Teaching English to finance trips?

Hi Peter!

Seems like we hit on the same group at the same time LOL

Thanks Huw, that was all very useful! I shall certain keep all of that in mind. On the above point, I can appreciate that. Things are never as easy as they look! The only real benefit behind me is that I'm a copywriter, was a journalist for a few years before that, and regularly study English grammar (outside of academia).

It is starting to sound like the course will be a good idea though. But I'm not really looking at this as a career, more as a way of taking the bite out of travel costs, meaning I can travel for longer than if I had to stick to a preset budget. But.. you never know, I could get the teaching bug, and want to take it up full-time.. so, yeah, lots of thoughts and decisions to be taken. Thanks for your insights!

(From what I've researched, a degree is only essential in Japan since you cannot get a work visa without one, except for the one-off six month 'working holiday' visa. Of course, a lot of people go as tourists and work anyway, but I guess that's not to be recommended!)

This site may be helpful.
http://www.english-international.com/CELTA.html

I've found Patricia T. O'Conner's grammar book, 'Woe Is I,' quite helpful. It's especially good at explaining English in plain English. That's a big plus for a non-teacher who wants to teach. She also has books on writing techniques (Words Fail Me) and online writing (You Send Me).

Allegra Bloom

If you are trained properly in ESL, you actually don't need to know much (or any) of the students' native language(s). I teach in a new arrivals program, and we can have 15 students with more than 10 native languages between them, and obviously it isn't terribly practical to know all 10 languages! The more you know about the students' L1 the better, obviously, so you can tell which mistakes might be transfer and that kind of thing, but one of the main things you learn doing an ESL teaching qualification is how to teach in the target language. It's quite challenging with absolute beginners.

I also couldn't agree more with the poster who warned that the intermediate students will know a hell of a lot more grammar than most native speakers of English. If you have ever learnt a second language yourself you will probably have a much better understanding of English grammar, but there are so many aspects of English that you just 'know', rather than need to specifically learn.