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One area I really like are the teacher letters on their experiences. I featured a few on the blog before, but thought I’d give a more comprehensive list of their reports on teaching around the world:

Argentina: teaching English in a public school

The Republic of Argentina Republic is situated in South America. It has a population of 37 million: about 17 million of the people are poor. at the time of writing every day more people become poor.

While reading this, you may think that Argentina is a country without natural resources. You think wrong! It has 4 very well-differentiated climates. It has more cows than citizens. It can grow any type of agricultural produce. Argentina has rivers, lakes, beaches, a wide variety of animals, mountains, hills and what is more important, plains. You may wonder why we are suffering from famine or other diseases? The answer is that the government is more preoccupied with how to “steal” money from its citizens than how to solve these great social and economical problems… read on

Australia: juggling work, travel and play

I really enjoyed teaching English in Australia and found it a great way to experience a truly massive and amazing country. I’d recommend it to anyone who (like me) can’t afford to fund an extended trip around the place but is willing to juggle work and play over the course of a year.

Work can be found in private language schools, teaching a mix of Asian, European, South American, and occasionally African students. These schools are similar to those operating in other English speaking countries, and generally consist of young adult students hoping to improve their English whilst having a good time in Oz. This means that motivation levels can vary widely. Classes range from hard working Cambridge groups and IELTS/EAP students desperate to get into Australian colleges, right through to easy going general English groups with more interest in surf reports than reported speech… read on

Belgium: opportunities for teaching English

Chocolate I knew about, as well as fries and good beer but what about the teaching situation? “Brush up on your grammar and prepare to teach advanced learners…You’d better get an extra qualification to teach Business English. I would have thought Belgium’s quite a saturated market” was what my director of studies advised me before I left for Belgium. Not quite what I wanted to hear pre-departure.

A pre-intermediate Vietnamese clairvoyant; two upper intermediate French engineers, an elementary Italian MEP; two Greek teenagers; an intermediate group made up of Japanese housewives, a Libyan expert on water management and some Belgians, were on the menu for my first week of teaching – a far cry from what I had imagined. In actual fact, just the Belgian and European capital has so much teaching work available that you need never be without work regardless of your qualifications… read on

Bolivia: different types of English teaching

There appears to be a divide between the experiences of the other South American contributors to this section. On the one hand, native teachers having to contend with apathy in their public school classes due to poverty, and finding the need to instil motivation an integral part of teaching. On the other, TEFL teachers from overseas working in large private institutes where the only necessary motivation is results. My experiences in Bolivia come somewhere in the middle of this divide.

There is obviously a great deal of poverty in Bolivia, and for most, learning English is of minor importance. The poorest are the indigenous campesinos who number half the population and speak the native languages of Aymara and Quechua. When they come to the cities they settle on the outskirts and are generally employed in street trade. Learning Spanish is their main concern. English is of little use to the majority so they don’t learn it. In fact, many of the poorer children forego education entirely to earn a living on the streets… read on

Brazil: two experiences of teaching in public schools

Two very different experiences of teaching in Brazil. Letters from a Brazilian who was shocked to find out how different life was in the Public school system and below a letter from an Irishman working for a rich private school… read on

Cameroon: It’s Milla Time

When I first told people I was going to work in Cameroon, the most common reaction was: ‘Why?’. The second was: ‘It’s in Africa, you’ll die!’. The third: ‘Where is that?’

So let’s give some answers. I was offered a job that looked interesting in a part of the world I’d never been to before. I’d also long had an interest in Africa, if in a rather vague way, so decided it was time to find out the reality… read on

Chile: travelling halfway round the world to work

Why does any woman up and leave her family, friends and beloved country, to travel half way around the world? It could only be love. That is how I found myself arriving in Concepción, Chile two years ago. My inability to utter one word of Spanish left me with only one employment option: teaching English. I found a job at a language institute in town, and off I went.

As with most places in South America, the idea is to have only native speakers as teachers, and experience is essential. Unfortunately, not many people awake from the bite of the travel bug and yell out “I think I’ll try Chile”, so inevitably many teachers are not experienced and receive only minimal training from these institutes. The salaries offered are not the best, but the cost of living is also not very high… read on

The extracts from the excellent One Stop English will continue throughout this week.

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