Angloville Review: Volunteering to Teach English in Poland

Angloville is a culture and language exchange programme. The project supports advanced English speakers to improve their English through 1:1 conversations with native English speaking volunteers. Read on for our Angloville review.

When we volunteered at Angloville in Poland, the project was much smaller than it is now. Since then Angloville has expanded to locations across Europe including the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Malta.

free holiday in poland mountains

The Polish mountains where we stayed.

How Angloville Works

Luke and I loved the Angloville programme. We volunteered in Poland near to Wroclaw. We stayed in a hotel in the Polish mountains near the city for a week. This was for free with accommodation, transport, activities and meals included. In exchange, we volunteered to speak English in 1:1 conversation sessions every day.

Angloville is an English language-immersion programme for the Polish participants, and for the native English speakers, it’s a cultural-immersion programme. Whilst they improve their conversational English all day, you get to learn about Polish culture first-hand.

This is one of the elements we loved most about the project — we got to meet and speak with locals. We asked them about their culture, home towns and travel recommendations. We couldn’t have planned such an amazing trip around Poland without these connections and friends!

And that’s how it works: you come to Poland and speak English all day, and you get your accommodation and food for free.

free holiday in poland at hotel chojnik

Speak all day and stay for free. Luke speaks with Howard, a regular Angloville participant who lives in the Czech Republic.

Who Can Volunteer?

Even if you have zero teaching experience, you can volunteer at Angloville if you are a native English speaker. Your role as a volunteer is to have conversations in English with the participants, helping them to improve their conversation and vocabulary. Most of the participants are already advanced English speakers but need more practise speaking confidently with native English speakers.

Applying to Angloville

How do you apply? Apply for the Angloville programme on their website. We applied this way and were accepted. You need to fill out a full application and past teaching experience will definitely help your application, even though it’s not a requirement to volunteer.

We found out we were accepted within a few weeks and we booked a cheap RyanAir flight to Wroclaw, packed a rucksack and went on our way. After a few nights in Wroclaw and a tour of the city provided by Angloville, a mini-bus drove us 2-hours into the mountains to the hotel. Our hotel was very well kept, in a quite rural but beautiful natural location.

hotel chojnik free holiday in poland

Hotel Chojnik where we stayed for 1 week. The surroundings were stunning, the rooms were good, but the food wasn’t great.

Our Experience at Angloville

When we arrived, we soon realised that nearly all of the native speakers are travellers of some sort. An American who has hitched across the world with only her guitar, another who is a military wife at a base in Germany, an Australian whose been teaching in Asia for five years, a New Zealander who spent his last few months Thai boxing, a Welsh blacksmith, and an Irish girl teaching in France.

The Polish participants, on the other hand, mostly had high-powered jobs in corporate companies (many of which paid for them to attend the programme). But that didn’t make them any less fascinating? Of course, it didn’t! Speaking with the participants on the programme was amazing. We talked about their work, our travels, their love of Poland, their travel recommendations and so much more.

When you travel, it’s common to meet lots of other travellers, but it’s not so often you get to meet and have long conversations with locals. On Angloville you actually meet and speak with locals during the whole project. It’s an incredible cultural experience.

angloville group on free holiday in poland

All of the Angloville participants on our programme, the Polish and the native speakers.

Angloville isn’t just a free holiday in Poland though, it is volunteering. Conversation hours run from 10am – 7.30pm with only a 90-minute break, and nearly all of these conversations are one-to-one. Whilst the Polish definitely have it harder, talking for this long can still be tiring. At the end of the week you receive a certificate for 70 hours of volunteering, so conversations and activities aren’t optional! It’s exhausting but exhilarating.

angloville irish dance

One evening activity involved the whole group learning an Irish dance. No easy task!

During the Angloville project, you are paired with a Polish participant who you mentor every morning for a presentation that they will give at the end of the week. This is an excellent opportunity to make a solid friendship, learn about their interests and even get some teaching style experience.

I couldn’t have been more over the moon to be paired with my mentee. The Angloville coordinators worked hard to match up participants and mentors who got on well and who they felt would be successful together.

wojtek and me

Me and my mentee, Wojtek. At the end of the week, he gave an excellent presentation on professional athletes and whether they go too far when trying to succeed.

Though it might sound like quite a lot of work, it doesn’t feel like work. You can talk over coffee, take a short walk or play pool during these conversation hours, and you’re free to discuss whatever you like. Consequently, these conversations are usually of huge benefit to you as a traveller.

By going to Angloville at the beginning of our trip, we got some invaluable advice from Poles living all over the country about where to go, which places to avoid, how to get there, what to eat etc. It certainly made us even more excited and much better prepared than we would’ve been for travelling Poland afterwards.

woodland wroclaw free holiday in poland

Nature in the surrounding woodlands.

Some jammy English speakers managed to hitch a ride to their next destination with their new Polish friends, and others were offered a bed for the night as well. Although we didn’t do this, one of our new Polish friends found us a place to stay at his friend’s apartment in Wroclaw for the night (she was a keen Couchsurfing host), and gave us a lift there when we got off the bus. Someone else offered to host us when we got to Warsaw too.

me and annie angloville

Me and Annie, an American working as a Teaching Assistant in France.

angloville 2014

Me, Luke’s mentee Michal, Luke, Annie, and my mentee Wojtek

Our Angloville Review

What’s our verdict on Angloville? We loved it and we’d definitely recommend signing up!

The Angloville staff were great and Angloville is a genuine volunteering opportunity. There are no costs to you as the volunteer (and nothing hidden!) It’s hard work because you do need to commit to conversation and activities with the participants all week. It’s absolutely worth it though.

For us, it was an amazing way to travel for free, learn about a country from the people living there, and make new friends. The cultural experience was invaluable. We learned so much about Poland and it’s people. Many of the people we met on the Angloville programme we are still in contact with too.

We later recommended the Angloville programme to our friends who volunteered at Angloville in Hungary and loved it so much that they also signed up to volunteer in Angloville Poland a few weeks later. You can read about their experiences here.

TEFL from Angloville

Update 2019: Angloville now offer TEFL certifications as part of their programme. When we joined the Angolville programme back in 2014, they didn’t offer TEFL qualifications, so we have no first-hand experience of this. However, fellow travel blogger Stefanie from The Hidden Coconut gained a TEFL whilst volunteering for Angolville in the Czech Republic. If you’re interested in the TEFL, I’d recommend reading her blog post.