What does it mean? Is it English?
If you’re referring to voluntourism, that’s a rapidly dying field.
My point is, I know that the county government where I’m at allots NT$850/hr in cash to foreign teachers for their weekend and summer camps (paid for 8 hours/ day, not the three hours actually taught). When the ETAs don’t take that money, do you really think the school that arranged the camp is giving the money back to the government? No, it’s a fistful of cash for whoever in the school planned the event. There was one year where there were five foreign teachers (FETs) and one ETA doing a camp. When the ETA insisted on not taking their share, their money got divided up among the rest of us. It was pretty sweet, until they then stopped asking the FETs to plan the camp because they realized they could make all that money off the ETAs. In one day, the people in the school that planned the event can make more money than an ETA (the people doing the work) makes in a month. That’s actually borderline slavery, and that’s not even an exaggeration to say so.
Yes, kids get a foreigner in their classroom who doesn’t know what they’re doing for a year in exchange for the foreigner being able to get any job they could ever want in the end. It’s all about the name, but really the ETA program just makes me raise my eyebrows at the claimed “greatness” of the Fulbright program. It looks like the qualifications are “you graduated from college with decent grades”? They don’t even personally (even over skype) interview you. Any American who’s legally qualified to work in a cram school could get a Fulbright ETA grant. It’s a bit watered down in the prestige category.
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you think so. I don’t think 40000NTD/month is slavery in Taiwan.
I use the word of slavery for college students who are forced to work in factories, not for those kids from US coming for 11 months of cultural exchange/experience with volunteering/internship at school and grant covering their all living cost.
The only point I care is the HIV disclosure requirement. I will ask them if that is an up to date info.
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When you produce a product (English classes) and your wages are being collected by your employer instead of being passed on to you (as is the case in the English camps), that’s slavery. It’s different from volunteering to clean up a beach or teach kids in a poverty-stricken area out of the goodness of your heart because there’s no money for them to give you. This is the money that’s supposed to be given to you for your work gets given to someone else because they think they’re entitled to it.
I’ve never met anyone who was so passionate in their hatred of the Fulbright program. What did Senator Fulbright do to you? It’s okay, you can tell us…
they choose to do it by their own will. They are not forced to sign the contract by any means. No financial pressure, no social pressure, no political pressure. No physical or psychological threatening.
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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.
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imo, you should compare their English level with their English when they wouldn’t have ETAs, not with the level you expect from a “proper” bilingual education.
they need to prioritize for what they use their money. Maybe bilingual ed is not on top of their list.
Sure, but the “data” they’re going off of shows that there’s been “significant improvement” in their English based on having ETAs, yet there hasn’t been any data collected. A survey of a student’s interest in English doesn’t show how much they’ve learned over the years, it shows that they can say “I value English” (in Chinese), while not being able to find their way out of an English coloring book.
And they can say they don’t have the money for bilingual ed/ hiring proper foreign teachers, but, in that case, they need to be honest with themselves that their method is never going to work. The reality is that Taiwan’s “law” says they’ll be bilingual by 2030. They’re going to have to do it somehow, and a constant turn over of foreigners who are only here for a one-year “experience” isn’t going to bring that. Maybe they should put the would-be ETA money into properly training their own teachers.
As the name suggests, he’s the founder of Fulbright.
yeah I got that
I’m an FET in Taitung. I think we have about 20 Fulbright ETAs in the county now. My two cents:
- Sometimes the Fulbright program works, sometimes it doesn’t. Usually it doesn’t seem to work well. The Fulbright program seems to be more about putting bodies into schools than about creating a good relationship between the schools and the ETAs.
- Some ETAs are very responsible people, but they are often burdened with things they shouldn’t be doing anyway.
- How ETAs are used seems to vary widely between counties. Some county governments are using them well, many others aren’t.
- A lot of ETAs don’t make it all the way through the school year. I’ve noticed the depression hitting just after Chinese New Year, and after that point they’re either looking for an exit strategy or they’re desperately counting the days until it’s over.
- They often seem very segregated from other foreigners. The coordinator in our area was actively encouraging them NOT to speak to other expats in the area.
- The program seems to generate a lot of confusion. I think the Fulbright Program needs to be clearer with the public school system, and explain better what this program is for.
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It seems like a very poorly thought out program that is relying on random graduates from the US for English teaching in public schools. I would much prefer my kids were taught by qualified Filipinos or Indians if that’s where the budget stretched to. This is disappointing as a parent with kids in public school here.
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I’ve seen that too. They’re encouraged to make local friends on a superficial level for bragging rights, but keep close only to other people in the program. I think if they were encouraged to reach out to the wider community (regardless of nationality), there would be more of a support system and a lot of their problems could be solved instead of suffering through/counting down the days.
I find the FETs from across Taiwan to be a fantastic group of people that I can rely on, and I might not have stuck around in Taiwan as long as I have if I didn’t have them + my other local and foreign friends. You need a support system of lots of different people who are willing to jump up and help due simply to their own personal awesomeness (and you need to do so in return) to survive anywhere. You can’t pay someone enough to be a stand-in for real friends.
I’ve done some things this year that have given me the chance to work with ETAs in my county, and I noticed that in September, the ETAs were really nice to each other and willing to work together, but by November/December (holidays that you’re missing of course don’t help), cliques had formed and some of our meetings were rather…tense…for reasons I certainly couldn’t see. When there’s only 20 of you and you’ve all got impostor syndrome and you’re trying to prove you deserve to be here, you’re going to run into social conflicts. Add that to the fact that some people do and some don’t know the local language/culture, not to mention you live in the middle of nowhere, and everything turns to crap.
