Have you ever wondered if you could make some extra money by teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) to children online? I’ve been teaching children, mainly in China, for around five years now. I’ve worked for three companies, and I’ve been interviewed by more, so I’ve gained a lot of insight into the variety of companies and types of classes that are out there, as well as the variety of qualifications required for doing so.
Instead of naming companies and risking any hard feelings or possibility of defamation, I think I would prefer to describe my experiences and share what I know, but I’ll refer you to Indeed.com or Glassdoor.com for reviews of specific companies. I guess I am partial to these two sites as far as looking for jobs and reading reviews of past employees’ experiences, although I realize that all reviews must be taken with a grain of salt. I would also advise searching the internet for each company’s website and scouring YouTube for any training videos that current teachers with those companies may have put out. There are quite a few, in fact.
Let’s Start with the Fun Part
When I worked for my first online teaching company, we had lessons set on slides that we would go through for each student on a one-on-one basis. We would enter the class a few minutes early and leave our cameras off until class time. During this time, we could see the students, but the students couldn’t see us. I would usually draw pictures on the screen until class time, and students would often join and add to my drawings. It was a sort of silent communication through pictures, and I think it helped build rapport.
I had one little boy, I’ll call him Peter, who always added to my drawings. If I drew a cat, he drew a fish for the cat to eat, if I drew a dog, he drew a bone, and if I drew a bunny, he drew a carrot for the bunny. Once we had exchanged drawings, I would open the screen to show my face, say “hello,” ask them how they were, and guide them through the preprepared slides.
One time, there was a technical error, and the lesson wouldn’t show up, but we could still see each other, so we just practiced conversation, and I asked if he could show me anything in his room. He had this huge collection of superhero characters that he introduced me to, and I loved the fact that he spoke so enthusiastically when showing them to me.
But the first time I opened the lesson and saw a little 5-year-old girl I’ll call LingLing, she was grimacing with her hair flying all over her head as her mother tried to tame the tangles with brush and comb. For those first couple of lessons, she would have that same angry look on her face and would scribble over my drawings with what seemed to be contempt, but I kept greeting her with funny cartoon animals and a big smile, until one day I opened the class, and her hair was smooth, and she was smiling at me, and things got better and better from there. She also stopped scribbling on my drawings and started drawing along beside them. But as she got older, she became more distracted and started walking around her room during our lessons, so I would gently call her, “Come back LingLing, come baaack.” Eventually, she would come back, and we’d have a nice lesson. I learned that coaxing worked better than telling with the younger ones.
And then there was the little girl who would point at my water bottle (I needed it to combat a dry throat), and she would roll back on the couch laughing hysterically. It took me a while to realize that she didn’t think water itself was funny, just the size of the bottle. I got self-conscious about it and started using a smaller water bottle, but I must say I enjoyed her sense of humor and watching her collapse on the couch with laughter. She also had a grumpy-looking baby brother or sister who sat in a bassinet, and sometimes she would turn the camera toward the baby’s pooched-out cheeks and little scrunched-up face and say, “See the baby!”
I also had a few older students, and we had some great conversations comparing their large cities in China with my town in America. When we exchanged answers on questions like, “How many hospitals are in your city?” there would be so many in a city like Shanghai that the students couldn’t count them, but when it came to my answer, they were flabbergasted when I told them we only have one hospital (I’m a bit flabbergasted about our lack of hospitals myself, to tell you the truth).
I got to learn about their transportation, restaurants, population, etc., not only through conversation, but sometimes firsthand when a student would take his or her iPad out on the street during a lesson, and I would get to look up at the apartment buildings and shop fronts. Sometimes parents would be driving their children around during a lesson, and I’d get a great tour of the area. I was surprised to open my computer screen one day and see a girl with her hair flying back and her head bouncing up and down because she had logged in from her iPad, which was strapped to her mother’s back, as they rode to school on a Scooter.
I remember spending time in the park and on the subway, and I even accompanied some of them while they were eating in restaurants. And I really enjoyed hearing them tell me about the different foods they would eat. In fact, I gained about 10 pounds during that first year because I kept buying packaged versions of the foods they had spoken of, from hot and sour soup to mochi balls. Mochi is Japanese, but one child told me about them, and I just had to go buy a pack at Walmart and savor those yummy balls of ice cream encased in sweet dough.
