What Learning to Teach English Taught Me About Marketing

Key takeaways

• Plain English is not the same as simple English. It keeps the meaning and strips out the idiom, wordplay and cultural shorthand that a second-language reader has to decode.
• Many of the people reading your English are reading it as an additional language. Only 8.7% of South Africans speak English at home, and Portuguese professionals tend to read English better than they speak it.
• TEFL’s needs analysis is audience research under another name, and its concept checking is a better test of whether copy worked than asking whether it was clear.
• Marketing carries over into teaching: learners are an audience with a job to do, and testing one variable at a time works in a classroom as well as in an ad account.
• Ten years of professional writing and editing in English is a real strength in a classroom, but it isn’t classroom experience. I have the first and am only starting to build the second.

Plain English is not simple English

I’ve just finished a Level 5 TEFL course. I went in expecting to learn how to teach English. I did. What I didn’t expect was how much of it would be about marketing.

The connecting idea is one I half knew for years and never had to defend: writing for someone reading in a second language isn’t a simpler version of writing for a native speaker. It’s a different discipline, and most copy gets it wrong in the same few places.

South Africa makes the point better than a textbook. In the 2022 census, only 8.7% of people said they speak English at home, against 24.4% for isiZulu and 16.3% for isiXhosa. That is a home-language figure, not a measure of proficiency, and plenty more people use English at school and at work. But for most South Africans English is something they learned, not something they grew up in, and much of the country’s marketing, contracts and instructions are written in it anyway.

I live in Braga, where the picture differs but the lesson holds. Portugal came sixth of 123 countries in the 2025 EF English Proficiency Index, as reported by The Portugal News, scoring 612 out of 800 against a global average of 488. Braga is among the districts that scored highest. Speaking was the weak spot: 130 points below reading. In other words, people here can often read my English more easily than they can answer in it. The index is built from a free online test that people choose to take, so treat it as a signal, not a census. The full index is on EF’s site.

I’m also, this year, an A1 Portuguese learner myself. It has made me a better judge of what “simple” means. A short sentence is not automatically an easy one. A sentence is easy when every word in it is one the reader already owns.

The commercial case isn’t subtle either. A 2020 survey by CSA Research of 8,709 consumers in 29 countries found that 76% preferred to buy products with information in their own language. CSA studies the localisation industry, so it has an interest in that answer, and preference is not the same as behaviour. But it points in one direction.

What TEFL changed in how I approach marketing

Copy: write for the reader’s English, not your own

The first skill the course drills is what teachers call grading language: choosing words and structures learners can process and dropping the ones they can’t. The British Council’s guidance on checking understanding notes that good concept questions have to explain meaning in simple language without using the target language itself, and that writing them is useful practice for inexperienced teachers in grading their own.

Idiom is the first casualty. NPR reported that decades of research show understanding dropping when a native speaker joins a conversation among non-native speakers, and that cutting idioms, jargon and sports references is part of the fix. I spent two years writing about football, a sport that runs on idiom, and it took a TEFL course to make me notice how much of that was invisible to a reader who was translating as they went.

I’d already learned the principle the hard way writing ads for second-language audiences in South Africa. What R200 teaches you about copy was about exactly that: idiom, wordplay and sarcasm die on arrival, and precision is what survives. TEFL gave me the vocabulary for why.

South African law has written the standard down. Section 22 of the Consumer Protection Act gives consumers a right to information in plain and understandable language, and it defines the test by audience: whether an ordinary consumer of the class the material is intended for, with average literacy and minimal experience, could be expected to understand it. The Act also singles out vulnerable consumers, including those on low incomes. A legal test that starts with who is reading is a needs analysis written into statute.

Design: build around one aim

A well-planned lesson has a clear aim: something the learner can do at the end that they couldn’t at the start. Everything else in the lesson exists to make that aim reachable. The same British Council guidance describes pairing concept questions with visual tools, such as timelines, because words alone don’t always carry a meaning across.

I now ask the same of a landing page. What is the one thing a reader should be able to do or understand here, and is anything on the screen competing with it? It’s the discipline that makes technical writing work too: ordering matters more than simplifying.

Strategy: needs analysis is audience research

Before teaching a new group, the first move is needs analysis: finding out what learners need to do with English. The British Council’s example is giving a class the proposed aims and asking them to prioritise them against the situations they’ll actually use English in. A marketer would call that audience research.

