3. Niche

The second thing is to find your niche. In a saturated market, it’s essential to try and focus on a specific way of English teaching. Although this seems daunting and may look unbeneficial as you are limiting your English student base, it actually has the opposite effect in the long run.

Here are  a few reasons why:

• Niche English teaching enables you to do cost-effective and targeted advertising and marketing.

• It helps English students who are interested in your specific services find you. For eg. If a student is searching online for a tutor to help them pass IELTS, they will see 100’s of English teachers and it will probably be overwhelming. Imagine they see in your ad headline that you are a specialist IELTS teacher, then it’s more likely that you are going to get contacted. They are looking for a specific service and you are offering that service, it will instil confidence in them that you can help them achieve their goal – passing IELTS.

• The majority of English language schools and academies cater to beginners and intermediate English learners. Once a student gets proficient in English they will more than likely seek out a personal 1:1 English tutor. This is where freelancers can compete with companies. A lot of companies charge English students twice as much as they pay the teachers who work for them. Logically, this means that there are a lot of English students who are willing to pay more than you receive at the moment. You can cut out the middle man and charge more.

Focus On A Speciality

I started out teaching general English in language schools and online but quickly realised that most of my online English students wanted to focus on English pronunciation more than anything else. I think this also had something to do with my philosophy that pronunciation is probably the most important aspect of learning English. I see it as a foundation that other things should be built on.

Just think, when did you learn to speak? After speaking for a few years we then go to school and start to focus on written words. What a shock when we realised that words that we spoke every day were spelt differently to how they are pronounced. Some argue that this is fine for a native English speaker who is immersed in the language but non-native speakers need grammar and vocabulary first and put more focus on these. English Language schools have been doing this outdated way of teaching English  for years.

Harmer (2001, The Practice of English Language Teaching. London) expressed that the first thing that native speakers notice during a conversation is pronunciation. He went on to say that, Grammar and vocabulary are important elements of language, but they can be useless if the speakers cannot pronounce those elements or words accurately. Native English speakers can understand people, despite their grammatical errors, if they use accurate pronunciation. Communicative efficiency can be guaranteed by correct pronunciation.

English Pronunciation

Whilst teaching in English language schools, I was often frustrated when we were following books that spent most of the lesson on grammar and about 5 mins at the end touching on English pronunciation. I found that the majority of times I didn’t understand a student wasn’t because of bad grammar but bad pronunciation. I even had higher-level students who probably knew English grammar better than I did and possessed a wide range of vocabulary, but they struggled to communicate with native English speakers on a day to day basis.

This began my journey to learn as much as possible about English pronunciation. What makes English different from other languages? Why do certain speakers struggle with certain English syllables or consonant clusters? Why do most Spanish not differentiate between B and V? Why do Polish speakers struggle with V and W? Is word stress important?

It was an interesting journey and I slowly built up a wealth of knowledge and resources to help non-English students master English pronunciation in as simple a way as possible. In future articles, I will focus on specific language learners and common problems and difficulties they face.

What’s Your Niche?

Just because this is my forte and niche doesn’t mean it has to be yours. Whether it be English grammar, business English, exam preparation or just general conversation, it’s important to think about where your strengths lie and start to focus on a more channelled aspect of English teaching. This way all your effort towards improvement, advertising and reaching potential students can be more channelled and will ultimately have more success.

Keeping up to date with trends and new policies can be an effective way to choose or change your direction. For eg. The recent Brexit has made a lot of foreigners in the UK worried about their position. New laws have come in requiring people to have certain levels of English who wish to live, work or study in the UK.  Students need to do a SELT to receive a UK student visa. Now might be a good time to focus on IELTS preparation.

English Learners Are On The Increase

There are plenty of English learners and they will start looking for online English teachers now if they haven’t already. Now is a great time to get more students and increase your online English business.

– All or nearly all (99-100 %) primary school pupils in Cyprus, Malta, Austria and Spain learnt English as a foreign language in 2017.

– In 2017, 95 % of pupils in upper secondary education in the EU were learning English as a foreign language.

Contact me if you want help starting a successful online English teaching business or even if you would like to improve your current one.