From 2008, all families who host a foreign a student, will have to have an enhanced CRB check.

Teaching English as a foreign language in third world countries

Teaching disadvantaged children in places such Kenya, parts of South Africa, Thailand and Ghana can be rewarding. From my research, it appears that many of these English teaching positions are for children who are generally quite young, probably aged between four and fifteen. They are very keen to learn the English language and make excellent students. Class sizes are often quite large ranging from groups of twenty up to sixty or even a hundred in a single class.

There are many companies on the internet who purport to have tefl teaching jobs. There are thousands of TEFL, TESOL & EFL jobs offered worldwide, tread carefully and check exactly what is on offer before committing yourself. To teach in many of these countries you will need a work permit, a visa and sometimes a health check too.

These can on occasion, work out difficult to obtain if you are not going through a reputable organisation and good companies will generally offer to take care of both organising this and meeting the cost too.

Destinations such as Thailand appeal to many students and backpackers for gap years or a short stay abroad. http://www.transitionsabroad.com/listings/work/esl/articles/teaching_english_and_living_in_thailand.shtml Make sure you are fully prepared and don’t expect to earn money to save as often schools in these places are able to pay very little. Meeting lovely people and getting to know and understand different cultures and customs are rewards money cannot buy.

Speak to friends who have been travelling and find out about their experiences of teaching abroad in the country or destination you would like to work. Ask what company they used and see if they have any contact with people who are still out there.

Finding teaching English jobs in Language schools

Many people find tefl teaching jobs at language schools all over the world. Language schools tend to appeal to students who are aged between 15 and 25 and so if you don’t wish to teach those ages, it’s probably a good idea to look elsewhere if you want older students.

If you are looking closer to home and want to teach English to foreign students in England for instance, there are many TEFL jobs in London on offer each year at the language schools. Students love capitol cities and London is an ideal place to learn and see the sights all at the same time. The busiest time of year for all English language schools is the summer. Europeans tend to break up from school slightly earlier than we do and so all of July and August tend to be very busy with peaks at Easter, October and a slight increase in December.

Bear in mind though that although you may be paid more than in other parts of the country, the cost of living tends to be higher in cities and one can rapidly outweigh the other. Teaching in a capitol city does tend to attract certain kudos to it and if you are young and looking for excitement and to see and live in a city, then this may be for you even if it is only for one summer.

Again consider who you are working for and read the contract thoroughly. What holidays do you get, what breaks are you entitled to; this may seem insignificant now but if you are standing on your feet for long hours particularly in the summer months and don’t get the chance to rest and do lesson preparation, what seemed like a good job can soon turn into a nightmare.

If you can, tour several language schools incognito and speak to staff there. Staff who are not happy will probably talk to you, unless they live in fear of their employers in which case they will not dare to talk, either way, you will get a better idea of whether or not you wish to spend more of your time with them.

Language schools vary as to how well they are organised. Good language schools will be well disciplined and the organisation will be apparent. Poorly run schools will cut corners and this relates to both staff and pupils and can be quite worrying places to work as staff will leave without warning as they feel undervalued and this then leaves other members of staff covering for them.

Consider your specialities if looking to change career

Career changes can be difficult to organise if you are not sure which path to take. Teachers today are often tired of poor behaviour and lack of discipline within the classroom. If you have a profession already such as teaching, nursing or sciences, engineering, the arts and other areas which may be of interest to students wishing to learn, lean towards specialising in these subjects first.

If you apply your areas of expertise first and look at work related to teaching people who are interested in your subject, it’s much easier to teach people if you have similar interests and hobbies and you will be able to share your knowledge and enthusiasm with your student.

Also, TEFL teaching is not limited to class studies and although more rare, one to one situations do come available from time to time.

There are hundreds of companies worldwide who operate with newly qualified as well as experienced TEFL trained people and if you are well trained and know your subject, it will not be difficult to find suitable placements.

If you have a nursing degree or knowledge of nursing, look for work within this area there are always companies looking to find ways of improving foreign speaking nurses English and who better to teach them than someone who has had a career in nursing.

Ask around for tefl teaching jobs, who do you know who has been abroad working recently? Ask what they thought of the company they went through, did they work over the hours they were paid, did they get paid holidays and how many weeks? Did they get accommodation with the job or did they have to find their own and what was it like, how expensive was it and so on.

