Teaching ESL with no assistance from Chinese speaker

Work Teaching English in Taiwan
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The job I’m doing requires me to also teach young learners. These are very young kids who need guidance from a Chinese speaker, and they have a homeroom teacher all day.

But when I enter the classroom, the homeroom teacher does her own thing and lets me teach alone. My problem is, my appearance is very interesting to these kids and they constantly want to play with me. So, it’s hard to fend off these playful advances and it feels like I’m being mobbed all the time.

The homeroom teacher is usually grading papers or doing other things. On the rare occasion I do turn to her to help explain something to the children, I get this odd look as if I’m doing something wrong. They are clearly unwilling to help, and it got me wondering if they might not be paid salary when I’m in the room. It’s the only way I can imagine being so unsupportive to a colleague.

I want to know if I’m being unreasonable myself. I think it’s unrealistic to expect me, who barely speaks any Chinese (and I was also instructed to avoid using Chinese to promote immersive language environment), to be able to control such young children.

It’s also a bad example for these kids. They mob me and see the Chinese teacher raising no objection, so they learn it’s ok to not respect me. You can imagine how that goes over time; my Nigerian colleague has a booming voice and speaks Chinese so they respect him, while I get playful laughter as if I’m a walking puppet show. It’s starting to become a problem, and I intend to tell this school that there should be Chinese language assistance or I’ll quit and find a place that does support me.

So, I’m just asking you teachers out there, am I being unreasonable? I taught in mainland China, the children there are much worse (coz of the anti-foreigner sentiment) but the teaching assistant made everything quite manageable. I’m getting no help here, but are they in the right to expect me to control young children with no Chinese language? I need assistance from a Chinese speaker in class, but it’s more like I’m being ignored by them while they sit there, and kids learn by example.

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This is a good thing.

The only time they get involved is to cause headaches for you.

If they aren’t getting involved then you’ve got a good one.

If you have one that takes the naughty kids aside to teach them to behave appropriately then you have an AMAZING one. Although these are rare (I’ve only met one)

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I’d suggest, off the top of my head:

  • Learn to speak a little Chinese, you won’t regret it

  • give them things to play with that aren’t you. I have a collection of teaching tools that i use for different things that I teach. Sticky balls are apparently a popular teaching toy in Taiwan (all about that annoying alliteration!), and I keep meaning to get some but I don’t teach kids so i can use things like dice and mobile phone games

  • develop a system that rewards good behavior and punishes bad behavior. This is harder to implement mid semester, but for example you can develop routines (works well with kids) where if you come in and everyone is ready to do your fun class, the class gets 3 points. If not, no points. If someone touches you, -1. If you give an activity and they have 10 minutes to finish, 1 point for every one that is finished. Make a large and colorful whiteboard style poster thatvyou can blue tac to the classroom and keep track, but also can take away with you. If the class earns x points by the midterm, everyone gets an ice cream. You get the idea. Have a system and be consistent, have routines and reward good behaviour. I used to date a primary school teacher in Canada and she found this worked very well

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SOunds like you need classroom management skills. Teach them some TPR, stand up, sit down, etc, and then all sit down, do the lesson. Have a sheet of stickers to give them when they respond.

The kids seem to like you. Use that to your advantage to assert control over the behavior.

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Yep, make the classroom management appear to be the game.

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What is the definition of “young learners?” How young is “young”?

You should be talking elementary school grades 1st through 6th, right? Certainly not kindergarten, right?

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Welcome to the meat grinder. Some of us do much better than others.

I had a class of 40 kids and a co-teacher who did absolutely nothing.

I had small class of 6 or 8 all by myself and 1/3 of the kids were really disruptive. Could not say a thing in the weekly reports to the parents.

You said it, the management and kids have no respect.

Only my experience. Surely the same doesn’t apply everywhere or for everyone.

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hahaha.

Welcome to Asia. That made me laugh out loud.

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It’s been a year since I commented on this thread, so it’s time I completed the story. I know the story was a bit disjointed because I was new in Taiwan and questioning my own observations, but I’m now more confident to offer clarity.

In Miaoli, I was working at an old, established school, but it was small, private owned. I’m sure it was a good school in the past. The owner was in cognitive decline and visiting clinics for treatment. As a result, things were falling apart, her attitude was declining with her faculties.

I was speaking up about poor communication, but sadly the best English speaker was also the woman’s half-American daughter, and very defensive of her mother.

