This is a farce (as usual). What do the newspaper reports mean by “qualified” ? Do they mean teachers who are qualified to teach in government schools in their home jurisdication ? Well, that would be odd, given that English as a Foreign Language is not taught in government schools, and when it is taught to immigrant populations it is not done so on a qualified or unqualified basis. Do they mean “qualified” as in “could get a work permit in Taiwan” ? Who knows ?
So they are going to use their overseas offices to recruit from foreign universities, and applicants must have basic Mandarin Chinese ? Yeah right. So there is this pool of “qualified” teachers who speak Chinese hanging around universities waiting to go to Taiwan ? Please !
And they will receive two weeks’ “training” when they arrive. So these “qualified” teacher still require two weeks’ “training” without which they wouldn’t be able to do their jobs. I wonder what they are going to learn in two weeks from the Taiwanese.
God help them.
If they really wanted people to go to the boonies, they would recruit long termers already in Taiwan who could handle living in the sticks for a suitable hike in earnings.
And one more thing - where did all the communists come from ? Why on earth should a foreign native speaking teacher with up to date training specifically in ELT get paid anything like a local teacher who has been trained in the piss-poor Taiwanese education system ? I cannot think why any non-native speaker (i.e. Taiwanese) should be involved in classroom teaching of English unless his/her English is very very close to native speaker level. It gives me an enormous pain in the arse to have to continually correct incomprehensible pronunciation of basic sounds, and even the letters of the alphabet, after they have been drummed into children by Taiwanese teachers who can’t pronounce them themselves.
The Taiwanese need to decide whether they want to move on from T-shirt slogan Engerish, or whether they want to continue their current Xenophobic jobs-for-the-boys approach to English langauge in Taiwan.
On the other hand, it would do my heart good to see 1000 MA in TEFL graduates come onto the island and turn their noses up at the way the English teaching industry is run here. You can bet your life that the government knows this, and will either steer well clear of anyone with TEFL qualifications, or will sack anyone who objects to the teacher-centred bums-on-seats methodology.
You see, this is a prime example of how little the Taiwanese know about teaching English. They simply have no comprehension that English can be and is taught very succesfully (are far more expensively than they could imagine!) to classes of mixed native-language speakers entirely in the medium of the English language in language centres around the world, from the very basics to people with absolutely no English whatsoever. You cannot fight an ethos which tries to maintain that even in the field of teaching their own bloody language, foreigners are inherently inferior to Chinese !!!
This story is likely to disappear in a few weeks. Might be dragged out and aired every couple of years or so, but I doubt it.