learn to teach English
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Who can teach English ?

Anyone can teach English.

As long as you speak English fluently.

If you speak English fluently, you can teach English and you can be from anywhere in the world. You do not have to be British, nor American nor a citizen of any of the main so called English language root countries. For example, people from India speak fluent English although their root language is not English.

To teach English you do NOT need a university degree, nor any English language teaching certificates such as TEFL or Cambridge exams.

Sure, many language schools prefer to have teachers who have these qualifications because that is the way they work but there are some terrible English language teachers all over the world who have degrees and certificates but are simply just bad teachers because they cannot communicate with students. There are also many great English language teachers in the world who haven't studied past secondary school.

Do I need to know how to explain English grammar ?

Does a 7 year old child know what a verb is ? Does a 7 year old child know what adverbs, future tenses and the cases of the conditional are ?

Of course not, but that same 7 year old speaks it's mother tongue fluently and grammatically.

In the old days, up to about 25 years ago, English was taught by first teaching the student some words, then some grammar, and then how to put it all together, today that is no longer the case.
In modern language courses today, grammar is not taught at all and this because the way the modern language courses are structured, the grammar is included in the go-as-you-learn methods and the student doesn't need to know that in English adjectives usually go before the noun.
But he will learn to sat : " I have a blue car" and not " I have a car blue".

The great thing about learning to teach English is that as you the teacher go ahead and teach using the best English language course books in the world, you will slowly learn the grammar automatically if before you too had little knowledge of English grammar rules.

In our course, we also tell you some real insider teaching secrets, like how do you answer a student when he asks you something about grammar and you have no idea how to explain it to him.

The tools of the English language teacher

Some good English language course books ?
Well, yes and no, since with any good language course books, you have just half the tools.

The other half is knowing how to use them, which courses to use for which students, and how to navigate and move inside the course books, and also to get the student to follow you.
And in our course we will also show you how you can expand and be creative on top of what the course book teaches.

Case study of a bad but brilliant
English language teacher

But...... but but but .........
Your most important tool of all, is simply to be pleasant and fun with the student or students you are teaching.
Pete - founder of this website - started teaching English when he was 17 years old and was living at the time in Southern Italy. This was before he completed his studies, just to make some money on the side. So Pete got a job at a private language school where at that time, they needed mother tongue speaking teachers.
All of the other teachers had just arrived fresh with their master's degrees from Oxford or Cambridge, most just for summer job teaching, some all year round.
Pete learnt the 'ropes' in 2 weeks, and at that time the language courses used to teach English were absolute crap [ The Alexander Method ]compared to the modern ones used today ... and after 4 months, Pete was earning more than the other teachers and was also being sent out to do important external English courses for companies for the language school.

Was Pete a brilliant language teacher ? Nope, he was actually quite bad at teaching English. But at the end of each course, be it a 3 or 6 month course, Pete had the same amount of students and often even more, than there were at the beginning of the course.
All the other teachers had gradually lost students during their course and often their course with 10 initial students at the beginning, ended up with five or three, and most of these didn't return to the language school the next year.

Why was this ?
It was because lessons with Pete were a laugh and students had fun and enjoyed them.
The other Oxford and Cambridge teachers were serious, and actually tried to teach the students some English, but the students didn't enjoy the lessons as they did with Pete.
Pete's students leaving the school after a lesson had smiles on their faces. The other teacher's students looked as if they had just attended a funeral.
Most of Pete's students returned to the school the year after, and most of the other teacher's students went elsewhere. So in his clumsy way, Pete was a big asset for this language school.

That's all it takes.
If you want to be a good English language teacher, make your students laugh to start with.
The rest easily follows. [ and this is one of many aspects of teaching English we will explain to you during our 3 hour learn to tach English course.]

If you want to have a chat with Pete, either via Skype or phone, just let us know.
You will understand withing 2 minutes what enthusiasm and fun are, and even if you don't take our course, you will receive invaluable information in any case.