Scott Sommers' Taiwan Weblog

Wed, 10 Dec 2003 09:29:49 GMT

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.

Sat, 06 Dec 2003 02:46:02 GMT

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.

Wed, 03 Dec 2003 13:12:07 GMT

Getting a Job at a Taiwan University

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 Ming Chuan University, 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 International College that MCU operates.

While it is true that candidates with minimum qualifications should be able to get a job teaching at the university-level somewhere, I want to stress how bad some of the jobs in Taiwan can be. Browse through Dave¡¦s ESL Job Information Journal, as well as some of the other chats operated for English teachers in Taiwan. You will see constant reference to how bad teaching at universities in Taiwan can be. It is not true that all jobs here are so horrible. My job provides 4 months paid vacation, as well as maximum teaching hours and other amazing benefits. The reason you don¡¦t hear about these jobs on the chats is that the people working at schools like this don¡¦t complain. In fact, they don¡¦t even quit.

It¡¦s not impossible to get one of these jobs, just difficult. If you are serious about getting one, there are things you can do to improve your chances.

1. Get relevant education. This means an M. TESOL, and M.Ed or another related degree. A Ph.D. is even better. In fact, a Ph.D. is so much better that it probably doesn¡¦t have to be in a related field.

2. Become an expert. Learn how to teach an area of TEFL that¡¦s in high demand. For example, no one wants to teach composition. If you are willing to teach writing, you can become extremely competitive. Many university classes are very large (50+ students). Learn how to manage large classes like these, and you can launch a much more competitive application.

3. Publish. I can not stress this enough. There are many regional forums that teachers can publish and present their work in, like JALT Quarterly and The Language Teacher. There are many regional conferences, such as those of JALT, KoTESOL, and ETA-ROC that are accessible to teachers. It doesn¡¦t have to be academic research; you must have something you do in class that other teachers would like to learn about. Just try it because having published and presented your work publicly is the single biggest way to attract attention.

Sun, 30 Nov 2003 12:10:36 GMT

Employment at Ming Chuan University

Ming Chuan University (where I teach) has just put up a new English langauge Web page. You can find openings for teaching positions at

http://www.mcu.edu.tw/english/english_index.htm

These positions include teaching English in the English Language Center and also teaching academic subjects in English at the International College operated by MCU.

I think the English Lanaguage Center at MCU is a first-class employer. You will probably not be able to find a better employer in Taiwan. But please keep in ind that I am extremely biased with respect to his.

Sat, 29 Nov 2003 02:28:17 GMT

Bad Things about Teaching in Taiwan: Income Tax

I don't always write good thing about teaching in Taiwan, but know that there's a highly positive tone about what I write. This is because I do think this is a great place to work. But I know that some people who work here don't have the same experience as me, so I¡¦d like to write about some of the serious problems that other teachers have told me about.

Income Tax and Residency

One of the biggest problems for new teachers is the residency requirement for income tax.

Taiwan income tax laws are quite generous compared with Canada. I pay a 6% tax on my income. That's it, no other deductions of any kind. But I pay 6% because I am a resident of the ROC. If you have lived here for less than 183 days in the year, you are not a resident. As a result, you have to pay 20% of your income as tax. After you become a resident, you can apply for a tax refund, and you should be able to get all that money back.

At my school, what that means is that your check says 54,000, but you take home about 40,000. Of course, you get it all back, but that's not 'til next year, and all that missing money doesn't help you pay the rent this year.

If you come here from overseas and don¡¦t have residency, your university will tell you about this. My experience is that being told and the reality of missing the money are completely different.

This can be a serious problem. Bear it in mind when planning to work here.

Wed, 26 Nov 2003 10:42:20 GMT

Tue, 25 Nov 2003 16:07:54 GMT

Grammar in the Classroom(Part 3): Why do we teach grammar?

We usually assume that the reason things find their way into classroom instruction has something to do with beliefs about their effects on students. In the case of grammar instruction, it's not straightforward.

No on ever learned grammar from their mothers or their friends. In fact, until very recently, virtually no one was literate, so it would have been impossible to teach grammar the way we think of being taught today. Ironically, at the same time that virtually no one could have been learning grammar, multilingualism was the rule of life. So how is that we came to think of studying grammar as a natural part of language learning?

The emergence of a modern, standardized English (ME) combined with the expansion of public education made the teaching of English necessary. Spellings for words had to be taught, as well as standard usages. In its infancy, the teaching of ME was not a straightforward endeavour. Such literary giants as Daniel Webster, as well as Benjamin Franklin and others argued that English could not be taught any other way than the way than nature allowed us to aquire it.

English was hardly the first language to be standardized. One of the first languages undergoing standrdization was Latin. Latin continued to be taught and used well into the period where English was undergoing modernization. In fact, Latin had not only continued to be taught long after its practical use had ended, it had aquired a status as a marker of 'proper' education and upbringing.

For various historical reasons, Latin had aquired a very particular way of being taught. This method is what langauge teachers today generally refer to as Grammar-Translation. This method refers to a method of teaching that relies on the teaching of language through exercise and manipulation of the grammatical properties of the language. It also relies on asking students to translate passages back and forth between Latin and the L1 of the student.

The status that Latin had aquired and the way it was taught had a significant impact of the development of modern language teaching techniques. English teachers of that time ran up against one of the major barriers that EFL teachers today continue to experience. Teaching something that seems to occurr naturally appears simple, and subsequently, the social status of those working in the field suffered. A natural way to address this problem was to aquire the methods of teaching higher status languages.

Subsequently, the instruction of English began to aquire more and more of the characteristics of the instruction of Latin. By the turn of the century 20th ecntury, teaching English to first langauge speakers had become so similar to the teaching Latin that the two were virtually indistingishable. Not coincidentally, it was during the emergence of English as language taught through grammar that we began to see the development of the grammar textbook. Vivian Cook, a leading linguist in this area, points to the time when the term 'native speaker' began to appear. Afterall, how could one have a native speaker if there was no codified grammar for that speaker to be identified from? But that's all another story.

Grammar is taught because it was a way for teachers of English to aquire professional status when the profession first emerged. It is not taught because there is any reason to believe this is an effective way to teach language.

Mon, 24 Nov 2003 10:51:00 GMT

Grammar in the Classroom (Part 2): What is Grammar?

As it turns out, the answer to this question is not so clear.

Usually, when English teachers refer to "grammar", they are referring to the rules that you read in books that claim to teach grammar. This definition includes rules like third person singular conjugation of verbs and how to construct past tense verbs, as well as their exceptions. It is what linguists refer to as prescriptive grammar because it makes a prescription for the proper use of the language. It creates the kind of situation you probably experienced in grade school with your teacher giving your endless pages of paper telling you how you should speak English and asking you to correct incorrect sentences.

This definition turns out to be extremely problematic. Language usage is not a recipe book. In the lifetime of people still living, English usage has changed considerably. A more significantly is that these so-called grammar rules tell us nothing about how people actually talk. The rules of grammar that you find in these prescriptive books do not even describe the way we use English today. I'll go even further. I'll say that if you spoke only the rules of prescriptive grammar as it is found in grammar textbooks, you would have trouble being understood.

I will be writing much more on these points in the postings to come. Suffice it to say to say that the contents of "grammar" or even the "grammar of the English language" are that simply defined. If you're willing to accept this fact, what then is grammar?

Grammar is regularity in language usage. Using a definition of regularity makes "grammar" a very different thing than just a set of rules to fit words into. Of course, regularity can be based on rules, but there are other concepts that create regularity.