Finding work Teaching English one to one

If you particularly want to teach English on a one to one basis, consider contacting the vast number of language schools which operate worldwide to find English teaching jobs. There will almost certainly be a school near you but you are not limited to staying with a local organisation, if you are good, many companies will take you on even if you are a number of miles away.

Finding posts to teach English abroad are much the same, contact organisations and language schools within the area you wish to live. Not all one to one English teaching will be at home, some schools offer it at the school and you may be lucky enough to find an English language school which will employ you, help you with accommodation and find you pupils who only require one to one tutoring.

Be aware that you will not earn as much as you would if you organised the student yourself, the language school has overheads to pay and costs to cover and so you will only get a relatively small sum for teaching, and for hosting if you do both.

A good language school will insist on you having a TEFL qualification and some will ask for experience too. It will depend on you to sell yourself enough to get on the first rung of the ladder but generally speaking, there are always sufficient students for good teachers and so you will not be short of work particularly if you specialise in areas such as medicine or engineering.

Look out for tefl teaching jobs through forums, by contacting language schools and by asking people you already know who have some experience.

If you want to source the students yourself to give you a higher return, remember that if you are in the EU it will be fairly straightforward for a student to come over to you but if you are expecting students to come from countries which require visa’s then that is difficult. To start with, stick with EU visitors and look later at other countries. You will have to have certain accreditations and be registered with certain organisations which is not straightforward and requires quite considerable expense.

There are now 27 countries in the EU, most of who can travel without too much paperwork of difficulty.

Ideas for teaching a foreign language for the first time

Have you taught before or had any experience of teaching? If you have then you will probably find that teaching English is not a huge challenge to you. If you have no experience of teaching or teaching English, try starting of at a low level, perhaps a small group of younger children. Look for ideas to use as props; puppets, cereal packets, photographs, books, clothing, toys, crayons and paper for getting familiar with colours. Using props during your lessons and games and activities are all good ways to keep your class interested.

Plan your lessons meticulously and with care. To start with, expect to spend around three to four hours of planning for every hour you teach. Obviously if your classes are repeated throughout the day, then those three or four hours of prepping will account for more of your teaching hours.

If you are teaching students with small variations in level, you will probably be able to make some minor adjustments to your planning and not have to spend hours on each and every lesson. However, don’t be tempted to skimp on planning. Students are watching you and will soon realise and see through your lack of content; this applies to students of all ages too. They will get restless and irritable and when you feel you are faltering you will begin to lack confidence in yourself.

Spend time looking at what other people are doing, I love watching people teach as you can learn so much from them. Good teachers make the lesson seem effortless and the time goes very quickly. Poor teachers are embarrassing to watch and you want to keep looking at your watch, or fall asleep!

Use lots of visual focus and if you can, try moving students around at least a couple of times in a lesson. Look at games, even for older students. Get them to laugh at themselves by doing exercises such as acting out little scenes, it improves their breathing and will keep them alert to learning even on a hot afternoon.

Don’t be afraid to do things not normally seen in the classroom. Students are there to learn and they will love coming to your lessons if they are different from other classes and they are learning. Some of the best teachers we have employed have used drama and humour. Even a large group of students who are only in classes because their parents sent them can be made to join in and laugh because of a well planned lesson. Its wonderful to see 16 year old kids coming out of a lesson smiling and telling you the lesson was great.

A weekend TEFL course

Taking a short TEFL course is a good idea if you want to try something new and do not want to spend a lot of money on something you are not sure about and may not want to continue. Generally a weekend course will be enough to give you a good idea of what to expect and some ideas of what lessons to plan and how to access your students.

Many students take short courses to enable them to backpack or travel during a gap year or two. Certainly it is a good way of earning some money and is a useful way to pretty much guarantee finding some work, pretty much anywhere without having to fork out very much.

You will find that it also opens up a wealth of opportunities to you, even after using it for a year, you never teach again.

Once you have decided that you still want to teach and take a TEFL course decide whether or not it should be a weekend course or the more intense CELTA or TRINITY courses which are several weeks in length. The vast majority of people who take weekend TEFL courses find work. It’s a useful course to have done and even school teachers who have taught for many years will say afterwards that they found it worthwhile and an eye opener and felt it has inspired them to teach in a different way.

