…and a business thrives on reliability and trust …
I really need to attend AA meetings more regularly.
For god sakes, rassie, take some ritalin and chill out. Jeezus. No one suggested that SA’s should leave Taiwan.
Well not all of us are so narrow-sighted that we spend our social time only with others like us. 
At the school I used to work for, the South African teachers were far better educated than the foreign teachers from other countries. A few of them weren’t very good teachers, most were fine, and two in particular were amazingly good. If you meet a South African with an extremely difficult to understand accent, it is usually because his or her native language is Afrikaans, not English. A South African native speaker of English shouldn’t be any harder to understand than anyone else who speaks a variant of British English.
By the way, since when does formal training help anyone teach at a bushiban? I took some classes in TEFL at university, but they didn’t prepare me at all for actually teaching. The classes were basically just theory.
In theory, the point of demanding a passport from an “English speaking country” is to obtain teachers who are native English speakers, not merely “foreigners”.
There is a complex bilingual situation in South Africa which the folks who make policy in Taipei are not aware of. The same thing happens with teachers with US passports, too – there are plenty of them who are not really native English speakers. Since there are already plenty of non-native speakers of English who teach English in Taiwan (=local teachers), the government’s intent is to import native speaking teachers.
Now, the government is not smart enough – and, to be fair, it would be very difficult to come up with a reliable test or measure to determine – who exactly is a native speaker. But it’s easy enough to figure out where a person’s passport is from, therefore that is the administrative equivalent of being a native speaker of English as far as the Taiwanese are concerned.
This doesn’t have anything to do with competence or qualifications. I have very good Spanish (so I’m told), lots of teaching experience and a Ph.D. in Foreign Language Education, and I was once offered a job teaching Spanish full-time in Taipei, but the school had to rescind the offer becuase they could not get a work permit for me since I had a US passport, not one from a “Spanish-speaking” country. (Although we are moving in that direction quite rapidly… 
)
It’s just very difficult to make snap judgements based only on documents, and that’s basically what the government has to do (because, Lord knows, they don’t know what good English is in 99% of cases!)
Why don’t they just institute a test of oral/written English? Makes more sense but I guess it’s too much trouble and money to hire people qualified to do that.
Oh, gawd, I can imagine it now. First they’d have to set standards for what was “good” or “native” English…and of course those standards would have to be set by good 'ol non-native-English-speaking Taiwanese because of course “we know English better than y’all do”…then someone would have to use those standards to give the actual tests…and the tests would have to include speaking sections. Every time the native speaking candidate said something the examiner couldn’t understand, points would be taken off. In the end, probably only people who speak English as their fourth or fifth language would be certifiable as a genuine “Taiwanese Government Native English Speaker”! 
I mean, just look at the GEPT, if you want to have nightmares for a week!
[quote=“Dangermouse”] While it seems proficient teachers will not be affected, it is reported that more stringent vetting procedures may be applied in the near future when foriegners apply for work permits, and may even include random “quality control” checks at random schools/cram schools.
It should get rid of the Riff Raff.[/quote]
I’m afraid that the government would hit the Trifecta in my case. Just in the past three or four days, my school has already found out that I can’t dance or cook very well and that my games are not photogenic.
By the way, what did the government say was wrong with not graduating from high school? It shouldn’t have an adverse effect on cooking, dancing, etc. 
Hexuan wrote:
What do you base that statement on? Prejudice?
Huge numbers of Canadians and South Africans are probably working in your own country of origin without the extra burden of constant pejorative statements made against them.
Canadians and South Africans are the primary targets of such slurs for one reason and one reason only, IMAO: they are the majority. Most of the foreign English teachers in Taiwan are either from Canuckistan or S.A. If 50% of the foreign English teachers in Taiwan were from New Zealand, then everybody would be complaining about the damn Kiwis. I wouldn’t get too upset about it, these kinds of resentment tend to come with the territory (and as an American I should know).
Peking Spring: please clarify, what is “standard English” ?
[quote=“keiththehessite”]Hexuan wrote:
What do you base that statement on? Prejudice?
Huge numbers of Canadians and South Africans are probably working in your own country of origin without the extra burden of constant pejorative statements made against them.[/quote]
There are also inexperienced /unqualified Americans, New Zealanders, and Australians.
Never had significant problems understanding Oz, NZ, SA, or Brit speech. Any problems were minor and on the same order as regional differences in my home country (US). Don’t understand what the hubbub is about.
The CELTA program is to prepare you to teach a classroom full of adults ergo the reason why it’s called the CELTA (Certificate for English Language Teaching to Adults) and not the CELTYL (Certficate for English Language Teaching to Young Learners). While many aspects can be applied to children, it’s not intended for that which is why they offer the CELTYL (if only I knew where…). You are also assuming that buxiban programs in Taiwan are realistic English classrooms. It’s kinda quaint how you were under the impression that they reflect any real sense of what an EFL classroom is like, but the reality is, in a country where EFL is taken more seriously, real teacher training is valued, and competition is based on quality, not just who’s on the brochure and how cute the mascot is, you’ll find that your CELTA might be more applicable.
