How can I teach English in Germany?

I am graduating from high school and taking a gap year before attending Middlebury College. I plan to go overseas to volunteer and live in a Spanish- or German-speaking country, to experience culture and life away from America, and to work on my language skills.

Now if I wanted to find an opportunity to teach English in Germany, how could I get in contact with some Sprachschule or some similar institution?

(I don't have a specific school in mind... I don't know where I would want to go geographically, either.)

My suggestion would be to look online. The Yahoo! search engine is good, but you can also try Google or my personal favorite, ask.com, for different results. Most school websites will have a contact email for their dean (or equivalent, i.e. headmaster, president, etc.). Also, try your school's guidance counselor! I'm a senior way out in the sticks, but our guidance counselor was able to provide very good information on British schools for one of my friends.

If you go the contacting-the-dean route, prepare a letter in advance that says who you are, why you want to go to school there, what you plan to do, etc. and have a couple of your teachers read it for you. You want to be persuasive! Show them why you are an asset to them. They owe you no favors - you have to show them why YOU will be good for THEM. And DON'T forget to provide your own contact information! (When you're excited, it's easy to do, trust me.) You'll want to provide a home address or P.O. Box number, telephone (provide a cell phone, also, if you have one), and email. And if you can, try to send it snail-mail - it makes a better impression.

I'd be glad to give you a few more tips if you'd like, just email me (living_in_a_bell_jar [at] yahoo [dot] com). Also, I can ask one of my German friends if she could help you - she's in university right now, so maybe she knows a few things I don't!

Well if you would have mentioned how good your German is,
I would have been able to transfer you some contacts. Report It

you could reaserch the school on the internet and find there main site then email them about your questions

Hi, a simpel question, but no simpel answer...

(1) Pupils normally learn English at the elementary school or highschool -- perhaps they need extra hours ("Nachhilfe"). There are several private schools for this or simply private contacts.

(2) Some people need English for Business, so they learn/brush up English at language schools ("Sprachschule" oder "Volkshochschule") or private contact at home.

(3) Possibly you can ask american/britsh institutes for cultural interchange for information (like "Goethe-Institut" for German Language), for example the Embassy or "Amerika Haus" (in many german cities).

If you want to learn German language, it will be better to be in the north if Germany (from Hannover to the coast), because there are written language and spoken laguage nearly the same ;-)