There has been rapid growth in the popularity of English teaching courses that enable people to teach foundational English skills to foreign language speakers.Some course providers are taking shortcuts.While Teaching English as a Foreign Language courses have become more popular in South Africa, the industry is largely unregulated, meaning a host of courses have been developed that take shortcuts and leave teachers unprepared to take to the classroom.
For one of these courses, Coutts said the majority of the material involved answering multiple-choice questions, and the qualitative responses that were required were marked as accurate based on the character count that was submitted. According to Coutts: Tanita Gouws, course manager at Teach TEFL, said because there is no regulatory body, students may not even know that their course is not up to industry standards.
There are around 15 different processes that the accreditation board needs to see in place to keep TEFL on the Beach accredited. He said its course needed to be designed by someone with a master's degree in a relevant field; there are marking rubrics used for assignments; and there is a plagiarism detection tool that is used.
Kootbodien also saw a dramatic increase in demand for TEFL on the Beach's courses when the pandemic hit. The school had about 200 customers enrolled for its R2 000 course between when it was founded in 2018 and when Covid-19 broke out.