What Is an ELA Teacher? English Language Arts vs ESL Explained

What is an ELA teacher?

An ELA teacher teaches English Language Arts, the American school subject covering reading, writing, speaking, listening and language study. ELA teachers work with pupils who already speak English and need literacy and analysis skills. ESL and TEFL teachers, by contrast, teach English itself to people learning it as an additional language.

If it is the second job you want, the route is a recognised teaching qualification rather than a state licence: our Ofqual regulated Level 5 TEFL diploma is the qualification employers abroad and online ask for by name.

Key takeaways

• ELA stands for English Language Arts. It is a subject on the American school timetable, not a qualification and not a type of English teaching abroad.
• An ELA teacher teaches literature, composition, grammar, vocabulary, speaking and listening, usually to pupils who are already fluent English speakers.
• ESL teachers in the same American school do something different: they support pupils who are learning English as an additional language.
• To teach ELA in a public school in the United States you normally need a degree in English or education plus a state teaching licence with a subject endorsement.
• To teach English as a foreign language abroad or online you need a recognised TEFL qualification, and no state licence is involved.
• The two careers overlap in skill and diverge completely in paperwork, so decide which one you want before you pay for anything.

What does English Language Arts actually cover?

English Language Arts is the umbrella name American schools give to the whole business of reading and writing well. In practice an ELA lesson might be a close reading of a novel, an essay on theme and character, a grammar and vocabulary session, a debate, or a piece of research writing. The five strands most curricula name are reading, writing, speaking, listening and language.

The word “arts” is what confuses people outside the United States. It does not mean drama or creative writing clubs. It is simply the older academic label for the language and literature subject that a British or Irish timetable would call English. If you grew up sitting English at GCSE or Leaving Certificate, ELA is the same territory under a different name.

That matters for anyone searching for teaching work, because a job advert for an ELA teacher in Ohio and an advert for an English teacher in Ho Chi Minh City are two entirely different jobs with two entirely different qualification requirements.

ELA, ESL, EFL and TEFL: where each set of letters belongs

The quickest way to keep the acronyms straight is to ask two questions about any teaching job. Who are the learners, and is English the subject or the medium? ELA sits on its own because the learners already speak English. Everything else on this list describes teaching English to people who are still acquiring it.

If you want the longer version of the four language teaching acronyms, our guide to what ESL means and how ESL, EFL, ESOL and TESOL differ takes each in turn. Every one of these terms, along with CELTA, IELTS and Level 5, sits together on our reference hub, TEFL qualifications and terminology explained.

Is ELA the same as English literature?

Not quite, and the difference is worth knowing if you are reading American job adverts. English literature is one strand inside English Language Arts. ELA also carries composition, grammar and usage, vocabulary, research skills, and speaking and listening, and in the younger years it carries the mechanics of reading itself: phonics, decoding and fluency.

So an ELA post in an elementary school and an ELA post in a high school can look like two different jobs. The elementary version is heavily about learning to read. The high school version is much closer to what a British or Irish teacher would recognise as A level or Leaving Certificate English, with set texts and extended essays.

You will also see the label used loosely in adverts for tutoring, test preparation and curriculum writing. Read the description rather than the acronym, because the same three letters cover a wide spread of work.

Do ELA teachers teach English learners too?

Often, yes, and this is where the two worlds meet in a real classroom. American public schools are full of pupils classified as English learners, and those pupils sit in ELA lessons alongside everyone else. So an ELA teacher regularly finds themselves teaching a novel to a class where three or four pupils are still building everyday fluency.

Most districts handle this with two staff rather than one. The ELA teacher owns the subject; a dedicated ESL or bilingual specialist supports the language. The role of the ESL teacher is a separate post here for exactly that reason, because the two jobs are appointed against different criteria and paid on different scales.

The practical upshot for a teacher planning a career: training in English language teaching is genuinely useful inside an ELA classroom, but it is not what gets you hired into one. It is what gets you hired into the other job.

What qualifications does an ELA teacher need?

In the United States, teaching ELA in a public school is a licensed profession. The usual path is a bachelor’s degree in English or education, a teacher preparation programme, a subject knowledge examination, and a state issued teaching licence carrying an English or English Language Arts endorsement. Requirements are set state by state, so the detail changes when you cross a border.

Teaching English as a foreign language works nothing like that. There is no licence and no state examination. What employers check is your certificate: the awarding body, the hours, and whether the qualification can be verified. That is why a regulated qualification carries weight, and why we publish our register numbers rather than asking anyone to take our word for it.

