The Forum > Article Comments > Speaking the language > Comments
Speaking the language : Comments
By Mercurius Goldstein, published 23/10/2006Why doesn’t Australia hire more language teachers from overseas?
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Importing foreign language teachers from Japan whose record of teaching English is just better than South Korea’s: both countries spend inordinate amounts of money bringing in unqualified young English “teachers” to waste huge amounts of time with pathetic, disappointing results for the majority. Please deny this and enlighten me. Articles I have read and people I speak with do not tout Japan as as the paragon of superbly effective foreign language teaching.
I support the idea of tandem teaching done by local teachers who know the students and their backgrounds and needs (as far as that is possible) and native speaker guest teachers with really good training. Think you’re likely to get funding for such a scheme in Australia, though?
Sorry, Mercurius. Good luck with that but … this mob in Canberra are the problem (a narrow view of languages teaching which goes: learn the language in mechanistic fashion, get a job in international business, rip people off.) No solution can ever come from them. You are right: we have to wait for Rudd & co.
(POSTSCRIPT Sample of values confusion in public media / discourse: “Buy this, get fat, now go to the gym, this house could be yours, you want this car, you do, don’t you want to be just like her, I’ll never never never introduce a GST, we’ll decide who comes into this country, naughty North Korea, by the way we’re going nuclear ourselves, oh, er, yes, climate change seems to be real after all, um, vote for me, I’ll save you from terror,” etc.)
Now, these issues would make excellent discussion topics for real foreign language classes