Teaching English as a Foreign Language

Stop Five, Hanoi 25/04/2015 to 31/05/2015
(Written by Him)

I imagine many of you reading this will have visited a foreign country in your lives or at least travelled to some out-of-the-way speck within your own national parish. Generally the experience is that of any other seasonal blow-in, pubs, postcards and pictures of oneself looking a little worse than you had initially anticipated. So far so good! But try to imagine working in that other place. Gaining employment from a local, turning up at your new foreign place of work, doing a passable job according to the local expectations and taking home wages at the local rate. This new dynamic is considerably opposed to the usual holiday mode of spending all around oneself while hoping to be allowed leave the country in 2 weeks time.

Before setting off both of us completed an on-line "teaching English as a foreign language" course. There are many TEFL courses available with a wide variation in terms of cost and credibility. We did not break the bank! CELTA and Trinity are the most highly regarded, highly sought after by employers and unsurprisingly the most expensive. Herself brought work to complete here in Vietnam which she had secured before leaving Ireland. 

This type of working abroad is challenging in its own right but it meant I was left to forage alone for work once we arrived in Hanoi. I was aware that it would be unlikely for me to find full-time employment given the length of time I planned to spend in Hanoi, and the free time I wished to dedicate to teaching. I would have to go the self-employed route. Fortunately there are many websites (including ex-pat websites) where one can advertise as a private English teacher at an hourly rate. If you have a cushion of savings as I had you can afford to price yourself competitively, at least initially. You will need a Vietnamese mobile number and a basic knowledge of the IELTS examination which is the most popular English proficiency exam undertaken by the Vietnamese. Ads quoting preparation for IELTS are effective. English is very important in terms of the Vietnamese job market and many young people are eager to improve their abilities beyond what they learnt in school. The fact that many prospective customers have a basic level of English to begin with really makes the whole process much easier for the outsider. I am equally sure that one could sit on the side of any busy street with a sign "15 minute English lesson - $1.50" written in the vernacular and you could also make money but I would not like to tempt a local cop to ask me about my visa. The lessons wouldn't pay for the bribe. 

Once I secured my first student I felt like I had achieved a lot. With a little persistence and word of mouth on the part of one’s new protégé a self-employed foreigner could build up a lucrative client base in a matter of months. Once again I was in the enviable position of not working to sustain myself instead doing it just for the experience which meant I did not have to always be pushing for more customers. In the end I had 3 students, which was more than enough for me. 

Hieple - an engineer, Maianh - a University teacher and Thien - a bar man, made up my student body. All were older, late 20's to late 30's and learning English for work purposes. All had little interest in formal learning sessions of say grammar, instead wanting to converse and have their pronunciation or tenses corrected as we went along. The most common mistakes apart from misuse of words or tenses was using the Vietnamese pronunciation for letters within English words. For example the Vietnamese "i" normally has an "eee" sound. So words like "mistake" become "meestake" and the Vietnamese "t" has a "d" sound so "it" becomes "id" etc. What I wasn't expecting was how easily my own English would suffer in conversation as I was making an unconscious effort to be understood, "How old she", "you eat Pho there" "how you know" etc.

My students brought few if any materials with them and I found the most important book between us was my Vietnamese / English dictionary. I would meet them individually, in public places where we could sit and spend time, local parks (when it wasn't too hot), coffee shops and shopping plazas. On one occasion we were evicted from an almost empty coffee shop as it was "bad for business". I think we were practicing too loudly for the other customer. I noticed both locals and tourists alike casting an eye over what must have appeared to them as a strange pairing, like my student and I were bridging some social divide as we sat together. 

I enjoyed every minute of it. Meeting new people and having good, prolonged and intimate interactions, learning about their culture and being able, in turn, to effect that persons specific situation (if only slightly) is a privilege. I recommend it to anyone who has time to spare and is interested in peeling back a layer of the veneer, getting to know a new way of life while also making real friends.

Where to next for my teaching English, cultural, social conquest....I'm looking at you Dingle!  

I would always arrange to spend an hour or so with each student but this time would invariably expand to 2 hours or more. My students always seemed to have free time and even when I would make gentle attempts to end a session they were clearly content to keep going seemingly indefinitely. Overall I met each student 6 times throughout my time in Hanoi and I have agreed with all to keep in touch on Skype where we will exchange English for Vietnamese.