Matin Monavvarian
Teach Enrich Empower
The Perfect Course For A Fresh Start!
My journey to move to China started last year. I was looking for a change and found out about job opportunities teaching in China from a friend.
I researched the requirements and saw that I needed a Bachelor’s degree (which I had just completed a few months before) and a TEFL certificate. Because of that my hunt for the perfect TEFL course began.
I must have searched for weeks and compared every TEFL company out there until I reached the conclusion that The TEFL Academy had everything I was looking for. A great online interface, high ratings from previous students, a website that looks professional, a lot of information, and a 168-hour self-directed online course that matched my needs. So I enrolled.
Through the course and its assignments, I learned about many important aspects of my future job, got the chance to practice lesson planning and received great feedback from professional teachers.
Just before submitting my last assignment, I started contacting employers all around China to find a job I liked and to my surprise with the Bachelor’s and my TEFL in hand, that wasn’t too hard. A few days after starting the search I had already been contacted by multiple employers and had a few interviews set up.
“Convenient, self directed, comprehensive TEFL program that opened many doors for me.”
After accepting a job in Nanjing, the process of the work visa began. To acquire the visa you need to notarize and authenticate all your documents. That includes your Bachelor’s, TEFL certificate and background check. Thankfully I was able to do the notarization and authentication of my TEFL certificate through a service The TEFL Academy offers and received my certificate ready and correctly notarized! Multiple notarizations and embassy visits later for all my other documents, I had my visa and booked a flight to China.
I must say I did not have a clear idea of what to expect but all my expectations were shattered when I spent a few days in Nanjing. A great city with a fantastic public transport system, restaurants, coffee shops, parks and other attractions all around and very nice people willing to help you everywhere. Just 5 days into moving to China, I started my month-long training at my new school and got to familiarize myself with what I was teaching and the tools available to me at work. After the training, I got the chance to slowly start teaching classes and I immediately felt more confident in the classroom.
I mostly work with 4- to 10-year-old students and it is amazing to see their progress from week to week. It is a known fact that language acquisition is strong with younger kids and they are able to learn faster, but seeing that from week to week as a teacher of a foreign language is both amazing and rewarding.
In conclusion, completing my TEFL course and moving to China was a great choice for me and I couldn’t be happier. If you are reading this and contemplating whether or not to go forward with it, I highly recommend you do so and hopefully you will have as great of an experience as I have had.
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The TEFL Academy was the world’s first TEFL course provider to receive official recognition from government regulated awarding bodies in both the USA and UK. This means when you graduate you’ll hold a globally recognised Level 3 (120hr) Certificate or Level 5 (168hr) Diploma, meaning you can find work anywhere and apply for jobs immediately.