A few proofreading foibles aside . . .
Where do folks get this “moonlighting” stuff from? I did not read Scott’s essay as whining about not being able to teach the hours in corporate classes. The four-hour thing is usually most rigorously enforced with regard to other academic institutions and if his school happens to be more stringent about the rules, there was no indication of that in Scott’s article.
Scott, I would suggest that you present this as an opinion essay and not a paper as “paper” implies more academic rigor (certainly citations and data for assertions).
Do keep in mind that just because one guy from Singapore says Taiwan is a backwater that doesn’t make it so. Asking your students what sort of English they use in the workplace is not the same as a quantifiable survey. Many of your statements in the essay are personal opinion rather than objective observations based upon unbiased data collection and interpretation so you need to label opinion a bit more.
I don’t buy your statement that the higher up folks go in terms of status for English teaching, the lower their skill. Of course, since I teach at the undergraduate and graduate level, I be a bit thin-skinned about such comments . . . . . . but, I don’t think so. Just because I have a PhD doesn’t mean you should assume I’m incompetent.
Yes, I have met folks in the upper levels who are less than perfect teachers but overall most have fundamental competence. Yes, I have met illegal unqualified folks teaching teaching on tourist visas who are quite gifted. However, in general, most folks who are unqualified have to get a lot of experience to make up for it.
How do you quantify this assertion? Is it based upon the few folks you know or upon your participation in conferences or the bushiban teachers you know? How do we judge competence here? Be wary of inductive reasoning here . . . just because you know a few incompetent teachers at a private university and a few really good illegal bushiban teachers doesn’t mean these few folks represent the trend . . . they could, but you need more data to back up the claim.
For the most part, the academic, corporate, and bushiban markets are different. Folks who go into academic programs as teachers for the most part are not the same as the ones who go into corporate or bushiban work . . . in my opinion . . . there may be some crossover but for the most part they are different. So, the criteria of qualifications required to get into academics are more rigoursly applied than in the bushibans - particularly in the fly-by-night illegal bushibans where most of the teachers are folks who make Hong Kong visa-runs. We really can’t compare the two.
Legitimate bushibans (with legal status as such) that employ folks with an ARC typically look for qualifications that the fly-by-nights don’t (so, there are schools that will hire anyone with blue eyes and a pulse while others actually look at the degree or experience a person has). The market has been evolving over the past few years so it is difficult to make generalizations.
While I agree with a number of your points, I found many of the statements to be assertions of value or opinion disguised as assertions of fact. You might get some data and see how that affects your conclusions.
These are just a few thoughts . . . rambling really . . . which I may change at any minute.