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Teaching English in China

Is Teaching English in China For Me?

Vocational Aspects

The best way to answer this question is to start with the vocational aspects. What you need to keep in mind is that, for the most part, the role of the foreign English teacher in China is de-professionalized. Westerners are hired to facilitate the practice of students’ listening and speaking skills and that’s about it. The more technical and mechanical aspects of the English language are delegated almost exclusively to the Chinese teachers. Some foreigners with a minimum of a master’s degree in a related field may find themselves teaching other skill sets (writing and reading) as well as courses other than oral English, e.g., literature, but those teaching assignments are relatively rare among foreign teachers within China’s educational system.

In addition, teaching English as a foreign language in China is very tiring work. Especially given our very limited roles here, it’s not particularly difficult work, but it is emotionally draining and physically exhausting to have to be constantly aware of the rate of one’s speech and the use of one’s vocabulary (and not just when in class but also when speaking with your foreign affairs officer, your supervisor and/or school owner, most of your Chinese colleagues and virtually all acquaintances, not to mention one’s Chinese girlfriend or wife). Experienced teachers of subjects other than EFL only have to be aware of what they are saying (i.e., the content). When you teach English, you must be constantly aware of not only what you are saying but how you are saying it (remaining forever conscious of the need to reduce one’s rate of speech and level of vocabulary).

We invite you to try a little experiment. Take a local newspaper and find a relatively easy story to read. Now imagine you have to both read and explain that story to someone with extremely poor (or barely existent) English language skills. Take just 15 minutes reading that story out loud at an unnaturally slow pace and make certain that you carefully and slowly explain that passage, being no less careful to concurrently find alternative ways of explaining words you take for granted (i.e., vocabulary words at the primary school level of education in the West). Now multiply that effort and strain by 80 times (approximating a workload of 20 hours per week). Only you can decide, for yourself, if this is something you would both enjoy and be successful at doing. You will need an inordinate amount of patience (the patience of Job really), and you will absolutely need to love teaching in order to be successful at doing this without feeling both frustrated and bored.

It is highly unlikely that anyone other than those with advanced degrees and teaching experience, who can successfully compete for the far better positions, will find the work professionally satisfying or particularly rewarding. For the vast majority of those teaching English in China, it is simply a job and a means to an end.

Sociodemographic Aspects

Overall, those who report the greatest degree of personal satisfaction with their decision to teach English in China are those who are either recent college graduates—that is, ones who are looking for some cultural diversity and travel experience before returning home to pursue their “real” careers—or retirees: those who have finished their careers, have some money saved and are simply looking to stretch their pensions (by spending Western-earned dollars in an Asian country). Those who report the greatest degree of dissatisfaction appear to be older (30 to 50), mid-career people, who had marginal careers or led unsatisfactory lives in their countries of origin, who—more or less—chose China by default as a geographic cure for their personal and occupational troubles.

There is also a fourth, and far less common, category of English teachers in China who do report a relatively high degree of personal satisfaction with their decision: Those who could best be described as career EFL teachers and directors of studies in Asia (or those aspiring to be). These are people who—for a variety of personal reasons, and although they had the potential and opportunity to pursue a variety of other, more financially promising careers—consciously sacrificed a more conventional life (one offering greater economic advantage) in exchange for one that offered them far more adventure and perceived personal freedom. This type of teacher typically has a bachelor’s or master’s degree in education or linguistics, often with a specialty in TEFL, has commonly taught in several other Asian countries, including Thailand and Japan, and is frequently a trainer in such programs, or a director of studies (DOS) at a private English language school.

The reason for the aforementioned findings lies in the fact that living and working in China require a considerable degree of highly challenging cognitive and emotional adjustments in virtually every area of life one can imagine. Thus, for example, a recent college graduate, who is simply taking a year off before commencing graduate school, can more easily tolerate the demands being made of him knowing very well that his life will be restored to “normal” in a relatively brief period of time. Related, a retiree—who has already enjoyed a relatively successful career back home—can easily rationalize that the social and psychological demands being made of him are quite fair in exchange for not having to count pennies in the way he might have if he had tried to retire in his country of origin. Conversely, those who are here by forced choice will necessarily struggle the most with the radical differences in food, personal and public hygiene, medical care, and China’s complex, and (at times) contradictory and challenging sociopolitical structure, to name but a few. Those who are—in effect—economically trapped here, will necessarily experience the greatest degree of anomie with resultant and alternating states of clinical depression, anxiety and rage, unless it is somehow true that their lives, in China, are nevertheless still better here than what they had fled from back home (and it often takes at least two or three years to acquire that level of adaptation, acceptance and relative comfort).

