What to Expect on a TEFL Course

Its hard to know what exactly one can expect on any given TEFL course around the world. Will there be a lot of work? Will I have time to have some fun on the weekends? How much homework will there be? Consider this, if you have never taught English and the goal is to start work as an ESL teacher right after the course then, yes, its safe to assume that there should be a reasonable amount of work.

So here's a run down of the minimum of what you can expect;

Grammar sessions
Phonology sessions
Teaching techniques- how to teach English to people who do not speak English
Teacher Practice- This is the cornerstone to any TESOL,TEFL or CELTA course. There must be a minimum of 6 hours of observed teaching practice. When trainees do not teach, they must observe each other.
At least one written report
At least two tests to measure mastery of Grammar and Phonology

Four weeks is a rather short period of time to turn non-teachers into teachers, therefore every minute of the course counts. My advice is to show up prepared to work and have an open, positive attitude. An open and positive attitude is the first prerequisite to living abroad as an English teacher well.

Introductory Arabic: The Idafa الإضافة

The idafa الإضافة is a basic construct essential to understanding Arabic. Without understanding it one can never get beyond a beginner's level. The word idafa literally means "the addition". In newspapers you will see اضاف المصدر (adafa almusdar) "the source added" used very often. Arabic is unlike languages like English and Spanish in that there isn't really a word for "of" in the possessive sense. In Spanish you would say "the book of the teacher" to mean "the teacher's book", but in Arabic you would say "book the teacher" to mean the same thing; كتاب الأستاذ (kitaab alustaadh).

When first starting to learn Arabic it seemed so foreign and strange that they don't have the simple word "of". I found myself struggling to form basic sentences because I didn't really understand the idafa. I would throw in the word مِن thinking that it meant "of" instead of "from" and get blank stares from my teachers. Here are some more examples to help drive home the idea of the idafa:

• صواريخ بعيدة المدى (Sawareekh ba'eedat almada) - Long range missiles, literally "missles long of the range"
• سرطان الجلد (Sarataan aljild) - Skin cancer, literally "cancer of the skin"
• تكنولوجيا المعلومات (Technologia alma'loomaat) - Information technology, literally "technology of the information"

When the owner of the object is already a definite noun, such as a proper name, you don't add the alif and lam. For example, if you're talking about Nadir's wallet, you're not going to say "wallet alNadir". You would just say "wallet Nadir". محفظة نادر is correct, NOT محفظة النادر . Here are some more examples:

• ولاية فلوريدا (wilaayat florida) - The state of Florida
• مراسل بي بي سي (muraasil BBC) - BBC correspondent (correspondent of BBC)
  

Something else you may have noticed about idafas is that when the first word in the idafa (the thing that is owned) ends in altaa almarbouta ة it makes a "t" sound. This can be see in the example of "the state of Florida". Even though, by itself, the word ولاية (wilaaya) doesn't have a "t" sound at the end, if it's the first word in an idafa then it does have a "t" sound. If you didn't make the "t" sound at the end of it and just said "wilaaya Florida" it would mean "a state is Florida". My teachers used to always stop me when I wouldn't make the "t" sound at the end in situations like that and I never understood what the big deal was. Some time later I realized that not pronouncing the "t" actually gives the phrase a different meaning.

Some Basics

Arabic seems like an impossible language to learn for most English speakers, but this is due mostly to how strange it sounds. Once you get past the sounds that we don't have in English the language is rather logical and the words are easy to remember. The vast majority of the words in Arabic come from a 3 letter root. You'll have a 3 letter root and variations of that root make different words that are all similarly related. For example, كتب (pronounced kataba) means "he wrote". مكتب (maktab) is a desk. مكتبة (maktaba) is a library. كتاب (kitaab) is a book. There are a lot more words that come from the root kataba, but you get the idea. Sometimes you'll have two words that aren't related at all but which have the same root which can be a little annoying, but most of the time there is some logic involved which really helps in memorizing words. In this respect Arabic is more logical than English. A foreigner learning English has to learn 4 totally different sounding, unrelated words; "he wrote", "desk", "library", and "book", while the Arabic words for these things are all related.

The grammar of Arabic isn't hard to grasp either. The most common way to structure an Arabic sentence is VSO (English is SVO). In Arabic you'd say, "Threw the boy the ball" if you wanted to say the English, "The boy threw the ball." You don't have to say it this way though. You can structure the sentence just like you would in English and they will still understand you. It's just more common to put the sentence in VSO form.

Verb tenses are also much easier in Arabic than they are in English. Easier than Spanish also. I remember trying to learn the Spanish verb tenses in high school and I never knew when to use one past tense or the other past tense. In Arabic there's no worrying about that because it only has 3 tenses (4 if you count the imperative). They are simply past, present, and future. There's no past-subjunctive-progressive whatever. To make a verb future tense all you have to do is put an "s" sound on the front. For past, all of the 3 letter roots are already in the past tense, so you don't have to change them for past tense. For present tense it's a little more complicated, but not much. You put an أ (pronounced "a" as in apple) in front of the root for 1st person present (I write), a ي (pronounced "ya" as in yak) in front for 3rd person masculine (he writes), an a ت (pronounced like "t") in front for both 2nd person and 3rd person feminine (you write and she writes). Those are the basics of the tenses. There is more about the tenses that is slightly more complicated but still really simple compared to other languages.

There are a few sounds in Arabic that English doesn't have, such as the خ which sounds like someone trying to cough up some phlegm and the ق which is like a "k" but is pronounced in the back of the throat. There are also 2 "s" sounds and 2 "d" sounds that are very hard for native English speakers to tell the difference between even with a lot of exposure to the language. Even if you can't tell the difference between some of the sounds you can still know from context what is being said.