My Tesol Story

My name is Mark, and I've been teaching English overseas for over 24 years. Teaching English has helped me to see much of the world, and meet a great many different people. Far more than I would have if I had stayed at home.

I've wanted to travel since I was very young, and I always had an interest in languages. So teaching English looked like a good choice to me. After leaving university I decided to leave the country. Britain was in a deep recession, and finding jobs was difficult, which would have been a good reason to leave, but my main wish was to see the world. At the time I thought I'd be back within a year.

I travelled across Asia - India then China. I realized then that I enjoyed the freedom of my new life. So when I needed to earn more money, I travelled to Taiwan, which gave me my first experience of teaching English and a good experience in life.

I've taught English in Taiwan (many times), Spain Turkey and Portugal . As well as some very short stints in China Japan and England.

During the past 24 years I've taught most kinds of class, trained teachers written materials including a series of coursebooks for children, taken an MEd TESOL with distinction, and set up and run a small chain of language schools with partners in Northern Taiwan.

Although the schools did, and still do, quite well, I needed a change. I sold my share, went back to university for a year, and then taught English in Portugal. I'm now back in Taiwan where I'm teaching full-time at a university on the top of a mountain, developing this website, and completing other writing projects.

Tesol Zone is doing better and better, and is bringing me an income equivalent to a part-time teaching job. I'm still working on it :) I plan to start another website - unrelated to TEFL - later this year. If you are interested, this is a link to the program I used to build this website, and understand online business: SBI (links out of this site).

I regularly update this website. If you would like to know when new articles are posted, subscribe to the RSS feed under the nav bar. If you've never used an RSS feed before, I highly recommend it as a way of keeping up to date on all the new posts from all of the websites you like - all in one place.

If you haven't already, remember to sign up to Tesol Post, our monthly ezine.

Tesol Zone has a facebook page where you can discuss or comment on any of the articles posted here, or discuss any TESOL related topics. This website will, I hope, grow and develop into a site where English teachers can find information on any aspect of teaching English overseas and also gain some new ideas on teaching.

If you have a question about any aspect of teaching, feel free to ask it at TESOL Answers. If you have any other comment or question, please use my contact form. Thanks for reading!

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