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nomad soul · Joined: 31 Jan 2010 Posts: 11454 Location: The real world

The future of the four-week course up for debate at IH London event
By Matt Salusbury, EL Gazette | Dec. 2018
http://www.elgazette.com

With the profile of the trainee and the contexts they work in changing dramatically, what is the future of training?

Brita Haycraft, co-founder with husband John of IH, remembered how the school they'd started quickly blossomed into a centre for teacher training. ‘Very soon we had to get an office just for the teacher training.’

But what is the future of teacher training now?

The four-week course, the standard entry qualification designed, originally, for native-speaker graduates, has been around for decades. Teacher training at IH started 56 years ago. The Trinity CertTESOL is 40 years old, and the CELTA, which replaced the old RSA PrepCert, celebrates its 30th birthday this year.

But the people taking such courses and the contexts they are teaching in have changed beyond recognition. IH London’s assistant director of training Jess Andrews pointed out that 50 years ago, virtually all the IH trainees were native speakers. This has now dropped to around 50-60%.

A similar opinion was expressed by Ben Beaumont, TESOL qualifications manager at Trinity College London. He noted that the four-week model ‘has served us well for many years. Yet, while the input has remained essentially the same, the trainees’ origins and destinations have changed dramatically.'

A CELTA assessor said she always talks to other trainers about what they are doing. ‘They have quite a lot of flexibility afforded to them – you decide the timetable’ and have a lot of discretion on what the input is.

How can training be adapted to the needs of today’s trainees and the contexts they work in?

(End of excerpt)

Vince · Joined: 05 May 2003 Posts: 559 Location: U.S.

So the article is saying that the CertTESOL and CELTA might not have the optimum training approach anymore, considering the high percentage of trainees who are non-native English speakers. If the trainees have enough English to qualify for the program, and if the trainers are flexible with non-native trainees, I'm not sure where the issue lies. I'm not saying that there couldn't be an issue, but that this article doesn't provide enough detail.

juriusz · Joined: 05 Sep 2011 Posts: 26

CELTA was created years ago, back then most of the students were adults. These days young learners are the biggest group of learners. I think it would be useful to have more YL content in the course - if I remember well, my CELTA had 90 minutes dedicated to YLs. There was YL extension to CELTA, now there is TYLEC, but you need to have CELTA in the first place. Many teachers do CELTA, then land a job and realise that teaching children or teens is a very different thing to what they know from the course. I think this should be considered, rather than the trainees' language skills. Unless something has changed, you need to be C1 to get accepted on the course (I know a person who was rather B1-B2 when she did CELTA, but somehow managed to do it).

Vince · Joined: 05 May 2003 Posts: 559 Location: U.S.

As a follow-up to my post above, I found an article from 2013 that argues that the CELTA and CertTESOL have become inconsistent with the growth of global English.

Here is the article: https://academic.oup.com/eltj/article/67/2/163/530109

This might not reflect all 120-hour certificates. Some might better address these kinds of developments in the EFL market.