Job Discussion Forums

[Otis79]

hello EFL folk
my name is owen, im an australian guy in france. Thinking of getting into the TEFL world as i want to live here, and probably a few non english countries after
like to think i would like teaching english, but really have no idea, but willing to give it a bash!
So......sorry if my questions are all very obvious, but it seems hard to find clear information on a lot of these......and my questions are!:

numero uno: Is there anyway to get the TEFL cert. or equivalent without having to pay the inane course fees? (im not interested in studying online) anything like an NGO or internship that pays mother tongue speakers to work as assistants and qualifies them at the same time? preferably in europe, im happy to go anywhere for a month or so! It is really expensive for me, most courses i am seeing are around 1000 euroes or more

2) I have a british passport as well, so im down with the EU, is there anything like a tech. course or community college styled course (read cheap!) in Britain, that could qualify me? i cant find it on the net

3)I want to work in france, or french speaking belgium or switzerland, are there any teachers assistant programs outside of the french goverment one (that hires american youth who have some formal study of french) that dont require qualifications? I speak moderate french, but its not very clean, and i have no quals

all right thats it!
basically i want to get good at french, live in france, and not have to wash dishes......if TEFL works out its something i can see myself doing on and off for a number of years, just a bit put off by the cost of getting started!
O

[dagi]

In the Netherlands you can do teacher training and get your university fees reimbursed by the government. They introduced this to make the teacher training more attractive for students.
The only downside for you is, that first you would have to work here for a while to become eligible for this as you are not Dutch.
Once you are a resident here, have a social security number and can prove that you paid taxes for a while you have the same status than Dutch students.

You can do the teacher training full-time or part-time and also chose to find a job while studying and get it accredited as internship. I did it part-time, worked in call-centres for the first two years and then started teaching. The fees for the first 2 years were reimbursed by the government and for the third year I paid half of it myself and the other half was paid by the school I worked for.
In the end you get a B.A. of Ed. and are a qualified teacher.
In the Netherlands most unis or university colleges have special "fast track" programmes for native speakers.

The European Union runs a programme for assistant teachers in European countries but to participate you must be a student at a university or university college in a European country. Not sure, but I do think it is the Socrates programme.