Job Discussion Forums

[eslstudies]

restless, Shanghai was my second stint in China. I first went in 97-8, coming from a high school English teaching background.
I used the net to find the Shanghai posting, and the same school still advertises on the same site.
the higher salary came down to:
- 20 hours, as opposed to your sweet 14.
- location on the city outskirts
- tech majors mostly, so hardly your top flight English students

I did the MU PGTESOL by distance while there, and have since moved back to teach ESL in the state school system in Australia. The pay and conditions beat working the traps hands down; the only problem is, I'm not OS.

After trying your wings at Fudan, you'll probably head for richer pastures. I'm sure you can get plenty of advice on the Korean and Japanese uni markets.
Fudan will have lots of links with other universities, so I doubt if you'll need to trawl the net to find your next position.
Be wary of the Korean thing. I teach enough well-heeled, professional Asian "students" here to know where the poster is coming from.

[restless]

Tofuman,

[eslstudies]

[restless]

eslstudies

[Yu]

Teaching at Fudan is certainly a good school to put on your resume. I taught at Jiaoda my first year in China. I was also only offered one way airfare from Jiaoda (My thinking is that it is standard at higher ranked schools.) Also the pay sounds reasonable as well. I think I had around 5800 at Jiaoda (3800 + housing---or something close to that) no travel allowance at the end.

Fudan students (if they are like my Jiaoda students) probably have a pretty good command at English, and are likely to want to improve their english in order to study abroad. That means they will have questions regarding gre vocabulary and TOEFL. (Or possibly Australian Equlivenents). I would expect some students to have very high levels of english. These students are also harder to please because they expect to learn or get more out of your classes. I felt inadequate when teaching at Jiaoda because I felt my knowldege to give them was lacking.

I think you should try to figure out if you really want to work with top students in China, or if you want to just come here and teach regular students. I did not feel I was a good fit for Jiaoda because I do not have a world class uni education.

Good Luck to you.
Having taught at one of the higher ranked schools in Shanghai, I would say that the offer is reasonable.

[eslstudies]

restless, my Chinese experience was very valuable. When I first arrived home, I wasn't keen to get back into a high school, so I worked a couple of short contracts in migrant ed and at a university ELICOS centre. My OS experience and PGTESOL certainly landed those jobs. Then an esl position came up at one of the few academic high schools, so I won a 7 year deal there. Much better pay and conditions, though lots of hours. Around half my students are Chinese, so knowing the general mindset and some language certainly helps in the job.
There's nothing I'd recommend taking for teaching purposes, especially not knowing exactly what you're going to be doing. As you're teaching writing, a guide to the different text types with their generic and language features could be useful, but pretty well all you need in terms of materials is on the net or in a bookshop; I'm sure Fudan will have a good one on campus too. The students will expect your grammar and spelling to be exemplary, and you will spend a lot of time correcting and grading work.

I actually preferred the distance mode at Macquarie. The lectures were delivered in note form, which saved me work! The course fitted around my work commitments very neatly, and although getting back into "academic" writing took some time, things ended up well. There are online tutors when you need help, and the whole thing was well organised.

Yes, its quite common for TAFE to deliver courses in China. We had this arrangement at my uni, and not only do they get Australian salaries, but an additional per diem of over $100! Sweet.

[restless]

[eslstudies]

Jump in. Macquarie, as I said previously, was very good, but remember I had been teaching English for decades and ESL/EFL for 7 years previously. I just needed a formal qualification to get into the Australian ESL scene.
CLT works well in a strong English environment. Even here in Oz though, I still need to revert to more traditional methods to make a learning point, and tend to mix functional and formal grammar teaching.
Yu was at Jiaotong University, the second ranked in SH.

[restless]

Jiaotong University,
,yep, heard of that one

eslstudies
you certianly have a much stronger background than i do in esl, i'm just about to put my toe in the water,you can imagine my trepidation


tell me more about the distinciotn btw traditional grammar teahcing methoda and functional grammar,
I do know some of the different teaching/learning styles, but i'm talking about the actual lessons that you present to students
and really thanks for the positive support, i've been going weak on this whole idea, which is really sad, becasue i love china, and the whole point of the esl degree, was to get me to this point!

[Yu]

I think that the thing for me was I just went to a mediocre university in the US. I have a MA in TESOL, but most of my English teaching experience was at real developmental levels. So the students at Jiaoda were much more advanced than any students I had taught previously.

In the classroom, students have been taught with the traditional GT method. Chinese students have different classroom values and ideas of what is supposed to happen in the classroom than the western counterparts, as a result many of the teaching methods you would feel familiar with would just not work as well in the Chinese classroom.

I think it is important to be well prepared before lessons, and also have a clear idea about what you want to teach students.

[restless]

[Yu]

I think it is great that you feel sufficently prepared to tackle cross cultural differences in the classroom. I would say that with a MA in TESOL, I did not even get a single class that addressed the possibility of this issue. I wish I would have known more about it, but at the time of doing my degree it just did not occur to me that these kinds of enormous differences would exist.

You will probably be fine. As far as grammar, I usually go with my gut, though I occassionally need to look things up. I apologize for my spelling at the beginning of the class, and ask students to point out my errors. My spelling, sadly, is quite poor. But I do tell my students they will not find spelling mistakes on stuff that I type because I am more careful about correcting it. Also, they may surprise you with the command of vocabulary they have. It may exceed yours (though I can say my vocab is not all that good). I prefer to say things simple and uncomplicated.

[tofuman]

Since there appear to be some linguist types chatting here, I'd like to describe a part of my lesson and hear what you think. I use a text I picked up while studying Chinese. I write a dialogue in Chinese on the board, then with the students translate it literally into English, word for word. I then ask the students to transform the literal translation into grammatically correct English.

The students are quite active in this part of the class and appear to enjoy it. I get nearly 100% participation. From a linguistic perspective, are there any problems with this approach?

[Shan-Shan]

[Shan-Shan]