Archive | August, 2012

by Dan Clarke
Dan works for The Real Brazil

With Brazil’s increasing economic clout and rapidly-growing middle class, the demand for qualified English teachers in Brazil shows no signs of abating. Whether it’s business people in Sao Paulo, or diplomats in Brasilia, more and more Brazilians are looking to either learn English from scratch, or to improve the English skills they learned at school. In fact, you can find vacant TEFL positions in most Brazilian cities, but there are five places in particular that you’ll find dominating the message boards and job adverts.

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by Amy Harris

Start with a TEFL course

TEFL courses are an ideal way to combine a love of teaching with a desire to travel. Courses are usually short and inexpensive and can lead to fantastic opportunities for living and working in different countries, cultures and environments.

Once students complete their course, they are usually itching to put into practice all the theory, the lesson plans and the tips and tricks they have learned. However, securing a first TEFL job abroad can be nerve wracking, especially if you have no idea where to begin. Fortunately, finding suitable work should not be a challenge. Here is some advice on getting your first teaching job overseas.

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by Allison Lounes

You just graduated college, you loved study abroad, and you want to travel the world to escape the horrible economy.

And to get by, you want to teach English.

Great! As a native English speaker with a degree, in most cases you already have 100% of the qualifications you need to teach English most places in the world.

But as a green employee, you may not know that some of the companies that may want to hire you are actually counting on your naiveté. They seek out young graduates who just want to travel and get them to accept crazy work conditions, making lots of money off of your skills in the meantime.

Here are three such scams to avoid:

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by Mihaela Schwartz

A name often mentioned in newspapers’ headlines, Israel is also a country with a high immigration rate mostly because Jewish people from all over the world are encouraged to relocate to “their fathers’ land”. Once they commit to live here, at least for a medium term period, they are granted Israeli citizenship instantly and they acquire a special status of “new comers” (olim hadashim), which gives them access to different types of assistance aimed at ensuring a smooth integration in this rough country: Hebrew courses in special language schools called “ulpan”, financial incentives, logistical and administrative support, job seeking consulting services, etc.

However, as different religious groups co-exist in this country, the “olim” are not the only type of immigrants arriving to Israel. Moreover, mixed (interfaith, interracial and international) marriages are a common reality of the contemporary world.

Some of these immigrants choose the professional path of being an English teacher either because this is how they have earned their living in their country of origin, or because they find it an appealing opportunity for a career change. Little do they know when making this decision about the painstaking procedures they will have to go through before obtaining a stable English teaching position.

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by Manjusha Nambiar

Teaching a large group of students is not as easy as teaching a small group. However, due to shortage of space many ESL schools are forced to offer large classes. A large class may consist of 50 or more students. Whether you teach a small class or a large class, an ESL teacher has to come up with engaging activities that will keep the students interested. Of course, it is not easy especially when you have a large number of students vying for your attention. Here are a few tips to cope with the challenges of teaching a large class.

Let’s start by talking about the advantages of teaching large classes. It is not easy to manage large classes especially when noise levels go out of hand. On the bright side large classes are fun and exciting. What’s more, time flies in a large class and you are unlikely to find yourself looking at the clock.

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By Katie Baxter
Guest blogger from onlinetefl.com

The simple answer is yes. You really don’t need to have a full grasp of the local lingo to be an English teacher overseas. In fact because schools expect students to be fully immersed in the English language, it’s frowned upon for English teachers to speak the local language when they’re in the classroom. And because you’ll probably be working in a language school or institute, there will be lots of people around who speak English.

However, you’ll have a life outside of the school gates and it’s such a great feeling to be able to order a meal or book a train journey in the local language. It shows you’ve made and an effort and it’ll also make your time overseas a lot easier and a lot more rewarding.

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by Clark Nielsen, author of Yes China!

1. A laptop

You will need a computer while you are in China, whether it’s to look up new teaching ideas or to stay in touch with friends and family back home. Now it’s possible your school will provide a computer for you. It’s also possible that said computer will be a piece of junk. It’s even possible that this computer won’t even exist, and any mention of it was simply a lie to get you to stop asking questions. Bring your own laptop. It’s actually cheaper to buy a laptop in the US than it is in China, and most (if not all) laptop power adapters can support the voltage in both countries.

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by Elliot Lord
Author of TEFLing Without Resources (except this one!)

Sometimes, when you open the course book to see what you need to go through next, you get disheartened by the presentations or exercises on the page. Despite using good quality books most of the time, I would still come across this situation many times. The things that came to my mind was my concern for how well the students would be able to learn from the activities I presented to them. I realised that it’s fundamental to get their attention, to make them want to take part in the lessons, and have them leave the class feeling that they’ve both enjoyed it and achieved something.

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