Ming Chuan University (Part 1)
I get a lot of e-mail asking about teaching at Ming Chuan. I get so much of it that I can't answer it all. Over the next few postings, I'm going to try to explain what my job is like, and hopefully indicate what kind of place it is to work for and what kind of people the school is looking for.
I have been at MCU since September 2002. So far, I am extremely happy and plan to stay for a long time. This doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of stupid things that the school does, but rather, it does mean that if you can't work for ming Chuan, I don't think you can work anywhere.
At MCU, every undergrad has to take 4 years of English. The English Language Center was set up several years ago to deal with this requirement. At that time, the school could handle all instruction with only a few teachers. But the schools has grown enormously since then, and now we have somewhere over 40 teachers in our unit. The ELC is the equivalent of a department, but must be distinguished from the Department of Applied English. The DAE offers courses to English majors, such as literature. linguistics, etc. We offer a program called Practical Englishto non-English majors based on our own textbooks that we have produced. We also offer advanced courses to high-level students who test into what is called 'Honours English'.
In fact, it is not simple as this. Many of our teachers also teach DAE classes and some of their teachers also teach our courses -- or at least that has how it has been in the past. The policy of our program is that first-year instructors should be fluent in Mandarin. Although this is not always the case, the result of this is that most first-year classes are taught by local instructors. If we don't have enough, we ask the DAE to help supply instructors. The same is true for them; if they can not find instructors for some of the courses they need to offer, they ask us to help. Keep in mind that all DAE instructors have a PhD. The DAE instructors I have talked to about our first-year classes are extremely unhappy and claim the course is too simple and boring. On the other hand, our instructors generally get sent to teach the courses that their instructors do not want to teach. An example of this is Composition. Because teaching Composition involves a great deal of homework and marking, they have handed ALL their Sophomore Composition classes to our teachers. I teach one of these.
The second major responsibility of the ELC is to construct and administer a test of English proficiency to every undergraduate twice every term (that's 4 times a year!). The school has something like 15,000 students. Complicating the problem is the fact that each level of the program needs a different test, and some levels may need a day school and night school version. That's a lot of tests, and the coordination and handling of this sometimes results in a very complex arrangement.
10:58:14 PM 
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