Why volunteer as a teacher?
Working as a volunteer teacher is an extremely fulfilling way to spend your gap year abroad or career break. Children are full of energy and see the world from a unique perspective – making each day different and exciting. If you are looking for English teaching opportunities and considering becoming a teacher in your career, teaching English and volunteering abroad is a fantastic way for you to gain valuable work experience and learn more about teaching. There is no better way to learn about a country than to live and work as a local community teacher. You will develop your teaching skills, help others to develop conversational English and in some countries speak the local language to develop your own foreign language ability.
At Oyster, we believe that it is important that the schools that we work with benefit from having native English and fluent English speaking volunteers. As a volunteer English language teacher, you will be provided with a full briefing, maximising the impact you can make teaching abroad. No previous teaching experience is required to teach English. There are plenty of volunteer English teacher positions in various locations across the globe. Teach English in Asia, South America and Africa.
Learning English is often vital for children living in developing parts of the world, particularly if they want to work in anything to do with tourism. A teach abroad program gives children the ability to learn English but also learn a little about the culture from where the volunteers live, again helping them to create a portfolio that may prove useful in future life.
For those looking to be paid to teach in a school abroad or wanting to gain an internationally recognised and accredited TESOL or TEFL course qualification, speak to the team or look at our TEFL jobs page. We offer TESOL training in Thailand.
If you want to be paid to teach English abroad then you will need to be a native English speaker with a BA degree.
Why different types of courses?
As well as TESOL and TEFL courses, there are also ESL teaching courses available (although these tend to be less popular these days) for people who want to become an English language teacher. These stand for:
- TESOL – Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages
- TEFL – Teaching English as a Foreign Language
- ESL – English as a Second Language
For more information about how we select our childcare and teaching abroad programs, and support our volunteers, read our child protection and safeguarding policies.
You can also read more about how teaching on your gap year can help develop your professional skills.
