Being a business English teacher
Finding a teaching job in the corporate environment
Why isn’t there more demand for business English courses in Thailand? Well, most of the available textbooks are as dull as dishwater and are far too generic. If they were designed for international markets then most of the countries in Southeast Asia didn’t appear on the list.
The value of learning groups
How to help students learn better
Think back to when you were a kid or a teen and what your least favourite school subject was. It wasn’t that it was boring because if it had of been then other students wouldn’t have liked it or excelled at it. It was because it wasn’t particularly accessible to you as a learner.
Yes, it's official
Thais can be just as good at English as Khmers, Vietnamese and Laotians but
English is a compulsory subject in Thailand. But class sizes are normally large. This leaves little or no room for one-to-one dialogues.
Teaching at my university
What does holding down a university job entail?
if you want to teach university classes like mine, in particularly regard to Thai classes, if they are school leavers they’re really as good a bunch of starters as you could ever hope to get. If you try and teach them in a systematic way, you will encounter difficulties – difficulties that might, at first, be inclined to plunge you into the deepest depths of despair.
Doing it yourself
What it takes to start your very own language school
For the first two years we actually lived in our school. This was tiring and annoying, but saved us a lot of money, obviously. Our monthly mortgage was only 6,600 baht, for which we got a house AND a school! The drawbacks to this sort of arrangement are that we had to pull out our bedrolls after the school was closed down
No magic bullets
Dave Patterson would most certainly like a word
Dave Patterson, who is a teacher at the Prince of Songkhla University in South Thailand, says it's about time Thai students took studying English seriously. And it's about time schools got serious about taking care of their students.
Book review
Bangkok Exit
As a refreshing change from someone writing about their ten years of hell in a Thai prison, you might want to take a look at Bangkok Exit written by Ryan Humphreys. Ryan gives readers a humorous warts 'n' all account of his first year teaching in Thailand at Sathit Wittaya School.
The madness to the methods
The often crazy world of teaching in Korea
Despite being sequestered on the furthest border of the Kumi frontier, nearly fifteen miles away from the closest foreign teacher, I am still surrounded by hagwon mania. These private schools are everywhere. Due to all this severe competition, schools habitually search for new angles to draw in students. At times the teaching methods advocated are only passing fads and cheap gimmicks.
The staff room
Inside a Korean hogwan
A total of seven teachers work at my school. All of them are Korean except for myself. Three of these teachers can speak English with me, but the others are too shy to do so. Staff meetings are held in the Korean language. I seldom understand what is discussed, but that is my fault for not learning to speak Korean fluently. If I want to learn about the meetings I will talk to the director afterward.
A teacher's lot
A week in the life of an English teacher
As Friday is my day off, I consider Saturday to be the start of my working week. Yes, that’s right, I work six days a week, not unusual if you work for a language school. Unlike Thai schools, the weekend is the busiest time for language schools.
