How To Teach English As A Foreign Language

The stuff nobody tells you when you first get a TEFL job

I've been doing this for a long time and I still run into the same issues every single term. The textbooks are mostly fine but they assume a level of student motivation that simply does not exist in most classrooms around the world. You show up on day one expecting to teach grammar and vocabulary and you quickly realize your A1 students can barely stand still for forty minutes without needing something physical to do with their hands. Start with what actually works in a real classroom, not what looks good on paper. Here is the method that has carried me through twelve different countries and about four hundred classes I probably should not have survived. You use the PPP framework. Presentation, Practice, Production. It sounds basic because it is basic. You present the target language in context, you get students drilling it in controlled exercises, then you set up a task where they have to use the language themselves. Most new teachers fumble the presentation stage. They stand at the front and explain grammar rules in English while the students stare at the board. This never works. You need to set up the context first. Show a short video clip, tell a personal story, use real objects, whatever it takes to make the meaning clear before you ever write a sentence on the board.

I had a class of Korean business professionals once who were supposed to be at B1 level. I spent twenty minutes presenting past simple tense using timelines and concept checking questions. Not a single person used the target structure correctly in practice. I switched tactics. I told them about my weekend, wrote three sentences on the board with the verbs underlined, and asked them to correct me when I made mistakes. They caught every error immediately. Then they started using the structure themselves because they felt useful correcting a native speaker instead of sitting through another drill. That was the moment I stopped trying to teach grammar through explanation and started teaching it through discovery. Class management matters more than your lesson plan. You can have the most beautifully scripted material in the world and it will fall apart if thirty teenagers are talking over you. Establish your routines in the first ten minutes of the first class and never break them. How you hand out papers, how you form groups, what signal means stop talking. These small decisions consume enormous mental energy if you have not figured them out beforehand. Write them down. Practice them. Treat them as seriously as you would treat your actual teaching content because they are equally important. The biggest mistake I see beginners make is talking too much. Teacher talking time should stay under thirty percent of the lesson. When you explain something for five minutes straight you are performing a monologue, not teaching. Students need to produce language. They need to make mistakes in front of you so you can correct them before the final production stage. Controlled practice activities should dominate the middle portion of your lesson. Match the right column to the left column, fill in the blanks, do the dialogue with a partner, repeat until it becomes automatic. Automation matters. Fluency comes after accuracy, not before it.

Material selection is where most people waste money and time. The big publishers produce solid coursebooks. Cambridge, Oxford, Pearson. They are reliable and level-appropriate. But they are also rigid and you cannot adapt them to your specific students without putting in serious effort. I stopped buying the teacher's books years ago and just use the student books. The extra worksheets and answer keys clutter up my bag and I almost never look at them. If you need supplementary material go to sites like ISL Collective or British Council Teaching English. You can download anything for free if you are willing to spend ten minutes searching. Technology in the classroom is a double-edged sword. Smartboards and tablets sound like a great idea until the internet goes down during your only class that week. I learned this the hard way in Saudi Arabia when the entire school's network collapsed during exam season. I had planned a video-based listening lesson and spent the period doing impromptu speaking activities with the students instead. They actually talked more than they would have if the video had worked. Having a backup plan that requires zero technology is not optional. It is mandatory. Every lesson should have a version that works if everything electronic fails simultaneously. Assessment is another area where people get it wrong. Testing should measure what you actually taught. If you spent three lessons on the present perfect continuous you should not put it on the midterm exam. Students pick up on this quickly and it destroys whatever trust you have built. Keep quizzes short and frequent. Five questions at the start of class about the previous lesson works better than a twenty-question test at the end of the month. Retrieval practice is a well-established concept in learning science and you should use it whether you know the research behind it or not.

Now let me address the part that nobody likes to talk about. Burnout. This job will take more out of you than you expect. You will come home with zero energy because you spent every waking hour in a room with twenty-five people who are not speaking your language and not understanding what you are saying and you are repeating yourself for four hours straight. I used to work six days a week teaching twenty-four hours total. By the third month I was checking my phone during lessons because I was exhausted from constant performance. Cut your contact hours if you can. The money is less but you last longer. I switched to four days a week after year two and my students' comprehension improved by an amount I could actually measure. There are also situations where the standard TEFL approach simply fails and you need to know that upfront. Teaching young learners in rural areas with no resources is nothing like teaching adults in a language school in Seoul. If you are placed in a context where the students have never seen English before and their parents expect you to produce fluency in three months you need to adjust your expectations dramatically. Native English speakers tend to underestimate how long acquisition takes. Six months of consistent exposure gets a motivated student to roughly A2. That is it. Not B1. Not conversational. A2. Write that down somewhere visible. If you want actual certification look into CELTA from Cambridge or Trinity's CertTESOL. They are the two gold standards and they are expensive. You can find scholarships and payment plans through some providers but expect to spend between fifteen hundred and two thousand dollars. The alternative route is a generic TEFL certificate you can get online for around two hundred dollars. It will get you a visa and a job in most countries but employers in competitive markets prefer the longer courses. This is especially true in East Asia and the Gulf states where applications flood in from qualified candidates.

Salaries vary wildly depending on location and employer. A beginning teacher in Vietnam might make eight hundred dollars a month with free housing and that goes further than two thousand dollars in Dubai. Know your market before you commit anywhere. I have seen people quit within three months because they signed a contract they thought was generous and then realized rent, food, and social life consumed most of it anyway. Factor in the cost of living before you accept any offer. If you want a practical resource to start with I recommend the Cambridge Guide to Teaching English as a Foreign Language. It is old but still relevant and you can find PDFs floating around the internet if you search for it. Paul Seelye's book on teaching young learners is also worth reading if that is your target demographic. Most of what you learn on the job cannot be found in books. You will figure out classroom management through trial and error. You will learn to read a room by getting bad at it repeatedly until you get better at it. That is the actual process. It is not glamorous but it works. The one skill that separates teachers who last from the ones who leave within a year is patience with yourself. You will have terrible lessons. Some days you will forget half the material you planned and the students will not remember anything either. This happens to everyone. Record yourself if you can. Watch it back. You will notice things you did not realize you were doing. Speaking too fast. Standing with your back to the class. Using gestures that mean nothing to people who have never seen an English lesson before. These are fixable problems and they compound quickly once you start noticing them.