Who here has taught english overseas

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

I taught ESL throughout Germany, and summers I would teach at a private school in Switzerland.

Despite what Paul in Qatar claims, I was earning some good money there - one of my jobs was, at the time, the highest paid ESL position in Germany, if not all of Europe! However, he is correct that on the whole, teaching in Arab countries has always offered the highest salary - I came close to going to Saudi Arabia, but after speaking to some who had gone there to teach, decided against it. Don’t know if they still do it, but back then they confiscated your passport while you were there and you were pretty much their “prisoner” until the terms of your contract were over. Had quite a few friends who had taught there - most really liked it, but some of their stories didn’t sound all that “fun”. Still, most people left there with a nice chunk of change in their bank accounts.

22

I taught English in Japan in 2003-2004. I worked for AEON, one of the major English conversation chains in Japan. My schedule was Tuesday through Saturday, from 12 or 1 pm to 9 pm at night. I had three “short days” a week and two “long days”. I got an hour for a meal break each day and another 30 minutes break time on my long days. I taught all ages, ranging from toddlers to retirees, but most of our students were people coming after school or work hence the late hours.

Noon or 1 pm to 9 pm were our official hours, but we were expected to be at work earlier and leave late. This was partially just Japanese business culture and partially because our regular schedule often did not allow for enough prep time. I think 9:30 was the earliest I ever left the office, and I would often be at work until 10 pm or later taking care of paperwork and prepping for the next day. So my work schedule was officially 36 hours a week (not including breaks), but the amount of time I actually spent working was more like 42-45 hours per week.

On a typical day I taught five or six classes. Classes for children were 30-45 minutes, classes for adults were 50 minutes. I had anywhere from 1-12 students per class. I sometimes had as few as three classes in a day, and very occasionally taught seven, but seven was considered an overload and was only scheduled in unusual circumstances. In theory I would have received overtime pay after exceeding 30 hours of teaching time per week, but in practice this was almost impossible since each class counted for only 50 minutes rather than a full hour. I never got overtime and never heard of anyone who did.

I received three weeks of paid vacation at the usual Japanese vacation times (around New Year’s, in April, and in August) plus five days I could scheduled myself with my supervisor’s approval. There were some “blackout” days on the calendar during busy times of the year when we could not schedule vacation time. The usual way people used their self-scheduled days was to take a 3 or 4 day weekend or to add a day or two onto the scheduled vacation weeks. We also had off on all Japanese federal holidays, but since most of those fall on Mondays and I didn’t work Mondays this usually didn’t make any difference.

I was hired on a one-year contract, which is the standard for most such schools. At the end of one year, teachers with satisfactory performance were invited to renew. We had the option to renew in three-month increments. Had the timing been different I might have chosen to renew for another 3-6 months, but as things were then extending my stay by even another three months would have made me miss Thanksgiving and Christmas for the second year in a row, and also my mother’s 50th birthday. So I came home after one year.

I made roughly US $25,000 during my year in Japan, which isn’t great money but wasn’t bad for someone right out of college with little work experience. Upon successfully completing my contract I also received a plane ticket home, a cash bonus of about $650 (people who stayed for over a year got more), and about $100 in traveling money. In order to get the free plane ticket we had to leave the country by the end of the month, but I requested the latest possible return date and so had a three week vacation in Japan after I finished work. People who did not want to go back that soon got an additional cash bonus of a few hundred dollars instead of the plane ticket. In terms of how much it would cost you to actually get back to the US, the plane ticket was a better deal because the cash wasn’t really enough for a one-way ticket.

I also received health insurance and a small rent subsidy (about $50 per month) from my employer. The school I worked for did not own my apartment, but arranged to rent it continuously from the owner. So the teacher I replaced had lived in this apartment before me, and the teacher who replaced me moved into it after me. We did not have to pay a deposit on the apartment. Furnishings, towels, bed linens, and basic appliances (TV, microwave, rice cooker, washing machine) were also provided by my employer, and the apartment also had some items like books and videos left behind by previous teachers.

23

I’ve always wondered-- how do you teach your language to someone whose language you don’t speak? When I was in middle school they would spirit us off to French class a couple of times per semester and we didn’t learn shit. The French teacher didn’t speak English. We all just giggled and made jokes about her probably having hairy armpits while she showed us flashcards.

24

Well, in my case I taught mostly mid-level and advanced students who already spoke English to some extent. The beginner’s courses were taught by native Japanese teachers. Students had to work their way up to having a “foreign teacher”. The only real beginners I taught were young children, and those were immersion type lessons and mostly involved repetitive games and songs.

25

I taught English one summer in Mexico, in the Jalisco region. I paid a for-profit volunteer organization to do it since I was eager to visit Mexico and learn more about the impact of emigration on that particular state. I started in the city of Guadalajara but ended up out in the middle of nowhere in a tiny mountain ranch community. It was about 40 hours a week, 8 half hour classes daily + time required for lesson planning.

I speak Spanish, which was a huge asset to getting to know people and finding my way around, but in a way I feel that might have held me back as a teacher, because I was more likely to try to explain things in Spanish. For students to really learn a language, it’s important that they hear it, and it was difficult for me to stick to predominantly English in the classrooms.

26

How did you learn your first language? No one was there to translate it into baby talk for you.

