Please remember that ESL programs are for non-native students of English living in English speaking countries. One could make the argument that Taiwanese students at truly international schools (ie, Taipei American School) are ESL students because the entire school environment and after school activities are conducted exclusively in English, but otherwise, there is no ESL in Taiwan, because the language when you leave the classroom is still Chinese. It’s frustrating that people here use “ESL” because not using the same terminology as the rest of the TESOL world abroad only leads to further confusion. Students in these so-called “bilingual” schools might have more advanced English than their non-bilingual school peers, but they are not learning English to survive in academic and daily life (as a necessity based on their environment), which is the purpose of an ESL program. Teaching academic subjects in English to Taiwanese students who are in Taiwan is “English immersion”. Teaching academic subjects to Taiwanese students who go on a summer trip to Australia is ESL.
That being said, I can’t imagine anyone actually enjoys teaching grammar and vocabulary. The complete lack of training leads everyone to think that’s the only way that English can be taught. There’s nothing to prove them wrong, other than crap test scores for decades. The reality is that teachers are too lazy to find a way that works on their own, but schools will happily use foreigners to do a half-assed job at creating more effective English language environments, then complain and blame when their students continue to fail the GEPT.
There was a lot of complaining at this year’s January FET training because a lot of FETs were told to teach “CLIL”, but were handed a Taiwanese textbook (in Chinese) and told to teach an academic subject class with little or no support from the schools. Interestingly, now that I’ve read through the contract about five times, I can’t actually find anything stating that I am required to teach English in the contract. I guess I could teach aeriel arts if I wanted to, since the contract only goes into detail about how many classes I’m supposed to teach a lot about how I’ll be fired if neighbors complain about my conduct outside of school. Nothing at all about how I’m to teach English though. Fascinating. It does explicitly state that FETs are to have a co-teacher, unless there is express written permission from both parties that allow teaching alone.