Achieving TESOL Diplomas

Taking this course has been a most rewarding experience. It has given me confidence, taught me organizational skills, sharpened my grammar, and shown me a variety of tools to use as I endeavor to teach others the exciting language of english. Before taking this course, I was attempting to help some friends from Togo to improve their language skills in english. I was comfortable in sharing what I could with them. I knew that there were others that would also benefit from some english tutoring, but I did not feel confident enough to teach people that I didn’t know personally. Now that I have taken this course, I feel confident in my ability to teach and to help many others with the same needs as my friends to improve their language skills. I would say that the most beneficial to me in this course was the focus on effective and interesting lesson planning. The ideas and structures given throughout the many units will help me in the future to plan concise, exciting, and appropriate lessons for any type of group that I may be given the opportunity to teach. This course gave me a new awareness of my native language. I always knew, even though I had taken high school and college grammar courses, that there were grammar rules and applications that I had not heard of before. Not having the need to understand all of the nuances of english grammar, I never thought to pursue it any further. Now that I will be teaching others english, it is necessary to know and understand these finer points of grammar so that I can explain their uses to others. So, I deeply appreciated the grammar explanations given in many of the units. Some of the tools that I look forward to using are the lesson plan templates, the many teaching ideas for presenting different topics, and the various applications of different teaching methods, for instance, choral repetition. The endless resources available should make teaching english an exciting and beneficial event for all involved. In the immediate future, I plan to begin lessons again in February with my two friends from Togo. Schedules permitting, my daughter, Rachel, will simultaneously be teaching another young woman, also from Togo. Since they are at different levels in their english abilities, I will be teaching a pre-intermediate to intermediate class while Rachel will be teaching a beginner’s level class. In the future, the Lord willing, I would like to offer some classes for other people in the area that need additional help in acquiring better english speaking skills. There are people from Africa, South America, and Mexico that come to this area for employment at a meat-packing plant, so the need is very high for classes in english as a second language. I appreciated the opportunity to be able to take this online course. I thought it was well thought out. It was concise, yet challenging. There were some parts that I felt needed further explanation and clarification, and I found help on the internet, but overall, the course was quite clear.