Korean Job Discussion Forums

[sunnata1]

Yesterday in Gwangju I attended the Global English Teachers Association (GETA) symposium. The title was 'Transforming Learners, Teachers, and the English Classroom.

This was recommended to me as a professional development conference. For Native English Teachers it was anything but.

From the first presentation to the last NETs were bashed. Within the first hour a reference was made to crimes being commited by NETs. There were a few laughs during the day at our expense, and the overall purpose of the day seems to be to make the argument that monies would be better spent training Korean teacher's rather than recruiting and hiring NETs.

One discussion group was held entirely in Korea (although it was an English conference.) The topic of that presentation? 'Transforming ELT in Korea.'

This was not a small break out group - this was one of two late morning discussion groups. Native English speakers who were already seated in the auditorium were told to attend the 'Transforming ELT in Asia' discussion panel.

The fact that the Transforming ELT in Korea panel was held in Korean shows exactly how much input NETs have in the discussion.

There were a few interesting presentation in the afternoon during the break out sessions. These were mostly by grad students presenting their research. But the overall theme for the day was that NETs are bad for the development of teaching English in Korea.

[nautilus]

The KT's hadn't a clue as to how to teach english when I first arrived at my school.Nothing personal against them, they're fine. Its sounds arrogant, but its just a fact: their lessons were monotonous, boring, dicatotrial. There was no excitement, ingenuity, activities or genuine interraction.And there were dozens of blatant gramar and other errors.
fast forward a year later, and there is virtually not a single thing the KT's do which is not copied from how I do things. The classes are alive, fun, and learning.

I dunno. It just seems that there is a wall of determination to find fault with foreigners here no matter what. This is a massive insult to those of us who have excelled and done our best. Its all so needless, anyhow, because NET's are not threatening the KT's job security in any way.

From what I can see KT's are no way ready to take over teaching their country english. If because of some sort of xenephobia/inferiority complex/ inability to accept and work alongside foreigners/mass fabrication of foreigner crime hysteria.. they want to sieze the reains at this stage, it will be a backward step for english education in this country.

[bassexpander]

This was a global thing, yet almost entirely Korean?

How many foreigners were there, roughly?

[cruisemonkey]

[lifeinkorea]

Well, let's see. You fly someone to your country to teach kids. You house them and put up a large security deposit. You hire a Korean to be their co-teacher.

Then, you stick the NET in an empty room with boards that are way too high for the students to reach (if they use chairs to stand on, they can only reach one third of it, you only half). You make the Korean teacher do completely unrelated tasks to teaching English and working with the NET.

After all that, you see no improvement in the students. Why is this? Must be the NET!!!

[sunnata1]

[halfmanhalfbiscuit]

[Manuel_the_Bandito]

The people who keep track of testing results know that schools that have NETs are doing better than those that don't. Were it not so we'd all be working in hagwon and unis. Until KETs prove that they can get better results without us we'll still be around the PS system. Based on what I've seen they're still a generation away from achieving this.

[pkang0202]

I recently conducted an interview for High School English teachers in Taegu. Out of the 7 candidates, 5 of them used excellent teaching techniques. They incorporated visual aids, audio aids, and have hands-on activities for the students.

2 of the teachers just lectured.

What's even more interesting was that 5 who used a lot of materials were women, and the 2 who just lectured were men.

[Demophobe]

[ytuque]