Canada’s English Programs
Dear editor,
I would like to add my personal perspective on the great English debate. Canada is a land of immigrants. To welcome these newcomers, Canadians have become adept at training them in English.
To teach English as a second language (ESL) to children, one requires a bachelor of education and specialized ESL training.
To teach ESL to adults in Ontario, one requires a post-graduate TESL (Teaching English as a Second Language) certificate from an accredited post-secondary institution.
The course should be at least 400 hours long, and contain 20 hours of real life classroom observation.
Further more, to pass the program and qualify for professional ESL teacher status, the student teacher has to teach for 20 hours in a real school, under the watchful eyes of a mentor teacher and the program lead teacher.
The lead teacher and the mentor teacher assess the effectiveness of the student teacher. If the student teacher hasn't `taught' the students, the student teacher fails the program and is not qualified to obtain the TESL Ontario Certificate.
Public school boards and the Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada program will only hire those people with a certified TESL Ontario Certificate. To retain this TESL certificate one also has to undergo continuous professional development. Thus you can see that standards are quite high to be an ESL teacher in Canada.
The most interesting part of my TESL program was the course called English Language Learning. In this course, students are introduced to the concept of content and process in language learning and teaching.
The nature of language, current theories of language learning, first and second language acquisition, and cultural models as they impact language learning are studied. The discovery, analysis and application of different learning styles will be integrated throughout.
Without some understanding of how people learn language, I personally don't see how one can be an effective language teacher.
Very few of these professional ESL teachers make the trip to Korea. Perhaps the Ministry of Justice could issue one- or two-month working visas, to accredited ESL professionals, to come here and give teacher-training workshops for native speakers and Korean English teachers. That would improve the English learning environment.
Ken Walton
Private instructor
Gunsan, North Jeolla Province