If a "bilingual", "globally-oriented" Taiwan is the way forward, immigration reform for educators is imperative

Just a quick thought at the end of Lunar New Year that struck me as I chatted about my life in Taiwan with a friendly British couple on the beach. Links to come later as I can't easily add them on an iPad. 

They asked me if dual nationality in Taiwan was even possible, or if I would have to give up my original nationality to get it. I told them sincerely I was happy that recent changes to the immigration laws in Taiwan created a pathway, but dismayed that the path was entirely too narrow and impossible - as an educator, I'd have to be a university professor (assistant or associate - I forget which because that's so far off for me that it doesn't matter yet.) I mentioned that I have friends at prestigious institutions like Academia Sinica who have been told that this is interpreted (incorrectly) to mean "when you have tenure", so they won't even write the necessary letters for their academics until that happens. 

"Imagine," I said, "having to get tenure at Academia Sinica before you even qualified as an educator!" 

It was the same thing I'd told Legislator Karen Yu just a few weeks ago. 

My husband joined in, "It seems like a rule that was put in place with very little thought - like some people in a room just decided that sounded good, but which has a huge effect on people's lives that the folks in that room are totally unaware of."

And I've come to realize, as those whole "bilingual country" and "English as a second official language" talk starts slowly creaking its wheels towards actual action, that if the government is serious about it, that immigration laws, especially for educators, simply need to be loosened. Now. 

The usual pushback to people upset that they don't qualify for dual nationality in Taiwan (like me!) is "this is the set of talents/skills that the government has decided it needs, that's why it's comparatively for someone in STEM to jump through the hoops, but difficult for teachers. They want STEM workers but don't need so many teachers. Deal with it!" 

This is of course nonsense, though I do acquiesce that this is what the government *thinks* are the skills it needs to attract to Taiwan. What's horseshit is the notion that Taiwan actually needs more talented foreign STEM professionals. Taiwan has reams and reams of local STEM talent, the best of whom are leaving Taiwan due to low pay and poor working conditions. (and even so, if anything there's a surplus of engineers and IT professionals. Perhaps pay would go up if they were more scarce.) Foreigners aren't going to take those jobs in any great number because the jobs aren't very good; what it needs is to provide attractive enough opportunities to get its own talent to stay, and perhaps some foreigners as well. Taiwan is not a developing country; what it would take to satisfy top Taiwanese talent is not far off from what it would take to attract foreigners. Expectations don't differ that much. 

But what Taiwan actually does need - or will need in the coming years - is talented educators. It's true that there is a surplus of not-very-well-trained "English teachers". While I support a way forward for them in the field that involves better apprenticeship and training than what is on offer now, they are not the ones I mean. We have a lot of those (too many, in fact) and not enough trained and experienced foreign educators - whether you have a teaching license, a Delta or a postgraduate degree. Among those who are here, a disproportionate amount are English teachers or non-specialized teachers of young learners; teachers who specialize in other subjects are harder to come by. We have even fewer experienced language teacher trainers - and I don't just mean among foreigners. There aren't that many options for teacher training in English among locals either. 

The government seems to have realized this - the talk at the meeting before Lunar New Year focused at times on this need. But they don't seem to have realized that if that is the talent Taiwan must attract, then one of the best ways to get those already here to stay and attract new professionals is to make it easier not just to move here, but to stay. That is, to further amend immigration laws so that teachers who want to build a career here have a hope of staying on as citizens, someday, if they wish. 

If we're going to really go ahead with a "globally oriented Taiwan" - that is, a country where English is integrated culturally to a degree that eases the road to greater internationalization, which is the actual goal - Taiwan is going to need more than a handful of professors who currently qualify. 

They are going to need teacher trainers (you know, like me). Not just to train up foreign teachers, but locals as well (which is what I focus on). No country actually achieves the level of 'bilingualism' that the government says it aspires to with foreign teachers alone: you'll notice that English medium teachers in countries like Singapore, India, Hong Kong (I'm calling it a country and don't care what you think) and the Philippines are overwhelmingly local. They're going to need advisors, translators, editors and tutors. They are going to need English proficiency test examiners (even though tests like IELTS suck for political reasons and you should not take them if you can avoid it.) 

And yes, they're going to need just regular teachers. Not just English teachers; if Tainan is any indication, this push is going to go hand-in-hand with a bilingual education model, where regular subjects are taught in English. This model isn't particularly common in Taiwan, although schools with multilingual curricula exist; educators who are familiar with it will be needed, and a number of them will be foreign. Teacher training programs and certification courses will hopefully become more readily available in Taiwan - I have high hopes for international standard pre-service certifications, including those run by Cambridge and Trinity. But those require trainers, and to get to a point where locals can do those jobs (as such training does not currently exist in Taiwan), we'll need foreign teacher trainers. 

So, it makes absolutely no sense, from this moment forward, for the government to imply through its immigration law that it does need foreign engineers but it doesn't need teachers. It makes no sense to set the bar for educators so ridiculously high that almost no-one meets it, and to predicate it on a job some valuable educators may not even want. 

Personally, while I think I'd be a fine academic, I find a lot of meaning in teacher training, especially training up non-native speaker teachers. This is a real contribution to Taiwan - but to become yet another university professor teaching the same old academic writing and speaking classes? That is also meaningful, but we have a lot of them already. Are more of those what Taiwan really needs, at a time when it will be gearing up to train a bunch of new teachers in modern methods that are not currently common here?

Many of us are already here, and have made Taiwan our home. We want to stay and contribute, and one of the best ways the government can ensure that we do is to make it feasible for educators to gain dual nationality. Taiwan is a fine place to live as well; surely some newcomers will want to stay. 

It's time for Taiwan to truly open the door to them, and amend its immigration policy to reflect the talent it says it needs. 

Alliance for a Globally-Oriented Taiwan kicks off

If you're reading this at all, you're probably wondering what happened to me all month. Yeah, well, I'm wondering too. I've been doing a pre-Lunar New Year deep clean of our apartment as I'm not particularly busy with work. Also, the election's still got me down.

Not because my "team" "lost" (they didn't, really: the NPP is the closest thing I've got to a team I root for, and they performed better than anyone expected, including perhaps, quietly, the NPP themselves). People I don't like win elections all the time and I don't fret about it for two months.

No, what causes a sinking feeling in my heart every time I think about it is a far bigger problem: that, although it would be political suicide for the DPP to make a big deal out of it, interference from China was real, and terrifying. We can't prove how effective it was, but there sure seemed to be some effect, and if that's the case they will try it again. And again. And they very well may win. Yikes. I just...can't.

So, let's talk about something positive instead.

This past week, a group of 90-100 people, foreigners and Taiwanese, congregated in the Legislative Yuan to have a large-scale discussion meeting about how to implement the 'bilingual Taiwan' initiative (you might know it as 'English as a second official language', announced by former premier William Lai). Heading the meeting were legislators Karen Yu (余宛如) Rosalia Wu （吳思瑤）as well as National Development Council leadership, Professor Louis Chen of Global Brands Management Association, STARTBOARD and Crossroads.TW founder David Chang. The general attendees were a mix of teachers, school owners, recruiters, academics, NGO and nonprofit representatives, a few activists and some journalists.

One thing that was made clear was that the point is not to suddenly start forcing everyone to speak English, or spend their own money to go to cram school to study English, or to have all official documents in English and Mandarin (but not any other languages more native to or historically linked to Taiwan, such as indigenous languages or Taiwanese). The point is to develop Taiwan's international competitiveness by making it more accessible in English, and to increase the general public's familiarity with English, while potentially reforming the educational system to emphasize English proficiency. And over several decades, as that.

Put that way, it sounds quite reasonable.

The outcome of this meeting is the formation of the Alliance for a Globally-Oriented Taiwan, with more specific action items to be developed in the coming weeks. At minimum we're looking at advocacy, advisory status and policy proposals. While it has the potential to be another layer of talk, there's also the potential for it to be much more than that.

That two legislators and the NDC made sure the meeting took place, were there and paid attention to what foreigners were saying is already huge: I'm not sure it's ever happened before. For that reason alone it might have some real effect.

