Koreans in general largely prefer to resolve disputes between two parties by themselves, and will only turn to the courts as a last resort when all informal means of reconciliation have failed. What this means for foreign teacher¡¯s purposes is that verbal agreements are usually more important to Koreans, and your boss may regard your written contract as not much more than a piece of paper which for some reason crazy Westerners require for employment. So when he or she breaks it or assumes, for instance, that thirty hours a week means they can be at anytime anywhere, it may not be so much a deliberate effort to break your contract to squeeze a little more profit out of you as the fact that he or she hasn¡¯t even read it.

As explained in the Why use People Recruiting? section, we will help you with major and minor breaches of your contract, but how you deal day to day with things, like the boss expecting you to test new students on your lunch break, is up to you. You can take the attitude that you are, after all, in Korea and should do as Koreans do, but this opens you up to exploitation and in fact most institute owners are familiar with working with Westeners and are aware of the importance they attach to contracts. So we personally recommend you to take a firm stand.


Please read more about this in the Culture section. Many many bosses all over the world think that because you work in their institute then they can treat you how they like, but whereas in most countries your contract will prevent you from becoming their slave, Korean¡¯s traditional disregard of contracts (see above) and hierarchical social relationships may well mean that not only is your boss is used to treating his or her Korean staff like slaves, but that they expect it and look forward to when they¡¯re boss and can do the same. Many foreign teachers can find this management style a bit abrasive to say the least, and are astounded at how Koreans tolerate it. If you do have a boss that is unfamiliar with working with foreigners, a culturally sensitive way to deal with it is to air all your problems and concerns, no matter how minor, with him or her privately. Koreans are notorious conflict avoiders, and will usually put up with a LOT for the sake of workplace harmony, so bosses are unused to loud and public confrontations and tend to find your questioning of their authority in front of others VERY insulting. But of course, they may deserve it.


There is no average class size in Korean language institutes, but once you have a specific job arranged we can contact the institute and find out for you. We can say that we have never taught more than 20 students at a time and most classes have much less, although university classes will be much larger.


Almost all Korean language institutes adopt a sink or swim approach and will give you virtually no assistance in your classes on your first day beyond pointing out what page the students are up to in the book that they are using – even the ones where the bosses and other teachers have been falling over themselves helping you to settle into your new accommodation and city. It is very rare for institutes to provide Korean teachers in your class to assist and translate for you even on the first day, and so you will very quickly come to wonder about how exactly Korean parents expect their children to learn English if you nor they understand a single word of the other is saying (see Learning Korean).

At most institutes you can ¡®t choose which books you to use, but will be able to supplement them with your own games and activities and will probably need to in order to make the classes interesting. Alternatively, you may be expected to choose your own books and develop a curriculum entirely from scratch by yourself. Generally, being told exactly what and when to teach is comforting to begin with but once you are more experienced you will probably find any lack of choice frustrating, especially if you don¡¯t like the books provided. There¡¯s nothing worse than being stuck in a tiny room with 15 teenagers sitting at toddler-sized tables at 8pm on a Friday anyway, but doing a book you all hate but must finish make things a lot worse.


Classrooms can of course vary greatly in their size and the standard of the furniture, but Korea is not fully developed and is also very crowded, so they are usually much smaller and dingier than what you¡¯d expect at schools or institutes back home and rarely designed with teaching in mind. Unfortunately, this is because of the huge ESL market, which means that anyone with the money can turn virtually any building they like into an institute. One of us even taught in an old massage parlor. Taught English we mean.


If you teach adults, then the only times they can attend class are before or after university or work, so expect split shifts, with something like 6.30-9.30 in the morning and 6-9 at night being quite common. But the vast majority of jobs available are for teaching children. For these you are most likely to have just one shift starting in the afternoon, say 2-8pm, teaching elementary children to begin with and high school kids by the evening. If you exclusively teach kindergarten children you are more likely to start in the early morning and finish in the early afternoon.

Virtually all institutes have classes lasting for 50 minutes, giving you a ten minute break, and very few institutes have Saturday classes.


Many foreigners spend a great deal on books before they come to Korea, especially ones on grammar, only to find that they never use them once they arrive and can easily buy them in Korea anyway. You will generally not be expected to teach grammar whatsoever and adult students especially will probably have a better knowledge of the rules than you do.

Having said that, buying a basic general grammar reference book like Practical English Usage, by Michael Swan (Oxford University Press, 1995) will be very useful as a reference guide, you are an English teacher after all, and general guides to teaching ESL such as The Practice of English Language Teaching, by Jeremy Harmer (Longman 1991) are very useful also and good to read before you arrive. And activity books such as Five-Minute Activities, by Penny Ur & Andrew Wright (Cambridge University Press, 1992) are great for coming up with ideas for lessons. Beyond these books however, we would recommend waiting until you arrive in Korea and settle in to you new institute before spending any more money on books. And all are available in ESL stores in Korea if you don¡¯t have the room in your bags.

If you will be teaching children, simple small cheap things like Word-Boggle and card-based games such as UTO will be prove very useful, and are generally much more effective teaching aids than the expensive games specifically designed for ESL that are available in Korea. And adults and children alike will love numerous pictures of your home country, and family, and you will be talking about it and them a great deal so a couple of big folding maps of your home country will help as well.