© 1997 by Oxford University Press
Articles |
Selecting candidates for teacher training courses
lecturer in ELT at the Centre for English Language Studies, University of Birmingham where she co-ordinates the BA in ELT. She also works with MA TEFL and Linguistics students from Britain and overseas. She has been involved in running and delivering TEFL courses since 1986, and is an assessor for the RSA/Cambridge CELTA scheme. She has an MA in Applied English Linguistics, and is working towards a PhD in language teacher education programme evaluation. She has taught EFL and ELT in the UK and Spain, and has run teacher development courses in Argentina, Hungary, and Hong Kong.
With the development of the ELT profession, it is now the norm for employers to insist that potential employees are qualified. This has thrust the role of gatekeepers to the profession onto the teacher trainers who select—or reject—candidates for their training courses. Despite the good intentions of many such trainer-selectors, there is at present a dearth of literature to advise them how to go about the task in a professional and effective way. This article considers what we can learn from the business and management experts who have written on candidate selection for jobs, and uses the findings of a small case study of TEFL course selection procedures in an attempt to make recommendations for good practice. It suggests that the need for training for this role could be fulfilled with relative ease, given the similarity of the repertoire of skills needed for good interviewing and good language teaching.