After volunteering as an ESOL home tutor for English Language Partners, Tiffany decided teaching was the right profession for her. She completed graduate certificates in TESOL and adult education, building on her Bachelor of Arts. She has gone on to work in adult education.

“My degrees have given me the competence and confidence to stand up in front of a class and teach material that I have carefully designed and developed.”

“Another invaluable skill I developed through these programmes is how to be reflective. I use reflection through every stage of my teaching process. I am able to step back and be my own ‘critical friend’; to constantly ask myself what am I doing and why? What has happened and why?

“I use this technique to further improve my teaching skills.”

“I have found it very interesting to see how much the two teaching fields of TESOL and adult education overlap. I constantly weave back and forth between the concepts and principles of my two qualifications.

“Having both enables me to view resources and plans from different perspectives ensuring that they meet the needs of all of my students.”

After graduating from Victoria University of Wellington with a BA in Linguistics and a GCertTESOL, I travelled for a few months and eventually settled in Santiago, Chile, where I have spent the past two years teaching English in a private British school.

One thing I love is how relevant the courses I studied at university are for my job. Every day of teaching I draw on skills and knowledge from my qualifications, whether helping students with their pronunciation, thinking about the influence of a student's first language or thinking about the vocabulary load of a text and deciding which words to pre-teach.

The GCertTESOL has been especially valuable for helping me with teaching methodology and classroom management strategies. Teaching in a different culture has been a huge learning experience.

Every job will always have its challenges, but I feel well prepared to meet them. It has been challenging but rewarding—and there is nothing quite so rewarding as seeing your students improve.

Carmen enrolled in several undergraduate courses in linguistics and TESOL as part of her BCom in International Business at Victoria University of Wellington.

“After completing my BCom, and inspired by these courses, I enrolled in the Graduate Certificate in TESOL, a 12-week programme taught over the summer trimester.”

Carmen’s personal interest in geographically-isolated and traditionally resource-constrained teaching contexts led her to work with the Ladakhi Women’s Travel Company in Northern India’s trekking base of Leh.

“Our mission is to provide young Ladakhi women with a livelihood whilst challenging traditional work roles in the male-dominated industry of mountain guiding.”

Her work with this company involves building the basic language capabilities of porters in a lower English proficiency class through to addressing wider societal issues such as climate change, development and gender equality in classes for more proficient trainee guides.

The practicum component of the GCertTESOL was of particular value to Carmen.

”It gave me the confidence to lead classes and experiment with ways of managing a class to provide maximum opportunities for actual language use in the classroom. I could not have asked for a better start to my teaching career.”