Online Teaching: Is the genie out of the bottle?

Two months ago, when we made the transition to online teaching in response to the pandemic, I was skeptical about the emergence of online as a serious long-term threat to conventional ESL classrooms. Now I’m not so sure. What has happened since then?

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The Interview. Techniques for the ESL Teacher

It is finally over. You have escaped the teacher training program unscathed. Or, perhaps you are a seasoned vet seeking to land a job in a new country or city. Either way, you need to get ready for the next step: the interview process. While this process is more daunting for some than others, there are always techniques to be applied that can significantly boost the chances of you landing the job you...

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The LGBTQIA+ Teacher Abroad: Doing your research

‘You are so lucky!’ ‘I wish I could go on permanent holiday!’.  Probably the two most common responses on finding out I am an ESL teacher, and in one sense I understand it, we do seem to have a dream job. With a teaching certificate and your degree, the world is your oyster. Who among us can say we hate the fact that we can take our skills and find work in almost any country of the world? But for all of us there is a flipside to this luck. You miss things, the big and the small, you miss moments and gradually it can seem like people begin to forget you. What’s more it can feel... 

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The Flexible ESL Teacher - Teaching to Students' Interests

When adult students come to class to begin learning English they are not going to want to learn about why 'read' is spelled the same in simple past but pronounced differently in present tense. Why you ask? Because it's not immediately relevant and therefore not of interest to their current lives. They are more than likely to have just arrived in a new country and are interested in learning the basics: how to navigate a new public transport system in their host city or how to order a cheeseburger without the embarrassment of causing a scene. Teaching to students’ interests can easily be done by placing...

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The Surge to Online Teaching

There is a mini-crisis looming in the world of English Language teaching. Most companies which play in this area are still operating on the traditional business model. They have very expensive training centres filled with very expensive teaching staff, delivering very expensively designed and created training courses – always run on a very expensive computer network and displayed on different sizes and shapes of displays, some small and basic, some large and interactive, but...

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