Personal Aspects

If you are young and seeking some personal adventure before resuming your “real life” back home or are old enough to retire with some money in the bank, then moving to China to teach oral English can make a great deal of sense. On the other hand, if you are an academician seeking a six-month to one-year sabbatical, you should be limiting your job searches to international schools and Project 211 universities only.

The truth is most foreign “teachers” in China are unqualified, never taught one day in their lives prior to moving here, and are only in China because they perceived it as their last choice. Despite the fact that this is the norm for the vast majority of foreign teachers in China, this is neither a healthy nor sound reason for uprooting your life and exposing yourself to what will be some very harsh and challenging adjustment demands.

The Chinese are not stupid. They fully appreciate that the vast majority of Westerners are teaching English in China for an average of $730 USD per month because they couldn’t find anything better in their native countries. Desperate immigrants with minimal job skills are never warmly received anywhere in the world and are commonly exploited as much as possible: China is no exception. If you do decide that moving here to teach oral English is your best option at this time, do not come here thinking that you will be appreciated simply because you had to travel up to halfway around the world to do so. The Chinese admire the wealth and success of Western countries, especially a relatively young country such as the United States, and, therefore, hold little more than disdain for any foreigner who was “too stupid,” “too weak,” or “too lazy” not to be able to capitalize on all the advantages he or she was born into. Although their perceptions of how “easy” it is to be successful in the West are obviously distorted, these types of romanticized images of Western life are nevertheless ubiquitous across China. If you are qualified and experienced or otherwise had what is perceived here as a successful life back home, the Chinese will specifically question you, with a look of total disbelief, about why you would possibly give all that up to move to their relatively poor and developing country.

The truth is, no matter how bad your current set of circumstances are, your day-to-day life in China will be generally more challenging and frustrating than what you are hoping to escape from, at least for the initial year or two, due to a variety of factors, and there are typically less support systems available to you here than wherever you hail from.

Your personal coping skills, particularly the ability to overcome and master frustration and significant challenges, will make a crucial difference in determining whether you can make the necessary adjustments. If your relationships with others (employers, coworkers, significant others, etc.) were tumultuous back home, you cannot expect them to miraculously improve in China. In fact, due to the stark cultural differences in areas that will initially and adversely affect your mental status and overall state of well-being, what you should expect is to be deluged by an emotional storm of frustration, resentment, bitterness, confusion, depression and intermittent rage.

Reflect in all honesty how others regard you. If you are generally considered to be flexible, good-natured, easy to get along with, and someone who has adequate interpersonal skills, you can expect to adjust reasonably well to China over time. If, on the other hand, you are viewed as immature, temperamental, unpredictable, moody, demanding and difficult, you will most likely have an extremely difficult time in the Middle Kingdom.

If you can move to China with your eyes wide-open, and with full understanding and acceptance of the realities you will face as an unqualified oral English teacher, you can adjust over time to the myriad of challenges you will be confronted with. You will need to remain extremely flexible, grow a thick skin, suppress your anger, and keep an open mind at all times. If your response to frustration proves to be one characterized by righteous indignation underscored by Eurocentric moral, legal, religious, or ethical superiority—with an inclination towards correcting perceived “wrongs” that, in many instances, have been culturally ingrained over a period of several millennia—you can count on being absolutely and thoroughly miserable during your stay in China. Conversely, a positive, open-minded, and alacritous attitude, as well as maintaining a clear and resolute understanding of your purpose for being in China, will make all the difference in increasing the probability that you will ultimately find your way here. In fact many foreigners who came to China as unqualified teachers do ultimately manage to carve out for themselves lives that are better than what they had left behind, which is why they stay year after year.

(From unit 2 in the guide)