Ecuador is sometimes overlooked as a TEFL destination compared to better-known Argentina and Chile. However, although earning potential is not as high as in the more prosperous southern countries, it is a good place to live,travel, and live. I spent the first stage of my ongoing career teaching English in Ecuador, I’ve come up with some top tips for those of you considering this fascinating, beautiful and action-packed country as your new teaching destination.

Before you leave

Do your research about teaching English in Ecuador

There are some questions for you to consider below:

How are you going to find work teaching English in Ecuador? Will you ensure you have a job offer, signed contract and work visa before you arrive, or will you come on a tourist visa and then look around?

Where within Ecuador would you like to live and teach? Aside from what teaching opportunities there are, think about the climate, the location, the safety reputation, what there is to see and do, and whether you’d prefer a big city, somewhere touristy or somewhere more off the beaten track. Check out potential destinations on Wikitravel. Most opportunities will be in Quito, Guayaquil and Cuenca, but opportunities within smaller communities do exist. If you’re hoping to teach private students online as a freelancer, is the place where you want to be set up well for working from home – what’s the internet connection like? Are there places where you could get computer equipment fixed should you need to?

How easy will it be to find somewhere to live? Does the employer provide accommodation, will they assist you in finding your place, or will you be on your own from the start? What do the other teachers at your new workplace do? If there’s a way you can find this out in advance (by asking the Director of Studies or Academic Manager, for example), I’d recommend doing so.

Pack light.

It’s easy to overpack, but try to resist! You can get much of what you’ll need once you’ve arrived and settled in somewhere. Note, however, that electronics are generally expensive to buy in Ecuador because they are nearly always imported (I remember it seemed relatively common for my adult students to take trips to Miami partly to buy cheaper electronics), so you might want to bring these with you.

Be aware that Ecuador is a developing country.

Don’t expect things to work in the same way as things do in your home country. Depending on where you’re from, the geography might also be very different to what you’re used to. The city of Quito is the second-highest capital in the world (9,350 ft altitude), so be aware of initial altitude sickness if coming directly from a low-altitude place. Ecuador has several dormant or active volcanoes and frequent earthquake tremors; most of which are very mild. In over a year, I only experienced a couple of these, but more major ones can and do happen. The last major one occurred in 2016 and was devastating. Also, be aware that, like in other South American countries with a Pacific coast, the weather in Ecuador is affected by El Niño events. There is a lot of rainfall, and in severe El Niño episodes, major flooding occurs along the coast.

Teaching English in Ecuador tips

I must preface this section by mentioning that 99% of my students were adults in Ecuador, with the occasional 16- or 17-year-old included in adult classes. Therefore, the tips below were written with my experience with this age group in mind.

Demonstrate your interest.

Your students in Ecuador are highly likely to be interested in you. Give information about yourself and be just as interested in them in return. I can’t overstate how important this is if you want to build a great rapport. See your students as people rather than as receptacles of your teaching. Be genuinely interested in them and their lives. Remember things people say, and make references to these in future lessons. In group classes, encourage an atmosphere of interest between students and provide opportunities for this to develop. Encourage small talk before and after class (and join in)—Personalise class activities so people can talk about themselves and learn about their classmates.

If your students are locals, take advantage.

If your classes are filled with locals of the place where you live and are teaching, use this to your advantage in class – not just because it can benefit your life outside, of course, but also because you can use this situation as a basis for classroom activities. For example, you can make comparisons with your hometown, or you can ask for recommendations about ways of staying safe, what local cuisine you should try, which places are good to visit, what local customs or festivals there are, etc. You can get tip-offs about special events and good but less well-known things to do or see. There are so many ways you can work with giving recommendations and advice in class – so many that this could be a blog post. I asked for guidance when I first started; it worked very well as an icebreaker.

Make the most of any variations between where your students are from.

Your classes are likely to be monocultural and monolingual; however, this doesn’t necessarily mean there won’t be any variations. There are pretty distinctive regions within Ecuador. If you have students from different areas, this can be valuable in the activities you can do in class, for example, discussions about differences in culture, cuisine and lifestyle. For example, when I was teaching English in Ecuador, in the port city of Guayaquil, most students were from the same city or surrounding area. Still, I also had students originally from other regions such as the Galápagos Islands, the Andean highlands and villages, the city of Quito, the Peruvian border and the coastal ‘Banana Centre of the World’, Machala… I also had the occasional student from other Latin American countries such as Cuba, Venezuela and Chile.

