Employment & Professional Development

Dr. Greg,

I am also a long term resident of South Florida and am now close to completing my doctorate in Civil/Environmental Engineering at the University of Central Florida this spring.

I have visited Asia many times and now wish to reside in Sanya City. I have taught many engineering courses here in the U.S. but I do not currently speak Mandarin.

I would love the opportunity to live in Sanya City while I learn Mandarin. My Chinese friends here at the university have told me that it would be ideal to teach English for a few years while I learn their language.

What is the best way to pursue an English teaching position in Sanya City? What should I consider my prospects with my particular credentials? What websites should I contact to accomplish my goal?

If your primary goal is to learn Mandarin, presumably because you believe it will help you in your future career as a civil engineer, then the northeast of China—where you will be exposed to standard Putonghua—is the best location for Chinese language study.

If your primary goal is to simply take some time off from life after having just earned a doctoral degree, learn Mandarin at the same time—as in killing two birds with one stone so to speak—and then use English language teaching as a way of subsidizing this plan, Sanya City would not be the best place to exercise this plan. Sanya is strictly a tourism destination: The vast majority of locals who reside there support the tourism industry but not in a way that requires direct contact with Westerners. Consequently, the need for English language education is limited to the hotel industry and only then at 5-star hotels.

Your best bet would be to conduct a search on large hotel chains in Sanya and then contact them directly with a proposal to teach “hotel English” in exchange for room and board and, perhaps, a small additional subsidy. The most you could hope to earn would be 150 yuan per hour, not including housing. If you could line up a couple of hotels at eight to ten hours per week of training, that would bring in approximately 10,000 yuan per month, a viable income allowing you to rent your own apartment.

A doctorate in civil/environmental engineering does not make you particularly competitive for an English teaching position in China. It would, however, increase your desirability at public universities as advanced degrees in any field are preferred, except there aren’t any universities in Sanya—so you’d be neutralizing your advantage by living and working there.

Finally, if your ultimate goal is to return to the field of engineering, spending "a few years" teaching oral English in China would effectively amount to professional suicide. No firm in either China or the United States would even consider you for employment with this type of experience on your curriculum vitae.

Unless you are planning a permanent career change to EFL teaching in Asia, you will need to completely conceal the fact that you taught oral English in China by referring to your time spent here as devoted entirely to Chinese language study.

Forgoing the opportunity to ever work in a field you are about to earn a doctoral degree in is a very high price to pay to live in Sanya and learn Chinese.