I don’t really know who Senator Fulbright is. What I do know is that my students come from elementary schools that claim to be “bilingual” and have a bunch of ETAs and other otherwise not-qualified foreigners teaching their classes.
When those students get to me in junior high, they have these insane beliefs about how great their English is, because their foreign “teachers” and the county government says so.
They also have no respect for me, because they think I’m the same dancing monkey with no idea how to manage a classroom that they’ve had since kindergarten (yes, there are ETAs in my county teaching kindy). So when I try to actually teach them something, using, say, TPRS or CI, they just roll their eyes, complain loudly in Chinese that they “learned this already”, and don’t have any interest in the interactive version of English class where we all listen to, act out, and speak English, some of which will be a review, because English class isn’t 100% new content every day.
Then they complain when I have videos prepared for EFL students at their level and I don’t give them Chinese subtitles. “our elementary school foreign teacher put up subtitles. We watched YouTube all the time”. Yeah? If your English is as great as you think it is, you don’t need subtitles for this video! I wouldn’t know what would happen if my students had qualified foreign teachers in their elementary school, because all I’ve ever had were kids taught by ETAs.
I also have to listen to my principal tell me about how my “incoming students next year will be really great at English” because “they have a foreign teacher teaching all their classes”. For the last 4 years. Yet to have an incoming student who can introduce themself when they enter my room.
I know I’ve beaten the whole “bilingual ed” thing to death in the other thread, but there is nothing more frustrating than an entire education system that truly believes that the act of having any foreigner at all in the classroom means the kids are gunna be fluent in English by the time they reach puberty.
We had a county government party for all the foreigners a few weeks back. One of the county officials spent a good 10 minutes talking about how their “research shows” that there’s been “significant improvement” of English skills in the county in past few years. I asked to see this research. They said they got the data from Fulbright. I asked to see that. They eventually told me the data came from a survey that they gave the fifth graders, which was ranking things like “English is very important to me” and “I think it’s important to learn another language” from 1 to 5. Sure, an improvement in an interest in learning English is great, but it’s not the same thing as English proficiency, which, at the end of the day, is kind of the point of having foreign teachers.
I know there really needs to be an education overhaul in this country for the whole bilingual thing to work, but increasing the number of college grads with a focus on their resume isn’t going to do anything about the crap English teaching strategies. The government is complicit by allowing exponential growth of ETAs while lazily not recruiting real foreign teachers who will stick around for more than a few months.