Scott Sommers' Taiwan Weblog
The growing demand for quality language instruction in Taiwan has not been accompanied by an increase in information about jobs. A clearer understanding of the situation will assist students, educators, and employers in achieving a higher standard.
Grammar in the Classroom (Part 4): How did you learn your grammar?
No doubt your grammar is excellent. But how did you learn all those verb conjugations and rules about gerunds? Did your elementary schools teachers teach it all to you? If you are like almost every--no, I take that back--like every single first language speaker of a language, you knew almost all of what we are talking about as grammar before you ever got taught a single lesson in school. In fact, if you were speaking early, you probably knew most of it by the time you were 4 years old.
By the time children enter school, they can all speak in grammatically correct utterances. Even at such a young age, virtually no one's speech deviates from what we understand as verb conjugation or plurals or article usage. Although we learn a great deal about English in school, almost none of this has to do with the grammar of how we speak. Rather, most of it has to do with standardization of the language. Much of this is related to reading and writing. But almost nothing has anything to do with how we speak.
Four-year-olds learn the grammar of English and other languages through the interpretation of input in socially meaningful circumstances. They learn grammar in circumstances where if they don't understand what is said and act upon it accordingly, there are serious consequences. They learn grammar because they hear it said that way over and over and over for thousands of hours.
I know of no one who learned how to utter the third person singular because they were taught by an elementary school teacher? Everyone I know knew how to do this long before they even knew what an elementary school teacher is.
Bad Things about Teaching in Taiwan: The Ministry of Foreign Affairs
I often rant about the evils of the Ministry of Education, but now foreign teachers have a new enemy; the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
MOFA has implemented some new regulations governing the certification of foreign instructors. I am not certain what they are, but evidently they are even more complex and bureaucratic than the MOE requirements. Be warned that documenting your educational credentials may be very complex.
Another problem is the documentation of previous teaching history. When I was hired, the MOE asked me to produce proof that my resume was true. I have no idea why this was so, but they did. I had to go to a previous employer and ask for a letter stating that I had in fact worked for them during the time I had claimed. In spite of the fact that there's a tax record of this, they wanted more paper.
Another emerging problem may effect how much money you make. Some of the new teachers in my school have extensive teaching experience in other universities. In such cases, it is possible to negotiate with the schools to give you credit for this experience and pay you as if you had been working at their school for the same period. I am coming to understand that the amount of documentation and the difficulty of obtaining it overseas makes this virtually impossible to ever do this. If a school offers you this deal, even in good faith, it may be impossible to get the money for it.
While we can think of all sorts of 'culturally'-based explanations for this type of situation, the reason is more likely based in politics. The MOE has always been bad, but the badness it emanates these days is related to the DPP-government appointmentees who run the organization. MOFA, on the other hand, is a far more conservative group. Many of the bureaucrats that staff its desks are still appointees from the previous KMT government. They don't get along. My guess is that MOFA is making it hard for the MOE to do its job.
Getting a Job at a TaiwanUniversity
In Asia and Taiwan, there is a large pool of highly qualified, very experienced EFL teachers. There are a large number of positions available, and it is likely that any determined person with minimum qualifications can obtain one. Nevertheless, the quality of these positions varies enormously. The best positions are fantastic, and the worst of these are only slightly short of slave labour. The best positions are also the most likely to bring you into competition with the most outstanding candidates.
It is a widespread and false myth that Taiwan universities will hire instructors with an MA regardless of their background. For example, at MingChuanUniversity, where I teach, we hired 15 new people this year. Of these, 2 have an MA in English, 2 have an M.Ed., and 6 have an M.TESOL. The majority of these teachers had been teaching for several years before they returned home and obtained relevant teaching credentials. Of the remaining five, 1 is a doctoral candidate in educational psychology, and all of the others had significant teaching experience. One of our faculty has an MA in management, but has taught at Taiwan universities for several years and his wife is Taiwanese. Also, bear in mind that the 2 instructors with an MA in English were hired to teach English literature in the InternationalCollege that MCU operates.