[tonymorris]

Dear Philcolman,

I'm actually doing the onlineteflcourse.net course at the moment and I haven't had any problems with them.

Its always good to be careful and check up when you are buying anything on the internet though.

As regards TEFL certification, you have to remember that it isn't really an academic thing - it is a business. It isn't like a college degree, there is no government oversight or regulation of the TEFL industry. ALL of the schools and companies which offer TEFL courses, whether weekend residential, online, longer term, whatever, are just businesses. There is no central accreditation body for TEFL courses, so basically no online tefl course you sign up for has any form of government accreditation. In this sense, most companies which offer online courses, or weekend coursesor whatever, are in the same boat.

You can go for the Cambridge CELTA, but that is a lot of money, maybe a couple of thousand dollars, which I didn't really want to spend. Anyway, if you are heading abroad to teach English the chances are that wherever you go to work they will care more about your general standard of education than about any TEFL certificate you might have. I am a college graduate, I am planning to go to work in China, I have had loads of job offers and none of them has ever asked me whether or not I have a TEFL certificate, they only care about my degree.

Of course, it depends on where you are going and where you want to work. If you want to teach in a university somewhere like Japan, then the requirements are much higher, I guess they would want to see at least an M.A. and some kind of heavyweight linguistics training. Similarly, if you are wanting to teach in the schools system in America or any other western country, then most TEFL certificates are completely irrelevant - you will need at least a degree in English teaching.

Like I said, none of my prospective employers have seemed too interested in whether or not I have any TEFL certification so long as I have a degree. My degree wasn't in English so I didn't do this course for the certification, more just to get a background in teaching techniques, especially grammar, and in that I haven't been disappointed, the grammar course is actually very good, about 100 chapters long, explaining things very clearly. It certainly wasn't cobbled together in a hurry or ripped off from public domain stuff, it looks like a really professional job.

I looked around quite a lot before I chose this course and it seems to me that the internet is full of companies offering online TEFL courses, and I guess that they are all mostly the same : i-to-i.com , intesoltraining.com, teflcorp.com, cactustefl.com, they are all businesses, not schools. Just remember that so you won't be disappointed whichever one you choose. I chose onlineteflcourse.net because it was cheaper than the others and so far I haven't been disappointed. The online tutor arrangement works well, you just email them your work and they mark it and email it back with their comments and the next assignment, that keeps going until you finish the course (it does actually say that on their website) and at the end of it you get a certificate to say you completed the course and to show what grade you got, although, like I said I'm actually not too bothered about the certificate.

Anyway, I hope this helps.