Dear all,
I have found passion in teaching and would like to take it as a serious career move. I am currently in the field of child education and would like to take a course to be a qualified IELTS teacher.
I have been doing my research online, but have not yet found anywhere providing such course. Please help if you have any information regarding this issue. Thank you very much
Do you mean you are interested in becoming an IELTS examiner, or a teacher on a preparatiion course for that test? If the first one, you can apply through the British Council or IDP offices. As far as the second is concerned, I have never heard of courses for people who want to teach IELTS preparation.
When you qualify as an examiner you are not actually supposed to teach IELTS preparation courses. The rules say something about not using your specialist knowledge. No one takes any notice, but there clearly is no need to be teaching teachers about IELTS if you don’t need examiners.
I’ve found the BC to be remarkably reticent when it comes to giving out information about IELTS examiner courses. As a money-making venture they don’t make a lot of effort to equip people to go and work for the competition, so if they don’t actually need examiners they’re unlikely to train anyone.
I’ve heard that IDP are more approachable and helpful.
I believe that if they do run a course you need to have three years verifiable relevant experience and a CELTA certificate. Maybe someone in the know can verify that? If you’re teaching kids now then you may find that they don’t consider that to be relevant.
IELTS is not for children, and teaching adults is a whole different ball game. Why not get some experience of adult teaching before spending money on training courses?
As the other guy said, there don’t apear to be any ‘how to teach IELTS’ courses out there. I persuaded one of my schools to run a short workshop a while back on this very subject, and think that it may be worth running an occasional weekend course written by experienced examiners and teachers.
I imagine that for two days it would cost NT$4-5000! Would anyone buy that if it didn’t lead to a recognised qualification?
The BC say they need a CELTA or Trinity Cert and 3 years’ experience before they will train you. However, I’ve been registered with them since October 2003 and have heard nothing about them training new examiners.
I did a course to become an IELTS examiner at ATEC (as the British Council in Taiwan used to be known) in about 1998. I failed the test to become an examiner, but maybe enough people have passed since, so that they have a big enough pool of examiners to call upon.
In HK, British Council seems to have an unspoken rule that their IELTS examiner courses are only open to their own teachers. They say the rule is that you must have a cert. level qualification plus three years of experience, but they have trained people with as little as one year of post-cert experience. As Loretta suggested, IDP is generally more approachable. I think this is because they don’t really offer a whole lot of language courses, so they don’t have as many teachers loafing around, looking for a bit of extra work like at the Council. When I asked some friends in management down at the Council here about IELTS examiner training, they all said that since I’m not a BC employee, the only hope I’d have would be at IDP. It does seem to be good work when you can get it, though.
Camille, perhaps another thing you could consider is the Cambridge Young Learners Exam. I’m not very familiar with it, but I’m pretty sure there is an oral part and that the examiner has to do some sort of course similar to an IELTS examiner course. The Cambridge Young Learners Exam is getting really popular in HK and generates a lot of income for BC and other tutorial centers that claim to offer prep courses for it. I imagine that it being a Cambridge thing, they would probably require CELTYL or an equivalent qualification plus experience. If you are a qualified primary school teacher, the CELTYL might be a good way to move into TESL to children.
A one hour flight away. You can do the whole CELTYL course there, or you can just do the YL extension if you already have a cert level language teaching qualification. BC Hong Kong axed their CELTA course, but they kept the CELTYL since so much of their business is now teaching kiddies. They need their own teachers to do the YL extension in order to meet demand. I imagine that the CELTYL and YL extension are also offered in Thailand or Malaysia if you need a cheaper place to do it. The HK courses are among the most expensive in the world.
The only problem is that now that I’ve finally found it, I can’t find any courses where I won’t have to take a month off work to do it. If only they offered summer courses like they do for the CELTA and the DELTA. The Thailand course starts at the end of this month. Very cheap, especially in comparison to the other countries I looked up, but very inconvenient for someone who works a regular school year already.
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