I know a lot of coordinators don’t want ETAs to know about the lives of other foreigners, because they’re kinda scammy and don’t want to be caught (they have been caught over the years. To no legal consequences). A 3 bedroom apartment that might actually be NT$15,000/month costs each of the 3 ETAs NT$7,000/month. A scooter that could be rented for NT$2,500/month costs NT$3,500. Sure, it’s skimming a little off the top, but you do that x20 and you’ve got yourself a better form of income than the job that gave you the chance to scam foreigners in the first place.
Yep. The schools and local governments genuinely don’t know what ETAs are, how they came to come to Taiwan, why they chose to come to Taiwan, and what they can and cannot legally do. A rep from the Taipei edu department I was talking to kept telling me that ETAs were all graduates of education programs in the US who were doing their internships. I don’t know if Fulbright straight up lies or just lets people come to their conclusions and doesn’t correct them when they’re wrong.
I sense Fulbright hasn’t explicitly come out and said “ETAs are recent college graduates who are here to experience Taiwanese culture through a placement as an English teaching assistant in a public school. They are here to learn how Taiwanese schools are run and hopefully learn some Chinese along the way. We hope that through this exchange, Taiwanese schools and especially English teachers can gain something too. They are not here to be used as a replacement for English teachers and have not been trained to do so. Please don’t try that, it’s illegal and we’ve already gotten our funding cut a few times for pretending it’s not happening”. If they did, and enforced it, there wouldn’t be a lot of schools/ county governments willing to work with them, cuz that’s a lot of work that schools and county governments don’t have the energy to do.
Or they could make it explicitly clear in their contract what ETAs can and cannot do:
"As an ETA, you can teach classes alongside a local Taiwanese English teacher. (etc.)
“As an ETA, you cannot teach classes alone or under the supervision of a teacher that isn’t an English teacher”. (etc.)
Follow that up with:
"If you are asked to do any of the above listed things that you are not legally permitted to do, please contact: …
If whoever in Fulbright tells you to just suck it up and deal with it, reminding you of the importance of your resume and how complaining will affect your entire career, legal help can be found at '… ’
“We value your mental health and the sanity of those around you. We hope you have a great experience wherein we all follow the laws and you don’t get deported, as the Apple Daily suggested you should be back in 2015 when we said the reporter was ‘attacking the name of cultural exchange’”.
boy oh boy would that clear things up.
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Preach. A lot of those guys - whether willingly or not - are just a shade away from being Mormons.
We had a couple ETAs in my school a few years back. It didn’t work out. For whatever reason they stuck them in an unfinished classroom, told all the homeroom teachers they were now the ETA’s “assistants,” and it went predictably badly from there. I tried to help out where I could, but I had my own classes to worry about and the collective apathy was palpable.
Every time someone mentions the Fulbright Program my first thought is this guy they put down in Tai Ma Li Township years ago, in the middle of nowhere. He had no Chinese, no nearby friends/cohort members, and no idea what he was supposed to do. He cornered me at a local English competition, thinking I was a Fulbright too. All I could do was tell him to talk to his coordinator, hoping that somewhere someone gave a f**k.
On another level I think the ETAs aren’t all that different from the FETs. Only more so. We’re like expensive computers. You can buy the expensive computer, you can think of all the wonderful things it will do for your students, but if you don’t figure out how to use it properly you were just wasting your time and money. Left in a corner, as many ETAs and FETs are, those computers start to break down.
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I think at least education department knows it.
邱孝文表示，由於英語外師並沒有教師證，所以只是以英語協同教學，並不直接教英語課程進度，利用如體育、音樂、美術、團體活動等課程，用英語參與學生的學習活動，創造使用英語環境，讓學生自然而然學會英文，在外師旁會有熟練英語的中師協同教學，所以每堂課至少有兩名老師，如加上專科老師，最多會有3名老師。
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If they have a clear plan that’s limited to what ETAs are and are not allowed to do more power to them.
But between the county education bureau and the individual schools a lot can get lost. Putting a few ETAs with subject teachers can work if everyone’s very motivated and the goals of that interaction are clear, but this isn’t usually the case.
Also it’s Yunlin, where all the weirdest stuff happens. 
This is the first time I’ve seen a press release clearly state the purpose of the ETA program and expressly state what they are allowed to do. I hope that this really is what’s happening in Yunlin, because if the schools really do understand what’s up, it would have the potential to save the ETAs from loosing their minds. It’s absolutely not what’s happening in my county.
I am a little confused by
This makes it sound like “because they don’t have teaching licenses, they are helpers and can’t teach directly to the curriculum” as a sort of “therefore, they can only use PE, music, art, and “group activities” (clubs?) to create an English environment.” This makes it sound like they aren’t allowed to teach English directly in any form, like conversation classes, etc.
This both clarifies and contradicts the entire point of the program. Aren’t ETAs supposed to assist in teaching English, whatever that might mean? (That’s the name, English teaching assistant). Where I find this contradictory is that it sounds like they aren’t allowed to teach English classes, but are expected to teach any non-core subject but English, using English. That’s not English teaching, it’s CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning), which can work if you don’t have someone translating every word into your native language, and fails to do anything for language acquisition if you do.
Does the education bureau understand that “bilingual education” means core classes are taught in the target language? From Wikipedia
Bilingual education involves teaching academic content in two languages, in a native and secondary language with varying amounts of each language
The more I hear about these “bilingual schools” boasting about using PE, art, music and “clubs” as the only time that English is being used, the more I wonder if there is anyone in the education bureau who has ever even dreamed of maybe setting foot in a “teaching world languages 101” class… “Academic content” is math, science, social studies, literacy, and maybe computer science. Fine arts and PE are not academic, as much as people might wish they were.
you didn’t read this post?
No. I try not to read too many of the political threads here, because I just find them depressing and often find myself at odds with both sides.
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