Got it, in my professional life I use the term ELL… But for the sake of this forum I’ve been using ESL…I know the meaning but it’s more commonly used.
Personally I like that. I prefer to create my own resources rather than follow some that are poorly chosen. I think this is because I’ve taught a variety of subjects and have experience. I can see why a new teacher might be find this troublesome though.
Anyways, I understand your point and I’m just reiterating mine that I much prefer to teach English through subjects
I already do thematic units, so there’s a bit of every subject in all my classes. I expect the students to use certain common sentence structures to express comprehension and their opinions, as opposed to “baby was found by a friend of mine”, and other garbage from 康軒. Vocab lists are created based on what they need to communicate about a topic, not from the government’s 1200 單 list. This semester, my students have learned statistics, geography, history and science (in the pandemics unit), Geography, history, human rights, environmentalism, and capitalism (in the fast fashion unit, which I was inspired to do after their truly garbage unit about fashion from 康軒), and now they’re learning math, science, and disaster prepping because of 康軒’s worthless “we saw the wind blow down many trees" lesson, which teaches dangerous lies such as putting tape on your windows during a typhoon. Point of my lessons is the information they walk away with, not the English specifically.
That being said, to leave me responsible for teaching content that the students need to know for the only thing that matters, the 會考, would lead me to leave this school pretty quickly. With the way Taiwanese homeroom teachers steal all materials from other teachers and test the students during break-time daily (on subjects that they’re not responsible for teaching), someone else would have made the students cram the information that I planned to teach (in Chinese) before I’d ever have the chance to teach it in any engaging way in English. Then I’d get “gerrrrrr! This is soooooo boooorrrriiiinnnggg!!! We learned this alllreeeeaaddddyyyy” from everyone and my existence and lesson in English would be pointless. Were I to provide fake lesson plans to the homeroom teachers in order to protect my opportunity to teach the students myself, I’d end up with co-workers who bitched about me lying about my curriculum and doing a bad job of teaching and everyone being fake to me. Because there’s a “required curriculum” and “my curriculum”, no one cares what I teach and I have total freedom over how I teach my students, without fear of homeroom teachers trying to test the students on material that they’re not ready for multiple choice tests on.
I hope the goal of the FET program would be to pair up Taiwanese teachers with professionals in bilingual education from countries that have made it work (I’m thinking of the Netherlands) and teach Taiwanese teachers to be better teachers. Along with this, train Taiwanese teachers to speak an English that isn’t riddled with Chinglish, and require an ACFTL score of “Superior” to be permitted to do any instruction in English. Then make FETs just another teacher in the school who teach whatever subject they’re licensed to teach in their home country, which could be EFL or any other subject, instead of some outside person who doesn’t have the same responsibilities or rights as a “real teacher”, and whose classes count for .1% of a student’s final GPA.
This question is a little off topic, but I was wondering if that link was what your contract says exactly? I was looking through mine today and noticed that some of the wording in the sections are different, or missing.
Contracts vary from county to county. I just signed with Pingtung County after working in Taitung County for years, and there were some slight differences between the two contracts for each county. I can only guess that the contracts for Kaohsiung, Taichung and Taipei differ even more. Taitung and Pingtung are still part of the nationwide FET program, Kaohsiung, Taichung and Taipei’s FET programs are administered by their city governments.
The contract I linked to was on the FET website last year. tbh, I don’t how it varies from my own contract, which I only take out to check dates (sometimes it’s from the date of arrival in Taiwan starting August 13-July 13, sometimes its August 26-July 26. Makes a HUGE difference for pay, since an August 23 arrival on a contract that ends July 13 means you lost 11 days of pay)
The only time my school has ever tried to hold my contract over my head was to tell me that I “must” teach summer camp, but then they couldn’t find it (in their copy of the contract). They break the contract alllllllll the time and tell me things like it’s “more of a guidance” and “you don’t understand Taiwanese culture”. Okedoke, I’ll see what the courts say?
I remember seeing a contract from Taoyuan a few years back that said “teachers can’t leave the school for any reason including going out for lunch” or something along those lines.
I’ve also heard of people who were given a contract and the pay chart was a few thousand less than the other schools gave them.
Not being able to go out for lunch I can understand (safety, and I’m sure something happened that would have that added in), but pay being less or hours being more would seem fishy.
There’s going to be some variation, but if your school’s contract varies toooo much, I’d check it against the one I linked to and talk to whoever the MOE contact person currently is.
I’m also a major fan of one of NatGeo’s ESL series. While I haven’t had experience with One World, I found Life for upper-Elem through MS to be amazing on all the same points you bring up – plus the student’s edition to teacher’s edition is seamless. Oh – and this part seems nearly impossible to understand for the local teachers and school admin because I keep having to repeat it – its topical content is clearly geared for pre-teens and teens and not 7-9 year old kids.
They’re not the only great series out there, but boy it’s just a fantastic base standard of when everything is clearly designed for the target students (skill and age). When the district tried to pitch me their poorly organized, poorly developed book, my counter was to immediately bring it up as either a direct option or design template standard.
The more I look into it, the more I think most Nat Geo texts are pretty great. There’s even a few that use TED talks as the main focus, which looks great for junior high and up. But yes you need to chose the ones designated for the correct age level. You can’t show first graders a TED talk about unfair housing, and ninth graders don’t need a lesson about things in their classroom (well, a lot do, but they won’t pay attention)
I went back to this statement, and you know something? That statement you mentioned is exactly true about me. I won’t stay in the system for another year or so either knowing the fact that my school decided not to extend my contract. But why the heck should I care?