I found that even after having three years of experience both teaching ESL to university students in the US and to English-immersion school kids in a real school here and my TESOL training during my linguistics program in university, I learned a bit about teaching English, even if some was material I had already covered, there were still other things I never thought about, or never really learned when I had studied pedagogy.
You truly are the first person I have heard say that it was a waste of time. I doubt that you gained nothing from it. I do doubt that you work for a quality school where they would appreciate or use the kind of training that you underwent in your program.
Uhm… where did I say that I thought it was a waste of time? I did not do the course for the sole purpose of teaching in Taiwan.
I assure you that I would not have paid the amount that I did nor put the effort I did into that course if I thought it was a waste of time.
I am sure that I clearly said I felt the course did not prepare me for the bushiban scene in Taiwan. Please note, that is my opinion (and a few others here in Taiwan that I have spoken to about it who too did the course).
I am well aware that the course is designed for teaching adults. I did after all enroll for, pay for and complete the course.
It is duly noted you are a fan of the CELTA course. Congrats, I think. 
You may get off your soap box now. :raspberry: [/b]
799GBP is a lot of money to spend on losing 4 weeks of your life for “a piece of paper”… Perhaps taking the 1-week course here in Taipei and getting their “piece of paper” will better prepare you for teaching at the kind of buxiban where a CELTA would have no use. Of course, so would a clowing class at Barnum and Bailey’s. But each to their own.
I have applied what I learned to teaching at my school. Perhaps that’s the difference: I get to actually teach at my school.
Save your sarcasm for someone who cares.
I’ll reserve my sarcasm once you reign in the sheer sanctimoniousness of your posts.
You make all kinds of pugnacious assumptions.
I have simply stated my opinion of the course and how I felt I benefited from it.
Didn’t your mother teach you that if you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all?
Please, go piss on someone else’s battery.
Oh, so you don’t babysit and entertain the kids as the buxiban’s idea of teaching them or are they learning from a proper curriculum?
That’s the only assumption I made. The rest, I got from your posts.
Cool! An obscure expression that my Dad (noted for his famous aphorisms like “Don’t take any wooden nickels” and “Tell them to go pound salt” didn’t know! 
My own take is that Taiwan = Fantasyland.
The language is not what you learn in the Chinese textbooks.
The pedagogy is not what you learn in education classes.
The food is not what you eat in Chinese restaurants in your home country.
etc. etc.
It’s even much easier to spend those NT dollars without having it hurt!
[quote=“keiththehessite”]Hexuan wrote:
What do you base that statement on? Prejudice?
Huge numbers of Canadians and South Africans are probably working in your own country of origin without the extra burden of constant pejorative statements made against them.[/quote]
Feel free to ignore the bit of my post where I said:
That chip on your shoulder obscuring your vision, eh ? Like the bit where you say:
No idea what that could possibly mean. However, if the buxiban owners find that suddenly have on their hands an influx of even cheaper teachers from some other place, your reliable, conscientious SA or Canadian teachers will be dropped like a shot. I guess from your comments about trust between employer and employee in the buxiban industry here being important that you haven’t been here very long. You just watch when these teachers (any teachers) go and ask for a pay rise as thanks for all the hard work they’ve put in at comedy wages. Straight out the door to be replaced by someone with even less experience and even fewer qualifications. This is no criticism of them or their ability to teach. It is simply the way it works here. My God, what an indictment of English language teaching here when courses are actually designed to be taught by complete novices who are treated simply as commodities to be replaced by cheaper alternatives on a regular basis. As Kenneth Ho (head of ELSI at the time) once said “If I could find a way to do this business without using foreigners, I would”.
He’s nearly there. I reckon the lowest rate for English teaching will be down to NT$400 soon. You will see a situation where native speakers are approaching the rate Taiwanese “co-teachers” are paid. You pay peanuts you get monkeys. The Taiwanese guys and gals teaching chemistry and maths and what-not up at the train station are getting paid NT$2,000-odd an hour. Wonder why that is ?
[quote=“hexuan”] My God, what an indictment of English language teaching here when courses are actually designed to be taught by complete novices who are treated simply as commodities to be replaced by cheaper alternatives on a regular basis. As Kenneth Ho (head of ELSI at the time) once said “If I could find a way to do this business without using foreigners, I would”.
[/quote]
This is what I call the localization of international standards and practices. It’s Taiwan’s way of dumbing down so to speak. And it is not just in the english teaching business. It’s in all businesses in Taiwan.