TESOL Certification

Anyone who was born or raised in an English speaking country has a huge advantage when it comes to getting a job abroad. By having a university diploma (regardless of my degree) and the native ability of speaking English I am qualified to teach English in a handful of countries around the world. While on my job hunt I found that China and South Korea took those two factors into consideration and with a few more questions, they deemed me capable of teaching English to children in their country. However, my dreams were a little more tropical than China and South Korea, so I headed my research in the direction of Thailand. Upon speaking to some programs in Thailand I found that it wasn't enough to be an American born with a university degree, I also needed a TESOL certification.

TESOL stands for Teaching English to Students of Other Languages (or some variation of that) and it's a simple way of saying that you've taken classes about the English language which qualify you to teach said language. There are numerous ways to gain this certification, all of which are expensive and time consuming, but extremely worth it in the end. Ohio University and many other schools offer a TESOL certification through their linguistics department, which seems to be the easiest way to gain the certification. You take the right mixture of linguistics classes and not only do you gain a degree in linguistics, but you also get a TESOL certificate. I was already pushing it to graduate college on time, so this wasn't a plausible answer for me. Instead I chose to complete my TESOL course online which was beneficial and informative, but definitely wouldn't have compared to having an actual hands-on lesson in person. Regardless, it resulted in my name on a TESOL certificate which is what I needed!

The whole program took me about 6 months to complete online, but I was also juggling a full class schedule at school and working 25 hours a week, so it wasn't high on my list of things to do each week. The online version prevented me from having any actual teaching experience but it did go over a multitude of topics about the English language including spelling, grammar and pronunciation. Now the question is, how much of that information did I actually retain?