Job Discussion Forums

[MissBroccoli]

Hello,
I currently teach ESL in a charter school in the States and am one class away from getting my Pennsylvania ESL Program Specialist certificate. It's an add-on certificate (meaning you have to have a teaching certificate in another field first- mine is elementary ed) and I'm not really sure what the actual documentation will say when I'm done. You need to take four 3 credit classes to get it. (Foundations of ESL, Language Acquisition, Linguistics, and Teaching ESL Methods and Assessment)

My hope is to be teaching ESL somewhere in Latin America in the next year or 2, and I'm wondering if this state cert will be regarded as a TESOL certificate.

I guess I really have 2 questions- do you think that employers would view it as being as good as a TESOL cert from one of those 4 week in-country courses?

Would a TESOL course still be beneficial after the classes I have taken? How indepth are they? My classes focused on teaching k-12 students English as a Second Language, which is really a different environemnt than English as a foreign language. Do you learn strategies I wouldn't have learned and do you learn enough of them that it would be worth the time and money?

Thanks for any help!
~Annie

[eslstudies]

The content, and the fact that its a 12 unit course, makes it sound equivalent to a semester length post graduate certificate.
Any employer unable to recognise this as being vastly superior to a 4 week pay your money and get your parchment "course" shouldn't be running a school!
Unfortunately, many of them fit this description!
So don't waste your time and money doing something else.

[naturegirl321]

State certs are worth more than one month long TEFL certs.

[MissBroccoli]

Thanks ESLstudies and Naturegirl. That was what I thought, but I figured I should check.