Can Anyone Be An English Teacher In Thailand?

[huyuli]

Thailand is in the process of instituting new qualifications for Western teachers in Thailand. If you want to teach in Thailand, according to the Thai Ministry of Education, you will have to either have these qualifications or get them. The downside is, they're expensive and basically useless outside Thailand. The upside? Well nobody seems to have found one yet.

Here are the new regulations, as outlined in a memo to most schools in Thailand at the beginning of February, 2008:

1. All teachers in Thailand must have a BA degree and a teaching license. If they do not have a BA and a teaching license (very few teachers do) then they will not be allowed to teach in Thailand.

2. For those teachers with a BA but no teaching certification from their home country they will have to take the following:

a) a 20 hour Thai Culture Course covering Thai society, Thai language and culture, Thai courtesy, Thai arts and music (why this is necessary to teach English in Thailand, nobody seems to know?) The cost for this course is 8,000 baht (approximately US $250).

a one year Teacher Training certification program at the cost of 80,000 baht (approximately US $2,500). (As this certification will only be valid in Thailand, you're not likely to get many teachers willing to hand over the money for it).

c) the teacher will have to pass four exams that are derived from current Graduate Diploma in Education courses.

3. Once all these requirements have been met they will have to submit the following:

a) a completed application for a Teacher's License

copy of passport

c) copy of evidence showing teaching qualifications

d) copy of foreign license to teach

e) copy of certificate of teaching operations (nobody seems to know what this means?)

f) copy of the certificate of knowledge testing and evaluation

g) two one-inch full face photographs.

I sent a mail to a school who have TEFL course, and this is their answer.

To teach in a language or government school you need a degree to get a

teachers license and subsequent work permit. However this regulation is

still open to interpretation and varies depending on the province. In

other words there are still lots of people teaching without a degree.

More up to date information is available here: http://ajarn.com/Banter/rulesandregulations.htm

Even though I have a higher degree in Education and a teaching licence from Australia, I still had to attend the 20-hour Thai cultural training program and fulfil other requirements as outlined in Applicant Type 1 - Method 1. It appears that no one is exempt from the 20-hour course.

[Loaded]

Here are the new regulations, as outlined in a memo to most schools in Thailand at the beginning of February, 2008:

6 months is a long time in Thai education.

There are now 2-year temporary licences available that don't require passing the TCT knowledge test. For sure, these will be renewable.

As Ajarn.com points out the loophole used by schools to obtain work permits for teachers without degrees (school Director's letter) is now being used for teachers without degrees to obtain the Teacher Licence.

The TCT messed up with their original proposals and what's happening now is a face saving compromise IMO. This isn't a reaction to foreign teachers' anger, but it is a reaction to school's anger as they realised how difficult it would be to run their EPs, MEPs, Bilingual Programs, native-speaker English... that they need to offer in order to persuade parents to part with money and send their kids to that particular school.

[mr_hippo]

am thinking about teaching next year when ive tied things up here in england. does anyone recomend a course to go on when i arrive.is it worth doing them 4 week courses with a guaranteed placement at end of it ?

ive got a few contacts in bkk im going to call to see best way they got in .

May I suggest two courses?

'Caps 101' and Punctuation 101 to start with.

[Neeranam]

Anything can happen here, especially if a school is desperate and its labour office is small and provincial.

I agree with that.

95% of schools hiring farangs couldn't care about their qualifications or nationality, only their skin colour and their ability to be a "dancing white monkey". It helps if they can't speak Thai and are willing to stand like a <deleted> every 8am in front of their school.

[pab]

I think that anybody who encourages the less able westerner to enter the teaching profession is doing a disservice to ESL teaching as a whole. There are plenty of able alternatives to the white faced westerner and these seem to becoming more attractive to employers as time goes on. A continued flood of applicants who are illiterate, dressed for the beach, and smelling of alcohol turning up for interviews is helping to cure the Thai teachers of their objection to darker skinned Asians. The majority of students actually believe that Filipinos are native speakers anyway. I think the problem is that many westerners who teach ESL don't see themselves as professionals and so don't feel any urge to protect the profession. Many may argue that this is all the fault of Thailand, but I think that is the individual teacher's duty to protect the profession.

Garro could not agree more with your sentiments. I am not a teacher but I have a good friend in Australia who has visited us many times and wants to teach in Thailand. She is a very experienced and successful English teacher as well as having extremely accomplished musical/drama capacities. Obviously she is very highly regarded by her current Australian school and they would be sad to lose her. She wants a new challenge and a change and is able to move easily. However, she wants to teach in Si Sa Ket as that is where we live but we have advised her that the salaries in this area would probably be far lower than in Bangkok. She does not expect Australian equivalent salaries but could you recommend some schools for her to approach in Bangkok? Also as an experienced teacher (more than 20 years of successful experience) would she need to do any qualification courses?

[Loaded]

Garro could not agree more with your sentiments. I am not a teacher but I have a good friend in Australia who has visited us many times and wants to teach in Thailand. She is a very experienced and successful English teacher as well as having extremely accomplished musical/drama capacities. Obviously she is very highly regarded by her current Australian school and they would be sad to lose her. She wants a new challenge and a change and is able to move easily. However, she wants to teach in Si Sa Ket as that is where we live but we have advised her that the salaries in this area would probably be far lower than in Bangkok. She does not expect Australian equivalent salaries but could you recommend some schools for her to approach in Bangkok? Also as an experienced teacher (more than 20 years of successful experience) would she need to do any qualification courses?

Sounds like she's qualified to teach anything anywhere in Thailand. However, I'm sure she's a successful and competent English teacher but teaching the use of your own first language and teaching language to non-native speakers are 2 very different forms of teaching. There should be no lectures in ESL/EFL teaching but rather short presentations of a target structure to students who may only have a few words of the language they are learning and then sequenced practice activities hopefully leading to student autonomy by the end of the class - not at all easy unless you've had an introduction to ESL/EFL teaching.

Edited August 29, 2008 by Loaded

[Loaded]

Anything can happen here, especially if a school is desperate and its labour office is small and provincial.

I agree with that.

95% of schools hiring farangs couldn't care about their qualifications or nationality, only their skin colour and their ability to be a "dancing white monkey". It helps if they can't speak Thai and are willing to stand like a <deleted> every 8am in front of their school.

You might be right about the dancing monkey but I don't agree with the comments about colour. Sure Thais look down on Asians with dark skin as they equate dark skin with poverty, outdoor work etc. But farangs seem to confuse this with Thai attitudes to Westerner's with dark skin. I know 'balck' western teachers happily working at many of the top schools in and around Chiang Mai. These schools have choices as they pay well and receive many applications from Western white teachers. They're employed because the schools (educated Thais) don't look at their colour. Western whites have created this idea that Thais are racist toward balck Westerners and the facts, certainly up North, don't support this idea. It's whitey that's racist towards his own people IMO.