Unfortunately, at a certain point in 2022, China chose to limit what companies could teach their children from outside of the country, and thousands of teachers/tutors from across the US and in other countries lost their jobs. This left a lot of us looking for other types of online teaching jobs, so there was a lot of competition out there. I applied to several companies and often didn’t realize that they weren’t the type of job I was looking for until I went through a virtual interview and learned the terms of each job. I am fairly satisfied with the company I’m working for now, but I continue to explore others as they pop up daily on Indeed.com, so I thought I would outline some differences to look at.
Curriculum
The first company I taught for had lessons with various exercises in speaking and completing sentences, matching words to pictures, and the like. They were pretty much timed to the minute and required no preparation time at all, which made it easy to set up back-to-back classes.
With my current company, some of their lessons are a bit short, so some advance preparation of other material may be necessary, but they also provide you with a host of other lessons that you can access to fill up the time slot.
And then other companies merely provide you with the platform (an online space to hold your course) and you are expected to develop an entire course on your own and find your own materials.
Qualifications for Teaching ESL Online
As far as my own qualifications go, I have a master’s degree in English, and I have college teaching experience, but I don’t have a grade school teaching certification. I also obtained an ESL (English as a Second Language) or TOEFL (Teaching Of English as a Foreign Language) certificate through an online course that costs around $150 and only took a few weeks. The first company I was with offered to finance part of this. And don’t worry, classes for teaching English as a second language don’t have anything to do with the student’s first language. I don’t speak Chinese, but I teach Chinese children.
But the variety of qualifications needed for these jobs is as varied as the companies. Some companies prefer you to have a teaching certification, some just prefer you to have a college education, and some prefer an ESL or TOEFL certificate. There are also a few, maybe one or two, that only require you to have some command of the English language, but those are the kind that may only pay about $7 per hour and even less to people in certain countries.
Other Common Requirements
- Many require background checks.
- Some require a passport even though you won’t actually leave your country to teach. I’ve only had one company ask me for this, though.
- One company insists that you have a computer that is less than three years old.
- Many companies require that you use a particular app to give your computer a speed test to prove that it is sufficient to handle the tasks at hand.
- Most require you to have your computer connected directly to your modem rather than just using Wi-Fi.
- Most require you to have a headset that is hardwired (plugged directly into your computer) because Wi-Fi may cause a sound delay.
- Some want you to submit a short introductory video of yourself or a short 5- to 7-minute video of yourself pretending to teach a class.
- Some want you to have at least two previous years of online teaching experience.
- Oh, and some actually do want you to be able to speak the language of the students that you teach. For instance, there is a job out there that I keep almost applying for until I notice that you need to know Spanish or Portuguese.
Hours Available
Most of my experience is with teaching children in China where there is a 12-hour time difference, so you can either teach at the wee hours of the morning from about 5 to 9 a.m. which would be 5 to 9 p.m. for them, or from 5 to 9 in the evening, which would be from 5 to 9 a.m. for them. But there are also jobs teaching in the U.S. and in other countries, so those times could vary accordingly.
As far as the number of hours you work, some jobs require you to work a certain number of hours, while others say you can work as many or as few as you’d like. Please note that “as many” hours as you want may not always be possible with the competition from other teachers at most companies, depending upon how they arrange their schedules.
It was easy for me to get 20 hours per week with that original company because I would just open up my schedule for certain hours and they would automatically fill those hours with classes. In the company I work with now, it is a little harder to get classes. They offer them randomly throughout the day as they become available, but you need to be ready to respond to their emails quickly to catch those classes before another teacher does. Each company is a little different.
