The issue of accreditation in TEFL is something people are not quite in agreement about. It's an issue most EFL teachers have an opinion about (have a look here, for example), and the answers are almost as clear as mud.
The bottom line is always the question "will it do for me?". And only you can really answer that question. Personally I started teaching with a half-finished TEFL course from my university, and regretted not finishing it. Others I know have no formal qualifications and are happy just doing conversation classes.
The issue of accreditation, however, is a difficult one because of the course providers' muddying of the waters. The truth is that there is not one "official" accrediting body out there. The reason TESOL and CELTA get their status is that they are approved (not accredited) by the British Council. The minimum requirements the British Council set for a TEFL course are:
having an external validating board
6 hours teaching practice and
100 hours TEFL input
As you can see, the requirements are quite open to interpretation... Apart from British Council, there are many "organisations" who give out "accreditations". Apologies for all the qotation marks, but we're going into definition overload territory here.
Anyone can make their own accreditation
When you see that a course provider is internationally approved etc, that may be, but it's not unlikely that they have made their own acronym to sound important. Likewise organisations like IATEFL, whose logo is banded about on various TEFL websites, is a £150 registration and you can use their logo. Does it mean the course is better? No. Does it look like that to Joe Bloggs who's looking for a course to take this summer? Yes.
Likewise the phrasing "internationally recognised" certificate. What does that actually mean? Well, since there is no international body who officially recognise any certificates, one can only assume it means that when someone looks at the piece of paper, they can recognise that it's a certificate. I could do that by writing "TEFL Certifiate" with big letters at the top of the page. Now if they can't recognise that as a certificate, what else can I do?!
Jokes aside, this is a big and competitive business, with very high profit margins and it's understandable that they want to protect it. But misleading customers is, in my mind, not the way forward.
Until potential students realise that this is a virtual cowboy market, they will go for capitalised acronyms of home made accreditations, made by the respective schools, rather than looking at what they're getting, how much they're paying for it, and what the guarantee's are actually worth.
Will the market be regulated? Unlikely. But, with a little research, it's possible for most potential students to sort the wheat from the chaff. Let's hope they can be bothered!
