China Post on English Teaching Qualifications

Work Teaching English in Taiwan
1

The rules regarding the hiring of foreign English teachers are significantly simpler. For the most part, a foreigner who wishes to be hired by one of the many chains of local licensed “buxiban” or cram schools needs to be from an English-speaking country and must hold a valid university degree. This would mean that theoretically, a South African who studied Baroque architecture would be qualified to teach English to Taiwanese children. This same theoretical South African, however, might not be allowed to work for a Taiwanese company that does trade with South Africa. It seems fair to question why the qualification requirements for English teachers are reasonably low while the bar for white-collar jobs is higher. As an aside, the government might also want to consider moving towards requiring English teachers to possess some kind of teaching certificate or at least have a university degree that has something to do with the English language or education.

If the government does decide to loosen the rules for hiring white-collar foreign workers it will need to set some ground rules. The rights and responsibilities of both the employee and the employer will need to be established and made clear to both parties. This process will not be an easy undertaking, but it is time to begin re-evaluating the laws regarding hiring white-collar foreign workers.

AGREED!

2

It would be nice if people who are teaching had some kind of educational qualification, or at the very least had studied the English language.

That’s just an aside :astonished: !

A criminal record check wouldn’t go amiss, either. Perhaps some knowledge of basic first aid, too?

3

A link to the editorial: chinapost.com.tw/editorial/t … t-must.htm

4

I think this was a cool thing. I am from Canada and I got a job working in White Collar area no sweat! I would rather teach English but I’m an ABC so no one wants me around. :boo-hoo: I think getting a job in taiwan is real hard if you don’t want to teach English, but I think it is for good. I love Taiwan! :lick:

5

It’s not going to happen. Here’s why. A teacher in the MOE programme gets about 1,000NTD/hour once you take into account all the benefits and bonuses. The MOE can’t get nearly enough teachers as it is. To become competitive with other countries really making a push into EFL/ESL (e.g. The UAE is now in the process of changing its curriculum so that English, mathematics and science are all taught entirely in English, and this obviously requires large numbers of teachers), they’d have to pay accordingly. They’d basically have to be looking at 1,500NTD’s worth of pay and other benefits per hour. That simply isn’t going to happen.

I mean, I’m sure if they were willing to send a current foreign teacher in the MOE programme and one representative from the MOE on a two week recruiting trip just to the west coast of the U.S. and Canada, they’d still be able to get themselves a couple of dozen teachers easily enough for well under 200,000NTD (and if you spread that over the course of a year for the teachers involved, you’d be talking about less than an extra 2,000NTD/teacher/month). They could do this easily. Hess (and probably other buxibans) do recruitments at university job fairs. In Australia and New Zealand, various teaching agencies for teachers in the U.K. recruit periodically each year. This is not rocket science. Why isn’t anyone doing it? I’d offer to do it myself if they’d pay for my expenses and/or give me a finder’s fee, but I know they’d balk at the idea of actually having to spend money on this, rather than just having an ad or website no one is going to see. Maybe I’ll still pitch it to them. Bit of a lost cause though.

Here’s where it gets interesting though. A teacher in the MOE programme would be teaching at least 20 kids per class. At 1,500NTD/hour, that works out at 75NTD/student/hour. Schools should be approaching parents and putting this forward. Actually, the MOE could just be telling them this is how it’s going to be. Parents are probably paying 150-200NTD/hour at buxibans and getting less qualified teachers (including Taiwanese teachers with no background in education). This is a no-brainer.

Or maybe not.

About eighteen months ago, my wife and I approached over one hundred government schools in Taoyuan City and Taoyuan County with this very proposal, which should be an obvious win-win-win for the parents, students and teachers. The result? Three schools were sort of interested. The teacher at one of those schools realised it was a very rational choice (most couldn’t have given a shit, sadly), but said it would be a hard sell to the parents. He pitched it at them, and they decided to keep sending their kids to buxibans in another town not that close to where they lived, and pay a higher price for someone who was presumably less qualified than I am. Someone else figure that one out.

It was at that point that I really needed a break from Taiwan and the English teaching industry here and left several months. I do what I do now, and I’m still trying to improve things, but other than what happens to me on an immediate level, I’m not too concerned anymore. Needless to say though, I’m not here for the money. Few of the people in this programme would be, which is why they also have trouble retaining people for the long term because aside from people married to locals, there’s no long term future here, either financially or professionally, unless you plan to eventually start your own business or build independent wealth in some other way (as I am doing with investing – which is why, one day, I’ll most likely just walk away from this entire industry).

