Job Discussion Forums

[sfaith]

Folks,

I am in the process of relocating to Saigon and thinking to attend either CELTA or TESOL course to teach English.

But my concern is that I am not a native speaker nor a European. In fact, I am an Asian, although my English is pretty fluent.

I am a Myanmar citizen, and lived in Singapore for a few years until last July. Did an Irish degree majoring in business over there. Worked in IT, media industry and digital marketing for awhile.

I am not sure if I am in the position to judge how fluent I am. If IELTS is any indication, I got 7.5 in 2007. My academic studies in Singapore are all in English, with lecturers flying in from Ireland. I did pretty darn well in my courses too. Hmm... I am not even sure if any of these can be used as criteria!

My concern is about my employability after I get CELTA or TESOL cert. It seems that majority of (99%?) EFL teachers are primarily white. So yeah... what do you guys think?

-- Sam

[mark_in_saigon]

You would need to get a 9 on IELTS to battle the natural built in discrimination of the system here. Even then, you will never be a native speaker, the native speakers can score that highly eating their cornflakes, so your services will probably always be discounted here. However, there are some other various nationalities teaching English in VN, but despite their skills, the parents prefer to have the native accent taught to their children, and even the Asian appearance is discriminated against in an Asian American. My guess is your wages would be discounted by about 30%. That is assuming you have advanced beyond 7.5. If not I am not able to speculate too much on that, but the discount would probably me more in that case. Also, you may get less hours, and worse schools. You may want to consider other countries that are not so blatant about their discriminatory practices. I think some of the folks from various countries like yours may move to the outlying areas or cities where there is less supply of the highly skilled native speakers.

[I'm With Stupid]

I know several non-native speakers and several non-white teachers. I can't say I've ever met a non-native, non-white teacher though. From what I hear, non-native speakers will have trouble with the schools, whereas Asians will have trouble from the parents. Since you fit into both categories, expect issues with both groups.

[mark_in_saigon]

To clarify, or draw an analogy, consider the most highly skilled VN teachers of English here. They have the huge advantage of being able to speak in the student's native language, plus they can speak English at about the same level as you can. Despite this natural advantage, they are almost all on the periphery, they may be administrators or fill in teachers, but the schools almost always wants the prestige of having the Caucasian face and the native accent. Right and wrong don't always apply here, and logic may apply even less.