After you complete the first two steps, the program schedules a Skype interview in which they check that you can understand and speak English well and that you are sane. My interview lasted about 45 minutes, and it can also extend up to an hour. The program will inform your selection or rejection within two weeks of conducting your interview.
The Chilean government and the program coordinators make sure that you are well taken care of before and during the program. The application process is transparent, and the program starts and ends on pre-scheduled dates.
And if the school where you teach or the family where you live messes up something and you inform the center about the problem, they will put you in a different place.
You need to come across the right group. The program paid me 70, Chilean pesos per month, and that is the volunteer allowance their website mentions as of now as well. It is a monthly allowance, but the center might pay you the amount in a lump sum at the end of the program.
I would suggest you have some savings to enjoy your time and travel in Chile. Though not extremely expensive, Chile is one of the most expensive countries to travel in South America , and to top it off, there are tonnes of fun things to do in Chile.
The program fulfilled its promise of providing accommodation with a Chilean family and food during our entire stay graciously. While applying to the program, you can list down your placement and accommodation priorities, such as whether you would like to be in the North, the South or in the middle of the country, whether remote or in cosmopolitan settings, if you would like vegetarian food or a non-smoking house, and other details. At least in my case, it did.
After doing a little Google search, I saw how beautiful the South was and chose the area as my location preference. The volunteer center gives you housing with a Chilean family so that you learn about their culture, speak Spanish, and have someone local by your side to help you adjust to the new country. I was put up at the house of a beautiful lady Cecilia who lived alone in Castro but had boarded some five people, volunteers and Chilean professionals, in all her rooms and together we all lived like one big family and had the times of our life.
You can choose to stay with a Chilean family or on your own in which case the program would give the money , Chilean pesos they had to give to the family to you, and you would have to do everything by yourself. Your host Chilean family would be kind enough to provide you with three meals, and the program pays the family for your food.
Good luck! Also, remember that when you travel to a new place you have to adjust, and people take time to understand your choices.
The volunteer center covers your entire stay with health insurance. Otherwise, my tooth that monstrously ached whenever it wanted would have cost me a fortune; thanks to the expensive but professional Columbian dentists in Chile. The program requires you to get a temporary resident visa. They guided me throughout the visa process, sent me the essential documents, and even asked the embassy to clear my residentship on a priority basis. You do not need to know Spanish, but as you settle into the program and start living in Chile, you will have to learn Spanish to survive in the hard-core Spanish speaking country.
The first few weeks were challenging as everyone around me spoke super fast Spanish and rarely any English which made me feel like an idiot. Read all about my heartfelt journey of learning and speaking Spanish in Chile in this essay. While living every day amongst native Spanish speakers, such as your family and other teachers, you would start speaking conversational Spanish soon enough. So be open and ask a lot of questions.
I have aggregated 25 tips on how to teach yourself a foreign language deduced from my Spanish learning and speak it fluently within a few weeks of landing in Chile. Try these tips; they would be really helpful. The center also has an online course which you can follow along and do its weekly assignment to assess your progress in Spanish. I only got to know the classes I would teach when I arrived in Castro, my placement city.
Though I taught only six different groups ranging from 7th to 10th standard, some of my volunteer friends taught classes of grades 5th to 10th. The program conducts an orientation week in Santiago and trains the volunteers for a week while seeing them off with a farewell party. During that induction week, the program coordinators organized many workshops and sessions to introduce us to the culture of Chile and the teaching modules the volunteers were supposed to follow.
We played games in English and thought of fun activities that could be done as a group to make English learning fun for the children. The coordinators conducted classes in other languages such as Portuguese to make us experience how strange you feel when someone teaches you a foreign language.
On the last day of the training, we formed groups and took classes of other volunteers while following the direct teaching model. Your accommodation in Santiago would be taken care of by the program, too. At our last weekend in Santiago, my friends and I explored Santiago, took a bus to a nearby national park, ate chorizos and cheese empanadas, drank wine, and enjoyed our time before we separated to go to our placement cities.
Then I hopped onto a bus that took me to Castro, my home for the next few months. But another volunteer from the US taught in a classier and better-funded government school on the same island, and her students spoke fluent English and won inter-state debate competitions. Some of the government schools in Chile have children with rough backgrounds and whose parents are not well-doing or are drug addicts and abusive at home.
Now you can look at the situation and say that is why the school needed a volunteer to encourage the students to speak English or you can say that those students would never bother about English when they have many serious problems. During my four months in that school, I tried to show them that learning a language could be fun and that English would open up many opportunities for them, as it did for so many of us.