The other co-teachers never spoke a single English sentence to me, so the burden was on the English speaking teacher to make it work. My Nigerian colleague had little trouble but that was because he spoke Chinese, seemingly fluently.

One day in May 2023, I was playing around with the kids, they were bored because the materials for practicing the summer play weren’t ready, again. Anyway, the daughter saw me chasing kids on the CCTV, stormed in screaming about how dangerous I was (not true at all), then walked away mumbling something about reporting me to the government. I offered my resignation letter an hour later, effective immediately.

I soon secured a new job in Taoyuan at a more professional institution, so I could even help with their summer camp. I rented an apartment near my girlfriend’s work, and things have been going well ever since. The staff I work with now, speak good English, they have a good eye on education and the kids are smart.

Taiwan has better education than Mainland China for sure, but you still want to be careful which school you choose. I don’t think these more rural schools should be hiring fresh-off-the-boat teachers straight away. The one thing I told the school when I collected my paperwork, was I hope the next person they hire speaks a bit of Chinese, because half the Chinese staff didn’t.

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Ha. Good. Did they apologise?

I was grassed up to management by a Taiwanese co-teacher for “teaching too slow”… as in, making sure the kids knew what the words actually meant. It was like having a damn spy in the room.

Your OP was good to read, because it shows all the subtle, surreal, second-guessing we go through in Asia.

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No apology. I got a letter where they cited personal conflict as reason for mutual agreement of termination. Cooperating was nice enough, expecting apology is expecting too much.

If management steps in the classroom and ‘takes charge’ because you’re supposedly not doing it right, they severely undermine the teaching dynamics. I feel they do it on purpose to establish dominance, and you as teacher just have to deal with students no longer respecting their FT. It’s unprofessional and my new school never did anything that crass.

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Cheers for that story…

They never stepped in. This was supposed to be my teaching assistant. She was this treacherous lump who sat there and made sure I ‘covered all the material’.

The pace was blistering, and I barely had a chance to even explain the words. So the students were just rote repeating words and dialogue they didnt understand.

Utterly surreal, TBH. I feel bad for anyone teaching under those conditions.

Ive taught in 7-8 countries. Taipei management is by far the worst, by a very long margin. Its a shame because the kids are good students.

Mainland China was fine. We had a syllabus, and had to complete it in 2 months. There were plenty of 9 or 10 year olds who spoke fluent intermediate English. Sentences were drilled dozens of times till the students got it. Huge rooms… throwing balls around, football in the classroom.

BTW, it might not be any better in a big city. In my experience, the rural schools can be a lot more laid back.

I honestly think these people deserve jail time for what they are doing to the students and teachers. Prison might be a bit far, but they should be banned from ever teaching again. Crippling fines, maybe.

That is at least one generation of children they have robbed of decent English now. At least one.

And who gets the blame for little Zhou’s bad English?

The perfidious Laowai.

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It is kind of child abuse on a few levels

  1. Emotional harm. Getting yelled at or seeing other people yelled at all the time is emotionally scarring. Worse, what you see in Taiwan is adults across the board ignoring most behaviors until they just snap. To a child, that means they never really know what’s ok. You let me climb up onto and jump off the table yesterday, why are you screaming at me to the point where my ears hurt today?
  2. Children don’t actually learn.
  3. Pressure for stupid reasons (passing tests)
  4. No time for unstructured play (this literally is why children nowadays genuinely are socially inept on a level never before seen in human history)
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Good. Thanks for writing that in bullet points too. Helps this informal ‘case’… which we now present before The Emerald City, and the Courts of Shamballah.

I saw the screaming first hand.

I was in some Godforsaken buxiban in Beitou.

The kids had homework time, or something. They were all pale, hunched over their desks, writing. Every 5 minutes or so one of the kids would shuffle up to the teacher, who was deadly silent, and show her their book.

Whenever the kids would even lift their heads up, it seemed…

… The teacher would scream at them like a witch.

I remember thinking… Christ, is that teaching?

What they are doing to the teachers is also mental abuse, IMO.

They won’t listen to any pleas to slow down the curriculum for love nor money.

Then the teachers get scapegoated for the systemic failures of the buxiban cartels.

The English Vegetable herself got involved, I remember… when she said that Taiwan wasn’t attracting ‘the right kind’ of foreigners.

So… Mackay turns up with a wad of cash, and they crawl to him.

All the mini-Mackays that turn up to do an honest days work in 2024?

Foreign Losers.

It looks like their revolving door mentality has come to whack them upside the head.

Now we just watch The Collapse. ha!