Training for Volunteers Working with ESOL Students

If you are 19+ years old and want to work with ESOL clients/students as a volunteer, or you want to teach ESOL to adults, look no further. Our new Training for Volunteers course could support your current work or be your first step towards working as a volunteer with ESOL students/clients.

On this course you:

• learn how to support classroom-based ESOL delivery
• learn how to support ESOL students/clients when working with them outside the classroom
• understand more about how people learn and how people learn languages
• understand the diverse nature of the ESOL community
• understand the barriers to learning faced by some members of the ESOL community
• become familiar with the standards and requirements for working in the volunteer sector
• become familiar with organisations in Oxfordshire take volunteers to work with ESOL clients/students and in what capacity


We will help your practice as a volunteer. We will help you to build new skills, or build on to existing skills, by demonstrating techniques that make support more effective inside and outside the formal classroom.

We will explain the framework for ESOL teaching in terms of the national curriculum and its levels, and we also explore language teaching processes. You will observe ESOL classes and ESOL volunteers working in class.

For assessment, you keep a reflective log and produce evidence of completion of the two mandatory units of the NCFE L1 Award in Volunteering.

On successful completion, you gain the NCFE L1 Award in Volunteering.

You need to have a good standard of written and spoken English. Some past experience of volunteering in a classroom is desirable but not compulsory.

You could move on to do the CELTA (Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults) which we run here at the College.