I won't spend too much time going over what was said by the leaders - that's been covered extensively in the Mandarin-language media and basically boiled down to "we're on your side", "we want to do this in a feasible way" and, of course, that the point isn't just to be bilingual, it's a push for greater internationalization.

Instead, I'll spend some time summarizing some of what came out of the contributors in the general audience.

Not everyone got a chance to speak (I did), but I was happy to hear that most opinions were dead-on (some I disagreed with mildly; there were just a few that I simply wasn't on board with). And yes, I do equate "dead on" with "I agreed with it", because in this particular field I will not hesitate to say that I know what I'm talking about.

There was a general agreement that we need to do a better job of teacher training in Taiwan, with ideas for this ranging from bringing in better-qualified teachers to building a teacher-training program in Taiwan from scratch. The latter is an idea I disagree with quite strongly: internationally-recognized and up-to-standard teaching certifications exist already, from teaching licenses/PGCE programs to CELTA/Trinity to Delta and various Master's programs. There's no need to build a program from scratch when...frankly, to mix metaphors, that wheel's already been invented.

The key is to make them more accessible in Taiwan. If you want to improve your teaching through formal training here, it's quite difficult: the government doesn't recognize programs like CELTA or Delta or any online programs; often for Master's programs (even reputable ones) there are residency requirements so a part-time student, even if they attend face-to-face, is going to have trouble. So we have to make these programs both available and recognized, potentially with a sponsorship program to make them affordable, too.

The owners of Reach To Teach, a reputable teacher recruiting company, pointed out that Taiwan has no program through which novice teachers can come here and work in schools (even as assistants), and the only way to work in a school in Taiwan is to come as a licensed teacher. Japan brings foreign teachers into public schools through JET by having them work as assistants as they are not qualified to actually teach; I'm not sure about Korea's EPIK program. What's more, in those countries novice teachers often earn more than trained teachers are offered in schools in Taiwan.

What everyone agreed on was that salaries in Taiwan being low for everyone, including locals, was going to make it hard to internationalize and attract foreign talent, and would not necessarily attract much local talent to English teaching, either. Before this can happen, pay prospects here simply have to get better.

Of course, as someone else pointed out, South Korea and Japan are not bilingual countries. Because, of course, countries where English is more widely spoken got that way through historical (typically colonial) means, but also because those countries routinely employ a large number of local teachers and don't rely on foreign ones.

That's really key, not only in terms of getting enough foreign teachers to do the job, but also cutting down a native speakerist view of English: that English is a White People thing, that White People go to Other Countries to teach Local People, who Learn It. But a country only becomes multilingual when locals are there making it happen. You can't import that kind of culture shift, nor should you.

(Obviously not every native speaker teacher is white, I'm talking about perceptions, not reality.)

There was a huge outpouring of angst, as well. That's not a criticism; I happen to agree with much of it. The notion that Taiwan needs to 'attract' more foreign talent bothered some, who pointed out quite rightly that many talented foreigners are already here, but can't get work outside of English teaching. Some stay and teach because it's all they can do; some leave because there's just no career future here and go to Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong, back to their native countries or elsewhere.

There was also an undercurrent of dissatisfaction with the lack of readable English information on Taiwanese websites, including government websites. If Taiwan is truly going to become an English-friendly country, at the bare minimum all government websites need to be translated completely into (good) English.

Quite a bit of dissatisfaction was expressed over Taiwan's horrifying national examination system (including from me). I pointed out that research consistently shows that elementary-school language teachers in Taiwan are happy to incorporate more modern teaching methods into their practice, but  junior and senior high school teachers aren't, and the big difference is that older learners need to be prepared for the massive battery of mostly-useless and actively harmful exams that they have to take. The teachers themselves have said this quite clearly. There is simply no way for a language education program that actually results in English language proficiency to exist side-by-side with those exams.

The issue, of course, is that parents and some teachers fight viciously against any attempt to change the system. The parents think that more accurate assessment is somehow 'less objective' (not realizing that the tests their children are taking now aren't even accurate or related to real-world language use, and take away so much learning time as to actually harm their overall achievement) and some teachers are afraid they'll lose their jobs if schools suddenly start doing things differently. We need to work with both groups to advocate for change and convince them that there's nothing to be afraid of.

And, as usual, immigration is a massive issue. Those of us who want to stay forever - the well-secured roots of an international Taiwan - are concerned with how difficult it still is to obtain dual nationality or even an employment Gold Card. As a friend of mine pointed out, his employer (Academia Sinica) interprets the dual nationality requirements as stated to mean "we'll do what we need to do to get your application through when you get tenure". Imagine having to be a tenured professor at Academia Sinica before you can even approach dual nationality as an educator! Making it easier to move here and work is important for new immigrants; dual nationality is a core concern of us long-termers. Without it, internationalization can't happen, as we'll always be outsiders.

The downside of the meeting is that a lot of the issues discussed - low pay, lack of career opportunities for foreigners etc - are not easily solvable by the government. Even if they were, there's an entire legislature to convince. Two progressive legislators and the NDC are a good start, but it's not the end. There's a lot to be done and simply "this doesn't work! We can't get good jobs!" isn't something that can be specifically targeted, especially when locals are also struggling in a slow-growth economy.

The upside is that, again, it's huge that the meeting happened at all. People in government are interested, and listening, and that's more than I could say even three years ago. (And for us foreigners, is a big reason to support the Tsai administration). That's something, and we need to turn it into something real.

Taiwanese teens know that their English classes are terrible

As an English teacher who believes in the power of authentic communication in language learning -after all, that's how I learned Mandarin - I've been following the work of Taipei Teen Tribune with interest. It's an English-language 'new media' website with articles written by Taiwanese teenagers, with a lot of really great content (and a useful site to follow if you want to know what Taiwanese youth are thinking). And as a professional, I'm interested in how it has helped Taiwanese youth to develop their English language proficiency.

Recently, 12th grader Irene Lin wrote this insightful piece about what it's like to learn English in Taiwanese schools. It goes something like this: 


Many students, who are able to get high grades on tests, are incapable of having an actual English conversation nor write an 
essay on their own. Lessons are designed for students to be able to answer grammar questions and fill vocabulary into sentences rather than practical usage.

Treating English like a math problem is the major flaw in Taiwan’s English education. Students are taught to look at a sentence by breaking them down into pieces based on parts of speech. Overemphasizing grammar and neglecting content causes students to misuse vocabulary and leads to a lack of ability to comprehend meaning.


Lin suggests a solution that pretty much every professional educator with solid training can get behind:


The amount of reading, writing, and speaking needs to increase to solve the problem. However, we not only need to increase the amount but also its difficulty. Students learn more vocabulary through a novel compared to a five paragraph text; learning to write an essay provides the opportunity to learn critical thinking, an ability that Taiwanese education has never taught.


The analysis itself could go deeper, but what is said is spot-on. I'd bend over and do backflips to have a student like this in my classes, and I don't even teach teenagers (I work with adults). Essentially, she's spot on that macroskills work needs to be increased by a massive amount, with an eye to creating users, not learners of the language. Taiwan's secondary school language curriculum currently focuses on passing the various national exams, which in turn are focused on a grammar-structure-heavy view of language.

It's a classic example of negative washback, and the effects are already well-known: while many Taiwanese English teachers are open to more communicative-competence oriented language teaching, only elementary school Taiwanese teachers of English feel they're able to actually incorporate this into their teaching. This is true even in Tainan, where "English as a second official language" has been a policy for a few years now: elementary school teachers are overall more enthusiastic than junior high school ones, almost certainly due to the pressure of preparing learners for national exams.

At the secondary level, teachers repeatedly say that the pressure to prepare learners for exams (which do not focus on communicative competence at all) keeps them from meaningfully incorporating learning approaches that are shown to produce competent users, not just test-takers.

There is just no way to incorporate anything like communicative teaching, task-based learning, a lexical approach or the Big Mama of bilingual education - CLIL, or Content Language Integrated Learning - at a national level as long as the teachers are still pinned to the wall vis-a-vis the national exams.

