OutsideInKorea » Education

E2 (English Teacher) Visa Changes

Chris — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 19:08:34 +0000

Like every government everywhere, the Korean government has a long and storied tradition of getting things exactly wrong, of creating policies by fiat and without consultation that worsen the problem they were intended to address, and result in unintended consequences down the line. The newest proposed change to regulations for the single largest group of foreign temporary residents — holders of 1-year E2 English teacher visas — neatly fits the bill.

There have been some recent and welcome improvements to immigration regulations in Korea recently, with holders of spousal F-class visas, for example, being granted more freedoms and rights, and these have been very welcome for long-term foreign residents. The changes, it must be said, have not come as a result of any consideration towards (the mostly male) foreign professionals with Korean spouses resident here, they’ve come from the changing requirements of male Korean citizens with foreign wives, a pairing once almost unheard-of. It’s a response to the rapidly shifting demographics in the farming communities of Korea, where last year saw a rise of mixed-nationality marriages to more than 40% of total marriages in the countryside, from near-zero as recently as five years ago. The story behind this sea-change is a fascinating one, and one that will have revolutionary effects on Korean society in the decades to come. The short version: there are thousands of male farmers of marriageable age in the small towns and villages of Korea entirely unable to find Korean wives, because of both demographics (the rock-bottom birth rate, the preference (actionable in recent decades through banned but not unusual sex-selective abortion) for male children, and the flight of young women and men both to the cities) and economics (no city girl wants to move into the countryside, which is for the most part like moving half a century into the poverty-sticken past). So women are being imported from China and south-east Asia, and what was once a nearly-total ethnic uniformity has exploded into something very different. It’s going to make for interesting times.

But that’s not what I want to write about today.

A LITTLE BACKGROUND

Recent years have seen a rise both in the frequency and intensity of media hand-wringing over some of the less savory people showing up in Korea to teach English. There have been fear-mongering exposés (nothing new, it must be said) of foreign teachers using and selling drugs, and recent discoveries of expat teachers with records of sexual abuse of children in their home countries have (justifiably) terrified many.

Now, I’ve long argued that the responsibility for the execrable overall quality of English ‘teachers’ in Korea can be laid squarely at the foot of the Korean government. Because of the overwhelming demand for teachers, they have, since the early days, allowed anyone with a) a pulse, b) English as a native tongue, and c) a degree in any discipline to come to Korea to teach English to children, adults, university students, whoever.

It doesn’t take a great deal of insight to realize that merely being able to speak a language does not magically grant one the skills to teach it in a classroom situation to others. To speak it with others, certainly. And I will grant that given the paradoxial pedagogical laxity with which most language schools and education departments are organized and run — an artifact, to a large extent, of a focus on the business rather than the educational needs of the ‘customers’ — many tens of thousands of ‘teachers’ from foreign countries have been able to fake it. Make with the idle chat, collect a paycheck. Some of those even had some natural ability or interest, and became, without the benefit of any kind of formal training in educational principles, to become effective teachers. A very very few (a handful of the hundreds I’ve met over the years) actually had some kind of certification to teach that wasn’t laser-printed in the back room of a 2-week TESL Certification mill in Bangkok or Bangor.

But the vast majority of arrivals over the past couple of decades have come and gone to make some easy cash, party, travel and have an overseas experience, because, thanks to the open policies of immigration here, it’s been cowboy country.

If the Korean government had required or allowed (and we could choose any or all of these) a) teaching experience, b) certification in teaching or in ESL from an accredited institution, c) any kind of vetting process before the candidate boarded a plane, d) the establishment of some kind of standards agency or organization, e) even the most cursory of regulation of the legendarily corrupt and massive hagwon (private school) industry, f) professional foreign consultants/interviewers (because, in all honesty, it seems almost impossible for many Koreans to distinguish seriously odd or hinky behaviour or personality traits from what they perceive to be the overall oddness of foreign attitudes), the consequences would have been better teachers, better quality of education provided, less conflict between foreign employees and Korean employers, and a more stable, professional workforce. Of course, making it more difficult for the less desirable candidates to show up and get in front of a class would increase demand and salaries for the ones who were professional and qualified. I can’t say that that would upset me much.

