Opportunities for English speaking actors in Poland? advice on teaching conversational English

Greetings! I am an American who is a dual citizen of both the US and Germany (EU). I was wondering about opportunities for teaching conversational English in Poland and acting. I have no experience acting,but I heard there is a massive need for opportunities of this sorts. However, I might be miss-informed about this .I am planning on moving to Austria or Germany to study next year,but I might want to explore other options as well for the distant future. Is it possible to earn a basic income and live comfortably teaching only English conversation;or would I have to teach Grammar? I am also aware that it is almost impossible to find teaching gigs in Krakow. Can I have some conformation on this;does this also apply to other big cities? Since I do not drive, would living in a medium or small town/city be a problem? I am interesting in Krakow as I have ancestral roots their and I have a friend who lives there who can help me get ''acquainted''. Also,have there been any general trends of other EU citizens (I guess British) setting up businesses and being successful like this article from the Guardian suggests? Is there still a huge market? My father might try to get Polish citizenship through ancestral roots ,he does mainly small scale investing.

guardian.co.uk/world/2007/dec/12/poland.helenpidd

I am afraid you will run into cutthroat competition against professional English teachers in Krakow....... Good luck, anyway.

Yeah that's what I expected about Krakau. Any advice on other cities or towns in Poland?

You know what might be an idea, is advertise teaching English to actors and/or public speaking to businessmen, teachers etc, where you can use your English/foreign/acting skills as unique selling points.

maybe look at trying to start and English language Theatre aimed at teaching English.

If you have a good speaking voice, you might also advertise as a voice-over artist. I've had a few jobs doing that for museums, firms etc. Not regular, but it exists.

dont use german names when in poland
krakow is the english name


for english only speaking people with no experience? dont be silly


grammar is obligatory even callan teachers teach grammar of sorts


i dont think youre fit to teach english


theres at least 38 million people here
thats a big market to me


but he has no skills or experience


most actors earn a pittance
i know one quite leading man in a theatre and he gets really nothing much
big money comes from selling crappy stories in crappy magazines


young americans are unlikely to cut it

I was specifically asking people about large cities where many people go to,my friend in Krakow told me that there are too many teachers there working for nothing. I was curious about other large cities.


The best way to learn English is by speaking ,while grammar is a must speaking should come first.


I significantly improved the English spoken by many Europeans this summer when I was in Vienna. They personally thanked me for that. I was improving my German,but people asked me to help with their English.

Gigs?


That article from 2005 is bullsh1t. There's at least one thread here already about it. During the week it was published one of the people who claimed to have a 30 million euro property portfolio sent his CV to me wanting to do $20 per hour English lessons and another of the 'successful expats' (who was sleeping on someone's sofa) had been pestering me for an interview but never turned up because he was hung over most mornings. Also the lady who is quoted as saying that you can live in the city centre and have a cleaner for £500 per month subsequently denied saying anything of the sort to the reporter.

If you are looking for English teaching work here, you should be aware that there are basically three types.

In-company work, where you would be doing lessons for people usually at a high level in companies and be expected to have excellent pedagogical skills and solid experience. People who do this as a career often register a business and deal direct with the client if they want to earn a good hourly rate however one needs to be established here to get the work and also spend a lot of time chasing it. HR Departments get offers every week from training providers both large and small who at the moment are undercutting each other. The people you would teach have usually had plenty of teachers before and to make a go of this you need to know what you are doing. Fees for lessons in that sector are being driven down at the moment and as ever, the bottom line of the bill is the important thing for the person who holds the budget. Hence they increasingly choose cheap over good.

Teaching people who have signed up for lessons at private language schools. Doing this, you would be competing with Polish teachers of English who are often very good at their job and often prepared to accept low wages as well as native speakers of whom there is a surfeit and who are taking ever lower wages. There has been a spate of private language schools closing over the last few years and they are having to charge less and less, with an obvious knock on effect on wages. The are also a lot of people from the UK and Ireland who have come to Poland with partners/spouses who don't speak Polish, have no teaching (or often any other) qualification and need some sort of work. They are easy prey for the individuals who run such language schools and as a result some schools are now paying not much more per hour than McDonalds. If you aren't an EU citizen you would be lucky even to get work somewhere like that. Your friend is, by the way, right. The market in Krakow is flooded with (mostly young, inexperienced and unqualified) people all chasing the same few jobs.

Korepetycja, teaching usually school kids after school. This can pay a reasonable hourly rate however unless you can be in more than one place at a time, you can only usually do one per day and the market for this is also saturated. The newspapers a full of small ads for it every day.

This is the situation in Warsaw at the moment. Friends who still teach here are not generally optimistic.

wrong

if this was true then the direct method wouldnt be thoroughly discredited

speaking properly can only come with a thorough understanding of the language
you might be able to speak but you wont know


significantly

any empirical evidence


interestingly i think its a growth area for natives who can actually teach
but it requires excellent skill with children and parents can be very demanding
most parents will not tolerate hangovers or uncleanliness

Polish friends who do this say that parents are becoming more demanding and try harder to beat the price down. Sometimes they arrange lessons with two or three people who've advertised and choose the best.

The improvement in language teaching in schools doesn't bode well for this sector though however I agree that native speakers, especially ones who speak Polish, could do well, providing they can fit enough lessons in. This needs both advertising and word of mouth and there is still the issue of how many lessons can be fitted into suitable after school/weekend slots, especially since this sort of work usually involves travel, often to outer suburbs.

I agree that there need to be high personal standards. I know of one Polish lektor who was arrested recently for making a pass at a teenage pupil.

I am sorry to inform you, you are very ill informed on the acting front. I know of an North American actor in Warsaw with qualifications and credits coming out of his ying and yang and he struggles to find work. He will get maybe 5-7 bit jobs a year, he survives by teaching English a job he despises.

jon357,
Could you link me to the threads covering this article? I would really appreciate it. Yeah after reading it again last night I am starting to see how it is complete BS. However, I am curious to see what the thread on Polish forums says about it.

Thanks!!!

i believe it
i do have a good story about idiot parents
one guy was happy to pay 100pln an hour for someone to teach his 18 month old baby
who couldnt speak
what he expected i dont know


parents will take the children to a suitable location if it is equipped properly
not a dark dingy beer can filled bedroom


idiotic
arent there enough stupid students out there not to need to try it on with a teenager

Sorry, I had a look via the search function but couldn't find. It might have been a discussion in the Random Chat, which is deleted every now and then, or on a thread about something else or on another now defunct forum that I posted on at the time the article came out.

It looks like the reporter for much of the second half of the article just spoke to people in an expat bar that used to exist, kind of bar room braggarts with a free drink inside them.

Re. the acting. I have a friend here who gets a few roles a year, but it's mostly adverts, bit parts, fake gameshow contestant work and as an extra and he spends a hell of a lot of time chasing it and schmoozing the right people. I strongly suspect that a percentage of money sometimes goes back in the direction of casting directors.