The exams themselves need to either be scrapped (at least the foreign language sections, though I'm of a mind to say the whole thing should go, with more proficiency-oriented assessment methods taking their place), or revamped so completely that they look nothing like what learners do now. There is just no place in modern language learning for pages and pages of grammar analysis without any nods to practical usage or even meaning in context.

There's just no other reasonable way to teach English for proficiency - you can't expect teachers to do that and to produce test-takers who can handle a grammar-heavy sit-down exam at the same time. The tests have got to go - but good luck convincing parents, some old-school teachers, and more conservative officials in the Ministry of Education that.

Certainly, meaningful skills and systems practice should be a part of any meaningful language-learning curriculum, but it's not enough to say "increase the difficulty."  As other professional educators in Taiwan have noted when reading this, another big issue is that the ways in which language classes in Taiwanese schools are already difficult are not the ways that will produce proficient users of English.

For example, as a knowledgeable friend pointed out, there's a glut of vocabulary in the current curriculum - far too much to absorb in any real way. If the target language for each class is 4-5 new words at most - but those words are truly used in terms of collocation, colligation, common usage, presence in idiomatic speech and more, and strongly contextually presented, by the end of a typical Taiwanese student's education, they will have still learned thousands of words - more than enough to be proficient, if they can use them across several collocations and phrases.  The difference is that they'll be more likely to actually remember what they learned, rather than trying to cram five times that many lexical items into their brains, vomiting it all up on tests, and then forgetting most of it soon after.

That Lin and her peers already know they're receiving a sub-standard language education is a start. That Lin is able to say clearly that her education does not teach her to think critically is, ironically, a sign of critical thinking ability. It gives me faith in the new generation, so I'll kindly thank you to stop calling them strawberries and mindless phone drones.

All of this leads right back to issues with making English a "second official language" in Taiwan. 

The idea itself isn't a bad one, and the stated goals of the program are actually quite reasonable. The goal isn't to make everyone a fluent speaker, or even necessarily a fully proficient one. They're to make Taiwan a more navigable, understandable destination for foreign visitors and businesspeople - essentially, to internationalize. They're to make English less 'scary' (so, for example, maybe shop assistants won't run away when they see me because they're afraid to speak English; nevermind that I speak Mandarin), and to improve the English curriculum that Taiwan already has. The timeline is reasonable as well.

That said, the fact that Taiwanese youth already go through about a decade of English classes in school, and most who don't come out speaking English in any meaningful way (those who do have almost always taken additional after-school language classes) is a massive problem. Simply having more classes won't help if the curriculum is ineffective. But if the curriculum doesn't work because it's preparing learners for exams rather than teaching them to use a language, it can't be changed unless the exams change.

Tainan is already doing a good job with this on the tourist end, with improvements such as English audioguides now available for major temples, so that any visitor can take a self-guided English-language tour of a number of Tainan temples, and by all accounts the work is quality.

When it comes to improving actual education and proficiency, however, my big worry is that there's simply no way to know if it's working. There seems to be no assessment mechanism built into Tainan's program, which is a yellow (if not a red) flag itself. Even if there were, it's so new that we'd have no idea if it were working by how anyhow; it's too early to know. That Lai has announced the initiative at a national level now is pure politics.

These issues aside, the problem that Lin dances around in her piece is exactly the thing that I fear will torpedo the program: we have no idea whether the continued existence of the national exams in Tainan is having an effect on the "English as a second language" program there, because there's not only no data, but no mechanism that I know of to collect it. Now, imagine that problem on a national level. I just don't see how this is going to work unless we kill the test-heavy way languages are taught in Taiwan now.

That itself is hard to do unless we clean house in terms of the teachers and Ministry of Education officials who will fight such changes, and not just hire "more teachers", but implement improved training for those teachers (both foreign and local - the time is here when it comes to no longer allowing uncredentialed 'native speakers' to be hired as English teachers in Taiwan, with little or no institutional support or meaningful training once employed. Although that's how I got my start, the system simply has to change.) For foreign English teachers, insisting on an internationally-recognized certification - especially now that one will soon be available in Taiwan - and setting parameters for which certification programs are accepted is just a first step.

On top of that, an entirely new curriculum will have to be written, which challenges learners in appropriate ways. What it means to assess learning will have to be entirely re-vamped. Only through consulting with experienced, trained teachers can we ever hope to do this well. 

Until that happens, we might be told that English education in Taiwan is going to change, but teachers will continue to prepare for the ludicrous national exams, and students like Irene Lin aren't going to see their language education get any better.

I'm not holding my breath. 

IELTS takes a political position (and my ongoing battle to fight The Man)

Jerks.

As my husband noted in his nail-on-the-head post on the same topic, pretty much every IELTS teacher and examiner we know is horrified by the change on IELTS's website of "Taiwan" to "Taiwan, China" (Notably, Hong Kong and Macau bear no such designation. If I didn't already know this was all about politics, I'd say that's odd).

Many of us have written to IELTS to protest the change, including me. I'd include a screenshot, except that e-mail contains references to the nature of my employment which I cannot divulge, but which when blacked out render the letter incoherent. Suffice it to say, it was an angry but basically formal letter of protest and complaint.

We all got the same completely irrelevant form letters in reply, which didn't actually address the issue we wrote about:

"Thank you for your enquiry and comments. The IELTS Partnership is updating IELTS websites and materials in order to ensure that IELTS remains available to test takers in Taiwan. The IELTS Partnership will continue to deliver IELTS tests in Taiwan, ensuring that the widest number of Taiwanese students and professionals can benefit from the work and study opportunities that the test provides."

You can write to them too, by the way, their email is globalielts@ielts.org. See if you get the same bogus form letter! It'll be a fun international discourse comparison!

Of course, I wrote back to point out that their form letter reply was irrelevant to the protest lodged and got a snottier, though I suppose more relevant, reply:

"Thank you for your feedback. Please be aware that your position has been noted. Our priority continues to be to ensure that the widest number of Taiwanese students and professionals can benefit from the work and study opportunities that the IELTS test provides."

This is where I got a little testy. I'd say "I have a short temper", but several days on I decided to send this anyway. It won't make a difference, so please enjoy it as a retort created for your entertainment:

"If you consider them 'Taiwanese students', why do you list their country as being 'China'?"

Here's the thing. I know perfectly well that we're probably not going to win this, because The Man doesn't care about our tinny complaints. It pretends to be apolitical while taking a political, pro-Beijing position. And that is what you're doing when you list Taiwan as "Taiwan, China": you are taking a political position. You are saying Taiwan is a part of China, a position most Taiwanese do not agree with.

It's hard to fight the power, which as a friend pointed out, is the entire point of having power - so it's harder for people to fight you. IELTS pretends to be a dispassionate language proficiency test, but it's also a source of power: are you a non-native speaker who wants to study in the UK (or other countries) or get certain kinds of visas? You have to take it. It's tied to the government through British Council and the UKVI service. That's power. It's not just a test.

It wants to think it's not The Man, but it absolutely is. And as The Man almost always is, IELTS is wrong.

For me, this is the point at which "Taiwan, China" stops being an abstraction: it's not just an unfair, stupid thing that terrible companies do for money. It affects me personally: I'm associated with the brand. Some of my income comes from them. If I refuse to accept this, there is a real impact on my life, moreso than boycotting airlines or slagging off TOEFL. I don't earn money from those companies. I don't know how I can take dirty money now, so for the first time in a very long time, I'm faced with a choice between a chunk of my income, and my principles.

As China expands its forcefulness, more people like me will start facing that choice. I have to hope enough of them will choose principles, as I'm headed towards doing, but I know that many won't.

This isn't a small issue relegated to Taiwan and China. It affects people like me. It affects international workers and foreign residents.

And, as Brendan pointed out in his excellent post (which you should absolutely read), IELTS is essentially helping China accomplish its political goals, which serve as precursors to its military goals:


The government of the PRC would like nothing more than to take over Taiwan and incorporate it into their territory....This is not the ranting of a conspiracy monger -- China isn’t even trying to hide its intentions. 

