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Advanced Certificate in TESOL

Payap University offers an Advanced Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). This four-week intensive program caters for groups of experienced teachers of English who wish to further their professional development.

Objectives

The aim of the program is that participants should become more autonomous teachers through:

  • developing reflective skills

  • exploring contemporary pedagogical theory and methodology

  • learning to mobilize a wider range of teaching tools and resources

  • mastering principles of classroom management

  • examining the implications of learner-centeredness for specific educational contexts

Themes

With these objectives in view, the program is informed by the following themes:

  • Reflecting systematically on teaching and learning

  • Problem solving approaches to course and lesson planning

  • Language awareness
    (The focus here is on aspects of language that are likely to be less familiar to our participants. Examples might be the particular grammar of spoken English, and lexical chunks.)

  • Assessment and evaluation
    (Here we address the question of whether assessment can be learner-centered, and explore how language skills can be assessed in ways that encourage learning.)

Work on each of these themes is linked to a project or assignment.

Teaching and learning activities

Teaching and learning activities on the course will include teacher-led input sessions, discussions, student presentations, classroom observations and reports, guided reading and library and web searches. The course will include approximately 80 hours of structured classroom activities, with further time being allocated for group and individual study.

Facilities

Participants have access to the services of Payap University's new library, the Sirindhorn Learning Resource Center, which has a collection of TESOL books and journals and is equipped with computers with internet access. Activities will also be arranged to enable course participants to see some of the attractions of Chiang Mai city and the surrounding area.

Assessment by portfolio

Participants are assessed on the basis of portfolios of work accumulated during the course, including observation and presentation reports, sample lesson and activity plans and written reflections. No final grades are given, but each participant is given a final report on their work.

Participants say:

"You completely change my understanding of teaching and learning."

"The course is inspiring and helpful."

"... sets a good model for our future teaching."

"The teachers are passionate, creative, informative and hard-working."

"The sessions are very successful: you show us a good example of how to put learner-centered teaching into practice."

"I've learned a lot of creative approaches to teach English as a foreign language and some new interesting theories that will certainly benefit my teaching in the future. And most important of all, I've learned how to teach English by focussing on learners to achieve better results."

2008 schedule

The Advanced Certificate will run from August 8 till September 12 2008.

Application

An application form can be downloaded (in .pdf form) here, or in .rtf form here.

updated 26 March 2008