Always aim to give students a bit more in terms of language.

Take advantage of opportunities within classes to introduce more natural language, which an expert speaker would use, instead of strictly teaching only what appears in a coursebook. By this, I don’t mean you should be overwhelmingly bombarding students. Instead, consider bringing in a bit here and a bit there, and whether it’s something you’ve planned to introduce, something you spontaneously identify a need for in class based on something you’ve overheard in pair or group discussions or activity feedback or something you submit as part of delayed error correction, always make sure the language is both relevant and valuable. It’s very much appreciated when you teach more natural phrases, expressions or other pieces of language in class – and facilitate the practice. I’ve found this to be the case in every country I’ve taught; Ecuador was no exception.

Use music in class.

Another top tip for teaching English in Ecuador. I found that students in Ecuador often had a great interest in music, and appreciated its use of it in class. Music is everywhere in Ecuador; salsa, bachata, merengue, pasillo, indie rock, pop, reggaeton… It’s an excellent topic for discussion, for example, as an icebreaker in a new category or to help you teach music- or dance-related vocabulary. Music can be the topic of a reading text or the subject of a debate. You can bring in songs in English to use as a base for listening activities or as a text from which you can draw out examples of vocabulary or a specific grammatical structure.

Use rhythm and beat to teach intonation and pronunciation – sentence stress, for example. You can have music on quietly in the background for some activities. Regarding singing, however, I would only do this with adult/ teen groups if a group specifically asked me to do it; otherwise, I’d avoid it.

Don’t take yourself too seriously.

I don’t mean you should be acting like a clown or trying too hard to be funny, nor am I saying that you shouldn’t take teaching English in Ecuador too seriously. It’s perfectly acceptable to be a more severe teacher. If that’s your natural teaching style, then it’s certainly not for me to say that you’d be any less effective a teacher than someone who is not particularly serious. Plus, there will be situations where seriousness is necessary for any teacher. In Ecuador, from my experience, it goes down well if you can smile or laugh at yourself, see the funny side in different situations, and allow your students to joke with one another and yourself once you’ve built a rapport with them. A sense of humour is appreciated while teaching English in Ecuador.

Be aware that students will often be late.

When I was teaching English in Ecuador, at any rate, being late for the class was common; it appeared deeply ingrained in some students. Being between 5-15 minutes late was seen as entirely routine, and later than that wasn’t rare. Lateness was so widespread that it happened to every teacher, and indeed we were warned within our teacher’s handbook to be aware of this relaxed approach to time. It’s a cliché to talk about Latin American lack of punctuality, and it wasn’t valid for everyone (within every class, some were nearly always on time). Still, I did find that it had some basis in reality, at least from the evidence my colleagues and I could see.

Others

Explore!

Take what opportunities there are to explore the local area and other destinations within the country. Don’t sit at home all the time and then realize, with regret, nearly at the point of departure, that you hadn’t managed to see much of the country. I took what opportunities I could explore, and I’m happy I did because I would have missed out big time otherwise. Aside from my explorations of the city of Guayaquil and nearby locations, just a few of my most memorable trips were;

• The beautiful, historic capital Quito and near-ish locations such as the cable car up Pichincha Volcano, the thermal baths of Papallacta, the village of Mindo within the biodiverse cloud forest, the famous market town of Otavalo, the Line of the Equator at the Quitsato Sundial (a more scientific and truthful location than the more famous ‘Mitad del Mundo’ elsewhere) and Cotopaxi Volcano
• The edge of the Amazon for the 4-day Carnival celebrations
• The colonial city of Cuenca for All Souls’ Day and the Independence of Cuenca celebrations in November
• The Galápagos Islands
• The adventure capital of Baños de Agua Santa
• Loja and Vilcabamba in the far south of the country
• Several coastal locations, including surf capital Montañita, quieter Olón and a wonderful weekend spent humpback whale-watching, eating fantastic seafood dishes in Puerto Lopez, swimming with green turtles, and wildlife-watching on Isla de la Plata, which is known as the ‘Poor Man’s Galápagos’ due to the blue-footed boobies, magnificent frigatebirds and other wildlife which live there.