There are literally hundreds if not thousands of weekend TEFL courses held up and down the country. Generally taking place in hotels, they will consist of a tutor and between four and twenty students depending on how large the company is and how efficient their marketing is.

Note that just because the company is small or has a small group, it does not mean that they are any worse than a large organisation who have offices, sales people and directors and have to fill their courses to capacity to pay for all the administration and sales.

I have introduced many people to Kristall who I did my course with and often get people calling me on the Monday after the course to thank me and tell me how wonderful the course director, Brian Almond is. Kristall is a small organisation but the courses are great, packed with information and encouragement and so students find work.

Most of the courses will follow the same plan over the weekend; to teach you enough of what to expect, how to teach, what to expect and situations you might come across and finally, how to find work.

Short courses will not really advance your language skills, it’s the practical side of teaching you are focussing on. Although you will do a practise teaching session for the certificate, you won’t actually get any real teaching practise on a weekend course as there are no real, live students to practice on! You will just practice on each other.

Most courses give you a folder of printed matter to take home to reinforce what you learned on the course. Information such as assessing students, common problems with language and what props to use is useful to go over again after the course.

Courses take place up and down the country every weekend. Some are followed, usually at extra cost, with a written part to the course which tends to be a reinforcement of the actual course.

Some companies offer a third module which goes more thoroughly into the grammar side of English working more deeply on the makeup and complexities of the English language. For the extra cost, which is generally cheaper if you book parts one, two and three parts of the course together, it’s probably well worth the extra.

Expect to pay around £230 for a weekend course and around £400 for all three parts of the course.

Courses are generally about 20 hours in length and can be quite tiring as you have to take notes and think all the time. If you are not familiar with teaching you may find the teaching practice aspect quite daunting too but with a good teacher, you will you do the teaching practice without getting worried at all.

Standing up at the front of a class for the first time can be daunting but you will have to do this in the real world if you really want to teach and most people feel as though they have really conquered something when they have done this part well.

Don’t forget either that most of the students there are new to teaching and will be just as terrified as you. Short TEFL courses tend to attract a wide range of ages, personalities and backgrounds too. I was on a course with a 17 year old and a pensioner on walking sticks!

Good teachers will help you to lesson plan accurately and produce a lesson of suitable content and with interesting material. Do this well and you will deliver your lesson with aplomb and sit down wishing you could do it all over again.

The Celta and Trinity TEFL course

If you are not confident with the structure of you English or your English is not so good or you are one of the people who never learnt correct structure of English at school, or if you definitely want to teach English and want to work abroad at a foreign university or similar, you might consider a CELTA or Trinity certificate.

Generally these courses are run over four weeks and you will need to find the cost of the course which is around £800 to £1000 plus accommodation costs.

Accommodation will be anything from £120 per week if staying with a family to £65 per night for a hotel. There will be other expenses such as daily food and stationary on the top of this.

If you are serious about finding long term work then a course which looks deeply into the grammar and construction of the English language is a good choice rather than a weekend TEFL course.

You will be able to teach at a higher level and possibly in some cases, but not all, be able to demand higher rates.

With regard to the countries you are able to teach in, this is still widely debated.

Often jobs posted will ask for CELTA or Trinity certificates as a first choice. For universities, they will often ask for an English degree with a module within that of teaching English as a foreign language.

Like for like, teachers with a Trinity or Celta probably do stand a better chance of getting work if competing against people with a 20 hour weekend TEFL certificate but as there are so many job offers out there, it is highly likely that a teacher with a 20 hour certificate will find work just as easily as a four week TEFL certificate.

Employers will usually take into account what other work experience the candidate has. For instance, if the candidate has a 20 hour certificate but has taught history or worked in that field and has considerable work experience, he or she may get the post over a person who has no work history but has an English degree and a Trinity or Celta.

My advice is to look at both options, see what you can afford, and try it. If you decide to take a weekend course and love the teaching but feel you are lacking confidence within the language structure, then take the Trinity or CELTA.

If however, you have the money to take the course, can take a month out, and want to find better paying clients from the start, take the Trinity or Celta.

The course will generally be split into parts and will probably look something like this;

· The methodology of English teaching and learning, and using it. · The grammar system of the English Language. · English pronunciation. · Lesson planning and teaching practice.

