[j00n]

If you're trying to get a "good" hagwon job, then yes, it is harder. If you want a public school (which are more desirable than hagwons), then it doesn't matter. The orientation for the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education had Asians, Middle Easterners, African Americans--quite diverse. Some of the Korean people I met there weren't even NATIVE ENGLISH SPEAKERS--to me, they still had really, really faint accents. I thought that was interesting.

-ginger

Yeah it's funny isn't it? Actually there are some that have HEAVY accents and are still teaching English. Some were those that studied in the US or graduated from a US University. It's because the demand for English teachers is still so high in Korea.

[Ahomiya]

Yeah I also have head that its harder to find a good job if you are not caucasian because koreans tend to relate english with caucasians. Im trying to decide between teaching in japan or korea. but for korea im just not sure of how my chances are.

For Japan - you will actually be taken more seriously if you're Asian than Caucasian. Caucasians are very subtly treated as entertainers rather than educators, although it's a mold that can be broken. If you're a woman, they'll also be more likely to recruit you. The teaching profession in Japan is male-dominated and schools highly prefer to hire females.

[qtlub]

HI, I really want to teach English in Korea just over the Summer and I am finding it hard to find places that only want teachers for the Summer. Anyone have any suggestions to where I can find places? Also, people around me have been telling me that I won't be able to teach in Korea at all because I still have not graduated from college (I'm a junior, major is history,social sciences-middle school endorsement/secondary education...i am graduating next year) I wasn't sure if it was true because I always hear of people my age and even younger that have gone to Korea to teach English, I am guessing they have connections? Thanks so much.

[apple_py]

HI, I really want to teach English in Korea just over the Summer and I am finding it hard to find places that only want teachers for the Summer. Anyone have any suggestions to where I can find places? Also, people around me have been telling me that I won't be able to teach in Korea at all because I still have not graduated from college (I'm a junior, major is history,social sciences-middle school endorsement/secondary education...i am graduating next year) I wasn't sure if it was true because I always hear of people my age and even younger that have gone to Korea to teach English, I am guessing they have connections? Thanks so much.

i'm in the same situation. i don't have my degree yet, but i'm going to try private tutoring...
hopefully my friends and family will help me find some students
what's a reasonable price for a private tutor? i can speak english and korean fluently, if it helps..

[ginger]

i'm in the same situation. i don't have my degree yet, but i'm going to try private tutoring...
hopefully my friends and family will help me find some students
what's a reasonable price for a private tutor? i can speak english and korean fluently, if it helps..

If you don't have a degree, less people will want you to be the tutor. Having a degree shows that you are at least qualified. A person with a degree AND teaching/tutoring experience can expect to make about 30,000-60,000 원 per hour. Without a degree OR experience...I doubt you'll be raking in the cash, especially when there are hundreds of other tutors here that are qualified, have experience tutoring AND teaching, and have the connections. I don't mean to be a downer, but I just find it kind of irksome when people come here expecting to work without even a BA. Tutoring isn't exactly easy stuff, you know. You have to have not only the ability to speak it, but the ability to TEACH it (how to explain grammar, sentence structure, subtle nuances, etc). It won't just be sitting down with a kid and talking--you'll be expected to buy quality materials and prep for each of your lessons--make worksheets, quizzes, dialogues, etc. And I wouldn't advertise that you're looking for private work, either--it's pretty much against the law in Korea.

-ginger

[GO!zilla]

Yeah it's funny isn't it? Actually there are some that have HEAVY accents and are still teaching English. Some were those that studied in the US or graduated from a US University. It's because the demand for English teachers is still so high in Korea.

not only that, the president said if you teach engrish, you don't have to go to the army.
lots of incentives.

i agree with ginger, tutoring is hard work. if you don't have the patience, you won't last long.

[SillyYun]

My cousin lives in Korea now cos her hubby is working in Seoul.
She wanted to teach but was rejected because her degree and where she is from is not US nor UK. It was said that she must be educated from UK or US or related countries to teach english, Shes educated in Singapore with degree in top uni.
Anyway shes trying to find tutoring there, does anyone knows where to get any jobs like that? I'm helping her to..

[ginger]

not only that, the president said if you teach engrish, you don't have to go to the army.

Wow, really? I didn't know that one. Is this the new 이명박's policy? He's really going crazy with this English thing! The govt is going to start sending in inspectors to make sure that all the English classes are actually taught in English. If they find that the teacher has an inadequate mastery of English, the teacher will be forced to resign their post as an English teacher and will have to find another subject to teach! Needless to say, the English depts around Korean schools are FREAKING out. I now have to teach 2 back to back English lessons to my Korean co-teachers every Friday!

-ginger

[GO!zilla]

^ya, saw it on kbs news like few weeks ago. he also announced that korea is gonna hire x amount (in the thousands) to teach english.

Lee plans to spend about 4 trillion won over the next five years, including hiring 23,000 new English teachers, to make sure all high school graduates are fluent in English.

