Language Skills and ESL Teachers
April 26th, 2006 by MarkSince an email conversation I had with Big Ell, a while back, I’ve been thinking about what would be the “ideal” teacher in terms of language skills. What sort of language skills should someone who teaches ESL to Chinese speakers have? Obviously, there are a lot of variables to consider. The short list I’ve considered is as follows:
- The level of the students: More advanced students have less need of a teacher who can speak their language. Higher level students might have a stronger desire to be taught by a native speaker of the target language.
- The number of hours of study per week: The more class hours per week, the more likely an English immersion program would work.
- The age of the students: For college students learning a new language, few would argue against using L1 in class. For toddlers, it would be the opposite.
My students start from the absolute basics, only meet for four hours a week, and have quite a bit of homework. Clear communication with their parents is also an absolute necessity for a successful class. As a result, there’s no way whatsoever a teacher who couldn’t speak Chinese could teach my classes. Big Ell’s school, on the other hand, teaches smaller children, and meets for many more class hours per week. As far as I know, they don’t assign that much homework, either. Consequently, teachers don’t need to know any Chinese at all to work there.
Now that I’ve acknowledged how important these factors are, I’m going to set them aside and try to rank each type of teacher. Obviously, this is pretty subjective.
- Doesn’t speak any English: Totally useless.
- Speaks English moderately well and doesn’t speak Chinese: the “fake American”, i.e., the Russian who knows just enough English to fake out the boss and secure a teaching job… not my idea of an ideal teacher.
- Speaks Chinese and English moderately well: the most common teacher I’ve seen of this type is the Filipino domestic worker who takes up tutoring on the side. This sort of teacher can communicate with the students well, and teach reasonably well.
- Speaks English fluently, but doesn’t speak Chinese: the typical fresh off the boat foreigner. This sort of teacher may be perfect for more advanced students, but wouldn’t be able to do much of anything at all for a beginner who only had a couple of hours per week of class time.
- Speaks English moderately well and speaks Chinese fluently: most teachers here fit this pattern. They can explain grammar and usage points to low level students, answer their students’ questions and motivate their classes. They may pass some of their own phonics and grammar issues along to their students, but those same students can always address those issues later. Unless the students are advanced, this sort of teacher can do really well.
- Speaks Chinese moderately well and speaks English fluently: most HFRB teachers fit this mold. This sort of teacher can provide a “perfect” model for pronunciation, grammar, and usage, and is capable of explaining it all to low level students, answering their questions and motivating them. The down side is that all explanations, motivational speeches, etc… spoken in Chinese are less clear and less efficient than they would be coming from a native Chinese speaker.
- Speaks both languages natively: Some Chinese-Americans and most children of westerners in Taiwan are in this category. They can provide a “perfect” English model, and communicate with their students with complete efficiency in Chinese when necessary. There’s no guarantee that people in this group actually are good teachers, but in terms of language skills it’s nearly impossible to get much better.
- Speaks both languages completely fluently, and learned one as an adult:These teachers have all of the advantages of those in the category above, and one additional one. They know exactly what it takes to become fluent in a second language… and they’ve done it. In my opinion, this sort of person is the ideal that every student could strive to become and that every school could dream about hiring. I’ve been told my buddy Mark, from Jiayi, is like this with French. Unfortunately, he’s a highly-paid interpreter instead of a teacher. The problem is, there’s a severe shortage of language teachers who have attained virtually native levels of skill in a foreign language. I mean, how many kids can “CCTV Daniel” and Dashan teach?
April 26th, 2006 at 6:50 am
How many “fake americans” are there in China? Here in Korea there aren’t that many. I’ve never actually met one but about a year ago, maybe more, there was a news report of a few that got busted and deported in Busan (southern port city).
I support the use of L1 for true beginners and even for false beginners but after that I feel that there is much more to be gained by 95% or higher instruction entirely conducted in the target language.
April 26th, 2006 at 12:53 pm
I’ve met several “fake ABCs”, three “fake Americans”, and one “fake Brit” during my three and a half years in Taiwan. Other than one Russian guy I knew who said he did the whole “fake American” thing in Shanghai, I can’t say much about mainland China. It sounds like there must be way more fakes in Taiwan than in Korea. Maybe it’s because Korea is so much stricter about visas and actually busts them?
