subject: How A School Accredited By The World Tefl Accrediting Commission Selects Students [print this page] When a school does not care about educating its students, but only about the money it can get from them, whether or not they wind up with a worthwhile education from their time there, it can be a real problem. Unfortunately, due to economic incentives to get students into some sort of college after high school, there are a lot of sub-par schools out there. A lot of such schools promise students that with almost no work on their part, they can graduate and get a high-paying job that will allow them to live in an exotic country and make money hand over fist and have no trouble paying back any student loans they took to go to school to begin with.
There are state regulations that try to prevent this sort of problem, but the states are sometimes unable to enforce the laws or have other financial priorities. This can be detrimental to the industries that actually do want to hire people who have been trained to do specific jobs and also give a name to all people in the industry.
With an understanding of this problem, the World TEFL Accrediting Commission has developed a set of standards that regulates how schools interested in teaching TEFL (teaching English as a foreign language) can teach, what they teach, and also how they can admit students and therefore what students they can accept. Now, not every school that claims to teach TEFL will be accredited by the WTEFLAC Commission, but if a student wants to really learn this subject, then finding an accredited school would be to their benefit.
The current code of conduct that these schools must follow if they want to be accredited by the WTEFLAC when it comes to accepting students are that they have to provide a clear admissions policy and one of the main requirements must be that the potential student actually speaks English competently. After all, if they hope to teach it there must be at least a minimum comprehension and also speech ability. Then, of course, the admissions policy must not discriminate in any of the myriad of illegal ways but instead it must meet equal opportunity requirements set forth by the federal and state governments.
Although this means that some students applying to schools accredited by the WTEFLAC may not be admitted, that also means they will not waste their time and money working toward a certificate that will have no value because they will not be able to get a job when they are finished if they cannot communicate effectively in English. This, in the end, is really a better outcome.