 Whether China takes Taiwan by force or by “peaceful” coercion, it doesn’t want the rest of the world to see it as a larger country taking over a smaller, less powerful country. That would look very bad. Instead, China wants the rest of the world to see Taiwan as a recalcitrant part of China that needs to be brought to heel. That’s why (among many things) it’s got people pushing to change “Taiwan” on those drop-down menus to things like “Taiwan, China” or “Taiwan, Province of China”. It’s all about changing the world’s perception of Taiwan so that if Invasion Day comes, the rest of the world doesn’t see Xi Jinping as another Hitler invading Poland. 

And every airline that lists Taiwan as China and every educational institution that forces students to declare their country as “Taiwan, China” is complicit in this. With Beijing -- not politically neutral.


I don't know how to fight that. I don't know how to tell you to fight that. I'm still weighing my options, although I know that not acting is not an option. I don't know what to tell my students, except not to take IELTS.

I know some Taiwan-based examiners read this blog. I know a lot of Taiwanese do, too. I don't know what to tell you.

I considered suggesting a strike, and still think that might be a possibility. I worry, however, that it will hurt local centers like IDP Taipei, who are not our enemies (I suspect a lot of the local employees of IELTS centers are on our side, in fact) without really hurting IELTS as a global organization. It might be our best shot, however, at getting this story to stay in the news and embarrass IELTS as much as possible.

I considered a petition, but TOEFL ignored the one directed at them, and IELTS will too. That's what The Man does - he ignores petitions, because he has power.

I considered saying you should change your scripts and say explicitly that Taiwan is NOT CHINA, but that could hurt candidates' performance and that's not fair. It's not their fault (even with the Chinese candidates, it's not their fault at all that their government sucks).

Of course I will continue to encourage Taiwanese students not to take the test.

Something more should be done, but the result has to hurt IELTS Global. What should that something be? I don't know yet. But I have no intention of going away and I have no intention of quietly choosing money over principles.

All I can say is that I encourage you to organize (and feel free to get in touch with me, by the way. I'm easy to find). Be creative, and don't back down. The Man usually wins, but that doesn't mean you have to sit down and obey meekly.

I wish I had better advice, though. I'm not sure what the next move will be, but I can assure you we're not done here. 

Don't Take IELTS (請拒考雅思)

Calling Taiwan "China" makes about as much sense as calling a horse a dog.
Shame on you, IELTS.

I'm still deeply upset as someone who has taught IELTS preparatory classes that the IELTS organization changed "Taiwan" to "Taiwan, China". I have quite a lot more to say about this, which I'll publish across two posts.

Right now, what I really want to say is that, as an IELTS teacher, I'm embarrassed to be associated with the brand. As a teacher who has advised her learners about proficiency tests in the past, I just can't with good conscience advise now that my learners take any test (TOEFL does the same thing, but I'm not a TOEFL teacher so I have less personally invested. They're slimy cowards for kowtowing to China too, though). My students deserve not to be humiliated just by registering.

To Taiwanese students, I say, don't take IELTS. Just...don't. I wish I had a better alternative, but I don't.

I considered writing this up for publication outside of my blog, but ultimately decided it was best published here, as it expresses a very personal opinion. That said, I do hope it reaches a wider audience, even though I feel as though this is a hopeless battle.

It took me a long time to get this together in Chinese, but here you go (English below):


拒絕雅思

每星期似乎都有新的公司或組織，在中華人民共和國的壓力下開始稱呼「台灣」（Taiwan）為「中國台灣」（Taiwan, China）。直到不久之前，這些矮化他人的組織中最過分的是航空公司，而且讓人覺得台灣人民或他們的盟友好像沒有什麽辦法可以抗議。現在，中國這種壓迫國際組織改變對台稱呼的霸凌行為，也伸向了英語能力檢定考試機構：目前雅思（IELTS）和托福（TOEFL）考試中心的國籍欄位都將台灣稱為「中國台灣」。

身為在台教學14年的認證英語教師以及正在攻讀教育學碩士的研究生，我相信，儘管語言課程討論的主題因為反映了現實世界而可能具有爭議性，或有時泛政治化，但整個語言學習的「世界」──學校、課堂和考試中心──不應該牽涉到政治。沒有學生該因為他們的國家被視為不存在，而覺得矮人一等。我在台灣有永久居留權，我也熱愛台灣這個國家，如今台灣因為中國這個日益蠻橫的擴張主義者的霸凌而慘遭除名，我實在不能眼睜睜看著我的學生因為自己國家遭除名而難堪。


我本身是雅思課程授課教師，也協助學生選擇適合的英語能力檢定考試，我曾自豪地說，雅思是所有能力檢定測驗較有效力、研究較有深度的測驗之一。沒有測驗是完美的，但以標準化的考試而言，雅思已盡善盡美。然而，現在我自己因為和雅思這個招牌有關而覺得丟臉，我再也無法向學生推薦雅思或托福了。學生受這種侮辱實在不值得。台灣整體值得受到國際組織更好的待遇。


我很多學生都想出國，常常想在短期內實現這項目標。然而在出國準備計畫方面，我能給學生的唯一良心建議就是暫停所有報考語言能力測驗的計畫，並透過考試系統官方網站上的聯絡資訊和社群媒體平台，寫信給考試委員會，要求把國籍名稱改回「台灣」，但同時將整份國家清單改稱為「國家╱地區」（Country/Region）清單，這樣重擔就會變成落在讀者身上，組織本身則不必表明政治立場。我建議學生也寫信給英國在台協會和澳洲國際文教中心，要求他們向雅思機構負責人正式提出投訴。


我自己也是從美國搬來台灣，我能體會延後出國計畫有多麼困難。然而，這些組織越快感受到經濟壓力，就會越快做出改變，公平對待台灣。

英語能力測驗公司不像航空公司一樣習慣應付憤怒的顧客，因此他們更容易因為報考人數驟減和抱怨增加而擔憂。他們和中國之間也不像航空公司和中國一樣彼此需要，儘管中國是雅思和托福的大市場，中國實際上不能像禁止外國航空公司一樣禁止他們，就好像中國終究沒有因為劍橋大學出版社拒絕將特定文章在中國下架而禁止他們。與你和航空公司打交道的經驗不同，你的聲音可能真的會被聽見。

在你的聲音被聽見之前，這名深愛台灣且曾教過雅思的英語教師只有一項建議：請拒考雅思。



That's for my students and Taiwanese readers.

In English:

Every week, it seems as though a new company or organization begins referring to “Taiwan” as “Taiwan, China” under pressure from the People’s Republic of China. Until recently, the most egregious offenders were airlines, and it felt as though there was little that Taiwanese people or their allies could do in protest. Now, China’s bullying of international organizations about Taiwan’s name has reached the English proficiency exam industry, with both IELTS and TOEFL designating test centers in Taiwan as “Taiwan, China”. 



As a certified English teacher of 14 years in Taiwan who is currently working toward a Master’s in Education, I believe that while topics of discussion in language classes may be controversial or occasionally political as this reflects the real world, that the ‘world’ of language learning - the schools, classes and test centers - should be apolitical. No learner should be made to feel denigrated because their country has been designated as non-existent. As a permanent resident of Taiwan who loves this country, I can not accept that any of my Taiwanese learners might feel embarrassed that their nation has been erased due to the bullying of an increasingly expansionist China. 



As a teacher who has conducted IELTS preparatory classes for proficiency exams and given advice on which exam to take, I was once proud to say that IELTS is one of the more valid, reliable and well-researched proficiency exams available. No test is perfect, but as standardized exams go, IELTS was as good as it could be. However, I am now personally embarrassed at being associated with the IELTS brand, and I can no longer recommend it, or TOEFL, to my learners. They deserve better than to be insulted in this way. Taiwan as a whole deserves better treatment from international organizations. 



Many of my learners hope to go abroad, often within a short timeframe. However, the only course of action I can recommend with a clear conscience is to put plans to sit for a proficiency exam on hold, and write to the exam boards instead to complain about this wording, both through their websites where contact information is available, and on social media. Ask them to change the designation back to Taiwan, but name the list “Country/Territory”, so that the burden will be on readers, rather than the organizations themselves taking a political stance. Write to British Council Taiwan and IDP Taiwan as well, asking them to lodge formal complaints with the head IELTS office. 



