GUIDE TO BECOME AN ESL TEACHER

By: RIDA AFRILYASANTI

ESL teaching

ESL career offers a unique multi-cultural opportunity. Becoming an ESL teacher provide you international travel opportunities, multi-cultural training, and job satisfaction. It always becomes a good idea to work abroad while thinking about what you really want to do. Like a coin, it also comes up with some negative aspects; therefore, before deciding to have ESL teaching career, learn a guide to what to consider before deciding to become an ESL teacher below:

1. Learn and understand about the ESL/EFL teaching market. Get to know the demand for English teachers out there. You can browse lots of information on ESL Job Market Demand. Knowing the demand will help you to decide whether or not to track this career path besides to give an idea of places in which you are probably going to teach.
2. Get inform on how ESL is taught. You also have to know and learn about standard ESL jargons as well as familiarize with ESL lesson plan format.
3. Find out main teaching areas in which you will be responsible for teaching. Learn more about specific teaching areas such as conversation, grammar teaching in ESL/EFL setting, and others.
4. Choose the teaching materials that can help to develop you own lesson plans. You can browse more information and get tips for choosing the most appropriate teaching materials for ESL/EFL classroom.
5. Learn some different lesson plans. It is a good idea to take a look at some lesson plans to understand the process of teaching English to speakers of other languages. By learning from the professional and other previous ESL teachers you will be able to construct and elaborate the best lesson plans for your teaching.
6. Recognize the way to teach; teaching techniques. Have a look at various ESL/EFL teaching methodologies as you will have a lot of materials to cover and a number of skills to learn and you have to make your students be interested and active in your teaching.
7. Get qualified to teach ESL/EFL. There are different levels of ESL/EFL teaching qualifications. However, basically, if you would like to teach abroad for a few years, you’ll need a TEFL certificate. If you would like to have a career in the profession, you’ll have to get a Master’s Degree.