I pretty much agree with you about using L1. I think my Japanese classes in college were just about perfect. In just two years of 1 class hour per day and two 10 week summer sessions of three hours per day, it got me from nothing to being able to read online news and mostly undertand Japanese movies. That’s without studying abroad. There’s no way anything like that would have been possible if the teachers hadn’t been able to speak quite a bit of English during the first summer and year long course. It would also have been impossible to do that if they weren’t teaching almost completely in Japanese at the higher levels.
April 26th, 2006 at 8:41 pm
worth the read
Mark has written an inciteful post about Language Skills and ESL Teachers. This post is very related to one I wrote in April 2004 Language Teachers Should Learn a Language. On another note An Australian EFL teacher in Cambodia has been sentenced to ten…
April 26th, 2006 at 10:59 pm
I’ve met LOTS of fake Americans here.
It is interesting that this list focuses on SPOKEN language skills and doesn’t cover writing — or is that the premise of the conversation between you and Big E?
Michael
April 27th, 2006 at 2:48 am
[...] Mark at Doubting to shuō blogs critically on what separates good ESL teachers in Taiwan from the bad. [...]
April 27th, 2006 at 8:10 am
In Taiwan foreign native-speaking teachers often have a local co-teacher or teaching assistant. This is another way of addressing some of the issues you mentioned. The combination of the two teachers is probably much better and easier than trying to find a “Dashan”.
April 27th, 2006 at 9:34 am
David,
In Korea it is also common at public schools and hagwons for elementary students to have co-teachers. However a lot of NS teachers complain that the Korean co-teacher resents their presence or does absolutely nothing to help or in a worse case scenario undermines the work that the NS teacher is trying to accomplish.
What is it like in Taiwan?
April 27th, 2006 at 11:27 am
@Michael
Fill in the blank:
Were writing skills ever to be used-God forbid-as a yardstick for measuring ability to teach English,____________.
April 27th, 2006 at 5:33 pm
Michael, since both my school and Big Ell’s school emphasize oral communication skills above writing, that’s what I decided to look at. If a teacher uses a whiteboard or expects the students to write anything, I’d say writing skills do matter, but nowhere near as much as speaking skills do.
April 27th, 2006 at 5:43 pm
David, I’ve had very poor experiences with the co-teacher approach. There have been many times in which co-teachers or well-meaning parents have undone the phonics work I’ve done with my students. Grammar and word usage problems come up, too. In one case, my co-teacher incorrectly taught my class the meanings of “above” and “on”, and since she explained it in Chinese and she had control over my students’ grades, no amount of visuals and examples on my part could disuade the students from using the words incorrectly.
I realize those are just my experiences, but the one thing in common amongst every single school I’ve seen in Taiwan that gets decent results is that they don’t use co-teachers. They all use single teachers from the fifth category on my list or below. Some, like Kiki, start the kids in a class with a local with decent Chinese skills and then move them to a class with a foreigner with enough Chinese to answer the tough questions and communicate with their parents, once they reach higher levels. I’m sure it’s possible for two teachers to effectively share a class, but at least in the way it’s implemented at most buxibans, it doesn’t happen often.
April 27th, 2006 at 11:51 pm
I’ve had a really good experience with Taiwanese co-teachers, but it wasn’t the kind of teaching that you’re doing (ie full on serious). I came into four classes for 40 minutes a day, and while I was there the usual Taiwanese teacher was really supportive. This was in a big kindergarten in Keelung - basically I was the co-teacher, not them.
One teacher was a terrifyingly strict woman who slapped the kids on the hand if they did anything out of line, and they loved her. That class was so easy to teach (combining my fun and games and her discpline), plus she knew enough English to explain things to them when I couldn’t.
One point to add, Mark about advanced level students, is that for them, a lot of what they are after is the how the language is spoken in certain settings (eg writing CVs, giving speeches to investment bankers). The demands that some of them have would be difficult to satisfy if you weren’t familiar with Western things, and a fairly specific set of Western things, no matter how good your general level of English was.
August 15th, 2008 at 6:26 am
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