The MOE could completely pull the rug out from under the buxiban industry by mandating an “English surcharge” that would provide a much better quality teacher at a much cheaper price than the buxiban industry provides. I suspect that there either isn’t the will because there’s no real incentive for a bureaucrat to do this, or there are active incentives (i.e. bribes) from the buxiban industry to maintain the status quo. Given the open flouting of the law by bilingual kindergartens, I suspect the latter.

6

Guyintaiwan, I agree with you but you have to keep one thing in mind when you calculate this.
The hidden costs of running a program is what gets you down.
if you are looking at paying a teachers 1000 an hour to teach a 10 student class, he costs you 100 dollars per person, but you are not calculating the cost of the rent, utilities receptionist and other things.
It is not all “GUNS and ROSES” out here. It’s a Jungle, not Paradise City.

7

“Where the grass is green and the girls are pretty” waaaaan!! ha ha. good stuff heimuoshu!!

8

Ah, but what would be the benefit of having better qualified English teachers? Who would be able to tell the difference – except the better qualified English teachers?

It’s all about those test scores, baby.

9

The problem, as you know (ironlady and others) is that the tests do not always measure proficiency and therefore we have o way of improving ALL test scores because some of them lack reliability and validity. Now what. It’s like trying to light a candle, in the cold November rain.

10

Further, ask yourself how most parents gauge “good teaching”. What kind of results are they interested in? Practical ability, ‘real’ acquisition, confidence?

For example, it kills me, knowledge of obscure grammar - mathematical, artificial language - isn’t very useful when one cannot communicate comfortably with a native speaker (of course, it is useful if you have a grammar-heavy ‘standardized test’).

Sometimes I think that most parents only want a white skinned, blonde teacher with eyes of the bluest skies, as if they thought of rain.

11

Another thing that is really annoying is that for many of us, this is a serious career. It gets cheapened by some of the clowns that come here and do nothing constructive.
Many of the types of teacher mentioned teach at day and dance with Mr Brownstone at night.

12

[quote=“tomthorne”]It would be nice if people who are teaching had some kind of educational qualification, or at the very least had studied the English language.

That’s just an aside :astonished: !

A criminal record check wouldn’t go amiss, either. Perhaps some knowledge of basic first aid, too?[/quote]

Don’t people study the English language in elementary school in England, Australia, South Africa, the United States, and Canada? I hope that after 12 years of formal education that one would know something about English.

13

Most of what is taught in Taiwan isn’t English, it’s English Linguistics Lite – grammar rules. Knowing those is how you succeed on the tests (assuming you’re also memorized all the individual vocabulary words).

The average level of literacy in an English-speaking country is quite low, if you take the population as a whole. Many people can’t spell, would have difficulty writing a coherent five-paragraph essay such as students have to write in middle school in the States, and generally would be hopeless at teaching English. Except, of course, that their passport is the right color, so Naruwan!

14

[quote=“steelersman”][quote=“tomthorne”]It would be nice if people who are teaching had some kind of educational qualification, or at the very least had studied the English language.

That’s just an aside :astonished: !

A criminal record check wouldn’t go amiss, either. Perhaps some knowledge of basic first aid, too?[/quote]

Don’t people study the English language in elementary school in England, Australia, South Africa, the United States, and Canada? I hope that after 12 years of formal education that one would know something about English.[/quote]

Yes, of course.

I was paraphrasing the requirements suggested by the China Post beyond simply being a native English speaker. The first was some kind of teaching qualification. Alternatively, some kind of qualification related to the English language.

15

I agree that there should be a criminal background check of people who teach children.

16

hei: Indeed, there are extra costs, but that’s all the more reason schools could completely put buxibans out of business. Any school already has the infrastructure in place, which it uses for other things and doesn’t have to pay a premium on compared to someone paying rent on a commercial building. Anyway, some of these buxibans, such as Hess get 20 or more kids in a class and charge them 200NTD+/hour. Plus they no doubt charge a premium for the books and other materials that students have to use. It’s a very rich and powerful organisation. The little buxibans are running on tighter margins. They’re fair game for schools to pull the rug, so to speak.

steelersman: By junior high school or the equivalent, grammar and spelling are no longer studied in and of themselves in English speaking countries. Things like essay writing are. Regardless, how many people get it at the time? It’s a vertical curriculum, but too bad if you were absent that day or simply didn’t get it. There’s no time to hold back until you do get it because the next chapter beckons. How many people remember it ten years later? If people can’t remember what they learnt in history or mathematics or anything else when they were fifteen because they don’t use any of that in their daily lives when they’re twenty-five, why would they remember a whole lot of English linguistics, essay writing, spellings of unusual words, etc. if they don’t use those things in their daily lives at the age of twenty-five? Most of what we learn in school gets forgotten. What (some) teachers often forget is that just because they are teachers, and therefore probably have some interest in knowledge, not everyone does.