Having moved from the US to Taiwan myself, I sympathize with how difficult it may be to postpone one’s plans to move to another country. However, the more swiftly these organizations feel economic pressure to treat Taiwan fairly, the more quickly the change can be made. 

Unlike airlines, who are used to dealing with angry customers, English proficiency testing companies are more likely to be concerned by a sudden drop in registrations and uptick in complaints. 

Unlike airlines, China needs them as much as they need China: while it is true that China is a huge market for IELTS and TOEFL, China cannot realistically ban them from the country as they might with a foreign airline, just as they ultimately did not ban Cambridge University Press for refusing to make certain articles unavailable in China. Unlike with airlines, your voice may actually be heard. 



Until it is, this English teacher who used to teach IELTS classes and who loves Taiwan can only give one piece of advice: don’t take IELTS.


To the other IELTS teachers out there, I say: stop recommending IELTS. Tell your students exactly what you think of them and their bending over for China. Show them that foreign residents of Taiwan care, too.

IELTS, too, should be worried that the very people - the professionals, the teachers, and yes, the foreign faces  - who are the 'face' of IELTS in Taiwan hate it so very much. It's not just me: I don't know even one examiner right now (and I am acquainted with more than a few) who has a good opinion of IELTS and I doubt I know even one teacher. I'm already telling Taiwanese students what I think now, when I would previously recommend them. Is that what they want for their brand image in Taiwan? If they cared, that is? 

IELTS bends over for China

Another day, another money-making entity kowtowing to China. This time the culprit is IELTS, the international English proficiency test that is the exam of standard for those hoping to study in the UK, Australia and several other countries (most of Europe if English is the required language, Canada, New Zealand - many, if not most, American universities accept it as well).

This makes no sense to me. Sure, China is a huge market for IELTS, but China needs IELTS as much as IELTS needs China. Chinese students and others hoping to move abroad need to take IELTS to make it happen, period. An innocent reading of this would be that many Chinese want to study abroad, and everyone - including the government - welcomes these international connections. A more sinister one is that China can more effectively expand its United Front operations abroad if it has a large contingent of Chinese abroad to facilitate that, including students. Most of those students would have to take IELTS.

So - unlike with airlines - this just doesn't make sense. IELTS could have told China to suck an egg and I don't see that China would have had a choice. Why didn't they? The only answer I can come up with is cowardice.

In my dreams, every IELTS examiner in Taiwan (or enough of them to make an impact) goes on 'strike'. They refuse to examine, or examine only at the bare minimum to keep their certifications, causing a severe examiner shortage that the IELTS head office will have to deal with. They don't budge until Taiwan is called 'Taiwan' again.

In reality, I know how unlikely that is to actually happen.

Here's a ray of good news, if you are an IELTS examiner who is angry about this change. If you don't want to refuse to examine - though come on, do ol' Lao Ren Cha a solid and refuse to examine! Make the consequences real! -  it is possible to get in touch with the IELTS head office. Ask your employer in Taiwan (so that would be either British Council or IDP) for the correct contact information and encourage them to complain in an official capacity, as well. Don't just leave this to the Taiwanese government. Then write to them.

It's not much, but it's better than trolling Air Canada for kicks (though by all means, do that too). Someone might actually read your letter and then politely respond to you with some British blather that translates to "we don't care", but it's something.

An internationally-recognized English teaching certification course is now available in Taiwan!

Trinity CertTESOL is coming to Taiwan!

As a teacher trainer myself, I'm very excited about this. One of the biggest flaws in the industry of English-teaching workhouses and abbatoirs here is that, once here, if you don't already have a basic pre-service teaching certification, it's difficult to get one as there were no offerings in Taiwan. No Trinity CertTESOL, no CELTA: two of the only - if not the only two - internationally-recognized programs that include practicum hours. And, as a teacher trainer, the only two that I can personally wholeheartedly recommend.

In addition to tuition fees, that meant leaving the country for a month (and losing a month's worth of income, if you could get the time off at all) and paying all associated costs with living in another country for that month - possibly as well as rent back in Taiwan. I know it was a huge financial burden when we went to do CELTA in Turkey.

Now, that's no longer necessary: on November 5th, a part-time (Monday-Friday, 9:30-13:30) certification course is finally available locally! If you can be free in the mornings, you don't have to leave Taiwan or stop working.

Trinity is equivalent to CELTA, which means that it will be useful to you even if you leave Taiwan. Having not only been through CELTA but also Delta and in the middle of a Master's program in the same field, I can say that it's worth it. The curriculum is sound - and I'm a teacher trainer who has completed an equivalent course herself, I would know - and the practicum hours set it apart from weekend or online courses. You will certainly become a better teacher because of it, if you take what you learn from it and incorporate it intelligently and thoughtfully to the classroom while developing your own style.

It's also important to remember that these certifications aren't meant to create insta-teachers or classroom superheroes. Nothing can do that except experience, reflective practice and consistent, high quality professional development. They are pre-service programs, which means they are open to people who have never taught. They aren't even meant to give you all the skills a professional needs: entire multi-year teaching programs exist for that, and not even they can accomplish it. They're meant to give you the fundamentals you need to be competent in the classroom as a novice teacher, or to improve your practice as a current teacher, with the assumption that you will receive further development and institutional support from your employer (how much institutional support you are considered to need post-certification will vary). They are stepping-stones to higher-level in-service teaching degrees. They get you on the track - they're not the end of the road.

You may be wondering how such a certification can help you in Taiwan. I admit that's a real problem here: the complete lack of any sort of qualifications needed to be a "teacher" in Taiwan, and how certifications are generally not rewarded well, which feeds the cycle of mediocrity and poor teaching practice.

But, better jobs in Taiwan do exist. There are fewer of them, but they are generally only open to teachers who have these certifications, or at least, those who do get their resume pushed to the top of the pile. These jobs tend to be more professional and pay better (though I wouldn't say they are wonderful - almost no job in Taiwan is). You may be frustrated that at Happy Oxbridge Engrish Scholar's Acadamy, you won't get a raise for doing this program, and I'm sympathetic to that.

But, better places to work will actually consider you seriously if you do, and that will come with better pay and other perks, like the ability to request more time off (unpaid) or more time off in total (perhaps paid).

Oh, yeah, and you'll just be a better teacher for it.

Improve English education in Taiwan with this ONE WEIRD TRICK!

My work in Taiwan is dominated by adult students who ask for help with accent training. They need to do business with Koreans, Japanese, various speakers of Southeast Asian languages, Australians, Latinx people, Indians or various Europeans.

You see, all their teachers have been from an "Inner Circle" country (UK, Ireland, US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand). They are therefore most used to those accents, North American ones in particular. They might meet people with those accents, but for business, there is a real need to better understand other Englishes.

My life in Taiwan is unfortunately punctuated by people bloviating about how racism in the English learning industry is somehow acceptable because of "choice" or "the market" or something (their arguments don't make much sense, because they are constructed mostly to avoid confronting uncomfortable issues rather than as stand-alone opinions).

They might try to say that this is acceptable because of some sort of subjective "clarity" of certain accents, although of course how clear an accent is depends in great part on how exposed you are to it compared to other accents (these people are not exactly experts in second language acquisition).

Some pontificate on how it is preferable to be taught by a "native speaker", usually with a very poor understanding of second language acquisition or what being a "native" or "non-native" speaker might actually mean. There is even less recognition that many people in India, Singapore, Nigeria, the Philippines (and more) are, in fact, native speakers, let alone questioning why they aren't recognized as such.

(The answer is racism, by the way. But that's hard for Johnny McBackpacker to admit when it casts doubt on his strongly-held opinion that "the market" is the Fairest Arbiter Of Them All.)

My life in England is characterized by mostly non-native speaking classmates, all of whom are fluent in English, and all of whom know more about the pedagogy of how to teach English than the average Johnny McBackpacker.

Sure, they have accents. But many of them have the accents that my adult students say they need to better understand for their work. Every last one of them is qualified to teach in Taiwan, but many if not most would struggle to get hired here.

