TEFL metaphor Quote of the day
“In many parts of the world, it’s still the case that anyone who speaks English as a native can get a job teaching the language, despite the efforts of professional organizations like TESOL and university departments of Applied Linguistics. I hope that the chapters so far will have convinced you that this is almost as daft as employing someone as a human biology teacher because they have a healthy working body.”
I hope that quote is just a case of not being able to edit it out because they were proud of how clever it sounds, because that metaphor doesn’t work at all. Speaking a language is a skill. Teaching is also a skill. Biology is an area of theoretical knowledge. Therefore a much closer analogy is expecting a native speaker to be a good teacher of their language being like expecting a great footballer to become a great coach. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t, but having an MA in football coaching is not going to make a lot of difference to most of the ones who have a natural coaching talent or who really should’ve opened a bar instead.
But the whole needing an MA to teach thing is not about teaching skills anyway, that is entirely a smoke screen. If we demand that every native speaker English teacher in the world has an MA, it will reduce the supply of English teachers and give the ones remaining the bargaining power to be able to join unions etc without having the danger of being replaced by 23 year olds just off the ship. That point is a little more difficult to argue with, but they could at least be honest about the reasons for it.
An equally effective demolition of that metaphor from another angle on the blog I got it from, Controlled Chaos.