Korean Job Discussion Forums

Good Will Riker · Joined: 25 Dec 2009 Location: South Korea

For those who can help:

I am a California native who is married and has been teaching in hagwons for a few years now, and now am strongly considering taking Business English courses on-line to become qualified to teach Business English to adult students here in Korea.

After doing some careful research, some of these Business English on-line courses require you to be TEFL-certified first, but are there Business English on-line courses that a teacher can take without the need for this pre-requisite:(100-hours TEFL + 50-hours Business English certification course = Certified Business English instructor)?

My contract at my current hagwon ends in 6-months, and teaching Business English full-time is what I am pursuing next. However, being married and presently teaching 34-hours of classes per week leaves me about 1 hour to study Business English each weeknight, so a combined 100-hours TEFL + 50-hours Business English certification course (Example ----> "TITC Business English course") is out of the question for me. I would just like to learn and become qualified to teach Business English without the need for a 100-hour TEFL pre-requisite.

Finally, can a regular student-Business English course (Example - "Linguaedge 6-month on-line Business English course") help prepare you to teach Business English just like a Business English teacher certification course, or are the two considered to be different when preparing (training) you to be able to teach Business English to adult students?

There are Korean companies that do not require you to have any training or experience to teach Business English to adult students (i.e. Just Google and printout Business English related materials and articles from websites on-line, etc. like this -----> "Business English e-book"), but I myself am looking into receiving on-line training or teacher certification to be able to teach Business English properly.

Finally, are there any good textbooks available on-line that can help you to teach Business English to a group of adult students?

Any advice would be helpful. Smile

ttompatz · Joined: 05 Sep 2005 Location: Kwangju, South Korea

Certification to teach the subject would mean that you have at least a base for understanding the subject AND as a teacher (which explains the need for TESL as a pre-req for some of them).

Having said that - AND having a good base in business (practical and post grad studies) I would honestly suggest that instead you might want to focus your time and attention on getting familiar with the subject matter.

Economics, marketing (not sales), sales, management (operational and strategic), and HRM (human resource management / organizational behavior) are all possible topics where you may need to familiarize your self with the language usage within the topics.

Read your face off and you should be fine teaching the language and usage of the language in the subject matter.

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Good Will Riker · Joined: 25 Dec 2009 Location: South Korea

misher · Joined: 14 Oct 2008

I currently teach business English and I'm with Ttompatz 100%.

Grab the material online and start familiarizing yourself with it. You don't need a certificate.

After you get some business English teaching experience under your belt that is all what employers will require. If you are on an F series visa the money can be decent 45/50 an hour.

ttompatz · Joined: 05 Sep 2005 Location: Kwangju, South Korea

Good Will Riker · Joined: 25 Dec 2009 Location: South Korea

raptorsfan · Joined: 16 Jul 2009

KoreanAmbition · Joined: 03 Feb 2008

OP,

Teaching business isn't too difficult as far as just getting the job done. However, your ability to build strong content will be limited.

There is a 2-week course in the UK that is like a CELTA-for-Business type of thing. I's expensive (maybe $2500, can't remember exactly), and you have to go there, but I would say that 2 weeks will set you up for life as far as how to design really good lessons.

At the end of the day though, it's all about the context.... this, in my opinion, is where a lot of business-English teachers would fall short (however, they wouldn't know it).

You can do okay with business-conversation classes.

However, most likely (not to be mean), for business presentations you won't know how to teach them properly. To make matters worse, there are almost no books out there that show it properly either. I'd say most presentation teachers aren't doing much more than just teaching the lesson of a regular "presentation-vocabulary in English". Fortunately, almost no one that you deal with will ever know the difference, so you're safe on that one.

I would say you'll have your hardest time with business writing, because although you can probably edit everything, you really won't know what the structure and content is supposed to truly look like. You'll produce things that Koreans think is great (because they only see the English) but in fact you haven't effectively dealt with the true business side of things.

Have you considered some online business courses? I'm similar to Ttompatz as far as background, and they just assume I know what I'm doing. If you have actual university courses, and recently completed ones, I would wager to say you could sell that better than some TEFL/TESL thing. The correspondence courses aren't gonna be cheap mind you, but you can do it on your own time.

Good luck...