Advice on Teaching English in Poland

You meant to say the only qualifications you can think of. Of course, you being from the colonies, your world turns around the British Isles. You know, Harry, most of the world is not that interested in British English, although we all think it is quite quaint.

Hardly any Poles are interested in passing the GMAT or alternative American tests - there's a niche market in Warsaw, but not much else. But the demand for Cambridge English qualifications is sky high - and the (dodgy) TELC qualification is also in demand - both of which are based on British English.

It's true that beginners prefer American English, but once they get to grips with the language, the vast majority want British English because it's simply what they come into contact with on a more regular basis, not to forget that a Cambridge qualification is seen as the gold standard here. No-one talks about passing the "B2 TELC exam", but plenty of them talk about passing the FCE exam. And - that is why British English is dominant.

Anyway, the CELTA is known throughout the world, not just in the colonies. It's tightly controlled by Cambridge and has integrity as a qualification - it assures basic knowledge about teaching and shows that the person has a degree of commitment to teaching and isn't only doing it for beer money.

No, I mean to say that those are the only two qualifications which are automatically accepted without question by both the industry self-governing body and the Polish Ministry of Education when they are doing their inspections. The Ministry of Education inspection is particularly important for non-EU nationals, because (as you doubtless know, given that you're commenting on which qualification is best) schools which pass the Min Ed inspection can hire non-EU nationals without the need for a work permit. Other qualifications may be accepted but only they've been checked out. I know several schools which simply can not be bothered and so will only hire CELTA or Trinity Cert. holders.

As for what most of the world is interested in, have you read many EU documents lately? There's precious little American in there. Indeed, if you read the official English language documentation produced by Polish companies, you'll find that most of it is very much British English.

It is really difficult to decide if you two are more like Cliff Clavin or a Polish schoolgirl who exclaims: "British accent is better."

But they're right. And I'm speaking as an American who teaches from British books but also teaches the differences between British and American English. Most of my students prefer an American accent, which they say is easier to understand, but in my classroom they healthy a healthy dose of British English because that's what's predominantly spoken in Europe, even though the accents are more more American than British. Go figure. Bit I'm siding with delphiandomine and Harry on this one.

So, 1jola, what do you know about Polish learners of English and what the marketplace expects/demands? Using wordy put-downs doesn't really contribute to this thread.

Perhaps you could enlighten us as to what else is considered to be a credible teaching qualification in Poland? I know that many schools are even unfamiliar with the UK PGCE.

It's clear that you know nothing about TEFL qualifications: if you did, you'd know that neither the CELTA nor the Trinity require people to use a British accent or British grammar.

When I did my TEFL cert, we had a lot of English and Irish folks come to the American University in Paris simply because the course was better there than the CELTA offered at the British Council, and a couple weeks longer as well. Funny that in France they don't give a hoot about the British standard; they prefer the American one. When the French want to work for Renault, they will have to produce a TOEIC score. Thanks to U.S. influence around the world you boys can have a job too, just because you also speak English. And yes, Poland is behind on many things.

Sure, I can believe it - but in Poland, the CELTA is the name of the game. The CELTA has its failings - it's probably too focused on grammar, it doesn't provide enough classroom experience (6 hours is not enough!), etc - but it is the magic paper that they're looking for in Poland.


Direct consequence of the Grand Ecole system using the TOEIC test as part of the graduation requirements. Nothing more, nothing less. I'm sure if they switched to requiring an FCE pass, Renault and everyone else would change.

Anyway, Poland places more emphasis on the Cambridge examination system than an American examination system. And the UK, which is leading the way in the EU when it comes to cracking down on dodgy students, has decreed that the TOEIC examination system isn't secure. What does that tell you?

Different countries prefer different things - and it doesn't matter if Poland is backwards or not (for what it's worth, I think the CAE and CPE qualifications are utterly rubbish in terms of what they test) - the poster wants a job, and if he wants a job, he has to comply with what's current in that country. The Middle East expects MA's - does it mean they get better teachers? Not necessarily. But it's what they want.

I basically agree, but this bit is interesting: The UK has decreed the US TOEIC is not secure.


They no longer believe in good sportsmanship. There is plenty of this racket to go around.

At last! Another person in Poland who recognizes that ELT is largely a racket!

It also has some elements in common with a pyramid scheme...

Teaching English can be quite lucrative, ironically it is in the satellite towns not necessarily in the cities where the best opportunities lie. The major cities in Poland, Warsaw, Krakow, Lodz, Tri-City for example have large towns around them, all of which have language schools. These language schools are crying out for Native speakers since the majority of N.Speakers head to the cities.

Earnings, the minimum a qualified N.speaker should receive is 40zl an hour after tax.
Working hours, this is the tricky part. The majority of students study between the 4pm to 9pm slot which usually means with a full week 20 hours.

Now often there are Saturday morning lessons and if the school is successful day time individual lessons to be taught.
However, not every school can offer more than 20 hrs per week.
The other sticky wicket are the holiday periods. The summer holiday is often three months, Christmas and the winter holidays cancel out a month or so and the Easter period is usually two weeks. NO MONEY. Go traveling, get a Summer job or teach at a Summer school.

