I always say to all english teachers that if you hate teaching in taiwan, try to work in a taiwanese company which most non native foreigners are doing with exceptions ofcourse. Then after u work in such company for less than 50k per month, you will start loving teaching again.
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I think I’ll get paid for more than 50k if I worked for a company in the electronic industry. The hourly pay wouldn’t be as sweet as a tutor though. That’s why I decided to become a full time English teacher. It’s just that I was surprised at the pay for school teachers when they contacted me for interviews.
I taught English in Taiwan 10 years ago and everyone back then said the pay was really good (compared to the cost of living in Taiwan, of course), but that the pay hadn’t gone up since the 1990s and it felt even better then. It’s interesting to see now that the pay is still exactly the same as it was when I was an English teacher (and, by extension, what it was in the 1990s), but nobody considers it to be “good” anymore. To be fair, I’ve heard that it’s the same situation across East Asia, except for China.
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If it’s the same number, of course it’s not good anymore, considering the inflation. And the fact that you could get paid more in a different industry. What was it like them in the 1990s? Could you find a better job, say, in a different industry?
I’m actually surprised that the author of the textbooks （康軒、南一之類的）only get paid for 20-40k per month. No wonder the quality is like that.
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Yeah, of course. It’s just that people always used to say that inflation is barely noticeable in Taiwan, which is why it’s taken as long as it has for this pay to go from “excellent” in the '90s to what it is now. Compared to inflation in the UK, it is remarkable how long it took.
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Inflation is pretty low in Taiwan besides the early 90s when rapid industrialization and growth was happening. Taiwan even went through a few periods of deflation since the 2000s.
I suspect the stagnant wages are mostly with the increase supply of English teachers. There are so many and it’s easily replaceable and there’s not a huge skill set required.
I think… there needs to be a huge skill set required… I don’t know many foreign teachers, but most local teachers are just… I’m in Tainan, and even their best high schools got some weird local teachers…
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Most of that is on the parents, hence the disparity for private tutoring and buxibans. They really don’t demand that teachers be extremely qualified at buxibans. How many kids actually get to any proficient level of English from Buxiban alone, probably very few.
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i think it depends. sometimes all you need is someone who can’t speak any chinese to babysit the kiddies
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Well at least they know how to speak English. Many local English teachers would even have difficulty doing so. Mostly in public schools…
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Maybe the pay is so low that the good ones have already left.
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I got to say… sadly that might be true.
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I tutored Chinese in the US. When I was in college and my Chinese was meh, US$10/hr. When I had lived in China and came back with a pretty ACTFL Advanced-High certificate, I had no problem charging US$50/hr. As a white American in the US.
I can barely convince Taiwanese people to pay me NT$1,000/hr for tutoring English when I have a major in linguistics, speak fluent Chinese, have teaching licenses in ESL and Chinese as a world language and have taught languages for a decade. That’s about NT$500 less than people paid me as a non-native Chinese speaker in the US eight years ago. And people don’t even want to pay that.
The reality is that English “teachers” here are just for show. The white man who shows up late to work and also high every day is “better” for most cram schools than the Taiwanese person with a masters in TESOL from NYU. I say this as a white woman who replaced a Taiwanese woman with a masters in TESOL from NYU, who had taught for some 8 years as an ESL teacher in NYC. Parents were all saying how nice it was to “finally” have a “real” English teacher for their child. Umm, no, your previous teacher was much more qualified than me to teach your child English.
In a society where people are actually looking for teachers who are genuinely qualified, there’s no problem making what you’re worth. In Taiwan, the only qualification for English teacher is “white face”. Only in the past few years have they even come to require a college degree to get a work permit to teach at a cram school. When the qualification is based on race alone, there’s no reason to pay people with experience any more money. They don’t need experienced teachers to attract students. Just the white face. So you’re kind of better off as an FOB who would be flipping burgers at McDonalds in your home country if you hadn’t moved abroad. That’s what the salaries are asking for, and people take the jobs
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How did you get this certificate? Can you point me to a course here in Taiwan?
I believe you will be very marketable in areas like Seattle, WA.
Not to dispute the rest of your post, but hasn’t this been a requirement for a long time? I remember a degree being necessary for a work permit when I arrived here a little over twenty years ago.
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I knew a number of former King Car teachers who were 19 or 20 years old who worked at Kid Castle while working on their undergraduate degrees from Liberty University. They might have been working under the table/on tourist visas, but they most certainly had not been to any university class in their lives. I think people got away with working w/o work permits more in the past.
The ACTFL certificate comes from an oral test (OPI = Oral Proficiency Interview) and written test (WPT = Written Proficiency Test). You can find out more about that here https://www.actfl.org/assessment-research-and-development/actfl-assessments/actfl-postsecondary-assessments/oral-proficiency-interview-opi and https://www.actfl.org/center-assessment-research-and-development/actfl-assessments/actfl-postsecondary-assessments/writing-proficiency-test.
It’s a general test of your ability to speak and write in the language (which then assumes that if you can carry out a conversation in the language, you have listening ability, and that if you can write, you have a reading ability.) I think it’s a really solid way to see where your actual functional language proficiency is, regardless of where you studied or what textbooks you used.
I took it three times. Twice at a university in Beijing as part of the language program (the end of the semester x2) and once scheduled on my own time at a US university’s library under the supervision of an approved proctor. It is my understanding that you can take it anywhere that there is someone approved to proctor exams (my guess would be probably any university?). They call you on the phone for the OPI and the WPT is on the computer.
People tell me I’d be marketable everywhere. Yet no one wants to offer me a full time job that pays the bills (and I’ve applied to a lot of jobs).
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Yeah, but that’s different. To get a work permit, I believe you needed a degree (or a fake one from Bangkok, not that I’m hypothetically referring to people I knew back in the day). But getting a job did not necessarily require a degree, and perhaps still doesn’t.
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Wow I didn’t know it would be hard for a white person to get more than $1000/hr. I heard that white people make more money in language schools, so I just thought it’d be at least $1000/hr.
I’ve always thought that language school teachers would make more money than private tutors, since they have more students in one class. But seems like it’s the opposite here. I wonder if it’s the same in other countries.