Thanks.  Armenia needs ESL teachers, especially native English speakers, but the pay is very low in Armenia (as is cost of living) - it's more a personal thing for me.  I applied to a program called TEACH with the Armenia Volunteer Corps - waiting to hear from them.  They do not require a TEFL or TESOL or CERTA certification as they train you, but I figured it would be a good idea to go ahead and take the online TEFL classes as they were very cheap and seem like they will be useful.

I'm a lawyer in the U.S., but I do not really practice law much (market is flooded and has been for years).  There is an attorney named Tom Samuelian in Armenia.  He is from the U.S. - his law degree is from Harvard and his Ph.D. in Linguistics is from U of Pennsylvania.  He is pretty instrumental in the founding and continued operation of Birthright Armenia, the Armenia Volunteer Corps ("AVC") and AVC's fairly new TEACH program. 

I looked into the possiblity of teaching in Poland and may do it someday.  I correspond via e-mail with an ESL teacher named Simon in Poland.  He's from England and oddly enough, he's an attorney too.  I do know at least one attorney in the U.S. who is thinking of returning to Poland (she's from there) to teach English.

Oh, sorry, I did realize that you were not in the internship program, but I didn't make that clear in my post.  I was considering applying to the internship program, but I'm over the age for the Poland one (though they say that can be waived).  Simon indicated that most schools in Poland want you to have teaching experience before they hire you and that they tend to be biased towards CELTA.  I took the on-line i-to-i TEFL class and have no teaching experience (well, other than sitting in on a private lesson in Armenia as the guest native English speaker - which was actually quite fun).

Have a good weekend. 

Tim

Hi there,

Thanks for the post. Armenia sounds like an interesting choice. It's not somewhere I've looked into though so I have no idea what the market is like.

I am working in Poland but I'm not on the internship. I prefer to find jobs myself and have done so three times now. It involves a certain amount of trawling through job vacancies (try http://www.tefl.com/jobs/search.html or http://www.eslcafe.com/jobs/) and Googling to see what you can pull up on various schools and locations. Truth be told I actually enjoy all this! Just remember that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

You can also find the names of schools and try contacting them directly. ESL Base has a list of schools in Armenia though I'm not sure how up-to-date it is: http://www.eslbase.com/schools/armenia.

Hope that helps.

Briona