Does Taiwan Already Have the English Teachers It Needs? Yes and No

While most of the teachers hoping to enter Taiwan may be qualified professionals, the petition itself panders to native speakerism:

Additionally, Taiwanese co-teachers have had to increase their workload to deal with the lack of English teachers, juggling homework, lesson planning, and leading classes usually taught by native speakers. This is placing an unprecedented burden on the shoulders of co-teachers and is ultimately doing harm to the industry.

Native speakerism — the idea, unsupported by research, that a “native speaker” teacher is preferable to a non-native speaker — is deeply problematic. First, it’s difficult to even define “native speaker” with any sort of specificity or academic rigor. Someone who has been using English since childhood might not be proficient enough in it to teach it, and someone who learned it well after learning their first language(s) might be indistinguishable from a native speaker (including accent, although this is fairly rare). There are so many accents and dialects as well that the mental picture that the term “native speaker” conjures up is, for most people, not in line with reality.

Most professionals instead use the term “L1 user”, but that doesn’t change the core problem: when people say “native speaker” they often just mean a white person, or perhaps a white person who also happens to be from an English-speaking country. Frequently, this affects what salary is offered, both to L1 users and non-native speaker teachers who are not white. Not all native speakerists are racists — indeed, the petition says that the teachers hoping to enter Taiwan are diverse, which implies they are not all white — but in other cases racist employers do use the same excuses as native speakerists to hide their racism.

Regardless, the academic consensus in TESOL is that one need not be a “native speaker” (or L1 user) to teach a language, and in fact an “L2 user” (someone who did not learn English as a first language) might even offer specific benefits. Instead, the measure of a qualified teacher is in their training, experience and contextualized outcomes. That is to say, the best teachers tend to have a combination of experience and training. If the experience is extremely valuable, and they learned from well-trained colleagues, in some cases these can be one and the same. This may not be typical, but it is possible.

Considering this, why is it assumed that the Taiwanese teacher in the classroom is a “co-teacher”, not able to be the primary presence in the classroom or teach “classes usually taught by native speakers”? If the Taiwanese teacher has a suitable proficiency level, training and experience, there is no reason why they cannot take on these roles.

Potential teachers are already living in Taiwan 

If Taiwan needs English teachers, perhaps offering better working conditions — an inexperienced foreign “co-teacher” to help with the administrative load and classroom management perhaps? — and salaries similar to what foreigner teachers tend to command, it would make it easier to find this talent locally.

Would such a shift in perspective reveal that Taiwan already has the teaching cohort it needs to fill these positions? Perhaps, but it’s difficult to say. Anecdotally, I tend to stay connected to former trainees and I have noticed how frequently our old Line groups light up with teachers asking each other if they know of any qualified candidates, as their schools are hiring.

This suggests that while Taiwan has the potential resources to fill these positions with locals and foreigners — both L1 and L2 users — who are already here, that subset of this potential talent suitably qualified to teach may be insufficient. In other words, if “Taiwan already has the English teachers it needs” assumes qualified teachers, Taiwan probably does not currently have them.

There are two possible ways to deal with this: accept the petition’s request and find a way for the foreign teachers to come to Taiwan, or figure out how to quickly train local talent (both Taiwanese and immigrants) to do this work. I have no particular issue with letting certified or licensed teachers in: they don’t appear to be untrained people whose only qualifications are being white “native speakers”. With the number of international students, citizens and residents returning, they would be unlikely to make up a significant percentage of entries into Taiwan.

However, there is an easy local solution if Taiwan needs qualified English teachers now: offer incentives and scholarships to locals and foreigners for professional training, or apprenticeship positions that lead to full-time teaching jobs, which would provide an alternative route to the classroom. Ensure that both locals who would like to teach English and foreigners who don’t fit the “native speaker” so-called ideal still have job opportunities by encouraging employers to stop hiding behind “native speakerism” to avoid accountability for their actions. Start this change in public schools, because it’s unlikely that buxiban owners will lead the way in making these changes.

Cram schools aren’t centers of language education

Employers will certainly cite market demand for their “native speakerism”: this is what the parents want!

The petition panders to this as well: 

Approximately 70% of parents in Taiwan send their children to cram schools, while a majority of households include parents who both are employed full time. This means that parents who send their children to these cram schools will not need to interrupt their day to pick up their children. This in turn helps maintain an efficient workforce and provides a significant contribution to the Taiwanese economy.

