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On the road, I have met a lot of travellers who never went home. Not because they dropped everything on a whim, but because they found a way to stay: teaching English. A woman from Brittany who had been living in a small Asian city for three years, a man from Lyon who spent his winters giving conversation classes in South America, a former accountant who had turned her career change into a very slow trip around the world.
Teaching English abroad is one of those ideas that keeps coming back when you dream of travelling for a long time. It is also an idea that is sometimes presented a little too simply. This piece tries to do both: explain why this way of living draws so many people, and say honestly what you need to know before you go.
Slow travel, while working
What all these travellers had in common was a relationship with time very different from mine when I leave for two weeks. They were not visiting a country, they were living in it. They knew the neighbourhood market, the bus driver’s first name, the local festivals no guidebook mentions. Their job gave them a place in the town, and that place changed everything.
You do not get to know a country by crossing it. You get to know it when someone is waiting for you on Monday morning.
That, I think, is the real promise of teaching English abroad. Not a spectacular salary, and not an extended holiday. A way into the everyday life of a place, with a role, colleagues, students and a timetable. Slow travel taken all the way.
What training actually changes
Speaking English and knowing how to teach it are two very different things. Everyone I asked confirmed it, often with a slightly painful memory of their first class. Explaining a grammar rule you apply without thinking, managing a room of thirty children, preparing a lesson that holds for an hour: these are skills you learn.
That is what TEFL is for, short for Teaching English as a Foreign Language. It is training that prepares you to teach English to people whose first language is something else: teaching methods, lesson planning, classroom management, how to teach grammar and pronunciation. Many schools and programmes abroad ask for a certificate of this kind in applications, and even where it is not required, it helps you avoid walking into your first class empty-handed.
Getting trained before you leave
Premier TEFL offers online TEFL courses you can take from home before you leave, or while you are already travelling. If the idea has been on your mind for a while, it is a good way to check whether you actually enjoy teaching before reorganising your life around it. The banner below goes straight to their courses.
I cannot tell you which course fits your plans. That depends on the country you have in mind, the type of school, and what employers there are asking for. Look at job listings from schools that interest you, note what they require, and choose your training accordingly. It is the only reliable way not to get it wrong.
Three questions to ask yourself first
Before comparing courses, I would ask you the questions these travellers asked themselves, sometimes a little late.
Where do you want to live, and for how long? A season of a few months and a move of several years are not prepared the same way. The country you choose shapes almost everything else: the visa, the type of schools, what they expect from a candidate.
Who do you want to teach? Children in a school, adults in a language institute, professionals in private lessons. These are not the same days, or the same skills. The happiest travellers I met had chosen their students as carefully as their destination.
What do you want from the experience? Funding a long trip, changing careers, learning a local language by living there: all three are legitimate, but they do not lead to the same choices. Saying it clearly, even just to yourself, saves a lot of disappointment.
What people do not always tell you
I would be dishonest if I made this life sound effortless. The travellers I met also told me about the hard parts.
Visas come first
This is the most important point, and the one people often discover too late. In some countries, work visas for English teachers are limited to citizens of certain English-speaking countries, or come with specific degree requirements. Depending on your passport, some doors are closed whatever your level of English, and others open much more easily. Check the official sources for your destination before anything else, including before you pay for a course.
It is a real job
Teaching days are tiring, lesson planning spills into the evenings, and the first weeks in a country where you do not speak the language are rarely easy. The people who last are the ones who love teaching, not only the ones who love travelling.
Your own English matters
Schools expect solid English, written and spoken. If you are not yet comfortable, start there, and treat a TEFL course as the second step.
Another way of being somewhere else
The woman from Brittany I mentioned at the start told me something I still think about: « I am not travelling any more, and yet I have never travelled so much. » She was no longer sightseeing. She lived somewhere, with a class waiting for her every morning.
If that speaks to you, take the time to check the conditions in the country that draws you, test whether you really want to teach, and train properly. To get started, you can explore Premier TEFL’s courses and see whether one of them fits your plans. The rest, as always, gets decided on the road.
Photos: Thirdman and kimmi jun via Pexels.
