Working world: Life as an EFL teacher abroad 

You want to travel but you also want money. Becoming an EFL teacher is a great way to do both! But what are the benefits and drawbacks of this job?

I want to make one thing clear. I did not – and still do not – want to be a teacher. Kids are great and I’ve enjoyed teaching in South Korea over the last year but it’s never been my passion. Therefore, my feelings towards teaching EFL may differ from those who went into the job knowing they enjoyed teaching. Still, there are some highlights and lowlights to life as an EFL teacher abroad, which nearly every teacher can agree on. If you’re considering a job teaching English as a second language, here are some things to think about before signing up for the ride.

Pros

• The kids
• Lesson planning
• Travel and work

Cons

• Communication
• Periphery of school life
• Babysitting

Look ahead to see what makes an EFL teaching position so wonderful, and where challenges spring up within this job. 

Pros

The kids

I know that they say you should never work with children or animals, but this warning couldn’t be more wrong. The kids are by far the best part of this job. Yes, sometimes you can have a difficult class. And yes, most days you’ll come home exhausted from teaching groups of kiddies. But they’re so damn funny. And cute. They’re quite insightful too, teaching me a lot about their culture and the latest trends in Korea. I would learn K-pop dances from my third graders and could talk to my sixth graders about the expectations for middle school. I loved getting to know their personalities. Truthfully, I can say the kids are what I will miss most about being an EFL teacher when I eventually leave Korea. 

Even if you’re not teaching little kids, like I was at elementary school, your learners are what make the job worthwhile. My friends at middle and high school loved seeing their students progress in classes. As an EFL teacher you’re lucky in the way students view you, feeling as though they can trust you, turning to you for advice. My friends have had students ask them for their insight into everything from friendship drama to college applications. Your students might even be adults as an EFL teacher. Teaching older ages comes with its own rewards as you can discuss interesting topics in the target language and get to know foreign learners through these topics. Whoever you’re teaching, the people you meet through being an EFL teacher make the job unique and special.

Lesson planning is a breeze

Work smart, not hard. This was my biggest philosophy coming into the job, and it was very easy to stick to. There are some wiser and more dedicated teachers out there who will plan every lesson from scratch, but if this isn’t your style, it’s very easy to use the resources already available to prepare for class. If you’re teaching a textbook, this is even more true, and the textbook itself may even come with a lesson plan and activities. If you prepare all your lessons in advance, your schedule will be clear for other things. You’ll never have to take work home. With all my lessons organised, I could use my free periods for other things like language learning or blogging. Hopefully, you’ll never feel as though you’re drowning in work as an EFL teacher. 

In Korea, there are a number of websites that are absolute lifesavers for lesson planning, Korshare being one of them. This website includes numerous lessons for different schooling levels and different textbooks. They even have to free lessons if you’re super stuck for ideas. From this website, I was able to modify pre-made PowerPoints and handouts, making lessons suitable for my kiddies with the help of tried and tested materials. Additionally, if you plan to be an EFL teacher for a number of years in the same place, you’ll likely be able to reuse materials from past years, meaning the job only gets easier and easier over time. If you want a job with a great work-life balance, consider becoming an EFL teacher.

You get to travel and work

Teaching EFL isn’t just a job. It’s an opportunity to live abroad and travel around a whole new country. Given your lesson planning doesn’t eat into your evenings or weekends (look above), you’ll have plenty of time for exploring. Travelling is amazing, but it’s very expensive, and moving abroad to live as an expat comes with its own costs. Therefore, having a job that lets you work and travel cheaply is a must. Some professions require lots of qualifications and studying, while others only offer long hours, meaning no time for exploring. Being an EFL teacher perfectly combines good working hours with easy qualifications. Once you have that TEFL certificate the world is your oyster. Then it’s just up to you to choose which country (or countries) you want to explore. 

During my year in Korea, I’ve explored many of the country’s cities and beyond. I was able to get home at 5 p.m. on a Friday night and be in Seoul three hours later. The job gave me the flexibility to do this so I never felt like I was wasting an evening doing overtime. Being an EFL teacher also comes with the perk of school vacation time, meaning you might not be teaching continuously the whole year round. In these breaks, you’ll have the opportunity to travel further afield and explore different countries, while still being paid. There is nothing I love more than travel and money, so teaching EFL was a near-enough perfect job for me. 