But nothing was done, and ‘teachers’ good, bad, and ugly poured into Korea. And some of them, almost inevitably, were kid-fondlers, some of them were idiotic enough to not be able to resist getting high, and most were less interested in teaching than they were paying off their student loans. (I’ve nothing in principle against drug use, but when one lives in a country where the laws and cultural norms are different from where one was raised, one makes allowances. When in Rome.) But naturally, it is the squeaky wheel that gets the grease, and the bad news that gets the breathless xenophobic media coverage.

NEW DEVELOPMENTS

So the government has just announced it is planning to institute the following changes, beginning in December 2007, according to the Korea Herald. In less than 7 weeks time from when I write this, at the outside.

According to a Ministry of Justice press release, foreigners who apply for teaching visas will have to submit a criminal background check, a medical check, and must undergo an interview with the closest Korean consulate to their home town. Visa runs to Japan will also be scrapped. Teachers must now receive and renew visas their home country.

Now I find little to argue with in terms of health checks. It seems a reasonable hurdle, one that other countries in which I’ve worked have required in order for me to receive a visa. A criminal background check, ditto. These are quite reasonable, and sensible, even if they do not really address the problems that they are ostensibly intended to address, which is dangerous or criminal behaviour once candidates arrive in Korea, nor do they address the real problem, which is that an open door employment policy opens the door to everyone, desirable or not.

But the last two stipulations, let alone causing grief for people who might be interested in coming to Korea (and it can be depended on that there are very few who really want to come Korea, but again, that’s another story), but it will cause a change in the English education industry here that will result in chaos and difficulties for the very people — business owners, students, and parents of children who are students — that the new legislation is meant to protect.

First, in a country the size of Canada, for example, from which the vast majority of English teachers in Korea these days come, the nearest place that a potential candidate from Nova Scotia or PEI would be able to have an interview would be Montreal. For someone from the Territories, or Northern BC, or Saskatchewan, it would be Vancouver. These are journeys of more than 1000 kilometers in most cases, and expensive. Given that most foreign teachers give as their primary reason for coming to Korea the need to make and save money, this is going to choke off a significant percentage of potential teachers. School owners in Korea, notorious for their stinginess, almost certainly won’t be footing the bills, even if the interview in Canada is a success. The notion of requiring face-to-face interviews is a reasonable and good one, but this is a counterproductive way to do it.

Second, the requirement for return to one’s home country in order to renew a visa is a death knell. Previously, E2 visa holders, if changing employers (or, in years past, merely extending their contract at the same employer), could hop over to Japan for a weekend with their paperwork, and return with a new visa. The requirement to spend, at a minimum, $2000-$3000 dollars to return to Canada, America, Australia (or wherever) to renew a visa will mean that an even larger proportion of teachers will spend no more than one year in Korea. There would simply be too little remunerative incentive to do so.

Which means that continuity for students is lost. Which means that rather than having teachers who have over a few years had the time to develop some sensitivity to Korean culture, some understanding of the people, some language skills, and some armour against the culture shock that hits everyone in their first 6 months — well, you’ll see a continuous carousel of shell-shocked newbies, their heads ringing with alienation, complaining, carousing, and, most importantly, given that there will be no new requirements for professional experience or qualification, not having the time to learn how to actually be effective teachers.

The result will, of course, be fewer teachers, but not better ones. This makes long-term pros like me, unaffected by these visa changes, all that much more a valuable commodity. I’m OK with that.

But I do hate to see the Korean government shoot themselves in the foot yet again, especially when the net result will be fewer teachers, another low ebb for quality and availability of education, no improvement in the actual quality or professionalism of people who jump through the new hoops, and the system once again failing the very people its meant to serve — students of English and their families.

I applaud the Korean government for taking the long overdue iniative in making an attempt to clean up the mess that the industry is in, but I can’t help but condemn them for not addressing the real problems, and enacting ‘reforms’ that will only make the situation worse.

Unintended consequences.