Granted, the circumstances are very different, but the process of language acquisition is fundamentally the same. And, after all, people learn new languages without the benefit of translation a lot more often than in a classroom.

In fact, teaching foreign languages purely through translation is one of the worst ways to do it. Your French teacher was just a bad teacher–the problem wasn’t that she didn’t speak English. Even at the purely beginning level, you can teach someone a new language without knowing their language…if you know what you’re doing.

All over the world people get jobs teaching English simply because they’re native English speakers (and they have some kind of non-related degree). It’s too bad that so few people understand the processes of language, and, more importantly, good language instruction pedagogy. Otherwise, there’d be a lot more, and a lot better, English usage in other countries. I’m surprised it’s as good as it is anyway.

27

IME, what works best at least for the first 2-3 years is explanations in the students’ language, practice in the second language. By the time explanations in the second language are any useful, we’re talking intermediate to high level.

And people who try to teach a second language “as you learned the first” are missing on some very important tools. Unless the students are very young, they have knowledge of grammar: both grammar by itself and comparative grammar are missing in those “natural language” methods. See above “teachers knew less grammar than we did;” that was VERY frustrating. If I have problems pronouncing something, it’s my problem; if I have problems remembering a rule, that’s my problem. But when the teacher doesn’t know any grammar beyond “subject must match verb,” and part of the time they get it wrong because they don’t know enough grammar to tell whether a subject is plural or singular… that should not be my problem, but it does screw me sideways with a rusty saw.

28

I’ve always thought that was a bad example, because it takes a baby at least 5 years of 100% immersion before they can really carry on a conversation.

29

Plus the baby isn’t hearing only “Johnny is under the table,” the baby hears full conversations.

30

Not a teacher myself but what happens is people are taught English in their home countries and during their summer break or sometimes longer go to the U.K. for immersion training.
The teachers teach and then take them out to visit places of cultural interest etc.where they are amongst native speakers.

Brit. students learning say Spanish,French,Russian ,German whatever do the same thing but in Mexico city,Frankfurt whatever.

31

Personally, I had enough Japanese to get by (I’d studied it for a few years before my semester abroad, and while not completely fluent, my Japanese class was high enough level that the vast majority of it was conducted in Japanese rather than in English). However, the students I tutored were ones whose English was already pretty advanced, so they wanted to improve their English conversation skills by working with a native speaker. I mainly had two students: one high schooler and one young woman who was probably in her mid-20s to early 30s. A lot of our “lessons” involved just chatting, with occasional pauses to discuss some grammatical rules, idiomatic speech, unfamiliar vocabulary, etc.

32

Oh, there are many English schools in London for foreign students. I worked for Frances King School of English, but also interviewed with 3 others. The pupils tend to be from all over the globe, and many of my students were taking English classes as a way to satisfy student visa requirements in order to stay in the country and work. Two of my students were wife and 6 year old son of a Middle Eastern diplomat.

When I returned home and explained that I had taught English in London, people had a hard time wrapping their heads around it. They would say the exact same thing, “How to you teach English in England?” One guy even told me that I was not a good American because I was pursuing a graduate degree in TESL/TEFL. He thought I should stay in the U.S. and teach American students, or immigrant students here. Another woman (a retired school teacher), argued that my degree would be ridiculous, as it was not a real course of study.

While your students will sometimes hero-worship you, I did fail to mention that you may receive a lot of flack about your career choice, as TESL can be a politically charged topic.

33

A common misnomer people have about teaching ESL is that you have to understand the native language of the student. Not true - to the contrary, a good ESL teacher will never speak anything but English in a classroom!

First of all, it is almost impossible; I have had classes with as many as 10 different nationalities in one class. I cannot be expected to speak Turkish, Chinese, Arabic, etc.

Your job is to teach English - just like you learned it - first of all with simple things like learning how to count, say the alphabet, learn simple words. Then you start in with simple sentence structure, “My name is…”, “I come from…” and teach how to ask, and answer those questions.

One of the biggest problems I had with my German students was that although many of them had had English in school, they had German teachers who taught them English grammar, in GERMAN! No wonder they never learned squat. They never had the opportunity to actually speak English, just learned “the rules”.

34

BTW, I forgot to mention that today I was offered a “side job” of teaching German to some local students who will be going to Germany next year.

I have to admit, I am a bit nervous about doing this…yes, I speak German quite well, but to be honest, I am a bit shaky with certain grammar points and my writing skills are more than iffy (even though I lived there 14 years!).

Still, I think for a beginners class, and with a textbook, I might be able to pull this off. I get the textbook tomorrow and will look it over to see.

35

That isn’t the point. L2 competence normally doesn’t transfer through explicit L1 description. While the typical instructor will often be the type of learner who can benefit from such knowledge, it’s unrealistic and unfair to expect most learners to do so. This has nothing to do with any particular approach or method (“natural language” or otherwise). I’ve had tons of students who get years of L1 instruction and they have little L2 competence. This is usually because

  1. It’s almost always limited to grammar, which is only a part of competence.
  2. The L2 is rarely contextualized effectively.

Even at the beginning level a properly trained teacher can succeed with a minimum of L1 instruction. And just because you speak a lot of languages doesn’t mean you can teach even your own language effectively to others.

36

I did in Poland for 2 years from 1900 to 1992.

37

Wow - 92 years of teaching ESL in Poland?! I know they have good health benefits there, but geez…