Taipei Times letter 2/20

i ever done such.

Being at an English-immersion preschool which teaches children with a preschool curriculum that supports their development rather than an English curriculum, I can see where this person is coming from. Before you start flaming me, hear me out.

Excuse me for using “their” when referring to a single person. If you are anal retentive about this or looking to use it as flaming fodder (yawn…), it’s because it saves time from writing “him or her”.

The first three years of a child’s life set the stage for the rest of their life. Even up to kindergarten, it is important to help children develop important skills in language, literacy, fine motor, gross motor, cognitive, social, and self-help skills. Sitting in a desk writing English words and getting drilled by flashcards for 5-6 hours a day is not the way to do this. I honestly doubt that up to 80% of the foreigners teaching children under the age of six have a clue about the developmental stages of their “students”. That puts a serious dent in our credibility as teachers. A small percent of foreign kindergarten teachers here have any training (and no, the two-week thing before you started teaching doesn’t count as teacher training in the real world), let alone early childhood or even elementary education qualifications.
I will be the first to admit that I don’t, but I have done courses in child psychology, educational psychology, and psycholinguistics that have helped me be sensitive and aware of how children learn and how children need to be treated in addition to my degree in linguistics (with a specialization in TESOL). I have worked under the tutelage of two great principals who have post-graduate degrees in ECE who have always been willing to help me and have been a wonderful resource of information and ideas. My first year in Taiwan, I taught a class of three-year-olds. While I loved that class, I am glad they handed it over to someone with a professional background in ECE. My background is language and I incorporate what I know about child development when I plan, prepare, teach, and record my observations of my preschoolers as the English intervention teacher. I teach them in small groups (I do not allow more than four children in my groups) for only 30 minutes which is spent doing activities which are relevant to their learning abilities while teaching them English concepts that they need for an English-immersion environment.
I think that the reputation of foreign teachers here have been to blame here, but part of that is due to the Taiwanese school owners hiring practices. By choosing solely on physical appearances, rather than real qualifications, they are shooting themselves in the foot. Would you have someone who looked like a brain surgeon and had a Ph.D. in archaelogy do brain surgery on you? Then why would a caucasian with a degree in philosophy have any reason to teach English to small children?
How about those who, God forbid, forge documents (i.e. university degrees) in order to be considered legal teachers? In the US, forging someone else’s document is a crime. In Taiwan, however, they encourage people who are willing to commit crime to teach young children by being lax on verifying their documents. I met an 18-year-old who bragged about having a forged master’s in child psychology. It seriously pisses me off that someone out there really worked their ass off to earn it and this person paid for someone to wipe their name off it so she could get a job she was not qualified for in the first place (five minutes talking to her and I would be afraid to leave a 15-year-old with her, let alone a 5-year-old). She’s not the only one in Taiwan who has admitted to me that they had a forged document. If the FA didn’t beat me to it, I would have been more than happy to report her to them.
No, it’s not a matter of having a degree making you more qualified to teach. It’s a matter of being honest. If you can teach young children, then great. If not, stick to elementary schools or adults where your lack of knowledge will not leave nearly as damaging of an imprint as on a small child. The Taiwanese are paying lots of their hard-earned money to schools and entrusting their young children to us. By knowingly lying to those parents by stealing someone’s accomplishments, how dare people then complain about a crackdown in an albeit misguided attempt to eradicate their children being educated by people who honestly have no business teaching young children. I only wish they would do it in a way that targeted fake schools (i.e. kindergartens where the preschoolers are given unrealistic expectations, such as memorizing lists of words each week, with no regard to developing them in areas other than language) rather than hurting everyone.

To tell the truth, it’s the lying, forgeries, and people completely ignorant of things that are appropriate to children’s learning (both of foreigners and the Taiwanese) that really bothers me. I don’t blame the MOE for finally saying enough is enough if this is their real intention for the latest decree.

Just my NT$0.67.

ImaniOU

Well, I’d say that depends how much time the kids spend at school - if you spent 30-40 hours a week in an English-only environment, no, I don’t believe it would require further reinforcement for the second language to ‘take hold’, at least the spoken aspect. But yes, everyone has to make their own decision for their kids :slight_smile: [/quote]

Think outside of language. Kindergarten should not be only about learning English. To apply what grayson says, discipline can be an aspect that needs to be reinforced at home. It makes a teacher’s job harder (trust me!) if they are trying to teach children to be responsible for their actions and be aware of the consequences for doing both good and bad things only to send them home to parents who don’t follow through on punishments and rewards and easily give in so the kids can keep pushing limits. To try and help kids resolve conflict through expressing themselves, only to have their parents encourage them to hit the maid when she does something they don’t like. Or to encourage a four-year-old to feed himself at school only to have mom bottle feeding him at home.
A second language learned at school probably doesn’t need much help at home. I know my mother is very monolingual yet I learned another language. Some kids at my school have no one who can speak English at home, yet they themselves are becoming very proficient in the language. There are other things, though, that need parent reinforcement at home, especially those that are relevant to child development. These things tend to be focused on more in a real preschool learning environment than learning English.

Sorry for the double post, by the way.

Yes, but at least they’re recognisably a form of playing with English as opposed to copying something that is ‘close, but wrong’ - and that copying then being being reinforced. “I could care less” instead of “I couldn’t care less” is technically wrong, but normal English. “I don’t want” (as opposed to "I don’t want to/it/that) is recognisably Chinglish, particularly if the accent comes with it. Dyageddit? Or you could care less? :slight_smile:

I agree with your points regarding discipline. However, if you went through the posts, the preceding discussion was specifically ABOUT language and language only, so taken in context that’s what I believe grayson was talking about in terms of needing reinforcement - and I responded on that subject only.