We talk about all sorts of things, not least of which is the idea of English as a lingua franca (ELF) or English as an international language (EIL). Most English learners speak regularly with other non-native speakers, some perhaps almost entirely so, especially if they are using English in business or academia.

Back in Taiwan, the consequences are not surprising - all that learning of English from Canadians, Brits and Americans (the so-called 'preferable' native speakers) has actually put those students who tell me they need help with accents at a disadvantage. They get to work and realize, oh, all that time I spent with Teacher Becky listening to dialogues between Tim and Karen, but I actually have to communicate with people who don't speak like Becky, Tim or Karen. I have to do business with Sandeep and Cheng and Fumiko and Nnedi and Abdurrahman and Lupa. 

Of course, most people making hiring decisions are not educators. Even if they realize that they are actually disadvantaging their learners by not providing the English education many instrumentally-motivated Taiwanese learners are likely to need, they don't care. "It's the market." And the market wants white - even Inner Circle "native speaker" teachers who aren't white struggle to get hired.

And I just can't help but think, if y'all hired fluent English-speaking teachers from around the world, ensuring that most learners through their time studying English were exposed to a variety of Englishes, maybe not so many adult learners would come to me asking for help, which I have trouble giving with my Standard American accent. Maybe if we hired more English teachers whose usage represented the speakers and Englishes our learners would actually be communicating with, we wouldn't have this problem.

I mean, I don't want to say "duh", but...duh?

Racism in teacher hiring provokes outrage, but sexism doesn't

I'm sure you're all familiar with Facebook Post Seen 'Round Taiwan, in which a kindergarten teacher at Kangchiao (a famous and extremely expensive international school in Taiwan) seeks substitutes, apologizing as they admit that the school won't consider any "black or dark-skinned" applicants.






Outrage followed. Outrage. Fury. I admit, I also shared the post. With good reason - it's not only blatantly racist, but such discriminatory hiring practices are also illegal in Taiwan.  (Notably, so is working at a kindergarten as a foreigner at all - chances are the teacher isn't aware of this, but the school is and hires foreigners anyway.)

I wonder if any reputable news outlet has asked Kangchiao not just for a comment, not "do you discriminate?" but "what exactly was that teacher told?" and "how many non-white teachers do you currently have?"

But what bugs me just as much as all of that is this:

Over the years, I have taken to task many posters, recruitment agencies and schools for sexist job ads: you know, female teachers wanted, that sort of thing. I've pointed out how many 'better' schools have all male teaching staff. I've been personally attacked for this. I've been threatened ("I'm going to find out who you work for and tell them you're a feminazi", "I'm going to report you to immigration/the tax office because [insert bullshit reason here].") I've been kicked out of and banned from job groups for merely pointing out that an ad is illegal and standing my ground when challenged on that. I've had people try to make the case that sexism in English teaching is okay for whatever (stupid) reasons - usually some tired fugue involving women being more "nurturing" or more professional jobs going to men because there are more "qualified" men, so diversity shouldn't be one facet of the hiring process.

At no point has an ad requesting a certain gender of teacher caused this much anger or made the news in any real way, despite it usually being more blatant than racism in hiring. Of course many if not most schools have racist hiring practices, but they will almost never advertise it openly. But they will advertise sexist hiring practices openly.

That's not to say the blatant racism in this ad shouldn't spark a furor, but that the sexism in other ads should. It's also illegal, it's also discriminatory, there's also no good reason for it, and it's also wrong.

There is no reason why, in a classroom or school situation, that gender should be a factor in hiring a teacher. Some of the most 'nurturing' teachers I know - the best with kids - are actually mostly male. The most dedicated Montessori teacher I have ever met is a man. I can rattle off half a dozen highly-qualified women who could easily teach higher-level classes (Business English, IELTS and the 'prestigious' buxibans) - and those are only the ones I know personally. There are obviously more. There is no reason for the teaching staff at these places to be almost entirely male.

Pretty much the only time I can justify considering gender in teacher hiring is if it is for one-on-one classes which will take place at either the teacher's or student's home. I can understand a female student feeling uncomfortable having a male teacher alone in her home or vice versa.

And yet, nothing - despite the fact that sexism in hiring is not only illegal, but also perpetuates harmful stereotypes (yo if you say I'm 'more nurturing' because I'm female, you'd better get yourself a good strong protective codpiece, buddy. I don't even like kids). It makes it harder for women who want to work with adults - say teaching Business English - to be taken seriously. It makes it harder for nurturing men who want to work with kids to earn parents' trust.

It perpetuates wage inequality as well: those 'nurturing' jobs working with children tend to pay a lot less, too. Surrogate-Mommy-Tracking women into them based on ludicrous notions that they're better suited for those lower-paid roles because they're female, and not bothering about better-paid teaching work being almost entirely done  by men leads to long-term wage gaps.

But nobody seems to be mad about that, and I'm stumped as to why. It's just as much a violation of the law. Every case made for violating the law comes down to "that's what paying customers want", but if what the students (or their parents) want is actually illegal and has nothing to do with who is actually best-suited and qualified to educating them or their children, it doesn't - or shouldn't - matter.

You know, though, about that ad. It doesn't matter either. It won't lead to any real change.

There's a lot swirling around about who said what and why which I won't get into, only to say that I have it on good authority that the problem here is not with the teacher who posted the ad.

The school, as reported in Taiwan News, claims it does not discriminate - but of course they have to say that. They seem to think the teacher "misunderstood" (according to another source) - though (and this is my interpretation here), anyone who has been in Taiwan long enough knows that "you misunderstood" is another way of saying "you embarrassed me/the organization by accurately reporting what I said or otherwise made clear, so now we have to pretend it was a 'misunderstanding' when we both know it wasn't."

And that's just it - nothing will change because if Kangchiao is in fact racist (I don't know for a fact that they are), they'll just try to be quieter or more subtle about it, to ensure that it never gets stated openly again. Even if Kangchiao is not racist, every other school that is (and there are a lot of them) will try to avoid this not by - duh - not being racist - but by trying to ensure that nobody outs them as racist.

The big outrage here as far as the racist buxiban industry is concerned isn't that there is racism in teacher hiring in Taiwan. It's that someone dared to say so openly.

I guess when it comes to sexism they're safe, as nobody seems willing to be outraged about that. And I'll continue to point it out, tell people it's illegal, and be threatened, shouted at and kicked out of groups for simply stating again and again that it's both illegal and wrong.

Doing a part-time Master's from Taiwan

I'm having trouble reading this - 朝山？潮汕？Is that a radical or a design element?

So, my first full term at Exeter is finished, grades are in, and I'll just say I'm quite happy.

It's important to me to write about professional development - after all, I'm interested in Taiwan for personal reasons, but my actual profession isn't related to Taiwan Studies, affairs, policy, any of it, and although I know there are others here who take TESOL seriously, it's hard to see that just looking online. Besides, people have asked. There aren't a lot of professional development opportunities locally, so for those who are actually serious about the profession I figure it'd be good to talk about what I've been up to.

I have less to say about this than I did about doing a CELTA (taking over a month away from Taiwan) and a modular Delta locally. I'm in the groove now - I know what I need to do and how to go about it, and there's less initial confusion and stress. So, it just feels like "life" rather than "something worth writing about".

But, there are a few things worth saying:

A bit about my program

I'm enrolled in the MEd Summer Intensive TESOL program at Exeter: it's the only highly-ranked school I could find that had a program quite like this - I've written about this issue before. It's not a "distance learning" program: you take your classes face-to-face over the summer, and then go back to wherever you live to write your papers. This is enough for it to be considered fully face-to-face.

The same program is offered full-time, and the summer program tends to be attended by people like me: working professionals in the field looking to level up (I have heard that the full-time program skews quite a bit younger.) Most of my classmates are non-native speakers, which I appreciate, and the entry requirements are stringent enough (though, to be honest, I did not fear that I'd be rejected.)

The main issue was finding relevant literature - in general:

There is just not a lot of TESOL literature available in Taiwan. Caves has a modest selection, I haven't yet figured out if I can use an interlibrary loan system here and, given that the best university doesn't offer my program, I'm not sure it would be fruitful to try. I can get most journal publications electronically, but it can be hard to access books, as many relevant titles aren't available in digital copies (when one is available, it's usually offered in a read-online format through the Exeter library).

