TEFL Educator

Lights, Camera…TEACH! A question I hear a lot from new teachers of English who want to go abroad is, “How do I find a job?” The answer, of course, is the same for English teaching as it is for many other professions nowadays—you look for job listings on the Internet and through a network of contacts that you build up. But, there’s a larger dimension to this question that I’d like to address in thi...[Read More]

Do you have Skills in Food and Beverage or Hospitality Settings? This area of ESP is becoming more and more popular, so this is a good opportunity to address how to find those niche jobs. A lot of newbie TEFL teachers are former restaurant and or hospitality workers. They are much more qualified to teach in this area than the other teachers unfamiliar with the ‘service mind’ and those with no with...[Read More]

Don’t Become “The English (Teacher) Patient” The best advice for staying healthy is the same no matter where you’re living: Eat right, sleep well, and get enough exercise. However, when we’re thrown out of our natural element by going to live abroad, at first it might be tricky to maintain your rhythms in the new culture. For example, you may be used to eating dinner around 6 or 7 p.m., but your n...[Read More]

What Do You Know? Many teachers of English as a Second Language transition into teaching from a totally different line of work. Before I began teaching, I was a social worker. I know other people who were business people, stock brokers, marketing agents, scuba divers, military personnel and who held a whole range of other jobs before they decided to live the good life abroad as an English teacher....[Read More]

Teachers of English as a Foreign Language are always looking at ways they can perk up their lesson plans. Even the very best textbooks can get stale now and then, for the teacher even if not for the students, and a good way to inject pizzazz in your class is to bring in something new. Realia is a great way to do this, as is multimedia. But if you’re like most teachers, the very first place you’re ...[Read More]

This post fits in the Things they forgot to teach you at your TEFL training school category of TEFL. When new teachers of English as a foreign language imagine their first job posting, they may picture themselves teaching in all kinds of scenarios: Large university classes, one-to-one coaching sessions, and small groups. But they might not imagine that they’d have a partner teacher. Many jobs that...[Read More]

Give Back to go Forward. On the fence about whether or not you dare teach English abroad? Or, maybe, you’re saving up money to make sure you have a nest egg you can hatch later when you’re overseas. If, for whatever reason, you feel the desire to teach English as a Foreign Language (EFL) but can’t go abroad to do it right now, I’d like to offer you a great alternative for the meantime that will he...[Read More]

[Guest written by our friend, Beth Verde] It’s a classic scene from a 1980s coming-of-age movie: a confused and anxious substitute teacher bombarded with a hail of spitballs, paper airplanes and a raft of abuse from the class he or she is supposed to instruct. Well, put away your shoulder pads and tweed jackets, substitute teaching in an English as a Foreign Language classroom is no reason for anx...[Read More]

You’re taking a TEFL certification course because you want to be in front of a group of students, leading them to better English, right? So, it may seem strange, especially for those of us who have been out of school a long time, when we assume the role of the student, and not the teacher. If you hang out in online forums about teaching English abroad (like I do) you’ll have encountered plenty of ...[Read More]

In some countries, teachers of English as a Foreign Language are expected to be half EDUcators and half enterTAINERS—or edutainers.  “Edutainment” is the term the industry has coined to explain the situation when your employer and your students are looking for games and laughter to go along with the English taught in the classroom. Edutainment is a Cultural Thing Now, if you’ve got a posting in Sa...[Read More]

Its better to deal with things in a positive manner Most new teachers fear the whole subject of discipline and avoid talking about it, but it’s an important subject for English teachers to discuss. How do you elegantly control difficult or disruptive students before they leak their behavior onto their classmates? How do you grab the attention of hyperactive learners who are doing everything except...[Read More]

Use your Real-Life Skills to Teach English for Specific Purposes After a long day at work, you might find your class full of sleepy and tired students. You’ll need to energize them. Once you’ve been around the block a time or two teaching English as a Foreign Language, you’ll probably want to branch out into ESP. No, I don’t mean you should hire yourself out as a psychic.  In our industry, ESP sta...[Read More]