And I also found out today that after they cut me from the program at my school, they are going to bring in 8 more foreign teachers into my school’s bilingual program. Let me tell you these foreign teachers could not be moving in from overseas because the border for Taiwan is closed because of the COVID-19. It’s most likely that all these foreign teachers are coming in from around Taiwan. They are adding more to the bilingual program by adding all these foreign teachers, and yet I am cut. Well, that’s OK because once I leave I am never coming back. I tried my best in this bilingual program but it does not seem to be fitting with me, or maybe it’s just the school.
I have been teaching in Taiwan for quite some time now. I began my teaching in Hawaii on the island of Hawaii, moved to Alaska and taught in the village of Seldovia, moved to Texas and taught there too. My certification is for Early Childhood Education from the University of Texas at Austin and have taught in some amazing International Baccalaureate member schools who promise: “The International Baccalaureate (IB) develops lifelong learners who thrive and make a difference.”
At this point, I have experienced a lot of Teaching methodologies. At the moment I am teaching in Tainan’s public school system under the BOE. My prior experiences in Taiwan had always been in Hsinchu and Taipei in the private school system. As far as I have been informed the Bilingual Education program is gone in favor of the Content Language Integrated Learning or CLIL program. Much of what the programs in the North do are “English Conversation” classes.
In the CLIL program I have taught Scouting, Home Economics, Performing Arts, and Physical Education or PE (Just to name a few). Back in the Private schools I was assigned to teach Bilingual Math and faced jealousy from the local teachers who just wanted me to play with the stunts and play games, leaving the Math instruction to them.
In Tainan’s CLIL PE I teach Kindergarten, 1st grade, and 2nd grade students. My students have very limited (often zero) English. But I teach them very well and their English abilities grow because they make serious attempts to understand the classes. We play brand new PE games every class. There are no vocabulary words or sentence patterns, that they are aware of… When I think of CLIL Taekwondo comes to mind. No child signs up for Taekwondo thinking, Oh Wow, I’m going to learn Korean. But all Taekwondo is in fact taught in Korean, so every student learns Korean while studying Taekwondo.
Teaching CLIL classes has been the best experience of my Teaching. If I could go back to Alaska and teach Children how to make traditional skin over frame boats or to Hawaii to teach them in the practical way that CLIL uses I feel certain that the learning would be amazing. Taiwan’s Bureau of Education or BOE really seems to be onto something.
CLIL didn’t originate here, it follows from the Canadian immersion system and the academic work has been buidling for quite some time
Like so much, it depends. Unqualified (even if “certified”) teachers lacking the linguistic competence and/or pedagogical flexibility are going to hate it and not get good results.
Off the top of my head Dalton-Puffer and Lasagabaster are two names you can search for in Google Scholar, with CLIL each time, for some reading
Sure, they’re learning words like “run” and “jump” and “stop” and will eventually maybe internalize them, but they can also learn those and how to use them in much more contexts with a few songs from “super simple songs”. I spent a summer in another country with people who barely spoke English. I learned a little bit of the local language and the very random words I did take in do stick in my brain very well all these years later. But a few weeks of me learning that language from a traditional textbook and out of the language country still gave me a much better foundation than just hanging out with people and playing summer camp games in that other language. CLIL never was meant to be used as a foundational language instruction method and the way it’s being done here is really just “full immersion but it’s ok if they speak Chinese”, which means kids might pick up on “I jumping!” but they’d learn that same thing if you just did regular old TPR with any amount of consistency
My problem with CLIL is that Taiwan has created two versions: version one = foreign teacher teaches a fake/parallel version of the “real” class where the kids hopefully learn some content and language but it’s ok if they don’t because the “real teacher” who teaches the “real class” will make sure they at least learn what needs to be learned to pass the tests. Version two = suddenly tell local content area teachers in mid-August that they will teach their classes half in English in the coming school year. Some of these teachers might know some English but some of them do not. I have Taiwanese friends teaching in public high schools who can barely carry on a simple conversation with me in English who have been told they might have to teach their subject in English in the next few years. At best, they’ll throw some Chinglish at the students and accept ChatGPT produced papers. What else do they have the skills to do?!
I am wondering what sort of proficiency assessment you’re looking at to come to this conclusion? What I see are a lot of confidently incorrect in their English students who score high on Taiwan’s English assessments because Taiwan’s English assessments themselves are not written by or for English speakers outside of Taiwan. To me, a successful language program would be one where students go from zero to “able to confidently, with relative accuracy, and at length, talk about basic things in their lives, such as where they’re from, things that interest them, other people in their lives, etc.” within 100 hours of instructional time. I look at Taiwanese schools that have implemented CLIL and these kids are getting upwards of 20 hours per week and congratulated on being able to say “I stu-en. I like-uh EnglEEsh” and correctly spell maybe 30% of the 600 words list without any knowledge of what any of the words actually mean or how to use them after two years of this education experience. They don’t know the difference between “who”, “what”, “when”, “where”, “why” and “how” and at best they can answer conversational questions like “do you like to eat pizza?” with something kind of related like “at noon” (because they eat pizza at noon?). I don’t see CLIL as progress compared to what moderately competent US-based world language teachers are doing on a daily basis (and with zero resources to give the students more opportunities to practice the target language outside of the classroom). I would be persuaded if the local governments did proficiency assessments like STAMP or ACTFL’s OPI on all students at the start, middle, and end of each year and progress was shown. But from what I’ve seen, unless kids have really good private tutors, almost all Taiwanese kids are still at a pre-A1/novice level even into high school. They know a lot of disjointed words but they cannot carry on a basic conversation or tell a simple story that follows a plot. Again, show me fluency test results (not anecdotal evidence) and I may be persuaded.