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My day had involved getting a bunch of four-year-olds to learn what noise a horse makes in English, teaching a couple of housewives important travel phrases like asking where the bathroom was, and drilling a spiky-haired university student on the vocabulary he needed to pass the TOEIC test and get a chance to study in New Zealand. The image forming in my head now of spending all day with men in suits, discussing suitable phrases to use in contract negotiations and sales figure presentations, didn’t really sound like it’d suit my carefree live-to-travel philosophy. But we really did want to spend some time in Europe, so we folded up our futons and took our first Business English instructor positions in Bratislava, Slovakia.

After a year there we moved to southern Germany, and in both positions I found that teaching Business English was far more interesting than it had at first sounded. It didn’t take me long to realize that students who are facing a tedious day in meeting after meeting, or who’ve been flat out at their desks for eight hours, don’t want to spend their entire ninety-minute English lesson talking business, anyway. They’re happy to be able to improve the language skills they need in all kinds of different contexts.

On the other hand, some students have pretty much perfected their Business English through daily use but can’t say anything else—one student could explain the ins and outs of a legal contract until the cows came home, but stumbled when we went to the office kitchen to make a coffee and she couldn’t name either the kettle or the teaspoon.

I know it as fact now, Business English doesn’t have to be boring. Take my recent class on language used in negotiations, for example. It could be pretty dry, but I quickly found ways to avoid merely doing exercise after exercise from a textbook. With an automotive parts sales manager as my partner, we found ourselves on one side of a role play as medieval peasants, fighting over how many kilograms of beans we would give in exchange for our neighbors’ prize-winning cow. “A lot” was the result here, thanks to my big mouth and poor negotiating skills. The other team used all the English phrases we’d studied, along with their already honed business skills, to leave me and my unfortunate partner out of food for the winter.

In other lessons, conversation or debate topics give my students a chance to practice new vocabulary or grammar. Just ask any of my German students to discuss practically anything to do with cars and fast driving, or my Slovak students to debate the pros and cons of Western investment in their country, and the English will spout forth for hours.

This also means that the teacher becomes a student. Becoming a bit more expert in some aspects of business has been a surprise bonus. In recent lessons, I’ve learned that my fleecy sweater was made out of recycled PET bottles, and that the mobile telephone I’d bought several countries away contained a tiny plastic component made by one of the very companies where I now teach. The figures on ice cream eating frequencies of Europeans over winter, broken down by country, was another information coup—the shivering Scandinavians ate a surprisingly high amount—and since I heard these I’ve been pigging out on my favorite choc-coated ice cream trying to skew the statistics.

Of course it’s not all fun, games and beans versus cows arguments. Listening over and over as my student perfected his presentation on sales figures for X and Y type pistons, I understood how my poor mother must have felt when I practiced my school speeches on her endlessly. Another frustration is the too-busy student who will cancel the lesson just as you arrive at their office, after your hour-long bus ride and trample through the snow. And I wouldn’t mind a paperwork fairy to take over all the forms I have to fill out to get paid each month.

Finding teaching positions in Eastern Europe is still reasonably easy for native English speakers of all nationalities, though nearly all these positions require a TEFL qualification or some previous experience. Move into Western Europe and the situation gets more complicated.

If you’re British or Irish or through some other way have a European Union passport, if you’re TEFL qualified and experienced and if you’re reasonably capable in the language of the country you want to teach in, then it’s usually possible to get work—take away any of these factors and the difficulty really multiplies. Plenty of employers specify that teachers without EU passports need not apply. Persistence and determination certainly help, and in our case a handy dose of luck helped us land jobs in Germany.

What did the trick for us was finding a small town where teachers were hard to come by—schools were more than happy to sponsor us for visas. Working-holiday visas, which allow citizens of Australia, New Zealand, Canada or France under 30 to work abroad for one year, is another solution to the visa problem. Because most people don’t know about this visa, it’s still very easy to obtain. A letter of intent and proof that you have $2,000 USD in the bank should do the job.

And it’s turned out that teaching Business English gives me just as much pleasure as the variety of teaching in Japan. This Friday when I reached the seminar room, Kurt had arrived early. “Good morning,” he said, and approached me excitedly. I remembered he’d been absent last week on another trip to South Africa. “Amanda, Amanda,” he began, “I ate chicken!”

Amanda Kendle is an Australian addicted to traveling. She has lived and worked in Asia and Europe, and spends her free time writing about past trips and planning future ones. Finances for these come from her job as a teacher of English to speakers of other languages, in which she worries that she learns more from her students than they do from her. See more at www.amandakendle.com and follow her travel writing life at notaballerina.blogspot.com

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