[kitty_N]

^ woah, awesome. now i'm not too worried about landing a teaching english job in Korea for next year.

[j00n]

Teaching privates is illegal on an E2 visa, but not on a F4 visa.

[little mixed girl]

people, if you want to "teach english", it's work.
it's not like you sit there talking to people. (maybe in some cases...)

people are paying you to learn them sumthin!

if you are really motivated, get yourself a certificate to teach the SAT, TOFEL, or TOEIC.
that should open a lot of doors.

i had 2 friends that worked at CDI. one of those got into pagoda, but had to quit cuz she got into cdi too.

GEPIK or is it EPIK is like the JET program for korea.

[ginger]

^ya, saw it on kbs news like few weeks ago. he also announced that korea is gonna hire x amount (in the thousands) to teach english.

DIzzam! I would kill for a high school gig in Seoul, but they're so freaking hard to find! I spent months and couldn't find anything because they don't hire through a group recruiter, like SMOE, GEPIK, or EPIK. By the way, GEPIK is the govt organization in charge of hiring for Gyeonggi-do, while EPIK is for the rest of Korea, and SMOE is strictly for Seoul.

That's so crazy, though. Didn't the last president want the number of foreign English teachers drastically reduced by 2010? These programs are costing Korea so much money, and SO MUCH could be fixed if they just changed the way they teach. Rote memorization is NOT the way to teach a language--the kids can spout off some silly dialogue but they don't know what it means or how to apply it to every day situations.

EDIT: Guys, I feel like I just have to reiterate this because the Korean ESL board I frequent has been bombarded lately with posts of "I want to come teach here (for the summer) and I don't have a degree! How do I do this?" To you, it may seem like it's not a big deal. But native English teachers here have a TERRIBLE reputation and one of the reasons is because people WITHOUT degrees keep trying to come in and teach. It's illegal and most Koreans find it extremely rude and lowly. So all of us who HAVE degrees are subject to much suspicion by the government and the school board. One guy was saying how his school was so suspicious they had him submit his diploma FOUR TIMES for checking. Our reputation as a whole is low because so many Koreans think, "these Americans/British/etc come over to our country to take our money and they don't even have qualifications. They're using us." Korean teachers have to work really hard to get their teaching degrees, and so the idea of a young college kid or a 40 year old bum with a career that is going nowhere fast coming over here without a degree and trying to worm their way past Immigration really, really pisses them off. And when they get pissy, we get pissy. It just takes a few bad examples of teachers getting caught without degrees to put us all in a bad light.

Ok, finished with my rant. Just WAIT until you graduate--it won't kill you. I started planning my trip to come here to teach during my sophomore year of college. Yes, I was extremely excited and just wanted to come here, but realize that you need to do it the right way.

-ginger

[ahjuhshi]

I was looking into going to korea to stay with a frnd of mine, I am half korean/american 20 years old, However my mother is still a Korean citizen and never renounced her citizenship etc. In all the other forums ive read it always seems that I am out of luck, other than some guy who said Just become a korean citizen wich im not realy going to do seeing as I would have to join the Rok army. Does anyone know a solution to this? Or another Visa I can get im not realy looking for an E2 either. Why is it that you have to have renounced citizenship to get an F4 Visa, I figure with all the national pride etc that Koreans have ppl who gave up citizenship would have a harder time getting one, this whole thing is a little confuseing to me.

[ginger]

I was looking into going to korea to stay with a frnd of mine, I am half korean/american 20 years old, However my mother is still a Korean citizen and never renounced her citizenship etc. In all the other forums ive read it always seems that I am out of luck, other than some guy who said Just become a korean citizen wich im not realy going to do seeing as I would have to join the Rok army. Does anyone know a solution to this? Or another Visa I can get im not realy looking for an E2 either. Why is it that you have to have renounced citizenship to get an F4 Visa, I figure with all the national pride etc that Koreans have ppl who gave up citizenship would have a harder time getting one, this whole thing is a little confuseing to me.

Korea doesn't *really* allow dual citizenship. Like, I had it for years without knowing it (was born there), but everyone just figured it was renounced automatically when I became a US citizen. It totally wasn't and when I first came to Korea and was in the immi office to get my visa, they told me I had to go upstairs and renounce my citizenship immediately. So technically, you can HAVE dual citizenship but once you come back to Korea, you'll either have to renounce it or fully embrace it. I renounced it and now I have an F-4 visa, which is as close as you can come to being a Korean national without actually being one.

-ginger

[Yubumsuk]

You cannot teach legally at any sort of institution without a uni degree - it's that simple. If you have a Korean passport or F-visa you can do private tutoring, however. If you enter Korea on a foreign passport with a tourist stamp even that is illegal.

[Yubumsuk]

DIzzam! I would kill for a high school gig in Seoul, but they're so freaking hard to find! I spent months and couldn't find anything because they don't hire through a group recruiter, like SMOE, GEPIK, or EPIK. By the way, GEPIK is the govt organization in charge of hiring for Gyeonggi-do, while EPIK is for the rest of Korea, and SMOE is strictly for Seoul.