From personal experience you can, when established, earn over 5000zl a month.

Mmm, interesting - what do you base this on?

Certainly, some schools would seem to be operating like this - Profi Lingua's whole model appears to be built on the principle of using the money to fund more and more advertising! I've noticed that they've put advertising absolutely everywhere in Poznan this year.


It's not going to happen outside of the big cities though - 40zl an hour after tax means what, about 45zl an hour on the distinctly shady 50% umowa o dzielo contract, without health care as well? These small towns simply can't afford to pay so much.


Any school which offers this should be considered to be a liar, unless they are very well established and with a fantastic name locally. I know two schools in Poznan who can be trusted to deliver this if they offer it - and that's out of a significant amount of schools!


I think we all know it is ;)

I do fine for myself as a freelance teacher, working for several different schools and having my own classes on top, but the circumstances in which I was hired for many of these classes (record so far : 2 minute phone call) leaves a lot to be desired.

We won't even talk about the rampant copyright abuse by some schools, some of which are teaching very very well known companies...

Well, I'm Polish, though not a schoolgirl, and I prefer British accent to American one. I find American English particularly ugly!
Of course Cambridge exams are standard in Poland, I wasn't even thinking about American qualifications, went straight for CAE.

beg to differ, but I'm only speaking from my own experience.

mafketis:
[/quote]At last! Another person in Poland who recognizes that ELT is largely a racket![/quote]

All business in Poland is a racket!

I think it depends exactly where these small towns are. In rural Wielkopolska, you'd be exceptionally lucky to get that - more realistic would be 30zl-ish. But without insurance, you're also gambling as a foreigner that you're not going to get sick. It can work for EU citizens, but a non-EU citizen would be taking a hell of a risk to live in Poland without healthcare paid for.

One thing that many foreigners (especially Brits) don't understand is that it's possible not to have health insurance here.

Miopip wrote:


great post. my attention certainly shifted to towns just outside major cities over the past year. basically, i was getting offered jobs outside the city, maybe they'd require a 20 minute train ride, but because of the location and a dire need for a native speaker, I simply named my price and at times they were forced to bite.

delphiandomine wrote:


i taught a 90 minute class once/twice a week at a company last fall/spring semester and was getting 250zl a pop because it was a small town with little to no options as far as finding a native and they were adamant about having a native teach the course. supply and demand, supply and demand.

if i had decided to stay in Poland for a couple more years, the next step would have been to buy a small car and persue more of these kinds of opportunities. running around the big cities teaching 398 lessons per week, working mornings, going back in the evenings, it's just not a good lifestyle, especially in the winter which lasts half the year.

miopip wrote:


absolutely. another big issue with this industry in general. the money can be great one month and then the well runs dry the next. and as far as the "Go traveling" part, kinda tough if that traveling is outside of Poland (which I think everyone needs to do once a year....spending too much time in this country will make you batty) considering you're earning such a weak currency. my wife and I went to the USA this year for my sister's wedding.....nothing like dropping 6,000zl on airfare....and that just GETS you there.

Almost everything?

The thing I noticed right away is that the ELT industry's main operating goal is to get students into the system and paying money and keep them there as long as possible. For this to work, you need to make sure students don't really learn very much (British textbooks like headway or whatever they're using now are great for that). I'm generally a very good language learner and I can't imagine actually learning anything from most monolingual textbooks. At most they're helpful practice for staying at the same level. And finishing one level of textbook doesn't really prepare you to do anything but .... the next book in the series.

Also an awful lot of ELT advertising (official and unofficial) is based on the idea of competitive advantage. That knowledge of English will give you more opportunities. But it doesn't work in reality since the more people know more English the level needed for an advantage is always going to creep up. There's a feedback loop where no amount of English learning is 'enough'.

I believe you, but it's weird how the situation is exactly the opposite here - schools in the satellite towns are often full of desperate people willing to work for cash in hand, just to get some teaching hours. Companies are a totally different thing though - I've seen proof that a large-ish factory outside of Poznan was paying 75zl an hour to Polish teachers, just because of the inaccessibility of the factory. Certainly, if someone wants to do the whole "car, commute, car, commute, car, commute" thing - they can make a hell of a lot of money very quickly.

But - I think we can agree that language schools in the small towns are making a killing!


I think it's a one way trip to going mad to be honest - it's bad enough in Scotland when you barely see daylight (light at 9, dark at 3:30) - but given the much worse economic situation here, it's not like you have a huge paypacket to comfort yourself at the end of the month. Or worse - you'll earn a lot of money by Polish standards, then realise that you need 6000zl to get home!

Having said this Fuzzy - if you could stand it (what with the over-Germanic way of doing everything), you should check out Switzerland some day. The going rate for private lessons is 50CHF minimum, with 70-80CHF being more of a realistic rate - at today's rates, it's almost 1:1 with the USD! Fair enough, it's an expensive country (rent will cost you about 2500CHF for anything livable) - but the money you can make there is absolutely staggering. From what I've been reading, there's a lack of properly qualified/experienced teachers there who can teach English at a very high level - especially with regards to things like the British use of sarcasm or aggression.

