Assistant Director of Studies

The English Teacher Training College and its associated Bilingual Classroom Initiative (ABCi) is a not-for-profit Austrian College and NPO headquartered in Vorchdorf, Austria, promoting cultural exchange and understanding between Austria and the English-speaking world. Founded by Frank Carle, Ben Stone and Jakob Gfrerer in 2011, the college has partnered together with Austrian students, teachers, headmasters and policy makers to promote Anglophone culture, language and sport in state schools, while providing subsidized teacher training courses for aspiring teachers. Our college’s current ABCi initiative is to reach all the children in Austria with a free english project by the year 2020 while providing high quality teacher training education regardless of the candidate's ability to pay for it.

The organization has a dual mission. Firstly, as a college, to provide subsidized TEFL teacher training education for young people as student teachers on our TEFL Courses including a substantial practical element to ensure that they can actually teach in a real classroom when called upon to do so. ABCi works with state and local educational authorities in Austria to provide that environment for our Student Teachers to improve their teaching as well as giving them the theoretical knowledge required to complete their TEFL-YL course certification. This emphasis on teacher training has a direct effect on the quality of our college’s initiative to reach all the children in Austria with a free English project by the year 2020. We feel that anyone should have access to high quality teacher training education, regardless of their ability to pay. Candidates are instead selected based solely on merit and their future potential to give back to the community or as our college's motto advises student teachers: “learn in order to teach.” Secondly, as an NPO, to act as a cultural exchange between English-speaking countries and Austria by bringing people from UK, US, Canada, Ireland, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand into Austrian classrooms to foster understanding between those cultures. Field staff and student teachers bring not only the language, but just as importantly, the authentic culture and sport from their English-speaking countries with them as well. ABCi has a special focus on bringing free English projects to rural and often otherwise overlooked children in alpine regions.

ABCi’s mission is to bring together Austrian children and English native-speaking ESL teachers to form a bilingual learning environment by means of linguistic immersion, cultural exchange and foreign sports that promote the everyday use of English in Austrian classrooms and will provide every child in Austria with an English project day including elements of language, culture and sport by the year 2020. The English Teacher Training College and its associated Bilingual Classroom Initiative (ABCi) is not a private school or language institute and does not provide language courses or private tutoring. The projects that take place in Austrian schools are as much a cultural exchange as they are a "language lesson" and the methodology which our NPO promotes is communicative: project teaching,active learning are uses among other  communicative learning methods. Our initiative primarily uses project work and active learning to improve English language speaking competences from A1 to A2 in the areas of “Zusammenhängendes Sprechen und an Gesprächen teilnehmen” and from A2 to B1 in “Hören” using a mixture of language activities, songs, games and speaking-focussed exercises. These are the competences required for the USE of English in everyday life.

ABCi projects include cultural elements of music, history, and geography integrated into active learning lessons taught taught by native speakers from English-speaking countries. ABCi exposes Austrian children to foreign sports encouraging them to “learn by doing” while becoming more active and healthy. ABCi also aims to provide in-service CLIL training for all interested teachers in Austria, fair wages for our staff, and professional development for our staff. ABCi encourages students to become supporting members of the association while fostering ties with government, community and business leaders.

In the 2017-2018 school year, native speakers from the college will give free English language, culture and sport projects to over 80,000 Austrian children while working closely with almost 2,000 teachers from more than 700 Austrian schools, demonstrating innovative methods to increase speaking competences in the classroom. At the same time, training over 120 new ESL teachers in the cutting edge methodologies required to best teach English as a foreign language. This 2017-2018 school year will also see over 25,000 new members join to support these activities and help bring these 262 native-speaking ESL teachers  from English-speaking countries to Austrian classrooms and to reach ABCi’s goal to reach every pupil in Austria with native speaking ESL teachers from English-speaking countries by the year 2020.

Join us to help complete our mission.