Making use of your time off
Working as an English Teacher at a university in France, teaching classes or workshops, can be a really great job. If you’re working as a Maitre de Langue or Lecteur de Langue Anglais, you can definitely have a lot of work on your plate during the semesters (particularly the months of October-November and February-March!). However, during other semesters, the workload might be lighter. And then come April, May, or even June, you will finish most of your classes, and you’ll have a lot of free time on your hands, where the only work to do is grade papers or proctor exams!
So the question is, what do you do with all that free time?
Well, one option is to take on a side job and find yourself working part time in France!
Knowing what you can and can’t do
Many don’t know this, but although the lecteur and maitre de langue jobs are considered “full time”, this simply means you can’t take on any other full time work. This is the case even if the university is closed for July or you don’t have any classes left in June.
However, you are allowed to do a certain number of additional hours per year as part-time work. Sometimes you may need an auto-entrepreneur status to do the work. However, if you’re working with a French company to do this part time work and you’ve given them your French social security number (as is the case with the public univerisites), they’ll deduct the taxes from your paycheck automatically and you won’t need an auto-entrepreneur status at all!
Working part time in Strasbourg
If you’re in France and want to find additional work, especially in Strasbourg, one company I recommend is called Stras’Cours. I worked with them mostly in person, but they also do some online work with English teachers. You can have either auto-entrepreneur status if you don’t already have a full time job, or if you have a full time job you can just add on the additional hours with them.
Working part time in France with a French company
Another company I’ve worked with online is called Wissen International. While mostly working in person and requiring a car, this company switched to providing online Business English classes to their clients shortly after the pandemic. I’m fairly sure they still offer both in person and online, but either way, they’re a good way to make some supplemental side income teaching English.
Working part time with an International company
And finally, one of my favorite websites to teach English online is Twenix. Although I haven’t taught with them personally, they provide a syllabus with courses to teach so you don’t have to do any of that work! Let me tell you from experience, after working with both Stras’Cours and Wissen International, figuring out what to teach every week was the majority of the work I had to do. Twenix provides lesson plans, plus you’ll have no homework to mark, because all classes are conversation-based and all the materials are provided. Students actually do homework exercises on the platform itself from a bank of reading, listening and grammar activities.
Twenix also is completely flexible, so you can choose when and for how long you want to teach, and can even modify your schedule or transfer classes to other available teachers if something comes up later and you can’t teach a certain class! They hire native and non-native teachers from all over the world, so you don’t have to have EU citizenship you could be from anywhere. You also don’t need a degree, TEFL certificate, or experience to work with us.
Because Twenix has such an attractive hiring policy, working with them would be a great place to get teaching experience on your resume if you’re applying for those competitive lecteur or maitre de langue jobs and you already have a degree, but not much experience teaching ESL directly.
Whichever company you end up working with, I highly recommend working part time in France, teaching English as a second language to hone your craft, get experience, and earn a bit of side money for traveling or saving.