Inter-city bus travel is easy and cheap (roughly $1 per hour). There has been significant investment in the quality of roads and other travel infrastructure over the last decade and a half. As Ecuador is relatively small, you don’t get the massively long, 24h+ bus journeys which you can get in larger South American countries. You can also get cheap domestic flights – I took a few of these without any issues.

Try the local cuisine.

Ecuadorian cuisine isn’t as well known as Peruvian, but it deserves to be! It varies depending on whether you’re on the coast, in the Andes or in the Amazon rainforest, though there are dishes you can find anywhere. My favourites included;

• Shrimp ceviche (which differs from Peruvian ceviche in that the seafood is cooked, and it isn’t steeped in chilli – there’s a separate accompaniment of hot sauce for you to add yourself if you wish). Sometimes tomato juice is included, too) with accompaniments of salted popcorn and chiles (plantain crisps)
• Garlic crab (be aware: this can get messy!)
• Fish in peanut sauce
• Various sects (stews), such as seco de pollo (chicken), seco de chivito (goat) and seco de pato (duck), all come with rice and slices of plantain
• Encocado de camerónes and encode de langosta (shrimp or lobster in coconut sauce with vegetables and the inevitable rice)
• Humitas (especially those with melted cheese in the middle) and quimbolitos
• Fried yuca
• Llapingachos (cheese & mashed potato cakes, often served with chorizo sausage, a fried egg, a slice of avocado, tomato and lettuce salad and chopped beetroot)
• Churrasco (in Ecuador, this is a thin steak topped with a fried egg and a ratatouille-type of vegetable sauce, often served with chips and rice)
• Francesca (a soup with 12 types of beans and grains, traditionally served during Holy Week)
• Buttery-tasting bizcochos (savoury biscuits) from Cayambe, a village up the road from the line of the Equator
• Guanábana (soursop) juice and drinking yoghurt
• Amazing hot chocolate
• Sugared churros (I only ever saw these sold on street stalls, and never served with chocolate like they are in Spain)
• Fresh pineapple and sugar cane
• The incomparable Ecuadorian version of the Alexander cocktail (condensed milk, créme de cacao, brandy and crushed ice)
• Morocho (similar to rice pudding, though in drinkable form and made with cracked white corn rather than rice; the best morocco I had was in Guayaquil)
• Colada Morada (a purple, sweet drink traditionally consumed on and around 2^nd November, All Soul’s Day – can be served hot or cold, it’s made from black corn flour, cane sugar and fruits such as blackberries, blueberries, pineapple or naranjilla)
• Guagua de Pan (roughly human-shaped sweet bread roll, traditionally served with Colada Morada on and around 2nd November) See picture:

• I also had some adorable Ecuadorian Chinese food at different Chinese restaurants, which are known locally as chifas.

Final thoughts

As I mentioned before, the earning potential in Ecuador is not very high (the average TEFL wage is between $400-$800 p/m; the lower end of this scale is in smaller communities, and the upper back is more likely in the cities of Quito, Guayaquil and Cuenca), but the cost of living is low in comparison to a lot of other places. I was paying $250 a month as part of a 2-person flatshare in Guayaquil, and this wasn’t the lowest rent out there in the city. Rent is likely to be lower outside of the big cities, too.

Whether you earn, and therefore save, much or not will depend on the institution you’re working for, how many hours you teach (as you will almost certainly be paid a monthly rate for a certain number of hours per month) and how well certified you are. Having a BA degree isn’t always necessary, but any reputable organizations require TEFL certificates. I highly recommend a Level 5 certificate to increase your chances of getting the best teaching jobs.

See below for some websites you can use to research paid work and volunteering opportunities in Ecuador:

Tefl.com – Sometimes, I see paid jobs and volunteering opportunities here.

Dave’s ESL Cafe (International Job Board) – The same as above.

Go Overseas

EF Education First

I highly recommend Ecuador as a TEFL destination. I have many fond memories of my students and classes, the opportunities to explore the country, and everyday life. It’s a stunning, endlessly exciting country with an incredible amount to see and do. If you can go to Ecuador, I will grab it with both hands – it’s 100% worth it!