It seems this debate is gonna run and run so I’ll wade in again. First of all, let’s get over any perceived or implied ill feeling between those teachers with TESOL qualifications and those without. If we are serious about our profession and have our student’s best interests at heart then A is as good as B in that respect.
Secondly, yes there are a lot of TEFL certificates that don’t stand up to scrutiny - I’m thinking particularly of those intensive one or two week types - so let’s also remove those from the equation.
For sure most teachers learn an awful lot on the job and years of accumulated experience can make for a very competent language teacher. I think what Alien was driving at is that, despite the accumulated knowledge of the actual business of teaching, there is also a vast body of knowledge which you cannot acquire without professional study and that this is important as it, not only underpins the reasoning for what we actually do in the classroom, but also allows us to question it.
Two simple examples that spring to mind are:
1 You’ve taught your learners a particular vocabulary item at least 3 times and yet they still can’t produce it. How can you remedy this unless you know something of the standard tenets involved in ‘learning’ a word?
2 You’ve taken your learners through the whole New Interchange Series and they’ve passed all the end of semester tests yet they still can’t produce basic functional expressions. How can you come to terms with this unless you are aware of the fundamental flaws in the presentation/practice/production methodology this book follows?
I think these cogently show the value of education in the theoretical concepts underlying this and indeed any profession. No, qualifications alone don’t make for a good teacher but they can make a good teacher an awful lot better.
Furthermore, learning and teaching a language is a highly complex, and still not fully understood, process encompassing fields as diverse as psychology to pragmatics all of which a good TESOL degree will encompass. This is perhaps one reason why some teachers become a little hot under the collar when they are subjected to assertions like “Anyone can teach their own language”. To a degree, that will always hold true but if you can’t adequately explain why something is or isn’t so then, to my mind at least, you aren’t a goodteacher; Any native speaker can choose the correct answers in a grammar test but how many can answer the student’s question “But why is that one not suitable?”
In extremis, China’s Cultural Revolution had people ‘learn by doing’ in fields from language teaching to practising medicine with varying degrees of bad to disastrous consequences.
Nevertheless, good EFL teaching is as much a ‘profession’ as practising good medicine is in that they both require a knowledge of the underlying principles and techniques. Finally, I don’t assert this as a vainglorious response but as a heartfelt and theorised belief.
Course I still sound like a patronising git but ther ya go! and apologies to Alien for stepping on her turf!