Rant about weird parent request (teaching English)

Work Teaching English in Taiwan
1

I’m designing a new course at my school for advanced students. This involves both grammar instruction as well as an English Language Arts course.

The parents have expressed their wish for a Taiwanese English teacher to teach grammar because they believe a Taiwanese teacher will be better at teaching grammar than a native speaker. Although I’m grateful to have a short reprieve from my mounting responsibilities, I found this reasoning to be a little funny.

I’m not sure what would lead them to believe this generalization. What do you think about this? Have you heard this before?

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They believe a local will have a better understanding of English grammar as needed in courses here, most simply because they learned it explicitly that way themselves. They may also believe that they can communicate it more effectively in a common native language.

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When I first started the Taiwanese teachers were in charge of teaching pronunciation. The logic being that they knew KK phonics

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4

This part I think is pretty reasonable actually. It’s a good point

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This one is a disaster. I found out a lot of the things I chopped up to being an accent is actually due to poor teaching in childhood!

I was shocked when I learned how taiwanese have been taught phonics

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It avoids possible contradictions with what the Taiwanese teacher is doing as well.

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7

How many taiwanese do you know who cannot differentiate between soft and hard A sounds?

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I forgot to point out, these classes are for fluent English speakers (fluent but not native).

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What is a soft and hard a sound?

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Sometimes I can’t tell if my wife wants to eat a snake(soft?) or a snack(hard?).

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11

I thought that was long and short vowels.

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Oh yeah. That’s what they called it when we were in school.

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My wife is apparently incapable, despite my best efforts, of addressing our nephew by his proper name Nate.

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A sounds like Eh like apricot

a sounds like ah like apple

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So they learn to pronounce
‘f’, ‘l’, ‘m’ and ‘n’
as
‘ehfoo’, ‘ehloo’, ‘ehmoo’ and ‘ehnoo’?

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That’s long and short vowels…?

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Yeah but a is specifically a challenge

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It’s easy.

ㄟ
ㄚ

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f = eh-foo
l = eh-low
m = eh-moo
n = uhn
g = jwee
h = ai-chee
r = aaaaah!
x = eh-kus

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Every language has its own readings of the alphabet.