Re: How to become an english teacher abroad

Karladc,

I realized I made a mistake with my initial post, which was posted in reply to Turnoi's post. To clear things up, that post which I've cut and pasted here was supposed to be meant for you, NOT Turnoi.

I'm going to be critical but not mean. Your grammar skills aren't even close to par with a native speaker of English. As far as I know, one of the requirements for most schools is for the teacher to be a native speaker of English or have a mastery of the language. Perhaps your speaking skills are better than your written grammar skills and an online discussion board doesn't necessarily require grammatical corrections to carry out one's point, but just from reading your post, I can tell you that you need way more practice with your English.
Are you interested in becoming an ESL or EFL teacher soon or many years later? If you're interested in becoming a teacher many years into the future then I can understand your question. You'd be able to perfect your English skills and plan ahead. On the other hand, if you're interested in becoming a teacher soon, then I wouldn't recommend you working as one.

Anyway, there are a number of things you can do to become an English teacher abroad. The internet has online TESOL, CELTA, and TEFL certification courses which are quite reasonably priced. Obviously, you may also study at schools that specialize in the ESL field, but they're very costly. Actually, most schools that hire teachers from abroad will require a university degree so if you don't have a university degree, then you will have a very difficult time finding a school that doesn't require you to have one. Grammar skills may not be important to some teachers, but I think they're very important and they can be difficult to teach. Also, you must realize that there are teachers who have the talent to teach a class, even if they never had any teaching experience before. However, there are people who can't even teach or have a difficult time teaching a student how to form a sentence and they become miserable with their jobs and quit. My advice? Start off slow and get a feeling of what teaching ESL or EFL is like. You may want to ask schools that teach EFL to students in your country if you could sit in a class to take notes on how a classroom is run. Of course, lots of classrooms are run differently from others, but that's why you should take notes and see if you'd enjoy a profession like this.