17

I don’t see any problem with the existing law regarding white-collar workers. The two-year rule is to ensure that workers bring some useful skills to Taiwan and to exclude the corporate equivalent of the “backpacker English teacher.” Any Westerner with less than 2 years experience in a professional job is basically a trainee and brings nothing to Taiwan except their, erm, whiteness.

18

[quote=“GuyInTaiwan”]hei: Indeed, there are extra costs, but that’s all the more reason schools could completely put buxibans out of business. Any school already has the infrastructure in place, which it uses for other things and doesn’t have to pay a premium on compared to someone paying rent on a commercial building. Anyway, some of these buxibans, such as Hess get 20 or more kids in a class and charge them 200NTD+/hour. Plus they no doubt charge a premium for the books and other materials that students have to use. It’s a very rich and powerful organisation. The little buxibans are running on tighter margins. They’re fair game for schools to pull the rug, so to speak.

steelersman: By junior high school or the equivalent, grammar and spelling are no longer studied in and of themselves in English speaking countries. Things like essay writing are. Regardless, how many people get it at the time? It’s a vertical curriculum, but too bad if you were absent that day or simply didn’t get it. There’s no time to hold back until you do get it because the next chapter beckons. How many people remember it ten years later? If people can’t remember what they learnt in history or mathematics or anything else when they were fifteen because they don’t use any of that in their daily lives when they’re twenty-five, why would they remember a whole lot of English linguistics, essay writing, spellings of unusual words, etc. if they don’t use those things in their daily lives at the age of twenty-five? Most of what we learn in school gets forgotten. What (some) teachers often forget is that just because they are teachers, and therefore probably have some interest in knowledge, not everyone does.[/quote]

I am not disagreeing but funny enough I took the PRAXIS to be a teacher in the United States and I only missed one math question after having taught English in Asia for five years. Prior to that I studied German Literature at the graduate level. How did I test in the top one percentile after not taking a math class since 2003? I also got a 700 on the GRE in math before entering graduate school to study German Literature.

19

steelersman: I don’t know. How is it that I studied history in school until the end of year ten and was reasonably good at it (though it was fairly shallow), then studied two semesters of medieval history in my first year of university and was not good at it, didn’t like it and can’t remember much now, and yet these days, I could probably tell you a lot more about history than the average person, and more to the point, have learnt more about history in the past five years than in all my years of formal education? Because I have an interest and have read about it? Because I am naturally talented? I don’t know.

I remember subbing a year 10 maths class in Australia once and being able to help the kids with their classwork, despite not having studied mathematics since high school (unless you include the bit of stats we did in psychology).

Maybe you were good at maths or paid attention in class or something. When I was in high school, and even at university in some subjects, I never studied for exams other than to quickly browse the textbook the night before. I finished reading The Crucible by Arthur Miller the day before my English exam in my final year of high school. I could do that kind of thing in most subjects and get very high marks. I figured a large part of it was turning up, paying attention, doing the homework and just thinking a little bit. Plenty of people go through school (and life) not turning up, or they turn up and don’t pay attention, or don’t do the homework, or they don’t want to think. I actually don’t think it’s difficult to get through school (or most situations in life either). Yet most people have really, really shocking problem solving abilities in any kind of novel situation and they’re really bad at learning new information.

I think though that for most people, they’re either engaged with life, the world and themselves or they’re not. There’s probably some sort of critical period for this in childhood, but for most people, I think they either get this or they don’t. Obviously, the education system should try to help bring out the best in people, but for the great mass of people, they’re just turning up to school, work and life generally. Maybe you’re just one of those people who gets it and probably always got it from the age of five onwards (which was probably apparent to all the adults around you).

20

Except for the adults that didn’t get it.

This might explain why I enrolled and began studying Mandarin at 7:30PM on a Monday in September 2007 after having arrived in Taiwan 24 hours before hand. I did not begin the Mandarin class because I was that excited about learning Mandarin. The thing I got is that you never know how long you will be in Taiwan so if you have the money and time one should get started learning Mandarin.

The way it is looking, I now may be speaking Mandarin until the day I retire.