Teaching Chinese in the US

Recently I’ve been entertaining the idea of moving back to the US (Los Angeles) with my family. My wife is Taiwanese and, if we do move back, she is interested in teaching Chinese in the US in order to have an extra source of income. First off, how big of a market is there for Chinese teaching in southern California? I hear it’s picking up, what with the rise of China and Americans’ fascination for China. What kind of certification (recognized in the US) can she get in Taiwan so that she can teach in the US? Is such a certification hard to come by? Any feedback would be appreciated.

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I can’t speak to licensure, but here in Austin there is a woman named Meggie that 10 years ago I used to take my kids to to learn Mandarin in her living room. Now she has an entire school and a dozen teachers working for her. The market is far from saturated (here) as I can’t find any good adult non-beginner classes while I’m stuck in the US. Unless there is fierce competition, I don’t imagine Socal being much different.

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I think the market could still be pretty ripe outside of university classes, but from what I understand it takes several years to get the license to teach Chinese in the US. Then again I’ve also heard of ABC’s who can barely speak Chinese being offered jobs teaching it at public schools in the US because schools are desperate for Chinese teachers.

Would have to teaching simplified Chinese though, and Beijing accent, unless it’s a Taiwanese-owned cram school. I know at my university, when I started there the majority of Chinese teachers were Taiwanese, but when I graduated they were mostly replaced by ones from China.

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Certified Chinese teacher and teacher trainer in the US here.

Market is okay. No problem getting a job. The question is whether you will want it. Public education in the US is not anything I’d recommend anyone I liked to go into at this point. Too much interference in the classroom from people who know nothing about teaching. Too much required training that has nothing to do with classroom practice or is just “flavor-of-the-month” buzzwords.

You will need to be licensed in the state where you’re teaching, and no outside credentials will make a lick of difference unless it is a proper university or grad school degree. Even graduate work won’t matter in large part because they require very specific courses which no one would take in college unless they were education majors. Increasingly large numbers of state are abolishing the “alternative pathways” to licensure and requiring an education degree (which is BS but there are so many voices that want this it has been rammed through).

I would not say the market is picking up, but it’s maybe holding steady.

The big buzzword right now is “immersion” so if she can get training to teach immersion that would probably impress the hiring committee. It’s not really the most effective way to go about things but everything believes it is, so it’s what sells now.

I may have a workshop or two coming up in Socal but not yet certain of dates. It’ll be later in the fall if I do. I gave a training near San Francisco in June but it was mostly private school teachers. (That’s another possibility for her, though salaries are generally lower than public schools. The teachers all seemed fairly content with their lot, though, which I can not often say about public school teachers by and large these days.)

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Good to know that credentials don’t matter. So I guess she shouldn’t bother with the Ministry of Education’s annual Chinese-teaching certification exam, which is pretty cut-throat.

Was it hard getting the license in your state? How much prep work did you have to do before taking the exam? As a Taiwanese, my wife wants to know if there’s a buxiban for it, of course.

I’m not sure how much extra income we’re talking about, but I do know that some Chinese churches or non-profit organizations (Tzu Chi) hold “Chinese school” classes on the weekends. Teachers were definitely not certified, but were paid. It was mostly, whoever was willing to teach were asked.

Maybe this is something she can look into doing if the idea of teaching at a private school or even a tutoring/prep class doesn’t work out.

There are two hurdles involved for State licensure in most states. The Praxis exam is only one of them. It does require writing an essay by hand in pencil (in New York State, at least, within the last 10 years – I haven’t heard that this has changed) and it’s more than just knowledge of Chinese. THe information is on the Internet somewhere, sorry don’t have time to chase it down just now.

The real problem is coursework. You have to show that you have taken college-level coursework that satisfies specific requirements. These vary from State to State (of course). If you can’t demonstrate that the courses on your college transcript fulfill those requirements, off you go to take more courses. It cost me about US$5000 to get certified in NY, and that was on top of a Ph.D in teaching Mandarin. Which did very little good at all when it came to getting certified, though I was qualified to teach every single course that was required of me.

You can do the courses anywhere, in most cases – including online. But check with the State to make sure. Be prepared – I had to show coursework in Chemistry to become a licensed Chinese teacher (I took the CLEP exam to get out of a lab course). CLEP has a couple of options for some courses that are commonly required, and it only means reviewing for a day or two and doing the exam (and paying the fee). It doesn’t matter whether you do well, only that you pass.

Getting certified through alternative route was hugely expensive and very troublesome, and in more and more states it’s not even an option anymore. If your wife has any other skills, I’d urge her to spend her time improving her English as much as humanly possible and just getting a “regular job” instead. Just my NT$0.66, your mileage may vary.