Dear Teacher

Thank you for visiting these pages which are currently being constructed.  Sorry for your inconvenience.  

Please come back soon or register as a member and I'll be happy to notify you when they're finished! I

'm typing all of this up/working in HTML, designing the website and doing all the fancy stuff myself...so it pretty much is an activity that I do whenever I'm not teaching or teacher training - which I'm doing about 90% of the time ;-)

Anyway, in case you're curious:

This section of the website is where I'll be putting up handy tips and tricks that you can employ in your classes, going through things like error correction, talking about your students' levels, styles of learning, assessing intelligence and of course, how to create materials that fit your students' needs... 

I'll also be going into things like teacher development and training, networking with other teachers, discussing good books, introducing you to some of the new media and programs out there and how using technology in your classrooms can really make a difference plus some good old-fashioned tips on using TV, songs&video.  

So... in the meantime, have a look around and I hope you'll come back soon - you can bookmark me using the little box at the top of the page! Here are some of my links in the meantime

Until then, Karenne

(p.s. New members get a free set of my G2KU conversation cards - really useful for first day and the "we're not in the mood for a book" classes)... and... I'd love to know what you think of the site in general, so don't hesitate to drop me a line.  K

Loving teaching

Do a job you love and you will never work a day in your life. Confucius

Could there be a better job than teaching English as a foreign language?

Probably not!

I mean, how many other jobs out there give you the chance to travel and see the world?  And while doing so, have the opportunity to live in great cultures, learn new languages whilst sharing your own and at the same time experience different perceptions of living globally?

What other job position provides the chance to have exciting adventures, share and impart knowledge, follow a loved one across a globe and secure gainful employment there? Spend hours a day creating, designing, chatting, laughing, learning, reading, innovating, growing, singing, loving teaching?

In the words of some famous rap guy out somewhere, "We got it good, man." 

So how does one get started at all of this?

(If you are already a teacher/language trainer you can jump straight over to the articles on the righthand side). 

Well, first off, you should really do a certificate in teaching English.  

I started my career teaching mainly by accident, however, it wasn't until after I studied how to teach that I actually knew what I was doing. I know a lot of "teachers" out there who say it's not necessary... but let me ask you this: would you like to pay (or have your company pay) for you to learn tango from someone who just happened to be born in Argentina? What about guitar lessons from a guy whose Dad happened to be in a band a long, long time ago. Probably not, huh?

So take yourself seriously and learn how to teach a language. It isn't difficult but it is important - people lives, careers and futures often rest on what we do!

There are many, many different certificate programs available and the best of these are the ones that get you in the classroom, that teach you how to teach, that go through things like analyzing student needs, levels and abilities while discussing learner styles and intelligences; that review or force you to review some of the grammatical structures you need (because unless you've studied English for a degreee, you probably don't know how to break down sentences  - and yes, this is very important even if you're teaching conversation).

You also need a course that will show you how to make a good curriculum and provide your students with a learning plan.

Also, unless you've decided to do your certificate course from home, (be it on-line or at a local adult education centre), you can even get real practice by doing your certificate in a fun new city/country - experiencing, right from the beginning, what it's like teaching abroad.  

Here are some options for training: 

Certificates for Teaching English

If you're humming and harring about whether or not teaching English to speakers of other languages would be a good career path for you, you might want to read up on the field before, during or after your certificate training: 

Learning to teach (books)

The following website links are also really quite useful, from David Graddol's report on the Future of English to articles on teaching around the world to learning about useful teaching jargon. 

David Graddol

Article 1

Article 2

ELT (English language teaching) jargon 

While learning, you can browse around for work. These great websites (tried, tested and true: I've used Dave's twice for myself and often for finding other teachers when I was a DOS) and you'll probably quite amazed just to see just how many jobs there are out there and how easy it is to secure a positon. 

Finding a job

Once you've decided (!) to get going, here are some handy websites that'll get you on a plane at a cheap price (oh! and learn some of the language beforehand instead of surviving on uno,dos,tres,hola y ciao - the way I'd foolishly initially arrived in Ecuador back in '99!):

Travel to teach