I lucked out in terms of having access to a large library of relevant titles through a helpful classmate, but if I hadn't made that connection, I might have spent thousands more just on books.

...and relevant to my context

Because this is a Master of Education program, and not a Master of Arts, it is very much tied to one's teaching context. You can't write abstractly: you have to find real teaching situations, evaluate them, and often propose your own output or adaptations for use in these real-world contexts. I appreciate that - it's relevant, not too up-in-the-clouds - but to ground your ideas in principled pedagogy and relevant literature, you need such literature about said contexts. And there just...isn't a lot. There are TESOL and AppLing researchers publishing research from Taiwan, some of which is crap and some of which is fine - but there's just not enough of it. In the field, Taiwan simply does not represent very well.

It can be a bit lonely

I did Delta with Brendan - we had each other to talk through the hard parts, read each others' work, make each other dinner and talk each other down from stressful moments. I also had a local tutor for the most difficult module, which helped a lot.

On the Master's, although one of my classmates is Taiwanese and we've become good friends, I don't see her often as she lives in Hsinchu. Otherwise, it's just me...going it alone. I'm quite extroverted so all that time stuck in books or behind a computer screen, without other people doing the same thing, got a little lonely. I started feeling a bit like a slug - not enough exercise. I felt trapped indoors on beautiful days. Finding friends working on their own stuff to be around and choosing outdoor cafes on occasion helped, but frankly, you're sort of on your own.

There's not a lot of local support

To be blunt, Taiwan does not seem to value qualified English teachers. It can feel sometimes like nobody cares. I quit one of my (many) jobs in part over frustration with what I saw as academically-underqualified management, feeling as though, if I wasn't going to get support at work, where my degree would be immediately relevant, I would at least need time to finish my papers. My other workplaces were highly accommodating of my time needs and I'm thankful for that - those papers, man - but weren't resources in terms of discussing module content and writing.

I'd worked with highly qualified academic managers in the past, whom I would have happily gone to with questions or for advice, but that dried up. I got some very helpful support from the person I consider as a kind of mentor (thanks, yo), but he's busy with other things too.

I know there are other qualified people in Taiwan I could talk to, but I have found once you get to this level, you tend to be horribly busy (as I have been), and I feel as though there's no such thing as a truly helpful workplace in Taiwan. Not even necessarily the universities. I have to hope I'm wrong.

Yet I can't help but feel as though English teaching here suffers from the same blight as journalism: professionalism is just not valued. It's depressing. Come on, Taiwan.

The best part is the travel - the papers are...papers

Seriously - the classes are lectures, a bit long (three hours) but fun to attend. Otherwise, you are free to ramble about Exeter, although many students will spend time in the library looking through the physical collection to take notes, get ideas on what they might need, or scan relevant passages. First year students have to write a fairly simple formative essay and take study skills seminars - we'll see what it's like for second years - but otherwise, we could enjoy the town (quiet as it is). There was never a point when we were too busy to go to the pub or out for dinner, or to enjoy theater and other performances with our student discounts. In fact, people commented on my constant social media posts having fun with my classmates asking if I was actually doing any work (some).

And, of course, if you're already in England, you may as well poke about Europe...last year I went to Georgia, Armenia, Greece, Czechia, Hungary and Austria. This year I'll go to Portugal, Wales and Italy (and there is talk of a weekend trip to Spain.)

Then, the papers came. They're not easy - I mean, it's Master's level at a fairly prestigious university. I did very well but I had to work for it, and I felt like I spent most of January, February and March deep in a hole with only my computer screen for company.

There are no exams (yay!)

I always found this a bit odd about my friends' Master's programs. I thought exams were for college classes where you could assume the average to...let's say "differently motivated"... students couldn't write a decent paper (sorry if that sounds mean, but...) and if you were in a Master's program, especially in any kind of liberal arts or humanities field, you would certainly do away with the nonsense of timed exams and express your literature-grounded, principled and justified ideas in writing. Apparently - according to people I know - that's not always the case.

My program, however, has lots of paper writing but no exams. As, frankly, it should be.

Time can be an issue

I was lucky - as above, my various employers were very accommodating. I also took on a new teacher training role during this time, which I've been really getting into. It was a steep learning curve, though, so I found myself teaching my first teacher training course while finishing up my first paper, and not sleeping much at all. But, the job presented itself and I jumped on it, as I'd always wanted to do teacher training.

However, it's less clear that others doing this program would be so fortunate: I remember being dependent on an employer for a work visa, and I remember not having the power or resources to tell an employer to buzz off if they weren't accommodating. Most employers in Taiwan don't respect teachers' time - you're scheduled without being asked, pressured to work weekends or take classes you don't want, corralled into doing extra unpaid work (judging [ridiculous] speech contests, pointless paperwork, 'English corner' or whatever) and aren't even paid particularly well for the honor.

I could easily imagine someone without my resources - the experience of having done a Delta, the course exemptions from that Delta, accommodating employment, permanent residency, a persuasive resting bitch face* and a supportive husband - struggling to get all of the papers written.

Even I - a fully-resourced person - gave up my Lunar New Year to spend 6 straight days writing a paper on testing and assessment, with a cold so bad it bordered on the flu. I didn't have the time otherwise.

It's caused me to re-think similar programs in Taiwan.

Looking from the perspective of someone who had done a Delta, MA TESOL programs available in Taiwan didn't look particularly impressive. I didn't see how they actually trained one to be a good teacher (and I have been told that the MA Teaching Chinese programs tended to focus on the linguistics of Chinese rather than how to teach it).

But, I'm finding that's true with pretty much any Master's program. You get a lot of background in the field and a deeper theoretical and academic knowledge of it, but if you are looking to get better at classroom practice, they aren't going to do that. Period. No matter where you are. The academic knowledge is worthwhile, but it's best to know what you are signing up for. 

It's still absolutely worth it

Seriously, I'm lovin' it! I feel like I've found my superpower - a great hidden talent - writing academic papers that keep getting high marks. When you enter the field as an inexperienced nobody, as I did, and continue to work in it despite it being dismissed as "not a real job" by so many other expats (which I want to say is not fair, but so many "teachers" treat it as "not a real job" that I can't even blame the haters too much), there's always this desire to do something to set yourself apart as a real professional. Besides, although I don't write about it much, I do care about the field. I've toyed with starting an TEFL blog but Lao Ren Cha is enough for me, I'd rather write as a hobby and leave the work at work. Besides, it is interesting (to me) - I enjoy knowing enough about second language acquisition that I can shrug off all of the folk theories and pontificating. Leading TESOL training and developing future language teachers simultaneously really drives home that I do have a body of professional knowledge worth sharing. It's great.

I mean the papers can be torture, but also, it's great.



*no, seriously, sometimes you just gotta don the face and tell people how it's gonna be

In China, tech companies are blatantly sexist. In Taiwan, not even Hooters posts gender-specific job ads

I have no desire to translate the rest of this for you. It's just as sexist as it looks. 

For years, I have initiated or participated in discussions of the relative level of women's rights and equality across various countries in Asia. For years, I have posited that while Taiwan isn't exactly great when it comes to women's equality (I struggle to find a society that is), it is the best country by far in Asia for women. The problem is that "in Asia" is a low bar, even when you adjust your expectations of how feminism might look in Asian societies.

Along these lines, a spate of news and opinion pieces appeared recently on how badly women are treated - just how much they are objectified and male needs are prioritized - in the tech industry in China (and, according to Zhang Lijia, whose video op-ed is linked to below, in Chinese civil service recruitment as well, with a number of jobs listed as requesting male candidates).

Chinese Tech Companies' Dirty Secret (watch this one first, and be horrified)

Alibaba, Baidu and other Chinese tech companies post men-only job ads

Wanted at Chinese start-ups: attractive women to ease coders' stress

In all of these pieces, the biggest horror in my view is the ad that says "Finding a Job = Finding a Woman: Fuck What You Want to Fuck". I truly have no words.

