The International Market for Teaching English Online

OVERVIEW | Overview: Online English Tutoring | Why Become an Online English Tutor? |

FINDING STUDENTS | The International Market for Teaching English Online | Where to Find Your ESL Students |

Traditionally ESL schools market their services to students who can understand any of the world's top ten languages. If you plan to promote an ESL tutoring service online, you can use the same strategy to effectively market your services in a few languages that are commonly used by the worlds web surfing public. Translating your web pages into different languages is also useful, since people tend to interact and form online communities regardless of what country they live in. According to estimates by Global Reach, only 34.2% of web surfers communicate in English. This means that the other 65.8% of surfers expect to find pages written in their own language. Other languages commonly used on the internet are Chinese (13.7%), Spanish (9%), Japanese (8.4%), German (6.9%), French (4.2%), Korean (3.9%), Italian (3.8%), Portuguese (3.1%) and Dutch (1.7%). It would be wise for language tutors to advertise their services in one of these languages for maximum exposure.

Another effective way to market you services would be to target students who live in countries with reliable internet infrastructure. The following is a list of Top 10 Internet Usage by country as of December 2005 according to the World Internet Usage Stats website.

**Top 10 Internet Usage By Country**
Country	Total Number of Users (Millions)	Percentage of Users
1. U.S.	185,550	19.86%
2. China	99,800	10.68%
3. Japan	78,050	8.35%
4. Germany	41,880	4.48%
5. India	36,970	3.96%
6. UK	33,110	3.54%
7. South Korea	31,670	3.39%
8. Italy	25,530	2.73%
9. France	25,470	2.73%
10. Brazil	22,320	2.39%

Europe alone accounts for 32.6% of students studying English as a second language. A high number of online ESL learners are located in France, Germany and from many other neighboring countries. In Asian, the highest number of online ESL Learners are based in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. Perhaps one reason for this trend is because of the growing influence of the English language in the region, and also because Asian countries are progressing much faster in building a high-bandwidth broadband internet infrastructure than other countries - including the United States. For example, about 70% of homes in Korea have broadband internet connection compared to only 25% in the USA. Japan and Taiwan top at over 40% each in terms of broadband internet access (Source: Robert D. Austin, Stephen P. Bradley, The Broadband Explosion). Another big market is China, which is seen as the largest potential market of English learners. The reason for this is China's accession into the World Trade Organization, and its preparations for hosting the 2008 Olympic Games.

Next: Where to Find Your ESL Students