A Free Korean Language Course

Chris — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 01:39:37 +0000

Just as there are a lot of terrible ESL books out there, there are also a lot of egregiously bad textbooks designed for foreign learners of Korean. In fact, I’ve rarely seen such badly organized and poorly thought out language texts as some of the ones I’ve tried to use to improve my Korean. It’s an insight perhaps, into the quality of language education in primary and secondary schools, if the Korean-made textbooks used to teach English and other languages are as poorly put together. Help is at hand if you’re a self-directed student of Korean, though.

The American Foreign Service Institute used to publish a series of courses targetting a wide variety of languages, for the use of diplomats and other government employees posted to overseas positions. The Korean one — Mastering Korean, available in two levels — is the best that I’ve ever seen, the most comprehensive and logically-structured introduction to the grammar and structures of the language

It’s not pretty in terms of design — it has no illustrations whatsoever and is typset in Courier — and it’s not intended as a classroom text, but for self-study, particularly if you have a modicum of knowledge about linguistics and grammar in English, it’s very good indeed.

The other good news is that it’s in the public domain. So I’m pleased to be able to offer the course for download here, from this site, free of charge. All I ask is that if you link to it, you link to this page, rather than directly to the files in question. Each chapter is in pdf form, and the audio component has been converted to mp3 files.

There is one gotcha, though. The author uses his own romanization, one different from either the old McCune-Reischauer romanization or the revised one adopted by the Korean government since 2000, and there is minimal use of the actual Korean alphabet in the examples and exercises. The romanization used is a sensible one, particularly if one knows the sounds of Korean already, and some of the quirks of pronunciation. If you take care to note, for example, the regular transformation of syllable-ending consonant sounds (for example a consonant-spanning ã…† is romanized as ‘ss’, even though it may be pronounced as a t-like unreleased stop followed by the sibilant), you’ll be OK. I recommend that you familiarize yourself with the alphabet and its sounds first (it’s a matter of a few hours to a few days), then learn the system used in the text, comparing and keeping mindful of the quirks as you go.

So, without further ado: here’s a belated Christmas present, Level One of Mastering Korean. Share and enjoy (and if you know of any other good textbooks for learning Korean, please feel free to let everyone know about them below, in the comments).

Update: You can find the Level Two course here!

Textbooks That Suck And Textbooks That Don't

Chris — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 22:19:06 +0000

I teach adults for a living, and I’ve been doing it (interspersed with periods of product R&D work in IT) for longer than I care to remember. I conduct business skills workshops these days, as well, but my bread and butter is language teaching.

A bane of the ESL teacher’s existence is the undeniable fact that there are, to put it bluntly, a lot of textbooks for adult learners that are, to varying degrees, crap. The reasons for this state of affairs are many and varied, of course. Many of them are weighed down under more than one layer of the old language guano. You’re waist-deep before you even get started, digging through the stink to find something useful. But I’m here to help.

A few of the most common problems:

You Vill Follow Zee Instructions: scrupulous adherence to outmoded ‘methods’
The Horrors of Clipart: design that is user-unfriendly, or just plain ugly. (Much could be learned from good web site design, here)
Siloed Syllabi: chunks of grammar (or language functions) are attacked (I choose that word with care), worried at like a terrier with a rat, then forgotten in the next section
The Random Walk Theory of Textbook Structure: throw slips of paper labelled with verb tenses and grammar patterns into hat, shake it and turn it out on your desk. Voila! There is your outline for your textbook. (Korean-language textbooks for English speakers are the purest example of this kind of thing, for the most part)
Formulaic Fundamentalism: Begin with stilted dialogue, then vocabulary list, follow up with humiliatingly banal ‘activity’, ancient, inauthentic reading and comprehension questions: lather, rinse, repeat.
More Words, More Better: Business English is all about reading interminable articles, parsing spreadsheets and boring the tits off anybody in the blast radius.
Be Free, Little Butterflies: Speaking skill is what the students want, amirite? Structural knowledge is soooo 10 minutes ago, dude. They can’t form the present tense yet? No worries — toss ‘em into the pool, get ‘em babbling away with this randomly constructed list of fascinating questions about eating noodles! Right.

