Teaching English in France

joolsveer

I am interested in teaching English to adults and children in the south of France - what was Languedoc-Roussillon but is now Occitanie. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occitanie_(r%C3%A9gion_administrative)

I need to do a TEFL course. I am a native of Dublin and am now retired. I tried the grammar test on http://www.ihdublin.com/celta-university-cambridge-tefl-course and it marked me down on a number of questions which I thought I had the right answer. Could this be down to differences between Hiberno-English and Cambridge English?

The reason I mention the region of France is because the French spoken there can be quite different from the French taught by the Alliance Francaise. The locals say pang for pain, demang for demain etc. There is no difference between vingt and vin in their pronunciation. It has taken me years to understand the local accents. The local plumber tells me to speak to his wife as he doesn't think he speaks proper French. The people of the department do not speak English generally but would like to.Their second language tends to be Spanish or Catalan due to the influx of refugees from the Spanish Civil War.

Eddy_Phelan

That's odd, sounds like a really peculiar regional phenomenon as opposed to a difference between Hiberno-English and Cambridge English (but that's just my immediate assumption). I've been looking into teaching English as a foreign language for some time now and have found these TEFL courses https://www.theteflacademy.com/course-option from the TEFL Academy. Did you come across them when you were looking around? If so, have you heard whether they're any good - they seem to have really good reviews?

pickarooney

Catalan as a second language? I've literally never met a Catalan speaker in 15 years in Provence.

Accent variation is very small in continental France compared to the UK. Vin/vingt are homophones everywhere.

To be honest you're unlikely to make much of a living as a TEFL teacher here. There's just a general apathy towards learning English to any degree beyond passing the Bac and there's no shortage of English-speaking natives living in the region.

looksee

Hm, it marked me down as well, and I really cannot agree with them on all the corrections, the ones I got 'wrong' all had shades of Americanisation about them.

joolsveer

My village is about 360km west of Marseille, about a four-hour drive. The local language is Occitan in Languedoc. Most of the people speak French as well. In Rousillon the local language is Catalan. Roussillon is known as Catalogne Nord.

Catalan, in its Northern Catalan variety, is recognised as a regional language only by the region of Languedoc-Roussillon; it then benefits from cultural support in education and in public medias, with some more regional power since the laws of regionalisation of France during the 1980s. It is estimated to be spoken by a third of the population,[1] but understood by another fifth.

Though it was still an everyday language for most of the rural population of southern France well into the 20th century, it's now spoken by about 100,000 persons in France according to 2012 estimates.
According to the 1999 census, there were 610,000 native speakers (almost all of whom are also native French speakers) and perhaps another million persons with some exposure to the language. Following the pattern of language shift, most of this remainder is to be found among the eldest populations. Occitan activists (called Occitanists) have attempted, in particular with the advent of Occitan-language preschools (the Calandretas), to reintroduce the language to the young.

joolsveer

Because I am retired I am willing to work as a volunteer in the local schools as a teaching assistant. My department is one of the poorest in France and I don't intend to fleece my neighbours. I have spoken to the village people and they are receptive to the idea.