It's fine in summer, but driving to and from lessons in winter gets real old real fast, I assure you.


The French and Italian-speaking cantons are by far the nicest places to live in Switzerland (although the Italian-speaking Swiss can be quite a bit madder than Italians). Each language region of Switzerland is pretty much a caricature of the nation which is home to that language.

delphiandomine wrote:


absolutely. i mean, as a small business owner, as long as the town is accessible to supermarkets and whatnot and you can put up with living in a small town, you can set up shop in a small town, get yourself a 100 sq. meter flat and pay pennies in rent, and charge people close to the going rate in the large cities because of......ding ding......convenience. "Well sir, you could pay x amount here and have a 5 minute walk to school.......or pay x + 10zl and drive 20 minutes to Poznan/Krakow/Warsaw/Gdansk/etc and fight for a parking spot."

delphiandomine wrote:


i hear ya, but if I'm not mistaken, getting into Switzerland, whether you're british or american or whatever, is a real chore. and yes, currently, CHF is even stronger than the USD. anyway, i'd love to visit switzerland. a buddy of mine is married to a swiss girl, the photos he sends me when they vacation there are absolutely breathtaking.

mafketis wrote:


great post. they really are just money generators, like most businesses. i've seen people in schools who are A2 level start with a course at the appropriate level but after 3 years of learning nothing aside from a few memorized phrases, the school because of the need to make them feel like they're getting their money's worth, pushes them through course after course till they're finally left sitting in a C1 level course with the deer in headlights face because they can't understand what the teacher or the students are saying and simply can't formulate 1 grammatically correct, sensible sentence.

Hello All,
In an attempt to make life a little easier for teachers to find work either students directly or in the near future with schools I've created another website - ZnajdeJezyk.pl - (and I beg the mods indulgence once more) which will go someway to doing this.

ZnajdeJezyk.pl hopefully goes someway to address the problems and holes that normal koreptycje websites have. The website aims to give the teacher and student more control over their chances to find each other. I'd appreciate it if people could have a loo at it and suggest feedback as I'm continually ironing out little bugs and will make changes to the functionality of the site in the near future.

PLEASE NOTE: I did post the following text in one other thread before creating this topic, so this is actually my SECOND post in this forum. In any case, I'm still very new here, so if you feel that I breached protocol, posted this in the wrong place, or that I should post this question elsewhere, then please let me know and I apologize any error and/or thank you for your help in advance.

Hi/Czesc,

As you may have already guessed, I'm new to this forum. In fact, I just discovered this place and decided to join after coming across this thread via websearch.

While I look forward entrenching myself here as a regular (if you all will have me), I do have one bit of business that I need to take care of right away. Namely, I was wondering if anybody could suggest a good "teaching English in Poland" program that would fit my needs.

I currently live in Chicago (USA) and am fluent in both English and Polish (albeit, in that specific order) and am NOT looking for a "summer abroad package" or anything like that. Rather, I'd like to find a course that will provide me with the necessary certification to teach before making a permanent move to Poland. I do have an apartment in Warsaw (specifically in Stara Ochota, for the curious), so again, I don't necessarily require a program that provides temporary lodging or anything like that (provided I ultimately find work in the Warsaw area, but for our purposes, let's take that for granted). I'd be happy to provided any further information that may be relevant (or irrelevant, for that matter).

So, does anybody here have any thoughts or leads for me? I'd be grateful for your input, and please feel free to contact me here or via e-mail.

Google "CELTA Krakow" - the ones that IH and Bell do (if they still do them) are OK. Ish. Bell may do it in Warsaw. Maybe your best bet is to do it in the US or even better in the UK before coming? Much wider choice of providers and dates.

Great website look forward to using it when in Poland. 2 more weeks to go on my TEFL course.

Also I am looking for help with a work permit fixer for non EU types. I am an American and would like to go the business license route and get proper papers for teaching. I am finishing up my TEFL in Prague in the next couple of weeks. Here they have people for a good price will run all the paper work around for you get license and send docs to proper places. Does anyone know of anyone doing same service for Poland in Warsaw or Krakow areas?

Thanks.

Hi,

I'm relocating to Warsaw in August 2011.

I am a TESOL-qualified English teacher, as well as a French teacher.

Can I have some advice as to which schools I should contact? I am currently in South Africa and obviously cannot attend face-to-face interviews. Are there schools that are willing to conduct Skype and telephone interviews?

Thanks,

Dee

Your best bet is Dave's.

Are most English teachers in Poland teaching high school students? What about younger children? Primary age? Is that an option and if yes what are the qualifications?

It's an option, but public school salaries are pathetic to begin with and private schools are very much only open to those "in the know".

It's possible to earn a decent amount as an experienced public school teacher - but Poland will simply ignore overseas experience, even if you have climbed the ladder there - you'll start at the bottom.

As for the qualifications - generally speaking, a Masters degree with a recognised teaching component.

Most teachers are working for private language schools.

Thanks for your reply, however I was under the impression that in some schools a CELTA certificate would be enough or is this wrong?