The TEFL Blog

Teaching English in a foreign country 'can' be a great way to save money or to pay off debts. A lot of the overseas teaching positions offer a decent salary, free airfare, free or subsidized accommodations, free medical insurance, and many other employment perks that can reduce your expenses while living abroad. So everyone who teaches English must save money or pay off debts while abroad, right? Wrong...Saving money abroad, like saving money at home takes discipline and sacrifice. Although it seems like expenses are very low in many teaching positions, that doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of things that you can spend (or waste) your money on. Likewise, there are some expenses that come along with living abroad that have to be kept up with to prevent new debts. In this blog entry, I just want to provide some simple, easy-to follow tips for saving money while teaching English in a foreign country. By following some of these tips I was able to pay off half of my s

Recently, through my work, I have been in contact with many institutions in China that are desperately seeking English teachers to work in their schools. These opportunities range from teaching children all the way up to working in universities. At the same time, I know there are many teachers in Canada and the US out there who are looking for jobs abroad; so I couldn't figure out why there is this disconnect between these schools and the abundance of teachers looking for work. So, I decided I'd look deeper into why potential English teachers are not going to China, and these are the assumptions that I have found that are keeping people from going to China: 1. China is too polluted 2. China is not safe 3. Schools will rip you off 4. The pay is too low 5 . There are too many people in China While there is definitely some validity to some of these assumptions, there is a lot of wrong with them as well. In this blog, I want to examine some of these myths, with the hope

Fantastic professional development opportunity this summer! There are still spaces available in this specialized certificate program for international English teachers. Contact tefl@uvic.ca for details :) Teaching English as a Foreign Language at UVic @Continuing Studies at UVic https://continuingstudies.uvic.ca/education-learning-and-development/programs/professional-specialization-certificate-in-teaching-english-as-a-foreign-languag