@SuiGeneris having worked there for a while, would you consider it a good environment for the kids? Are the kids there actually bilingual? Would a mixed child who is bilingual in Chinese and English already do well there or would it be a waste of money?
yes
the majority, yes
Absolutely
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Did you add Yuteh Bilingual School on the blacklist?
I’ve been working there for a few years and, after having worked at several schools in Taiwan, the conditions seem fair to me. Just to quickly respond to some of the origional posters criticisms:
There is an elementary and a middle / high school which operate under different conditions/management, and from what I can tell, the elementary is more structured. We have more paperwork than the highschool, but overall most teachers leave at 4:30 – so the workload can’t be too terrible.
I’ve heard stories of admin changing grades, but I’ve never personally been told to change a grade. Many of the students pass their Cambridge tests in elementary and their English is better than the students I worked with at a public elementary school.
I’ve never experienced any hostility or awkwardness with any of the other staff - everyone’s friendly and easily approachable. However, the school is large and there are many teachers in different departments. There are some teachers I’ve never met because they work in the high school or ESL departments and our paths have just never crossed, but everyone’s busy with their own thing.
Whenever I’ve had an issue, I’ve been able to bring it to the headteacher for my grade level or the admin to resolve it. There’s been some malcalculations with the salary, but the accounting department has corrected it and the money was added to the following month’s salary.
There are roaches and rats, but I wouldn’t call it rat or roach infested. It’s an open air school similar to the design of most elementary schools, which I think contributes to the problem in many Taiwanese schools.
There are a lot of teachers that quit or get fired, recently they “fired” (declined to renew the contracts) several teachers because they have poor teaching quality/classroom management, but overall the majority of teachers seem happy.
So recently a lot of teachers quit or got fired but the majority of teachers are happy ?
Ok…
I don’t see how those are inconsistent statements, a lot is a subjective, but the majority of teachers did not quit or get fired.
I’m stuck on the part where literally anyone who has taken a TESOL certification class, no matter how cheap and low in quality, knows that ESL = the process of teaching English learners in a country where the dominant language is English and therefore the motivation of the students lies in quickly learning the language as pretty much a matter of survival. There is no such thing as “ESL” in Taiwan, as Taiwan is not an English-speaking country. While this might seem like splitting hairs, in the world of teachers who know what they’re talking about, you will not find one that calls teaching English to students of other languages in a country where English is also not the dominant language “ESL” teachers. Schools in Taiwan who say “these are our ESL teachers” or “this is our ESL department” also say “we want to claim to be international but we actually didn’t do our research into the basic names of things at all”.
It really, really does
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Well, when you look into sociolinguistics and the language of an “in group”, the people in the “in group” identify themselves as members of that group through the specific language they use. Go sit down with a bunch of [insert profession you know nothing about here] and tell me you understand what they’re saying and that the conversation related to their field is not filled with jargon they all understand but you do not. When it comes to TESOL, someone who is trained in and/or does research on the topic either knows to make the distinction or fails to do so and is not taken seriously in their work. I know when I see peer reviewed articles about “ESL in Korea”, I’m about to see a research paper about “the next best way” to memorize grammar and vocabulary, nothing by anyone who actually has something useful to offer to the world of language education. That’s based on their choice of words alone. And this vetting method never failed me — every single article I came across that talked about “ESL” in a non-English speaking country was rubbish, and I must have gone through thousands by the time I was done with my masters degree.
It really seems like the field of education is the only professional field wherein rampant misuse of terminology is supposed to be accepted, whether in the context of what to call your department at a school or words used in research. The reality is that ESL and EFL, while both target learners of English, are totally different fields of study. If you’re a marine biologist who studies coral reefs, going around telling people you’re a deep sea ocean scientist makes no sense. Both study the ocean and require a similar background and research methods, but they’re two different fields of ocean science. Yet that’s basically what people do each time they say “ESL” when referring to EFL — both are talking about helping learners of English to acquire the skill of English, but one has the target of full functional fluency so the leaner can function in their immediate English-speaking society while the other has the function of passing some tests or some other unclear goals.
When schools in Taiwan say “these are our ESL teachers” and “this is our ESL department”, they say “we think we’re trendy and do more with English than those average monolingual schools”, but it’s apparent to anyone actually doing research in the field that they’re just another cram school (or private school with the standards for their teachers of a cram school) that doesn’t have any idea what they’re up to.
Yeah, my graduate degrees are in applied linguistics, and education
But you bring up this specific point at every opportunity
And in common usage ESL is fine. If you are teaching a course in being a language teacher, or publishing a paper on language education, or working for a journal of language education (all things I’ve done, BTW) it might be useful.
Here on Forumosa, I agree that it is splitting hairs
It isn’t that different. Tesol.org is the major international organization for both.