The R200 campaigns were the same exercise with less data. Device type, language settings and cultural interests were the signals that told me who was actually reading. What TEFL added was a sharper question. Not just “who are they?” but “what do they need to be able to do, and what’s stopping them?”

Evaluation: stop asking “is that clear?”

The course drills one habit above the others: don’t ask “Do you understand?” The British Council’s entry on concept checking points out that a learner can say yes without having understood anything. The alternative is to ask questions that show whether the meaning landed, or to have learners repeat instructions or explain meaning in their own words.

Marketing asks “is it clear?” constantly, in reviews, at sign-off, on client calls, and gets a yes every time. Click-through rate and time on page are proxies for attention. They tell you very little about whether the message was understood. The concept-checking version for a piece of copy is to ask a reader to tell you, in their own words, what you’re offering and what they would do next. If they can’t, it isn’t clear, however many people clicked. It’s the same test I recommended in Beyond the Whitepaper: get someone outside the team to read it and watch where they stop.

Writing for a second-language reader isn’t easier. It’s the same job with the margin for error removed.

• Kyle Smith, Marketing Manager at Miraculous Equation and Level 5 TEFL-trained English teacher

What marketing taught me about teaching

The traffic runs both ways. What follows is how I intend to teach, not a record of how I have, because I’m only starting out.

Learners are an audience with a job to do. Adults rarely study English for its own sake. They want to write an email that gets a reply, get through a meeting, update a CV. A professional in Braga who reads English well but hesitates to speak it doesn’t need a general course. They need speaking practice built around what they do on a Tuesday. I’ve spent a decade writing for people who arrive with a problem and not much patience, and that instinct carries over.

Lesson aims should read like good copy. Good copy leads with what the reader gets. “By the end you’ll be able to write a polite follow-up email” beats “we’ll study the present perfect” for the same reason.

Test one thing at a time. The most useful lesson of the R200 budget was that when you can only test one variable, you think much harder about which one. A one-to-one lesson is a small-budget environment too. Change one thing, see what happens, keep what works.

Editing is error correction with a purpose. Years as an editor taught me to separate errors that block meaning from errors that only look untidy, and to fix the first kind first. The course gave me a framework for doing that kindly, with a learner in the room.

What I bring that a standard TEFL profile doesn’t

Plenty of excellent teachers have no marketing background and don’t need one. I’m not claiming a better classroom. I’m claiming a different set of strengths, and I’d rather be specific about them.

Ten years of writing in English where the words have consequences. Reporting at Soccer Laduma, running a newsroom at Explain, turning technical whitepapers into plain language at Ammbr, writing ads where a weak line costs real money. I can explain not just that a sentence is wrong, but why a different one works.

Experience writing for people who read English as an additional language. From R200 campaigns in South Africa to explaining self-sovereign identity to social media creators in Nigeria, much of my work has been written for readers who weren’t native speakers.

The professional English adults actually need. Emails, proposals, CVs, presentations. I’ve written them for a living, so I can teach them from the inside.

The gap is classroom hours. I’ve just completed the course and I’m building teaching hours online. I’d rather say that plainly than leave a reader to work it out. It’s the same instinct that makes me name the weak points in my own numbers.

What to do if your readers aren’t native speakers

Write down what the reader needs to do afterwards, not what you want to say. Build the piece backwards from that.

Cut the idiom, the wordplay and the sporting metaphors, then read the draft as if you were translating it. Anything you stumble over, they will too.

Ask someone to explain it back to you. If they can’t say what you’re offering and what happens next, the copy hasn’t landed, whatever the analytics say.

A TEFL course is meant to make you a teacher. For me it also made me a more exacting copywriter, and the years of copywriting are making me a more careful teacher. The thread is the same in journalism, marketing and the classroom: find out who is actually reading, work out what they need, and check that it landed.

About the author

Kyle Smith is a writer, content strategist and Level 5 TEFL-trained English teacher based in Braga, Portugal. He holds an honours degree in journalism from Stellenbosch University and spent two years reporting for Soccer Laduma before moving into technology, where he has spent the last decade explaining blockchain infrastructure, cybersecurity frameworks and AI adoption to people who don’t build them. He is currently Marketing Manager at Miraculous Equation and is building his English teaching practice online.

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