Tax Issues
So far, I have taught through companies centered in the U.S., even though I taught children in China. This might be something you want to consider with regard to communication issues with the company and tax issues. The companies I have worked for so far did not take out money for taxes, but did send me a record of my earnings for the year so that I could calculate my taxes. Be sure to look into your tax responsibilities as a person who is self-employed. You may need to calculate your self-employment taxes quarterly if you make more than a certain amount of money. I was surprised to find out that self-employment taxes were somewhat higher than taxes I’ve paid in other jobs, so if you do need to file, be sure to count every expense you can think of because those costs for computer, internet, pencils, paper, printing ink or whatever else you might use can add up and take quite a bit off your bill. Something that didn’t occur to me at first was deducting the cost of the antivirus software, Microsoft Word, and any other programs or apps I might be paying for in order to facilitate my work. If you have a dedicated room for nothing but business, you might also be able to claim an exemption for a home office. Unfortunately, I don’t think I can get away with it because I teach from my bedroom with one of those desks that rolls over my bed. But, hey! When you’ve got sciatica and restless leg syndrome, being able to teach while sitting on your bed with your legs alternately stretched out, or cross-legged, or kicking and squirming, is priceless.
Contracts and Obligations
In this world of clicking to sign a contract every time you visit any website, most of us never read that five- to ten-page document full of big, long, complicated words in really tiny writing, but it is probably a good idea to read your contracts for jobs very thoroughly.
There is one company that still continues to send me e-mails asking me to teach classes even after more than a year, but I haven’t attempted to. I ended up being accepted for that job and signing a contract with them, but some things in the contract bothered me a little bit, specifically a statement that any payment disputes would be dependent on Singapore law and not USA, and a warning about teaching similar classes for other companies, and something about a $3,000 fine.
The wording was dubious, and I couldn’t figure out if they were trying to keep me from plagiarizing their works, which makes sense, or to keep me from teaching the same topic for any other company, which would be ridiculous because I’ve found that many online teachers work for several different companies in order to get enough hours.
Then I read some reviews of that company on Indeed.com, and teachers were always talking about other teachers “backstabbing” other teachers by telling their students to leave poor reviews on other teachers. The reason for this was that the company gave more classes to teachers with the best reviews. It seemed like this merit system was creating competitive salespeople rather than teachers, and I don’t think I want to be involved. I don’t even know any of the other teachers in my current company or my last two, and I like it just fine that way. My only competition is that of competing against student apathy and doing my best to engage them.
Pay Scale for Teaching ESL Online
Pay scales seem to differ widely. I was paid $20 per hour by my first company, but I only make $15 per hour with my current company, which is a little bit better than the second company I worked for, which only paid about $12 per hour. I’ve come to not expect much more. Before I was doing this, I was teaching adjunct English classes at local colleges and only being paid about $1,200 per semester for each class, which, if you divide up class preparation time and paper grading time, probably equals to less than minimum wage in any state.
If you search for online teaching, you may see one company offering $25-$30 per hour, and you have to ask yourself at what point you might get $30. With many of these companies, the pay bonuses are not so much for merit, but for recruiting other teachers. Personally, I’ve had some troubles in the past with recommending friends for other jobs I’ve had in life, so I’m not all that crazy about the idea.
Some companies advertise as high as $50 or more per hour, and I found many of those are really just providing you with a platform for teaching classes that you design completely on your own and decide on the prices. As I read further on one website for such classes, I found that you only get 70 % of the fee, so if my math is right (it’s not my strongest subject) that would mean that if you charged $50 you would get $35, and if you charged $30 you would get $21, which is okay, but then I found a note that said “In general, we recommend setting a price point of $18-$21 per learner, per hour in class.” Sooo … $18 to $21 would actually be $12.60 to $14.70 per hour after you give them their 30% fee, and you will be putting in a lot more than an hour when it comes to setting up your curriculum and reading papers. But perhaps you will actually get more than one student in a class. You never know.
I will say that it is hard to get full-time hours for most of these jobs, though I’ve seen offers for a few. I was able to get 20 hours per week with my first company, but that was about all of the available time. I am struggling to keep 6 to 10 hours with my current one, but part of that is because I’m partially retired and don’t want to work evenings and weekends. So far, as long as a man with a chainsaw doesn’t take away my social security check, I’m okay with making about $400 extra per month because I get to stay home, and the kids online can be lots of fun. If the man with the chainsaw does come, I’ll be scrambling to get all of the classes I can.