LivEnglish! Live with your English teacher!
We are starting our business this summer and we are already booking homestay students from Hungary and France!
The English learning holiday for teenagers is a brand new concept here in Hungary. Each Anglophone family takes 1-4 students into their English speaking home for 1-3 weeks, and they are immersed into their life 24 hours a day for the entire week.
They speak English throughout the day without going to an English speaking country.
Basically you live with your teacher during school holidays.
The schedule follows all linguistic séjour, or Homestay layouts.
- morning lessons
- afternoon activities
- evening movies, games and homework
Homestay arrival times are normally Sunday afternoon, after 15:00 and departure times are normally Saturday morning between before 11:00.
Hamori family activities include:
- Horseback Riding
- Escape Room
- Lasergame
- Acrobranch
- Balaton Lake day
- Cycling
- Hiking
- Spelunking
- Aquaworld
- Roman Healing Baths
- Bowling
- Mammut mall shopping
- Shopping famous Vaci utca
- Wakeboard
In house activities include
- painting, canvas and watercolour
- cooking
- video games (in English)
- movies (in English with English subtitles)
We are holding an open house February 11th 2017 to introduce the new concept to locals, teachers, host families and students; here in Hungary.
We are inviting our business partners as well as friends and family to come and learn what we do for a living in Hungary!
Welcome to LivEnglish Hungary.
We are so excited to start a business we love, in a country we equally love.
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We are looking for native English speaking families to host students for LivEnglish.
Want to be an ESL teacher for teens?
Truth be told, many people end up teaching as their is a huge demand for native English speakers in most non-Anglophone countries around the world.
It is easy to become accredited online and to find good jobs in language schools or hosting organizations like ours throughout the world.
I find people who are becoming teachers later in life, have life experiences that help them teach.
Also, arriving to a new country as an expat, often job opportunities are much harder to find. Homestay offers an instant income upon arrival.
Personally I feel homestay is the most rewarding job I have ever had.
I work from home, I take children on fun activities with my own kids, and I watch these kids progress in English and it is fun for our whole family!
As a mother of two, it allows me to work from home during the school holidays and I never have to worry about babysitting.
I cannot think of a better job!
But becoming an effective teacher is entirely different.
Most good teachers get good after years of teaching.
Some strengths would be learning how to assess a student’s level quickly, being aware of problems and having lesson plans ready to combat them. Lastly, teachers should know how to effectively execute a lesson plan.
Top Five List, What makes a good ESl teacher?
Here is my list
#1 Talk to students using terminology and trivia they understand
Keeping up with what’s new in the media, visit popular YouTube channels, current music and films. This will place you in a very good position with teens. If they find your class interesting, they are far more likely to be engaged with you than if you are running grammar points on the chalkboard.
There are many good resources of lessons available to us online! Use anything you can find!
Fill in the gap lessons based on popular music is always a winner when all else fails. Find out what they like and work it in to the mix. Current events, elections and controversial topics get them thinking! Change directions, make up games, play with vocabulary and make it challenging.
Students love competing against each other for a prize, even if it is something as silly as an eraser or granola bar! Kids like to feel special, and making them work for it, gets the whole class involved!
#2 Dress nice
I know this seems strange, but teens are so influenced by what they see on TV and movies, and what their peers look and smell like!
Keep hygienic with clean combed hair and tidy clothes; it keeps you connected to the things that matter to them. Teens are uber sensitive to this part of their world, and by going to work in nice clothes makes you feel more confident too, right?
You don’t want to be known as the stinky teacher with bad breath, or the teacher with bad clothes and shoes. You are a professional, act like one!
#3 Dialogues and acting
Being a writer, I enjoy getting the children writing, especially dialogues. After, I ask them to act them out. It feels great to watch them at the beginning of the school year barely able to read and watch them progress reaching some level of fluency within the school year.
We can reach the same levels very quickly with Homestay, focussing on the child’s needs and attacking problems immediately.
#4 Pairing up students in class, tutor and tutee
Pairing up students with high marks with struggling students help advanced students from getting bored in class, and brings the lower level students up far quicker than the traditional methods.
I find to teach a lesson, you need to understand the lesson 100%. Far too often an advance student becomes lazy, because they feel they are far higher than the level they are being taught. But some let their knowledge slip, and fall behind. This method stops this from happening, and takes the pressure off the teacher who is teaching in a multi-level class. Win-win for everyone involved.
#5 We are teaching, not talking down
Try not to preach. If we treat them like equals they will respond much better to guidance.
After all, we are all but students in this life, and I find the pupils often teach me more than I ever teach them. They are so interesting, these young minds with access to so many forms of information. They are so much smarter than when we were kids. I feel my job is to help them find their way, connecting the information they are absorbing and relating it to something concrete in their own lives.
They have so much potential and their own gifts waiting to be shared. It is our job to discover them, encourage them and help them communicate them.
There is nothing worse than a class that hates their teacher.
It can make for a very long year.
Bonus tip
Parents know their children better than anyone. if you have a problem with a child, best source of information are their parents. Parents often help with their homework, and help them study for tests. If you notice a big change in a student, sometimes there is something going on behind the scenes that you don’t know about. Contact the parents and talk about things. Find strategies to help the child progress, perhaps with extra work or finding a good time for the child to study.
I know some teachers frown upon this, but being a parent, an open line of communication between parents and teachers can be very effective!
And that’s it, LivEnglish is open for business!
