02/26/10 04:06 Age: 190 days
JHF’s First TESOL Course Held in Tianjin
Category: Teaching
BY: CAROL WOODFORD (USA)
As part of the new English Teacher Training Project, JHF’s first TESOL course was held from 18 January – 5 February 2010, at the Tianjin representative office. The course is certified by International Training Network, Christchurch, UK, and taught by Carol Woodford.
Four tired but successful trainees completed JHF’s first TESOL course in Tianjin on 5 Feb 2010. These four – three JHF associates and one non-associate - will receive certificates from International Training Network, a teacher-training organization in Christchurch, UK, which helped plan and monitored the Tianjin course.
TESOL, which stands for Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, is also called TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language). A TESOL course provides the basic knowledge, skills and experience needed to be a confident English teacher. The Tianjin TESOL course is part of JHF’s new English Teacher Training Project, which also will include professional development seminars for JHF teachers and a summer training program for Chinese English teachers. The project manager, Carol Woodford, has been conducting TESOL courses in cooperation with ITN for five years and holds a Master’s Degree in Applied Linguistics and ESL (English as a Second Language) from Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
A key facet of any good TESOL course is the teaching practice, in which trainees gain valuable experience teaching real students with the supervision of the trainer. The teaching-practice students for our first TESOL course came primarily from the Tianjin Senior Citizens University, which sent 12 eager and delightful students to study English with our trainees. These students enjoyed the lessons so much that they gave Spring Festival gifts (stuffed red tigers) to the teachers when the course was finished.
During the project’s first year, two full-time TESOL courses (meeting 35 hours per week for three weeks) and two part-time courses (meeting 10 hours per week for 10 weeks) are planned. The tentative dates for the remainder of 2010 are 16 March - 22 May, 2-20 August and 6 September - 19 November. We hope to begin a training program for Chinese English teachers in summer 2010 and professional development seminars for JHF teachers in the autumn.
Last updated on: Tue May 16 21:42:40 2006 by: Achim Gerber
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