Hard graft but a highly valuable and practical experience

I completed the college's CELT-P course in Autumn 2016 and have returned for the Winter 2017 CertTESOL course. Whilst the workload was somewhat excessive on the CELT-P course, there were also many advantages to studying and gaining teaching practice with ABCi and the English Teacher Training College.

One of the best things about the courses is that they provide you with plenty of practical teaching experience in a wide variety of schools throughout the country. The teaching practice combines the delivery of a set programme with the implementation of your own lesson ideas. This aspect of the course was excellent as you become familiar with many tried and tested activities and language games which can be easily adapted and used in different situations.

Teaching the programme also allows you to really focus on your delivery in the classroom and improve on things like behaviour management techniques. Although I had done a PGCE and had worked as a language teacher for several years before beginning the course, it was a real eye-opener for me as I had chance to observe my peers and course tutors on a regular basis. This exposed me to different teaching styles and techniques and the support and feedback from course tutors was very helpful indeed. They gave me some great ideas about how to improve my own teaching methods and encouraged me to be more creative and adventurous in my lesson planning.

As far as I know, these advantages are unique to the college as most other CertTESOL or CELT-P courses will not provide as much teaching practice or as many opportunities to observe and be observed by experienced teachers. At the end of the day, I decided to return to the college because I really enjoyed teaching their programme, I felt that there was a lot of support from the course tutors and I knew that there was so much more to be learned from them by completing a second course. It is also a great deal financially as you gain an internationally recognised teaching qualification free of charge whilst living in some really beautiful places in Austria.