason, the programme requires no use of films, tapes, computer displays or any other of the aids now so popular in most West European institutions. The programme can be run without electricity other than that generated between the presenter and the participants. It assumes the availability of a board with chalk or pens and it does assume an ability to make locally or take with you photocopied handouts.

Read the FIRST page for a checklist of things you should have done before starting the training programme.

The PROGRAMME page contains summaries of the units and links so that you can view on-screen or download session plans, handouts and commentaries. The real “meat” of the material is in the COMMENTARIES. This means that some of the pages are a bit text-heavy, but I hope you will not mind that too much.

The pictures are just there to brighten up the pages. They are scenes from some of the countries where I have used the materials.