That's so crazy, though. Didn't the last president want the number of foreign English teachers drastically reduced by 2010? These programs are costing Korea so much money, and SO MUCH could be fixed if they just changed the way they teach. Rote memorization is NOT the way to teach a language--the kids can spout off some silly dialogue but they don't know what it means or how to apply it to every day situations.

EDIT: Guys, I feel like I just have to reiterate this because the Korean ESL board I frequent has been bombarded lately with posts of "I want to come teach here (for the summer) and I don't have a degree! How do I do this?" To you, it may seem like it's not a big deal. But native English teachers here have a TERRIBLE reputation and one of the reasons is because people WITHOUT degrees keep trying to come in and teach. It's illegal and most Koreans find it extremely rude and lowly. So all of us who HAVE degrees are subject to much suspicion by the government and the school board. One guy was saying how his school was so suspicious they had him submit his diploma FOUR TIMES for checking. Our reputation as a whole is low because so many Koreans think, "these Americans/British/etc come over to our country to take our money and they don't even have qualifications. They're using us." Korean teachers have to work really hard to get their teaching degrees, and so the idea of a young college kid or a 40 year old bum with a career that is going nowhere fast coming over here without a degree and trying to worm their way past Immigration really, really pisses them off. And when they get pissy, we get pissy. It just takes a few bad examples of teachers getting caught without degrees to put us all in a bad light.

Ok, finished with my rant. Just WAIT until you graduate--it won't kill you. I started planning my trip to come here to teach during my sophomore year of college. Yes, I was extremely excited and just wanted to come here, but realize that you need to do it the right way.

-ginger

That's very, very true, with one exception: for Koreans at the primary school level it's very hard to get into a university of education in order to get a degree in education; for the secondary school level, while it's difficult to get a tenured career, it's quite easy to graduate with a degree in education. In the case of an English education degree, it's possible to graduate being hardly able to communicate in English.

Another problem is that many foreign teachers who do meet the minimum qualifications for an E2 - a degree in any field - do absolutely nothing to further their professional development. There are plenty of EFL teachers over here who have never read a book about TEFL, never picked up a journal about TEFL, never attended a conference about TEFL, and have never even learned the basics about English grammar. I recently had a discussion with a group of 'camp' teachers at a pub, none of whom knew the difference between the progressive and perfect tenses. In an educational system that relies upon explicit learning how are they going to fit in when they have no cognative awareness of the English language themselves? Many teachers' 'research' into their field has not extended beyond visiting bogglesworld to look for time-saving handouts. And some of the worst in this regard are the 'qualified' teachers from the west who think that because they were a social studies or biology teacher in America, they have all the background they need to teach EFL in a Korean school.

[jurassic5]

with the won going back to about 1,000 won to the dollar...i hope the americans in Korea have sent most of their money back to the states so they can get the better exchange rate.

when i was there in '04, it was like 1,200 to the dollar...i got screwed on my exchange rate.


anyways, i guess if you live in small cities like geumchon, you end up making hip-hop videos about the life there. pretty amusing vid.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjBfy_HVoSM

[FRUITYCHEESECAKE]

Hi, guys.
I am going back to school (yes, going back to school...who would've thought I would actually go back T___T) to get a teaching certification in Secondary mathematics. I am planning to teach after I graduate in the States for a couple of years but if I decide to go to Korea to teach English or Math, do you think having a teaching certification (although it isn't in English) would somewhat help me to get a job in a school ( I don't like the idea of teaching at hakwons for some reason)???

My friend in Korea told me that I could get a job as a math teacher at a foreign school in Korea but I really doubt that they would hire some newbie math teacher there? I've looked into some foreign schools in Korea and they required at least 10+ years of experiences...which I won't have. =/

I already have two degrees...just not in teaching. I hope that would help me, too....T___T

Any opinions would be appreciated. Thank you!

[Yubumsuk]

Hi, guys.
I am going back to school (yes, going back to school...who would've thought I would actually go back T___T) to get a teaching certification in Secondary mathematics. I am planning to teach after I graduate in the States for a couple of years but if I decide to go to Korea to teach English or Math, do you think having a teaching certification (although it isn't in English) would somewhat help me to get a job in a school ( I don't like the idea of teaching at hakwons for some reason)???

My friend in Korea told me that I could get a job as a math teacher at a foreign school in Korea but I really doubt that they would hire some newbie math teacher there? I've looked into some foreign schools in Korea and they required at least 10+ years of experiences...which I won't have. =/

I already have two degrees...just not in teaching. I hope that would help me, too....T___T

Any opinions would be appreciated. Thank you!

Some internaitonal schools would hire a newbie teacher with a teaching certificate in secondary school math. If you're single you may even be more attractive a candidate than an older teacher who requires a higher salary and has dependents the school also has to sponsor. For all other jobs in Korea your certificate would be pretty worthless. You say you have two degrees - is the second one a master's? If so, that could bump your salary up slightly at some teaching jobs.