But why is English so important? Even many of the older students told us so. I began teaching my classes at 8 in the morning on a stomach of Nescafe black coffee and toast with margarine. After cursing myself for my decisions which would make me get up so early, I used to dress up, put some tea bags in my purse, and after drinking half of Nescafe black coffee and stuffing a toast in my mouth, I would run to the street to wait for my headteacher, Marcia, who picked me up every morning.
Most of the stories that I heard from other volunteers were all positive home stay stories, although with some notable exceptions. One volunteer that was there at the same time as me switched after receiving a very religious family that tried to convert him to Catholicism and bring him to church with them.
I felt that I could converse with my host mom about pretty much everything, and really enjoyed my time there. EODP provides good support before you arrive in regards to the visa process, and lets you know exactly what you need. Once you arrive in Chile at your host family location, you have to go to the nearest visa police department my small town actually had one and get your residency permit. Where you need to go is different than the actual police station, so ask for assistance.
Once you arrive, you have to get the residency permit by yourself, but can ask your host family for support. Getting a Chilean work visa is insanely simple!
The English Opens Doors program sends you emails with specific tasks and deadlines, so they make the process easy and streamlined.
The Chicago Chilean consulate was also literally empty when I arrived, so it took perhaps 15 minutes total to get my visa. All of the volunteers arrive in Santiago, and are put through two weeks of training. You also need to create your schedule with your local English teacher and provide a copy to the EODP headquarters in Santiago.
You're also supposed to ask your partner teacher about the local teacher's network so that you can go to monthly professional development sessions if you have class during that time, you can get excused. Professional development is very limited. However, many other volunteers did: teaching English in Chile isn't always easy.
The two-week training is valuable and does provide you with a lot of tools that you can draw from, but the ongoing support is next to nonexistent. If you like planning your own lesson plans and being on your own, then the English Opens Doors Program is really nice.
They do provide you with a lesson plan library, which essentially includes old lesson plans that previous volunteers have submitted. I had my one observation from my regional director, and that was that.
She was very nice, but extremely busy and had to travel throughout the region to observe different volunteers. When I did have issues with my room, though, she was helpful and addressed them with the school. My town also apparently didn't have a teacher's networking group at all, according to my partner teacher. Liking this thorough post? Sign up to receive monthly emails keeping you up to date. Each class is 80 minutes long, and so for 40 minutes you receive the first half of the class and for the next 40 minutes you receive the second half of the class.
This makes the classes much more manageable, as the majority of classes in Chilean public schools exceed 30 students. Ideally, you should be co-planning with your partner teacher and creating lesson plans based off of the units that your teacher is covering in class.
This rarely happens, but more on that later. As most schools are over-crowded, this is usually the most difficult part for public schools to accommodate a volunteer. Many volunteers are put in the library, computer lab, or a spare room. However, my classroom experience was very much shaped by my co-teachers.
I was placed in a trade high school, so by 11th grade the students decided if they wanted to study agriculture, engineering, nursing or humanities. My partner teacher had all 11 th and 12 th grade classes, so I did as well, plus an additional two 10 th grade classes that were with a different teacher. Overall, my students were fun!
Their levels of English were absurdly low, so my lesson plans revolved around greeting, expressions, parts of the body, daily routines, and the like. They were, for obvious reasons, more difficult. Most of my students seemed to enjoy my classes, and I developed good relationships with a lot of them. She was good at classroom management and laying down ground rules, which bled over into my class and helped me a lot.
Rather than stress out, I just worked with the students that came, marked the other ones as absent, and gave them failing participation grades at the end. But it goes to show that your experience is largely shaped off of your partner teacher s. She would mainly show me the textbook pages. So, I usually just did my own lesson plans and that was that. I also had two classes with a different English teacher, and he never provided me with lesson plans or anything so, again, I just did my own.
Both English teachers at my school were part-time, which meant that I only had classes on Monday-Wednesday. However, the classes were quite packed in, especially on Monday and Tuesday, which meant two very stressful days. This 3-day week was not the norm: most other volunteers had classes days a week. I never had an after school program. There were literally no after school programs at my school the school days is very long! Volunteers can develop their own individual activity -Share own culture with students, thus broadening their worldview -Helping students improve their listening and speaking abilities -Motivating students to learn English.
Program Locations Santiago, Chile. Overall rating. Program Details Provider :. Other Related Programs. Costa Rica, Turrialba. Palestinian Territories, Hebron.
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