These are, of course, just a sampling of the sins against the teacher and insults to the student committed by textbook publishers, of course.

The three biggest producers of lines of ESL textbooks for adults are Oxford and Cambridge University Presses, and Pearson/Longman (Oxford and Cambridge Presses both have poorly organized, confusing, slow websites. Prepare to be frustrated if you visit them). There are others, of course, but most of the series I’ve encountered in decades of teaching have been from these publishers, for better (sometimes) or worse (often).

Variation in quality between different titles, even within a single publisher’s catalogue, is a bit shocking, even to an unshockable old duffer like me. They range from superb (American Headway) to merely adequate (like New Person to Person, by Jack Richards, whose essay ‘30 Years of TEFL/TESL: A Personal Reflection‘ is a must-read if you’re in the field) to slightly embarrassing (New Interchange sucks in more ways than I care to think about).

The same problems and the same wild variation in quality exists in the Business English space as well. Cambridge’s New International Business English is one of the worst books I’ve ever seen along several of the axes of awful I mentioned above. A real stinker. Global Links from Longman is slightly better (while making the idiotic and all-too-common (and bewilderingly stupid) mistake of using readings that start with things like ‘Carly Fiorina is CEO of HP…’), and Communicating In Business, also from Cambridge, is actually pretty damn good, if demandingly difficult.

If you’ve made it this far, you’re probably looking for a recommendation or two.

These are mine: if you’re teaching English to adults (and you can group them more or less into levels from False Beginner to Advanced), you can’t do better (as of this year) than the American Headway series. They are well-designed and engaging, and structured in such a way that it is clear that they were written from a deep understanding of the way people approach and learn language. They have great depth for the dedicated teacher, and plenty of material that will make the novice look good, merely by following along. They eschew most of the cliche content that makes so many ESL textbooks tedious exercises in repetition. They have excellent companion teachers’ guides. I can find very little to complain about (other than Oxford’s tendency to use the same small stable of voice actors for all the recordings in a book, and even across different books) — I’ve used them for a few years now, and am happy to revisit them with each new class. Each time through, I find new ways in which links between concepts and structures have been embedded in the books’ structures, and ways to extend and enrich the material.

If you’re teaching Business English, I recommend Cambridge’s Communicating in Business. It’s intended for Intermediate to Advanced students, and demands business knowledge on the part of the teacher, but it rewards effort, and is directly applicable to the requirements of students wanting to increase their skills in and understanding of the language of international business.

Got some recommendations of your own? Post them in the comments, below, with my thanks. There are a lot of books I haven’t seen (for which, if experience is any guide, I can count my blessings).

A Brand New Day?

Chris — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 01:43:36 +0000

I can count on one hand the number of English teachers I’ve met in the ten years since I first came to Korea who were actually certified teachers back in their home country. If the proportion topped 2%, I’d be shocked.

There is one reason for this, and one only, despite the acrimony and scattershot accusations that fly around in waves whenever the Korean media decides once again — something happening at the moment, but I’ve promised myself that I won’t let this site go topical and start talking about news ephemera, so I’ll leave the able chest-beating to others — that some more ad units can be sold if they haul out the dead horse ‘foreign teacher as parasite’ strawman to give it another few whacks. The root of the problems is obvious, and it’s fixable, but the gordian knot of money and politics and attitudes towards education in Korea continues to keep it from being fixed.

You see, almost anyone can legally come to Korea to teach. We can omit the word ‘almost’ if we choose from a pool of native speakers of English who have graduated from a university, in any faculty at all. We can omit both the words ‘legally’ and ‘almost’ if we choose from a pool of native speakers of English who are willing to falsify their documents.

This is, to speak plainly, ridiculous.

Now, like I said, of the hundreds (thousands?) of foreign teachers (so called because of the jobs they’ve held, rather than any consistent set of qualifications or experience) that I’ve met here over the years, more than 99% had received either no formal training, or perhaps had attended a two-week TESL training course (special sale this week only at Bob’s TESL Hut™!). Of those, there were some who actually were adequate teachers, despite the absence of formal training. Some combination of dedicated, enthusiastic, articulate, language-aware, empathetic, smart. Most, however, were not.

