If you have ever thought about teaching English in another country, and if you don’t already have a TEFL certificate (Teaching English as a Foreign Language), now might be a good time to get that certificate.
First of all, the TEFL certificate is widely accepted and will get you a job teaching English just about anywhere you want to go. The only certificate that might be a little more desirable is the TESOL (Teaching English as a Second Language) only because someone normally earns the TESOL through university studies, and thus it not only takes more time to earn the TESOL, it generally costs a WHOLE LOT MORE. But from what I have seen, the TEFL certificate is just as good … and a lot CHEAPER and LESS TIME CONSUMING to earn.
Now you can find schools all over the world that would gladly take your money (and as much of it as they can get) to give you a TEFL certificate without doing hardly any work. But that’s not what you want, right? Besides, if you get your certificate through one of these fly-by-nights, you may not get that job you want as an English teacher.
Before I started my TEFL training, I did extensive research on the internet to find legitimate certificate-issuing TEFL training institutes/schools. In my opinion, you can trust two schools in particular – BridgeTEFL, and the other is called i-to-i TEFL. You can find i-to-i TEFL at www.onlinetefl.com, they place students all over the world, and seem to have an excellent program. I was very close to choosing i-to-i TEFL because their online course was a bit cheaper, but they are based in Europe and I was afraid that my personal tutor as well as their online and print materials would be “European English,” and I did not want to add that to the mix. Having said that, I expect that some of my fears are unfounded, and that I probably would have had an equally good experience with them. But having said that, I chose BridgeTEFL, also widely known and respected, and based here in the United States. You can take BridgeTEFL courses locally if you can get in the class (which were booked when I tried), or you can take their course entirely online at www.teflonline.com.
I was very pleased with the BridgeTEFL program I took online at www.teflonline.com. It is not an easy program by any stretch of the imagination – it took me about 8 weeks to finish the course – but it was very informative, with very well developed materials and video tutorials. You will also have a personal tutor that corrects your assignments, and with whom you can communicate throughout the course.
Earlier in this message I said that now might be a good time to get a TEFL certificate because I noticed that both these training institutes have their prices about as low as their going to ever be. At the time of this post the 120 hour online TEFL course by i-to-i TEFL is being offered for only $249; BridgeTEFL had also discounted the price for the 120 hour online program to $416.50 (which is what I paid for it several months ago). Again, I felt completely comfortable with BridgeTEFL, and was willing to spend the extra money to go with them, and I took their online course.