Teaching English: Is it really a long-term career?

If you are still trying to weigh the pros and cons of becoming a teacher of English, doubt no more. When choosing a career we are usually guided either by what we love doing or by the financial benefits of a job. In my opinion teaching English can be the perfect combination of both - it is a fun job (you are guaranteed to never be bored) and there are plenty of opportunities to make good money. Another point in favour of choosing teaching English as a long-term career is that there are a lot of options to transition to from teaching per se to other areas within the TEFL industry: you can become a DOS, open your own language school, move into materials creation and...

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Getting to grips with your 2020 job search

If you are planning to change jobs in 2020, here are some pointers to consider:

THE JOB: Where is it? What does it entail? What are the prerequisites? Do as much research as possible before applying. If the job entails a move to another country, check out the climate, local customs and laws, standard and cost of living, ease of travel etc. What are the duties, hours and a typical timetable? Be realistic. Are they attractive/feasible? Would they provide a good work-life balance, given your other responsibilities and commitments? Ascertain the specific professional requirements as set out in the job advertisement and ensure that you have the qualifications, skills, training and experience requested. It is common practice for prospective employers to check out applicants’ references and to require any gaps...

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Discrimination and the Non-Native Teacher - An Insider's View

Everybody has heard of or even experienced some form of discrimination in their life be it racial, gender, age, sexual orientation, or any other type of discrimination. The world has been fighting discrimination for centuries, but despite the struggle for equal rights in our day and age, we still come across instances of discrimination.

In the TEFL industry, one possible reason for discrimination is the native language and the nationality of a teacher. If you were lucky enough to have been born in an English-speaking country, it seems all doors are wide open to you as an English teacher. You can get any job you like anywhere in the world and sometimes...

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Tools for your online classroom

Keeping students engaged is always important, whether we are working online or working in a traditional classroom. I believe that managing an online classroom requires several tools. In this article I will discuss some of the key points in designing your very own online classroom. Like any other classroom, you need to think about who you will be teaching. If it is children, then you will need to think about bright colours, characters, topics that will interest them. Teenagers, don’t want to be treated like children, you will need to bring a certain level of sophistication to your style, and of course adults who appreciate some serious and some more fun material as well. I am not going to specifically address IT or platforms in this article, for those of you wanting to know more about...

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TEFL vs TESL vs TESOL - The pros and cons

If you are a qualified English teacher looking to start a career you might be facing a dilemma: whether to look for work abroad and kill two birds with one stone (see the world and make some money on the way) or to stay in your English-speaking country and teach foreigners coming to study, work or live there. Let’s have a look at your options in detail and by the end of this article you will have a fair idea of which...

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Rethinking ELT's Environmental Impact

Globalisation has resulted in many good things. To list just a few examples, it has eradicated diseases that used to be endemic, with most of the world’s human population enjoying rising standards of living and longer life expectancy than any generation before. Globalisation has also resulted in wonderful technological developments, giving us instant access to vast amounts of information. We can communicate in real time with people on the other side of the world, and can travel around it faster and more comfortably than our ancestors could ever have imagined. The spread of English and English language teaching (ELT) has gone hand in hand with these processes, and like globalisation...

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The LGBTQIA+ teacher abroad: Back to School, open your closet?

The faint sound of Christmas songs are around the corner, pumpkin spice lattes are in the shops, and the sound of children laughing in the streets is fading away. It can only mean one thing. The new academic year is here, in the northern hemisphere at least. This prompts teachers all around to ask themselves certain questions: where did the summer go? What reward system should I try this year? Which computer game DO I prefer fortnite or minecraft? How strict is too strict to start the year off? All equally important and valuable questions, but for the LGBTQIA+ teacher there are other questions you may be asking yourself. Questions such as, should I tell my colleagues straight away? Should I wait for them to ask me? Should I bring the topic up...

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Marketing yourself as an Online Teacher

Once you’ve made the leap from the physical to the online classroom, you will play a greater role in attracting new students for yourself. The competition online is stiff, so you will have to put lots of effort upfront to ensure that you are a credible, and a serious teacher. Many people are still skeptical of the quality of the online classroom, so be sure to bring legitimacy to what you are...

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Language Teaching - the soft skills bonus

Teaching English as a foreign language can often be an ingenious win-win activity for you as a teacher as well as for your learners. Sometimes underestimated and reduced to a year ‘off’ during which you speak your native language to impressionable locals whose culture you can discover in exchange which is far from the reality of professional language teaching, this job is in fact an excellent avenue for acquiring and honing a multitude of...

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Not over the hill at 70 - The benefits the older teacher can bring to the language class

Are teachers over the hill once they pass the dreaded three score and ten mark?  Should they pack up and head for the academic equivalent of elephants' graveyard to muse on past endeavours and lament the evaporation of those energies and passions that he or she once possessed when attempting to indelibly install the complexities of phrasal verbs and third conditionals, not to mention the unspeakable paradoxes and contradictions of Anglo-Saxon pronunciation, into students' cerebral zones? By no means, says this writer who recently reached 79. He, for one, is still going strong and there's little...

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