If you now want to ‘think outside language’ and talk about discipline, that’s a completely different issue :slight_smile: The stem of the discussion was whether learning two languages at once would ‘confuse’ children due to the differences in the grammatical structures - not the other aspects of kindergartens or whether the MoE decree was a good idea. I completely agree that kindergartens should be about a LOT more than learning English - my point was only that I don’t believe the mere act of exposing them to English in addition to Mandarin/Taiwanese will hinder their future development as the original letter suggested.

From my own experiences in kindergartens in Taipei and South Korea, I don’t think it’s fair to blame the foreign teachers. The average foreign teacher from a Western country has a better understanding of modern theories of education than Taiwanese people do because they have been educated that way themselves. All of the inappropriate teaching I have seen in kindergartens has come from either the Taiwanese owner, who I can pretty well guarantee knows nothing about teaching children, or the Taiwanese teachers. Examples: scolding a 2-year-old for speaking Chinese; putting 40 children, ranging in age from 2 to 6, in one class; insisting that 2-year-olds sit at a desk and use a textbook to study English; refusing to let the children speak during meal times; a Taiwanese teacher with a M.A. in TEFL hitting students when they make mistakes; etc. Do you really think that the average university graduate from the US, Canada, etc., couldn’t provide a better, more age-appropriate, environment than this if just left alone to teach?

In my experience at least 95% of all Taiwanese school owners don’t know the first thing about what the hell they are doing and are only in da biz for da $$$.

anybody going to write a letter to the Taipeitimes to say that this expert’s letter is crap and to countetr the editoral in the TT

Wonder would they print it?

Just take a look at the letters the TT publishes . A letter published there is no achievement. :unamused:

How do all these so-called experts know so much about how a child learns to speak ? How do they know ? They don’t know shit. Most ELT texts I have read are fairly upfront in telling us that no-one actually knows for a fact how people esp. kids acquire a second language. Hence the endless theorizing, and the “my theory is fact” bullshit that we are being treated to now.

No different from the guys who pretend to know which way the stockmarket is going to go tomorrow and the next day… and so on.

Butter is good for you butter is bad for you eat more margarine eat less margarine cholestorol is bad no wait a minute it’s good no it’s bad again asthmatics should take asprin yes they can no they cant … experts ! Ha Ha Ha !

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a young child learning two or more languages at the same time. They almost always sort it out as they grow up. I think what this letter was saying, though, is that there are people out there teaching young children at a critical age for their development with no idea of how to help them. I don’t assume that the Taiwanese make better teachers, or that someone without teaching certification is wrong for teaching them, but I think that if you are going to, you should have some knowledge of and/or experience with that age group since it’s a very important stage in their lives. If you have no training or experience, then stick with older kids and adults where a lack of knowledge is less damaging. As someone once told me, when an unqualified person teaches young children and says, “Wow, I’ve learned so much about teaching in one year!” they neglect the fact that while they were learning how to teach, a group of children grew up one more year and will not get another chance to get it back. As a kindergarten/preschool teacher, you need to realize just how great your responsibilities are. There is a classroom of small children who are looking to you to help them grow. If you are not prepared for such a task, then you could do more harm than help. Think about it.

My daughter speaks English well, albeit with some Chinese grammar. I don’t see this as being such a big issue, and she seems to be working out the difference over time. It doesn’t bother me in the least and I’m extremely confident she will be speaking like a native in the near future.

The popularity of all day English classes at kindergarten and day care centers is testimony to the demand and success of these programs in general. The real issue as I see it is probably cultural, and racial. People rightly believe that culture is acquired in the cradle, and carried through language. They are afraid of the big hairy barbarians instilling their values into the next generation of kids. For a paranoia check, imagine if every child in your home country were being taught by citizens of another country in a foreign language for the first five years of their lives and then part time through elementary on to senior school etc. Talk about bringing on the cultural hegemony. What if every child in the States over the next ten years was suddenly learning Arabic, being taught by Arab men wearing those long white robes that they dig so much. Now I’m only trying to play the Devils Advocate here, but I can see there is an area of concern socially with this issue, and it really has little to do with English learning in one sense i.e. the ability of kids to adopt to a number of languages readily at a young age.

Ah, I finally worked out where you are coming from - you are referring to the original Chen article, right? I had only been looking at the 20/2 letter from Chandler which originally started this thread and not paid much attention to the article/letter it was building on. :slight_smile:

I do agree with her points that English should not be learned at the expense of sacrificing all other childhood development, which may be the case in some schools. We chose our preschool because it was bright, happy, the local teachers seemed very caring (the foreign teachers were pleasant, but I think less warm) and there was a very broad curriculum including excursions, music, drama, arts and crafts etc. - a bit more structured than I would have expected for pre-schoolers, but very balanced. I hope it’s a proper school :slight_smile: From the article, it sounds like there really needs to be a investigation into the schools she claims are passing themselves off as preschools, without filling any of the basic requirements. That’s a pretty scary thought.

I actually forwarded the letter to Chomsky’s MIT office, perhaps an assistant might provide a little commentary. If a couple of others did the same it might make for a clearer path for them to comment on it. It might just get added to the database of newspaper references that are attributed to him.

His public published email ischomsky@mit.edu.
I thought what the heck he might respond.

I don’t want to traumatize these kids, and I hope my teaching them all day is not doing that. But I would like to help them to get this tool (competency in English) so they can use it to have better lives.

good posts, xp and immaniou. I am in fact traumitized by language problems and I an supposedly a “grown-up”
smashy