I am a Canadian actor and now ESL teacher and coach, and this is my story. In 2021, the year when the world locked down and self-isolated, the year that I decided to change my life direction, something happened that I had been longing for and thinking about for many years, but never actualized. I have now just finished ...
My ESL teaching journey began when I ‘retired’ from my career as an early childhood educator and decided it was time to do some traveling. I’ve always been a language nerd and thought it would be fun to do some English teaching abroad. So, I signed up for the Oxford Seminars certificate course, with a plan to complete the ...
I started with Oxford Seminars in March 2015. On the first day of my first course, I was nervous. Teaching a new course is nerve-racking. Still, I had found a vocation in teaching ESL, and I was excited to share my experiences and knowledge with others. Fortunately, the course was a success, and I have now been an Oxford Seminars Instructor for ...
What influences in your childhood development allowed you to learn English? Was it all of the hours sitting in a classroom listening to a teacher? I suspect that the answer would be “no”. Looking back on my English development as a kid, there were multitudes of resources that helped in my English skills development. If such techniques allowed for ...
As an ESL teacher, we can easily get stuck in a rut. Every day we create lesson plans and carry them out in our classrooms. We stick to the textbook and play a few games to liven up the lessons. We play videos and movies to make it interesting. We might even sing songs or tell jokes. I have ...
As an Oxford Seminars instructor, one of the most common concerns I hear from teachers-in-training is that they might not know enough about English to become an effective teacher. Is such a fear justified? The short is answer is no. If you speak English comfortably, you can learn to teach it! But what if I don’t know much about grammar? ...
What is the difference between a student that learns and a student that does not? The more that I teach, the clearer it is to me that motivation is almost always the answer. Defining motivation is a little more difficult than identifying it as a problem, as there are many different kinds that come from many different places. To ...
I decided to teach ESL in South Korea because I wanted to explore my interest in teaching English abroad to foreign learners. I knew that it would require more schooling for me to teach here in the U.S., so I thought this would be the perfect way to test the waters before investing my time and money in a graduate ...
A teaching moment can appear when you least expect it. If you had told me I could use yoga to teach ESL, I would never have believed you, but then it happened while I was studying in India. Finding New Opportunities while Teaching ESL in India It's another ...
I stared at my new teacher incredulously. It was my very first Spanish class, and she was speaking in Spanish, only in Spanish. After the first class I was pretty irritated, but after a week or so it started to make sense. If I was going to learn Spanish, then I needed to be in a Spanish-speaking environment. The same principle ...
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