It’s hard to argue the bare truth of this: most cram schools aren’t centers of language education so much as after-school daycare while parents work excruciating hours. The multitude of interconnected issues here deserves their own discussion: onerous work schedules, a lack of suitable after-school care and whether it’s appropriate to send a child to all-day school because workplaces are hostile to the needs of families.

In that context, of course parents may insist that they want a “native speaker” teacher: the optics of having a foreigner with a Taiwanese “co-teacher” likely matters more than any actual educational benefit. Incentivizing more Taiwanese and other L2 users to enter the industry can help change this perception, of reaching out to parents is a part of the strategy.

This would entail educating parents about what it really means to have a qualified language teacher for their children: a person with experience and training, who might even offer benefits over a white face — such as a better ability to clarify grammar and lexis that they themselves had to learn — and that a white foreigner at the head of a classroom isn’t a very good guarantee of learning actually taking place.

That said, I do think there can be a role and an entry point for untrained and even inexperienced teachers that doesn’t involve expensive coursework at the outset, before you’ve even decided you like the job enough to stay in it. There was an entry point for me, and I wouldn’t want to deny that to potentially talented future teachers. The fact is, however, I would not hire that past version of myself to teach. I should have gone about it differently, however. A system that prioritizes real training and communities of practice over race and “native speaker” status while providing alternative routes for new teachers would be beneficial for education, teachers (experienced and new) and the country.

That leaves the question of whether local training programs are good enough to accomplish this goal. In my experience, they are. 

Onerous testing requirements do more harm than good 

In my CPD courses I’ve found Taiwanese teachers to be enthusiastic, knowledgeable, thoughtful and creative. They are aware of modern teaching methods. This points to fairly good training at the outset — perhaps not perfect, but no training is. If you’re asking yourself why so many Taiwanese students graduate unable to speak English despite having highly proficient and well-trained teachers, the answer is simple: testing, is the tumor. 

The curriculum and testing requirements are preposterously out of date and extraordinarily onerous, to the point that teachers can’t implement modern or cutting-edge pedagogy the way they’d like. The tests don’t even really test language proficiency. It’s a classic case of negative washback. It’s a credit to teachers in Taiwan that they are already aware of this, although they may not have the power to change it (in fact, this is a common complaint).

Changing this, too, might inspire more people to become teachers and improve language learning outcomes.

There are also suitable training programs for foreigners already in Taiwan. It’s doubtful that many are licensed English teachers who are simply not working in schools. Most are not going to enter local public school licensing programs, which take years. That leaves the international certification programs such as CELTA, CertTESOL and TYLEC, as well as local courses. These usually take a few months to complete, and can produce teachers with basic classroom competency, though most will need further guidance in their new jobs. That’s how they were designed; it’s not a curriculum flaw — nobody can transform from neophyte into expert teacher in a few months.

The good news is that most of these courses are now available in Taiwan, which wasn’t the case when I moved here. I work with the people who got these courses started and am able to deliver sessions on them, so I like to think I play a very small part in making them possible.

The bad news is that they’re very expensive, and in a time when people already in Taiwan are seeing their hours cut due to the pandemic, one might not be inclined or able to lay out that much money. Scholarships and government funding would be vital.

One of the reasons I went into that area was because I felt that making teacher training more accessible locally would improve the overall quality of EFL teaching in Taiwan, and provide a route for people often discriminated against in the field to change perceptions about what it means to hire a good language teacher. Certainly, it’s not fair that a local or non-Western foreigner might need to take a course to be seen as competitive against an untrained white “native speaker”, but the first step to changing that is to get more diverse faces at the front of the classroom.

Conclusion

If the teachers who want to enter Taiwan are qualified for the work and the jobs need to be filled, there is no specific reason to deny them, especially if international students are being allowed in. Although this is not a reason to keep them out, I would caution these teachers to consider the local context more deeply. For example, the poor naming of the “Bilingual by 2030” initiative obscures the fact that Taiwan is already a multilingual nation, so references to “bilingualism” in the petition don’t help their case among teachers already here. They might consider as well that local teachers, who are often just as qualified as their foreign counterparts, may quite rightly resent that they are often consigned to lower-paid, lower-status positions such as “co-teacher”, and that “cram schools need teachers so workers can work” obfuscates an exploitative corporate culture in Taiwan that also needs to be addressed.

However, it would benefit Taiwan in the long term to commit to developing the potential talent it already has. There may not be enough qualified candidates to fill these positions now, but that can be changed fairly quickly if the Ministry of Education takes a strong initiative.

(Feature image from Unsplash)