The extensive CELTA course

As an alternative to the four week intensive CELTA course, IH Barcelona also offers a part-time CELTA course [ dates ]. We talked to trainees on it to find out a little more...

Amy Collins hadn't been in an academic situation for nearly 12 years when she began her CELTA course. "I did it part-time because I didn't think I had the mental stamina to sit in a classroom for eight hours a day and absorb everything and participate fully," she says.

Like most people on the part-time course, Amy was already in a teaching job in a school when she did it. Did she find that she could take things literally straight off the course and into her own classroom? "Definitely," she says. "At times it was a lifesaver ­ and it was also a way to practise, too."

It obviously depends a lot on your own learning style, but for some it can be hard taking on board everything on the intensive course. "You're thrown to the lions a bit," was in fact how Amy put it. But she felt that one advantage of the part­time course was that ­ that you had that extra time (days!) in which to put what you'd learnt into practise. "Once you practise it, it starts to make sense," she says.

Like Amy, Usoa Sol was already teaching and the 9-to-5 course timetable was completely incompatible with her other commitments. She also felt that the intensive course might be "a little too intense" for her and that the extensive one "would give me more time to think about what I did on the course" and also "to reflect on the feedback I got", a point course tutor Lynn Durrant had also made to us.

"Probably the main reason people take the extensive course is that they are already living here," says Roger Hunt, one of the course tutors. "They frequently have children, and because of both family and work commitments the intensive course is impossible for them. There's also the financial aspect of not losing a month's income."

There are other reasons, too, of course. For Debbie Krupski it was partly that she really wanted to be Barcelona for longer than just a month, and the four-month option also meant that she could work (and pay for the course!) at the same time.