Main Course elements

· Tenses and grammar. · Pronunciation. · Productive skills: speaking and writing · Receptive skills: listening and reading. · Presentation and practice techniques for grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation. · Classroom management

The course details were taken from the following site http://www.windsorschools.co.uk/tefl-tesol-prices-dates.html and whilst I do not know this company, they offer a good and informative website which is worth looking at.

Lesson planning for teachers new to TEFL

If you have no experience of teaching, you might find lesson planning an overwhelming task or worse still, don’t plan and just try to ‘wing’ it. Don’t. The class will know and you could get yourself off to a poor start which will erode your confidence further.

Some good reasons to Teach English as a foreign language

People teach English as a foreign language for many different reasons.

It could be to earn extra money and teaching is something you feel you could do, even if you have no experience. A few extra pounds in your pocket are appealing and almost anywhere or whoever you teach, you will earn more than the minimum wage.

Do you need extra money but find it difficult to get out to work for instance, if you don’t have a car or have young children and need to be in the house to look after them? If so, consider teaching over the internet. See Teaching over the internet

Many mums work part time and earn a reasonably good hourly income with very flexible hours.

Would you like to travel? If you are considering taking a gap year and want to find some work to support you while travelling but have no experience teaching, consider taking a TEFL course. There are Tefl courses which are run over weekends and will give you the necessary insights into what to expect and how to look for work.

You can also take online TEFL courses which are cheaper.

Many people look at teaching EFL as a way of deciding whether or not they want to take a PGCE into teaching. Tutoring students one to one on a subject you enjoy can lead to finding out if you could do this work full time and whether or not you would find it enjoyable.

I have had several people respond to adverts about taking short term summer students. The respondents have a degree but have not used it for some time because of either family commitments (had children) or changed career because they no longer enjoyed what they were doing. After taking a 20 hour TEFL course and subsequently, a student, found they loved the work. They then returned to college full time to take a PGCE and are now fully fledged working teachers.

Keeping a hand in. If you are a teacher but have left the profession to have children or other family commitments, then working for a summer school or taking some private foreign language tutoring can be a good way of keeping your CV up to date and earning a little extra without compromising family.

Consider also Teaching over the internet as this can be worked around your daily life.

Housebound. With today’s technology you may find it difficult to get out but that does not limit you to mentally staying indoors. Again Teaching over the internet can open up a whole wealth of opportunities to you. You might have to sit in your living room physically but why not find students who are in exotic locations in the world? Its not just the teaching which will broaden your mind, find out about your students country, culture and customs and earn money at the same time.

If you have had a career and are looking to change, experienced tutors with for instance, a strong medical background, can earn £30 to £60 per hour and are in demand if they are good at their job and will find pupils recommending them to others.

The great thing about teaching nowadays is that with mobiles and telephones and the internet, teaching is very flexible. More and more tutors and pupils are turning to the internet as a means to communicate and finding it flexible and cost effective. For instance, instead of having to drive to a pupil, you can teach in your slippers and at any time of day or night when you can fit in an hour or so.

Consider using Skype

Or maybe because you are looking for something flexible which could earn extra money and fit in around your children? Again, consider using VOIP, teach over the internet or actually take a student in to live with you for a couple of weeks or months and teach at set times each day. Younger students can actually come with you on shopping trips and other family activities, integrating just like another family member. Make the situation work around you and be paid for it.

Do you want to travel? If so this can provide a useful income while taking you to some interesting places.

You don’t have to be a student to take a year out to go travelling, people of all ages find work teaching English or a language abroad either short term or in some cases, long term.

Obviously, once you are in a real life situation, with real students, it is different insofar as your students will not understand you in the same way your English speaking classmates on the TEFL course did.

However, they won’t know that you are new to teaching, neither will they understand that you are making mistakes and if your content is interesting, they will be back for more fun, games and knowledge that they have learnt some English and will continue to do so in your classes.

Looking to take a TEFL course but don’t know which one to take? There are so many different courses out there that it is difficult to decide. However, if you are limited on time, or are not sure that this is really what you want to do, consider the following

So you want to teach English?

Take a look at the options open to you regarding teaching English or a foreign language. You are not limited to just teaching young children in Spain or Africa although don’t discount this option.

Teaching in a school in Spain for the summer can be a brilliant experience. If you are looking to learn a language such as Spanish as well as taking a year out and experiencing another culture and earning enough to get by, this may be what you are looking for.

What makes you even consider taking a TEFL certificate?

 

 

 

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