Teaching Italian

[alessmac]

Moi,

I am an Italian native speaker who moved to Finland for sentimental reasons. However, I'm now confronted with the thorny issue of finding a job here.
I am a fully qualified Italian teacher (master's degree in languages and master's degree in education and all that) and I do have some teaching experience, My English is quite good (I used to teach that before deciding to go for Italian) and I would be available to teach under (almost) any condition anywhere in Finland BUT! I don't speak a word of the local language. I'd love to learn but it'll take time and money and I still need to make ends meet for me and my partner (who's studying here).

Do you have any recommendations apart from "abandon all hope ye who enter here"?

Kiitos for help,

Alessandro.

[sammy]

Spanish as a foreign language is taught at many schools, but not all - AFAIK it is not very high on the 'most popular foreign languages' list... English, Swedish (as you may know it's note really a foreign language here), German, French... maybe then Spanish, Italian... Not sure how Russian would fare in this ranking.

However, maybe -just maybe, I do not have any stats- the popularity of Spanish as a foreign language has been on the grow for the past few years.

See this link: http://www.suomenespanjanopettajat.fi/index.php?lang=es - but at the same time, bear in mind that just because your native language is Spanish it does not qualify you for a school teaching job. Also get familiar with this.

Hmm... just replace the Spanish teachers' association link with http://italianopettajat.altervista.org/news.php and you have some advice

Also you could try and contact some of your countrymen already here...

http://www.finlandese.net/public/forum/ ... ge=italian

http://www.circoloitaliano.fi/

School teaching without the local language skills is more or less out of the question, no matter what your qualifications... unless you find a job at some IB-secondary school or one of the "international schools" (there are not many of these)... but maybe some other form of teaching...

[alessmac]

Hey, thanks for the very useful info!

In the long term, of course the goal is to learn Finnish and aim for a proper school, but in the meanwhile I'll make do with whatever I find.

Thanks again!

Alessandro.

[Pursuivant]

Main thing is to get all your degrees officiially recognized, get the "apostille" to every document, and then appy here. Once you get the paper - there is not many/ any "qualified" teachers of Italian, so you can get a job say in 1-2 high schools, polytechnic etc.