And that isn’t to say that each and every teacher I met who had the heavy qualifications and experience was a great educator. Most teachers, when it comes down to it, just aren’t that good. But most of the paperholders I’ve met were at least better than adequate. There just aren’t many of them on the ground here.

Why on earth would this be the case? Why would a nation so obsessed with education and the perceived status that scholastic achievement confers allow a situation to develop where the overwhelming majority of foreign language teachers were unqualified, inexperienced, and often utterly disinterested in the actual profession of teaching?

Well, because the government said it was OK. Proof of graduation from a four year university, in any field, along with a job offer (which is, thanks to the unscrupulousness of most recruiters and the cluelessness, to be blunt, of most hogwan (private institute) owners) is enough to get you an E-2 (English teacher) visa.

Now this is good news for the thousands upon thousands (latest figures put the total number of foreign English teachers in Korea at 15000) of young recent graduates desperate for a little travel and some money to pay off their student loans. Great news, in fact. Nothing could be easier than to pop over to Korea for a year or two and babysit some cute Korean kids.

But it’s absolutely heart-breakingly bad news for students of English, whether they be kids forced to study after hours by their parents, university students looking towards a global future, or adults studying for their work or personal improvement or retirement or whatever. If they’re savvy, or lucky, they may be able to find a school that hires actual teachers, or find one themselves, through word of mouth or connections. But if my experiences in the last decade have been any guide, they’ve got about 1 chance in 100 of finding someone who’s both capable and qualified.

Editorials in newspapers like The Korea Herald have been suggesting recently that parents actually ask teachers at the private institutes their children attend for proof of their qualifications. Well, sure, but that conveniently ignores the lack of filtering assumed to have been done upstream, not to mention the fact that even if the parents could speak English, they might reasonably be assumed to be less than qualified to evaluate the veracity of any documents produced (assuming the teacher in question was not so offended that they refused to produce said documents, digging themselves in turn a deeper hole of mistrust). It’s tacit acknowledgement that the system is so badly broken that there’s nothing to be done but arm yourself, stockpile textbooks and pencils, and get ready for the education apocalypse.

But there’s an smarter, less ad-hoctastic way to fix it, and it would be win-win-win for everyone involved, except of course for the cowboys, the forgers, the sex-tourists, and the ‘native speaker teachers’ who are incapable of properly forming the simple past tense, let alone teaching it.

Raise the standards for E-2 visas. Raise them high. Qualified teachers only, with experience. Nothing less than a CELTA/DELTA or equivalent if the candidate is not university-educated to be a teacher. Interviews for those candidates, performed by people who understand English, understand western mannerisms and culture, and who can (as few Koreans seem able) winnow out the scam artists and freaks (hell, hire native-speakers for the job!) Interviews that actually ask them to do a quick spontaneous demo lesson, if you can imagine that.

What happens under the new regime? The quality of language education rises. Happy government, happy students, happy parents. Demand continues to outstrip supply for teachers, and the imbalance increases, but the pool of vetted candidates are quality, and their cachet and remuneration increases to a level similar to those of full-time Korean professional employees. Happy teachers. The (perceived or actual) number of ‘freaks and refugees’ decreases, leading to a decrease in lurid tabloid exposés, which might make the media unhappy, but to hell with them. Private institutes close in droves, of course, but there are far too many of them, and far too many solely concerned with turning a profit, anyway. On the hagwon-owner upside, they can guarantee quality instruction, and can charge more for it. Quality over quantity permeates the education system. It’s a Brand New Day!

I’m being facetious, a bit, as is my wont, and I leave details of implementation to people more energetic than I, but I’m serious about this. There is one easy way to fix most of what is wrong with foreign language education in Korea, and English education in particular, and the filthy cloud of confrontation, mutual wariness, distrust and resentment and angst that hovers over the language landscape: raise the bar. Go upmarket, and do the right thing, rather than the short-term economically expedient thing.

Because attacking symptoms rather than causes is a fool’s game.

[Update : Welcome, Joongang Daily readers. Nice of you to drop by.]