If you only intend to teach english for a year and just want a job to pay the bills i’d say go for it. The teachers are a fun lot, they have plenty of regular weekly hours (17-20+) and pay on time (but do have a complicated payment scheme, 80% at the beginning of the month and the remaining 20% a week later so you can’t do a runner without getting screwed out of a week) and the class format is strictly conversation. No listenings, writing, reading or lesson planning.Your class materials are handed to you each week. 15 mins to prepare. Pay is 15+ euros per hour. As they are creative with the accounting, very little is taken out of your pay. If you gross 1200 euros a month you’ll take home around 1150. Easy money.
TEFL program?
If your goal is to get a job with Oxbridge, don’t bother. You have the same chance by just applying for a teaching position, even with minimal or no experience and save yourself the course costs.
If your goal is to use your newly acquired TEFL certificate to find a job in Barcelona, look elsewhere. Why?
Their reputation with other schools is not stellar. They’ve sent people hopelessly inadequate to the task before them into the marketplace and employers have noticed. I base this on a conversation a had during an interview. I ended up getting the job after demonstrating my grammar knowledge and ability to explain concepts clearly as well as a short demo lesson. I found out afterwards when talking with the other teachers that they didn’t have as rigorous an interview as I did.
Minimal real teaching practice and the practice you do receive is only useful for their in-company classes. It will not prepare you for a traditional classroom environment. The current advertisement on Loquo says 30 hours of teaching practice? You might want to ask how many of those hours are with actual students and how many involve you practicing on the other tefl trainees.
Is watching a couple of classes, teaching only 15 minutes of 2 additional classes and 3 full classes on your own enough? It’s possible they’ve increased the number of practice hours. FInd out how much real practice you will have.
Materials are sub-par. Photocopies and no textbooks.
If you are considering this program, ask to see the syllabus.
Find out:
What methodologies are covered? PPP, ESA?
Classroom management? Really? Specifics.
Do you cover how to teach reading, writing and listening in addition to speaking? How? Oxbridge is speaking only in the classroom. No reading writing or listening. Yes, that’s right.
What about lesson planning, anticipated problems and how to resolve them?
What about phonology?
What about sentence analysis and identifying parts of speech?
What about identifying tenses, describing the function and more importantly providing teaching guidance for each?
What about how to describe language and functions to students?
The course is designed to train you to work for them. That is the main focus. Everything else is supplemental. The things I mention above are in fact covered, but much in the same way Barcelona gets covered in snow every few years, barely at all. You will not be well prepared for anything other than in-company conversation classes, and only if you don’t need to plan the lessons yourself.
My opinion? Don’t waste your money.
