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.
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.
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.
Continue reading "Textbooks That Suck And Textbooks That Don't" »
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.