Through those years, the biggest point of contention I've come across is a belief that Chinese women actually have it better - have more equality, get more respect from their society - than Taiwanese women. Talk about how in Shanghai, women rule and men do as their wives and mothers say (I haven't really found anything to corroborate this beyond what people say; I suspect it's an urban legend to some degree). Talk about how Communism sucks but at least one of its ideals is gender equality (maybe true under Mao, not so much anymore). Talk about how there are more female engineers and women in traditionally male fields in China - I saw 39-40% cited on a number of websites, but none I'd trust as a source especially given the links above).

But, you know what? I just don't believe that. I never have. I lived in China, I saw how women - in several unrelated examples where I knew the people involved personally - were treated as a matter of course. I saw, with my own eyes and through personal stories told to me, how many men in China really thought they had the right to "fuck what they want to fuck" - in some cases, literally.

In short, what I saw and heard didn't add up to this belief that "China is a gender equality leader in Asia" or that it somehow outpaces Taiwan in gender equality.

Now, I can say with confidence that I was right.

I set out to see if such job ads were common (or even rare but extant) in Taiwan, and while I would not call my look into the issue a feat of investigative journalism (it really wasn't), I did ask a wide range of people both online and off, including a number of female professionals that I know, to see if they'd even come across such an ad. I included questions not just about sexist ads targeting men (showing Zhang's examples in the vomit-inducing video above), but also ads stating explicit gender preferences or appearance requirements. I specifically did not include ads for foreign teachers, which are their own cesspit of sexism and general unprofessionalism (I'll discuss that topic below). I trawled 591 for a bit, but it's huge and I admit I barely made a dent.

Nobody - no-one on Facebook, no-one in real life, none of the professional Taiwanese women I asked - had seen anything like this in Taiwan, nor could I find any evidence of it. Every last one was positive that any company that even attempted these sorts of recruitment tactics in Taiwan would get sued so fast that the Apple Daily issues would still be literally hot off the press when the subpoena arrived.

The best I could find was one woman - a female programmer - who said there were rumors of the sorts of "engineer comfort women" (she did not mean the term in the way it is typically used in Asia, the point was to be more of an at-work hostess, not to actually provide sexual services) discussed in the third link above also exist in Taiwan. However, I could not find a Taiwanese ad for such a job.

On the contrary, I was alerted to several instances where gender discrimination in hiring in situations that might actually be open for debate were met with lawsuits: in one case, a "maid cafe" (where female servers dress up like maids - it's a subculture thing that I think is a bit tacky but is not worth my time to complain about - whatever) that would not accept a male applicant, citing its uniform of short skirts as awkward for men to wear, and was fined NT$150,000. (Link in Chinese). While I think it's relatively likely that the male applicant purposely called up the maid cafe to hear that he wasn't welcome to apply based on his gender so that he could complain, it doesn't matter: in Taiwan, it doesn't matter if you are explicitly a maid cafe. If it can be proven that you are discriminating based on gender, you are likely to lose any lawsuit that is filed. In another well-publicized case, China Airlines listed height requirements for flight attendants, saying they needed to be able to help passengers put luggage in overhead compartments. They also lost.

One of the women I asked pointed out that, as a C-level executive with hiring powers, she has to attend a workplace gender equality training regularly, and that it confirmed what the maid cafe link mentions above: the court ruled that very few jobs could restrict hiring based on gender, citing underwear modeling as one such exception (I dunno, I think an ad for boxers where the boxers are worn by women, implying that she's your girlfriend wearing your boxers the next morning, would actually do well).

This brought to mind a Hooters job ad that I saw once, which stipulated no gender. It is quite obvious that they would hire women to be "Hooters Girls" - I mean their Facebook page, predictably, is a parade of cute young women. If Hooters (Hooters!) knows it can't post a gender-specific job ad, then damn - you really can't post a gender-specific job ad in Taiwan, let alone a blatantly sexist ad touting your "beautiful women" to potential male recruits.

The hashtags include "#hootersgirl", but note that there is no gender specification in the ad itself. 

That is not to say that Taiwan is doing fine. I'm sure anyone reading this far is screaming "but there's still discrimination in hiring! They just don't tell you they're doing it!" And that's true. There absolutely is - I can't find anything proving it, and yet, I haven't talked to anyone who isn't fully aware it happens (part of the point is getting away with it by making it impossible to prove). I doubt a man applying to be a Hooters Girl, for example, would actually get the job. I personally know of a few instances when, without giving out too much information, people in charge of hiring debated female applicants based on their looks. I know of a few instances where a man got specific contracts because he was male, and at least two where women got them specifically because they were women (in at least one case, it was a situation where she'd be working mostly with men, who seemed to want some eye candy to go along with their work obligations - yuck). I don't think it's a coincidence that in Taiwan, flight attendants tend to be young, attractive women whereas in America they seem to be more average-looking women and men of a variety of ages. It can't be that only young, attractive women apply for those jobs in Taiwan (and if that is the case, something must be actively discouraging other potential applicants).

This is not right, but a lot of people come to the (wrong) conclusion that this means the law doesn't work, or there shouldn't be a law. "Isn't it better to know up-front whether they want you or not then to waste your time applying to a job that won't actually consider you?" "Why would you want to work somewhere you're not wanted anyway?" - yeah, yeah, yeah. A tempting line of reasoning, but ultimately wrong. If there is no law specifically forbidding gender (and other) discrimination in hiring, then it becomes socially acceptable to do so. If there is a law, that's step one to eradicating it. What people who think it's better that companies be open about it are missing is that these things take time to become social norms. Passing a law doesn't mean immediate amelioration of a social problem: it's just step one. But without it, we have no power when we do see blatant discrimination, and we will never make it to step two, which is reducing actual discrimination. Anecdotally, I do see this happening: the openness with which people accepted the existence of discriminatory hiring seemed far higher a decade or even 5 years ago. Now, people acknowledge it exists but are openly disgusted with it. Without the law, we never would have gotten that far. And if you break down the numbers intelligently as Brookings has, you'll see that this could well be affecting female participation in the workforce, especially in managerial positions.

In cases where discrimination can be proven, the law seems to be actually enforced, too. That's really something - China has a gender non-discrimination law too, but it's vaguely-worded, rarely invoked and almost never enforced (Zhang Lijia covers this in her video above). Zhang is wrong about only one thing: the issue isn't that companies can get away with this because the job market is competitive. They can get away with it because society lets them, and they know the law is ineffective. In Taiwan, society doesn't really let them - not anymore - and if they face the law, which they well might, they are likely to lose.

And of course, once hired, women in Taiwan may still face discrimination or sexist treatment in the workplace, a problem faced by women around the world. Taiwan still has a wage gap - it's narrowing, but still entirely too big. I don't know any Taiwanese woman who has not faced sexism in the workplace. I have as well - it happened at a job I quit in 2014. That too is difficult to fight, but enforcing gender non-discrimination and slowly eradicating sexist beliefs in society is one tool we have in winning that battle.

Every screamer who's left is probably now shouting "but job ads for foreign teachers in Taiwan specify gender all the time!" That's right, they do. I wanted to focus on local job ads, because it does feel like different factors are at play, including that:

a.) Most of those jobs for foreign teachers are posted by dodgy recruiters and third-rate buxibans, hardly professional work environments. I do expect the average Taiwanese office at anything larger than a family-run company to be at least somewhat more professional. I have very low expectations for these sorts of schools and recruiters, who are - and I am not sorry to say this - the gutter scrapings of the English teaching job market. That doesn't make it right, but it does clarify why they think they can do this.

b.) They probably think they can get away with it, assuming foreigners don't know the law. I do not at all believe that these gutter-scrap jobs and the people who shill for them don't know the law - they do.  When it's pointed out to them - and I once got kicked out of a Facebook group for doing so - they get angry and defensive and show what kind of work environment they'd really provide. They're not stupid, they're just crappy people. There's a difference. (OK, sometimes they're stupid too.)

So, no, Taiwan is not perfect, but it's still the best in Asia. We have a lot of problems to face, but hiring managers (and men) here know they can't just 'fuck what they want to fuck'.