Hi there!!

I am a Turkish citizen and I am an English teacher in Turkey. I have been teaching English for 8 years now.

I started taking the online tefl course in late November and I am about to finish it; actually I am doing the last bit the video courses at the moment.

I have been checking the job adverts as well but I could not find anything for non-native speakers or non-EU citizens.

If you know anything about it please let me know as when I started yhis course the TEFL people from this course told me they could help me find a job.

I am not looking for a permanent job as I have a job in my country. I am looking for a summer job where I can teach people who are willing to learn English as a second language.

Thank you,

Eda ESEN

Hi Eda,

Why don't the people you are doing your TEFL course with help you with your job search? Have they gone back on their word? I happen to be in the same boat that you're in. Realizing how difficult it would be to go it alone looking for a job and being a non-native English speaker myself, I hit on the wonderful idea of doing a TEFL course all over again with any TEFL course provider who could promise me a job placement on completion of one of their courses (the ads and the promos seem to gurarantee this, even for non-native speakers). I tried to register for one of the internship programs of a cerrtain TEFL course provider (whose name shall not be menitoned) as a way to get into and work in a TEFL destination country legally and without any hiccups, and so have all my paperwork in order, as well as to be reasonably certain that I would end up teaching in a respectable institution. But to my shock and dismay, I found that the very same course providers I was hoping would get me a job placement had announced, in big, bold lettering on their website, that only applicants from New Zealand, Australia, UK, USA, Ireland, and Canada could apply, even for internships to countries whose governments don't necessarily stipulate that English teachers need to strictly be from English-speaking countries, like China! I felt this to be a disappointing case of dastardly double standards!

But then I remembered! TEFL courses around the world are now typically undertaken 90% by non-native speakers of English who are hoping to teach English abroad. This is now an established trend and a complete reversal of what it was, say ten years ago, when the majority of those who did TEFL courses were native speakers of English. TEFL courses are businesses and the English-teaching industry has become a global, billion-dollar one, and it would not be in the financial interest of those who run the show to let the biggest representative portion of their customers find out that the TEFL qualifications they are paying for have not a chance of a snowflake in hell -or at least they have a very slim one- of securing them any gainful employment in any of the traditional English teaching markets around the world. So they've got to lie, or at least exaggerate, and promise us the world. It just makes business sense! 

That, in a nutshell, has been my analysis. What's been your experience, Eda?

Regards

Mugisa

P.S. A simple word of advice on your job search: now then, if you are a confident and fluent speaker of English, instead of being cowed by the demands for native English speakers in the advertisements, you could try to actually call or skype those recruiters so that they might actually hear your voice and your excellent command of the language so they may be persuaded that the term 'Non-Native Speaker' which, to them, is probably synonymous with the phrase 'Heavily-Accented & Broken English' doesn't necessarily apply to you. All the best!