Teaching English in Seoul, Korea has been a very interesting experience to say the least.  I came here with no formal teaching experience.  I have a degree in Information Technology and spent my first two years after college as an IT consultant and the last 7 as a full time real estate investor and broker riding the wave.

I am extremely outgoing and had done my fair share of real estate training and tutoring over the years.  Still, I was a bit apprehensive about jumping right in to teaching.

I feel very fortunate to be teaching conversation classes to adults.  These students are here because they want to learn English.  Jobs in Korea are very competitive.  There are over 12,000,000 people living in Seoul along which is much larger then New York City.  Many of the best jobs are at companies such as Samsung and LG that require a certain level of English proficiency even if the job you are hired for doesn’t require them to speak English.  There are also numerous trading and import export companies which almost certainly require a proficiency in English.  I have a great mixture of students.  I have university students, young professionals, not so young professionals, and housewives practicing English so that they can help their children or travel abroad with their husbands. 

My first month, I was given higher level classes.  I taught only the top two levels at my Hagwon (Private English School).  At the high levels many students have studied in an English speaking country and are very capable of keeping up a conversation.  What I find is that overall they are able to understand me, although sometimes I have a bad habit of talking too quickly.  I tell my students even some of my American friends tell me I talk to fast sometimes.

Korean students start taking English at an early age.  A majority of students start learning English during early middle school.  Some students I’ve met started learning as early as 5 years old.  Nowadays, most students are starting to learn in elementary school as I know many other English teachers who are teaching 6 year olds basic English. 

The classes can be challenging for me in ways I didn’t think about before I started teaching English.  I didn’t realize how much of our conversation happens without really thinking about it.  I get a lot of questions like when would you say something is “under” and when would you say something is “below.”  I’m still not sure if there is a rule somewhere but all I could do is go through examples in my head and give them most of the common expressions I could think of for each of the examples. 

There have been far too many of these types of situations to chronicle here but it has turned out to be one of the more interesting and challenging parts of my job.

Re-learning grammar has been a bit interesting as well.  It can be embarrassing if a student in your class has a better knowledge of English grammar than you, however I remind myself that it is a conversation class and that these students have had grammar drilled into their head for 15 years more so than conversation.

One of the biggest problems I’ve had voiced by my students is that the middle and high school English lessons focused so much on grammar and memorization and not on conversation.  There are times I have been very impressed by a lower level student’s vocabulary, however they cannot put things together into a coherent sentence at the lower level.