How To Become A Teacher In California

Situated on the west coast of the united states in southern California, San Diego benefits from a year-round warm climate making it an incredibly pleasant city in which to live, work and study. The city also benefits from long stretches of beautiful sandy beaches and a close proximity to the Mexican border. California’s second largest city is surrounded by beautiful coastline, impressive mountains and gorgeous valleys. Inside the city you will find numerous museums, galleries, theaters and music venues, while the beaches and surrounding countryside offer a seemingly endless number of sport and leisure activities. All of this makes San Diego the perfect place to take a TEFL/TESOL course and to start your journey as a qualified English teacher. Although known as the ‘birthplace of...  [Read more]

Group Dynamics I have always been fascinated by social dynamics and how they affect groups in personal and professional contexts. A teacher must be constantly aware of group dynamics while teaching. The teacher is not, however, merely exporting language information-grammatical structures, vocabulary, etc-but also acts in a role model capacity. This translates into how the teacher presents materials and engages the class. While researching for this essay, I stumbled across an article titled, Teacher Identity as Pedagogy: Towards a Field-Internal Conceptualisation in Bilingual and Second Language Education. The article explores using the teacher’s personal identity as a ‘field-internal’ teaching tool, as a way to teach students a language, but also excite collaborative skills in...  [Read more]

Large Class Size Findings in many of the past studies do indeed suggest that small-sized classes are indeed more effective that larger classes. The benefits of smaller classes are endless, but what about those instructors that have no choice in the matter? Many scholars have come up with strategies in order to help those that are presented with the larger class and want to make it a success. Along these lines, many feel that it isn’t always the size of the class, it is the quality. Students at the University of California, Santa Barbara, have expressed their opinion that the instructor has more of an impact on the quality of the class than the size itself (oic.id.ucsb.edu/). And in order to make the classroom a quality learning environment, many individuals, including those at Penn...  [Read more]

TESOL certification courses have traditionally been offered either as 4-week, classroom based courses or as 100% online or distance learning. We at ITTT see the benefits and drawbacks to both types of study. In order to offer greater variety and flexibility for course participants, we’ve combined the best of both methods of study and training into one unique course. As the name suggests, the Combined course combines two elements of study: the first being online and the second being in class study, training and teaching at one of our Combined course training centers. The course offers the opportunity to study the theories of teaching online and at your own pace from the comfort of your own home or office. Then you’ll have the opportunity to put theory into practice through further...  [Read more]

Mighty big place, Partner. As Ferdinand Braudel, the great French historian observed, ‘the land dictates the people’, and it is a good idea never to stray too far from this theme. If you want to know what ‘cold’ is then head up to Minneapolis, north of Toronto, in the mid winter. If you want to know what ‘hot and humid is’ then try Orlando in the height of the summer. If you transcribe a line from Los Angles to Miami and turn this into a road trip then the number of different peoples and environments you will encounter is immense. By all means there is a thin veneer of Americanism, and everywhere you will find both McDonalds, and the presence of the Federal Government; however, you shouldn’t let this take your eye off the ball of the fact that the people and environment of...  [Read more]

British english vs american English With English being recognised as the global language of choice, which one is considered the official language? So just how did American English diverge from British English in the first place? American English roots back to the early colonial days of the late 16th century, were a whole gamut of cultures converged into a single society. In some colonies English wasn’t even a spoken language and in those colonies that did speak English it was quite different from the English we know today. The Elizabethan English of the day consisted of many varieties of regional English dialects. All these different dialects, intermingled with a multitude of cultures formed one big boiling pot, of which over time, a new variant was produced – American English. And...  [Read more]