What Is The TEFL Code Of Practice?

The World TEFL Accrediting Commission

The WTEFLAC (World TEFL Accrediting Commission) was originally founded as a knowledge gathering organization, to bring all of the ideas of effective TEFL teaching from around the world, and make it available to TEFL instructional facilities and individual teachers everywhere. At the same time, it was designed to be a standards commission. When a teacher gained accreditation from a teaching facility meeting commission standards, then it would mean the exact thing for another teacher getting their accreditation from a completely different facility, as long as it too was governed by those standards. It became a way to raise the general level of TEFL education, and define it for those teaching TEFL, or hiring TEFL educators.

The TEFL Accrediting Body Is A Quality Assurance Organization

Many will remember the great push of manufacturing agencies in the 1970s, and later to improve the quality of American and European products. This was in response to the groundbreaking quality programs devised by the Japanese. Prior to that time, American and European products were the finest in the world. Inferior copies produced in the Orient were denigrated and labeled “Jap Junk”. However, soon after the second World War, the Japanese industry realized they needed to increase their manufacturing standards if they were to gain a place in the world. With these newly created programs, the Japanese pulled ahead of its foreign competitors, and many American and European companies suddenly found themselves struggling to keep up. They had little time to devise their own strategies, and so in an ironic turn, as the Japanese had previously copied American products, now the American firms had to copy Japanese quality programs.

Since that time, standards-based organizations have learned the dangers of being lax, and have always taken a proactive position in defining standards and continually improving quality. This is the atmosphere of the WTEFLAC, which is doing for foreign-language teachers what the Japanese did for manufacturing.

What Is The Quality Assurance Program of The WTEFLAC?

The QA program for the World TEFL Accrediting Commission is the Code of Practice. If this sounds like branding, it is. The Code of Practice sits on the commission home page, and stands as the core of the standards arm of the commission. A goal of the TEFL Accreditation is that the Code of Practice will become as well known throughout the TEFL community as any education program has. They want TEFL teaching facilities to live by it. They want teachers to learnonly from commission-approved facilities, and they want those who hire TEFL teachers to look toward those standards while judging their candidates. With the growth of the commission, these goals are being realized. The Code of Practice is important now, and continues to gain in prominence throughout the TEFL community.