Tag: ESL resources

So you have been thinking about traveling abroad to teach– that’s great! You have taken your first step in the process: research. As usual, I will herald that everybody will have their own experience wherever they are. With that being said, there are a number of things that you should prepare yourself for before you make the big move. Here are some things you didn’t know about teaching abroad:

There are few things more draining to ESL teachers than always feeling like you are pulling teeth to get students speaking. And for your students, speaking up in any class can be intimidating enough – when it’s in a completely new language and they are afraid of mispronunciation or grammar mistakes, it’s an even trickier situation.

Packing up your bags and moving to an entirely new country half-way across the world can be terrifying – trust me, I know. It’s difficult to fathom what kind of life awaits you in a distant place which you are hardly familiar with, but that’s what is most exciting about making the leap.

Our latest teacher to agree to interview with us is Michaela Gray, a teacher who made the brave leap from her farm in Iowa to the bustling city of Taipei. Read on to discover her tips and advice about moving abroad and some of the great things that she has experienced so far.

While trying to manage a classroom, most teachers’ first instinct will be to simply punish students for disruptive behaviors. There is definitely a space and a need for that – some behaviors are simply too disruptive or even dangerous to not address immediately and decisively. However, there are a lot of compelling reasons why rewarding and reinforcing good behavior is a far better long-term strategy than just using negative consequences.

Last week we brought you the first installment of our teacher interview we did with Mary McCusker, a teacher that dropped everything in New Jersey to head to South Korea to teach English. Read the rest of her excellent adventure here.

Mary McCusker is currently teaching for EPIK in South Korea through Reach to Teach. She has kindly shared with us her experiences and pictures in an interview. She had so much to say about her experiences that we have made this into a two part interview.

I’m sure we can all remember more than one class in high school or college in which we struggled to keep our heavy eyelids from shutting out an instructor droning on in an endless string of statements. Though the teacher or professor was doing their best to share the information in his/her head, very little of that information was entering ours.