Cons

Communication with colleagues

You spend a lot of time with your colleagues. If you’re working an 8-hour day, that’s around 40 hours with other teachers every single week. And if you can’t communicate easily with these teachers, it can make life as an EFL teacher very difficult. The nature of the beast is that as an EFL teacher abroad you’re likely to be in a placement where you’re the only native English speaker around (although some lucky folks wind up in Language Centres or specialist schools). This means that, unless you’re proficient in multiple languages, you might find talking to colleagues difficult. 

How does this affect you and your work? Well, first off it makes communicating problems in the classroom difficult. For particularly troublesome class, try raising your concerns to another colleague who can help out. However, if communication is an issue these problems are unlikely to be resolved. This difficulty also extends to your personal life. Colleagues can be your lifeline in a foreign country, able to tell you the best doctor to go to or a point of contact in an emergency, but as an EFL teacher, you might struggle to reach out to colleagues. By far the most sad thing about not being able to communicate with your colleagues is the loneliness at work. This was the hardest part of the job for me. I continually couldn’t join in on group conversations and would be anxious about speaking to other teachers. Having no friends at work is hard, but sadly it is one reality of the job. 

Periphery of school life

So communication is difficult with your colleagues. This can eventually lead to you feeling like you work on the edge of school life. Never in the loop. Never included in school events. Certainly, never treated as a “proper” teacher. It’s difficult to be an organised and prepared teacher when schedules are continually being changed and you’re not told. I was always relieved when I was told lessons were cancelled, even if this was five minutes before the start of the class. However, this meant I often wasted my time preparing materials. I liked it less when my colleagues told me about a staff dinner the day of the event. In this case, I’d have to rearrange my plans after school to join in. Being an afterthought at school was sometimes hard to stomach and made being a good EFL teacher for my kids difficult. 

Worse than being informed about an event late, is being forgotten completely, which might be a consequence of teaching English abroad. On several occasions, the school arranged special events for times when I wasn’t in school or when I had to teach an extra class. These events would usually be teacher-bonding experiences like plate painting or visiting a cafe together. Not being considered in the event planning made me feel like I wasn’t a real teacher. These feelings of loneliness and exclusion are the reason why it’s even more important to have a life outside of work as an EFL teacher working abroad. 

Are you a babysitter?

Your job is to teach English as a foreign language. But why does it feel more like you’ve been roped into being a babysitter for a class? You constantly feel as though you’re only standing at the front of the classroom so that other teachers can have a break? In lessons that were not textbook-based and where I was given no guidance, I felt this even more strongly. It didn’t matter if I let my kids watch movies, play games, or just chat for the whole lesson, as long as they weren’t misbehaving. The amount of English they were learning felt unimportant. Even if I wanted to teach my kids fun lessons about culture and useful English phrases, their other lessons drained them beyond their attention span. The kids often saw my classes as free time. 

Some kids are just not interested in learning English. I’m sorry to say it. You’ll find this a lot at elementary school where they’d rather play and run around. And you might see this disinterest in high school where EFL is a means to pass an exam. Anything outside of the textbook seems redundant, making you a glorified babysitter. As an EFL teacher in Korea, I was expected to run winter and summer camps, where we’d meet every day to have fun English lessons. At no other point did I feel more like a babysitter than in these weeks, when parents would send their kids to school to get them out of the house during vacation time. Although these camps could be fun, they often lacked purpose and were frustrating if I put pressure on myself to really teach the kids something. As someone who wasn’t invested in teaching as a profession, I wasn’t too fussed about my role as a babysitter. I enjoyed spending time with the kids and talking to them outside of formal lessons. Nonetheless, if teaching is your passion, you might be able to see why being an EFL teacher abroad can be so frustrating.  

Is the EFL teacher’s life for you?

If you’ve already got that teaching qualification or a TEFL certificate in your hands, I would recommend you give teaching EFL a try. If you’re toying with the idea of teaching a foreign language abroad, I would still say you should definitely give it a try. Even though there can be difficulties in communicating and your job description is slightly blurred, it’s a truly rewarding job. Also, I’m sure there are highlights and lowlights to any job you end up in, so why not do a job where you can meet amazing people and travel the world? Korea is a great place for teaching EFL, but there are many more amazing countries around the world that are looking for enthusiastic and excited teachers. If teaching EFL in Korea interests you, make sure to have a look at the EPIK program and this blog post to help you through the application process.