Accreditation and regulation

These are the two regulated qualifications behind the courses named on this page. Both are listed on the public Ofqual register, which is the primary source, and both are awarded by Highfield Qualifications, Ofqual recognition number RN5219.

You can check either entry yourself on the Ofqual register of regulated qualifications. For the professional development side of English language teaching, the British Council’s TeachingEnglish service publishes free lesson plans and training courses, and its resources are organised by the Council of Europe’s Common European Framework of Reference level descriptions, the A1 to C2 scale you will meet in almost every language school abroad. Neither of those levels applies to an ELA classroom, which is another sign of how separate the two jobs are.

How we research and check guides like this one is set out in our Editorial Charter.

What does a TEFL course teach that an English degree does not?

This is the question that decides whether a well qualified ELA teacher succeeds or struggles in their first month abroad. An English degree gives you the subject. A TEFL qualification gives you the method for teaching that subject to someone who does not yet have the language to discuss it.

Concretely, that means grading your own language so a beginner can follow you, presenting a grammar point without using grammatical terminology, designing tasks where learners speak more than you do, correcting errors without stalling the conversation, and running a mixed ability class with no shared first language. None of that appears in a literature degree, and all of it appears in a lesson observation.

It also means the practical business of the job: planning a lesson to a shape a school will recognise, using a coursebook without being run by it, and assessing speaking fairly. A regulated Level 5 diploma covers this at 180 guided learning hours, and the Advanced Diploma at 300, which is why the hours matter to employers rather than just the certificate title. If you want the difference between a course that is accredited and one that is regulated, our guide to accredited versus regulated TEFL sets out what each word actually guarantees.

Can an ELA teacher teach English abroad or online?

Yes, and licensed ELA teachers are among the strongest candidates in the market. Years of running a classroom, assessing writing and managing a curriculum transfer straight across, and international schools in particular pay a premium for a licensed subject teacher.

The gap to close is the language teaching method. Teaching Macbeth to fluent sixteen year olds and teaching the past simple to a class of adult beginners are different crafts, and employers know it. A TEFL qualification is what shows you have trained for the second one, which is why almost every school abroad asks for it regardless of what else is on your CV.

The reverse move is harder. A TEFL certificate does not shorten the route to an American state licence, because that licence is a separate legal process. If your long term plan is an American public school classroom, treat TEFL as excellent preparation and additional evidence rather than a substitute.

ELA teacher or ESL teacher: which career suits you?

Ask yourself what you actually want to spend your days doing. If it is literature, essays and the slow craft of writing well, ELA is your subject and a state licence is your route. If it is language itself, and you like the idea of doing it in Hanoi, Madrid or from your own front room, then English language teaching is the job and a TEFL qualification is the entry ticket.

The money and the mobility differ too. An American teaching licence is portable between states with paperwork and almost nowhere else. A recognised TEFL qualification travels to around eighty countries and to every online platform, which is why our graduates are teaching in eighty of them.

If you are still weighing which certificate answers which question, the definitional guides sit together on the hub, and what ESOL certification is and where it leads is a useful companion read if adult learners in the United Kingdom or Ireland are your likely market.

Four mistakes people make with these acronyms

The first is treating ELA as a qualification. It is a subject label. Nobody issues an ELA certificate you can put on a CV, and any provider offering one is selling you something that does not exist.

The second is assuming ESL and EFL are interchangeable. They describe the same teaching from two sides of a border: ESL is English taught inside an English speaking country, EFL is English taught where it is not the community language. Most schools abroad use the terms loosely, but examiners and awarding bodies do not.

The third is reading TESOL as a different profession. It is the umbrella term covering both ESL and EFL, and in practice a TESOL certificate and a TEFL certificate are assessed by employers on the same three points: awarding body, hours and verifiability.

The fourth is the expensive one. It is buying a qualification for the job you are not applying for. An American licence will not get you hired in Vietnam, and a TEFL certificate will not get you hired in a Texas public school. Work out which classroom you want first, then buy once.

How to cite this page

The TEFL Institute, “What Is an ELA Teacher? English Language Arts vs ESL Explained”, teflinstitute.com, published 27 August 2026. Qualification data verified against the Ofqual register of regulated qualifications on 27 August 2026.

Written by Katie Troy, The TEFL Institute Group. Last updated 27 August 2026.

Ready to qualify to teach English as a foreign language?

If the second career on this page is the one you want, start with a qualification an employer can verify. The Ofqual regulated Level 5 TEFL diploma is the strongest option, and you can see the full range on our TEFL courses page. The TEFL Institute is Europe’s largest TEFL trainer by teachers certified, having certified 161,000 teachers since 2017 who have gone on to teach in 80 countries, and every certificate carries a number an employer can check.