I followed this link from Dave's ESL Cafe (Jason was looking for native speakers from Ireland one point, Jason, if you see this and want a clear Irish voice, please do get in touch) and as I live and work in rural Ireland, I tend to work via the Internet.
For the past few years I have worked mainly with text (translation, proofreading, editing and some rewriting), but before that I was a full-time EFL teacher living in the Netherlands. While I did do some teaching in the state schools there, I found the 'professional' market to be far more lucrative, and ended up working for various language training institutes that dealt with language needs of professionals in medicine, petroleum, the police service, logistics, factory production, academics, teachers, etc. Most of my classes were one-to-one, which was very useful in that we could pretty much focus on whatever was required by that client - report-writing, making presentations or speeches, dealing with customers on the telephone, whatever.
When I'm in Dave's ESL Cafe, I find that adult visitors to the chat room tend to engage me in a private chat to ask about particular issues with the English language, and my experience in dealing with this has equipped me to those particular issues. It helps a lot that I have learned other languages (Dutch, German, French and Irish), and so am aware of the types of challenges they face.
I've had students of all levels, from complete beginners to people who would pass the Cambridge Proficiency with flying colours. Complete beginners are the most challenging for any teacher - how do you communicate with someone when you absolutely cannot speak their language? I'm very lucky in this respect, as I am also a professional visual artist, and can draw pictures to present a situation to a student, get them on the same wavelength, elicit what language they may have, and teach them the new language. However, I'm not sure how this will work online, so if anyone has any suggestions, I'd be very happy to hear them.
As an aside, teaching teenagers can be the best craic (Irish for fun) ever. I have had groups of French kids, football and hiphop mad the whole lot of them, and one of the things that went down very well was drama and improvisations in the classroom. I also used games - that level of competition made things very exciting indeed. Because the particular emphasis of their lessons was their visit to Ireland, I had to devise some activities that involved looking for information, and even find local folkloric stories that could be adapted in some way for the classroom. But one thing I am very proud of it the way I could get them to learn a very famous Irish song in just one morning - The Bog Down In The Valley-oh'. As there is so much repetition in it, and all you need do to trigger the new words is draw a simple picture, it's one of the easiest songs to teach. Mind you, with the jaunty rhythm, some of the kids did get a little carried away ... but in general, they enjoyed singing it very much.
I'm on Skype, if there are any interested students out there ......
