Comments on: Interview- Jason West Dishes on Guardian Languages and Sets the TEFL World to Rights!

By: Peter Fenton

Peter Fenton — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 15:50:45 +0000

I don’t think Meetup is the best place to find potential students and organise English classes. For a start, it’s only available in six languages, which excludes most people who want to learn English. Also, it’s probably not exactly the first place people would go to if they were looking to learn a language. It would be useless for me in Poland, for example.

Also, as a dogme enthusiast, I don’t really feel the urge to pay for materials created by someone who knows nothing about my students. Besides, there are plenty of materials on the internet already, like on this site for example. For free

By: David Bargh

David Bargh — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 12:26:32 +0000

I have been working on the internet teaching adults using http://www.buddyschool.com, where you more or less turn yourself in to an EFL school of one, and all the admin a “normal” EFL school looks after.
Now I am contacting EFL schools in Europe and beyond to see if they would like to offer the service of conversation classes via Skype + webcam. This is attractive in two ways: one, the teacher(s) have no hassle with timetables or payments and two, the student knows that the teacher is fully qualified and experienced.

What goes on on Skype is between the student and teacher and any complaints either way can be adjudicated on by the school. I hope that this will be the way to harmonise relations between existing schools and the new technology we have to hand.

By: Julian Gilbert

Julian Gilbert — Thu, 07 May 2009 12:41:40 +0000

I think everything Jason says about the future of elearning etc makes sense. And I’m sure it’s going to happen. But the problem at the moment is that students themselves are reluctant to embrace learning on-line, which is also the reason he gives for the failure of the Guardian project. This will change I’m sure, but slowly, and there may not be the revolution he envisages.
His main problem is that he wants to make money from the process. But it is possible for learners of English to chat (sorry practice) their English with native speakers now, for free. They mostly however, don’t choose to do so and are very very reluctant to pay for it, as they know it should be for free. Teachers also expect services which connect them to potential students, such as forums or chat rooms, to be free and they would use virtual classrooms in greater numbers, if they were free too.
As for materials, teachers will recycle old ones or adapt and create their own for on-line learning.
The only way I can foresee profit in the process is for someone to create a free teacher to student matchmaking service, with virtual classroom facilities and make money from ads, extra services etc.
That is the truth I’m afraid.

By: Alex Case

Alex Case — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 00:12:12 +0000

Some gems about the Guardian, that bastion of left-wing middle class hypocrisy, from December’s Private Eye:

“Readers of the Guardian will know what a dim view its pundits take of firms which get rid of staff and outsource their jobs…. When Grauniad hacks move into their new HQ at King’s Cross next week, staff who work on the switchboard, in the postroom or on front-office security will not be joining them. Their jobs are all being, er, outsourced to cheaper agency workers”

But at least standards are being retained for some:

“’Boardroom bonanza’ howled the Guardian last Friday, frowning on the appointment of Nigel Rudd as chairman of technology firm Ivensys… Carolyn McCall, chief executive of Guardian Media Group, enjoyed a modest 957,000 pounds last year [and] picked up a further 67,000 pounds from a non-executive directorship of Tesco…taking her over the 1 million pound mark and easily eclipsing Sir Nigel.”

By: Sandy

Sandy — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 17:29:18 +0000

Well said, Jason. The cheque’s in the post – in Russian roubles, natcho.

By: Jason West

Jason West — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 19:47:55 +0000

Oh, I think I get to leave a link don’t I Alex? Thanks. Jason

Read more of my ramblings at: http://www.languagesoutthere.com

By: Jason West

Jason West — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 19:45:35 +0000

See, Sandy is proof that good teachers have always been ‘doing it for themselves’. How many teachers do you or I know who have private one to ones or small groups going all of the time?People are just taking this online but the difference is they are able to work with a wider catchment area and (depending upon the sites they use to teach) they can get rated by their students. Doesn’t that seem to be fair? I think it is. I can understand your fears Alex (and I think you might have a slightly faux-luddite stance to maintain a little, go on, you do don’t you? because your fears are those that everyone in every service industry, nay industry, has when technology shifts things. A teacher is only as good as the success they have with their students and if their students are happy and feel they are learning at the speed they had envisaged (even hoped for) then the teacher is doing a good job. Most teachers online give a free lesson or a discount for the first lesson and if the student doesn’t like it they don’t need to go back. What if you booked an expensive course at a reputable school, travelled half way around the world expecting a multi-cultural learning environment and found the teachers were good, the school had good facilities but that you’d been thrown into a ghettoised environment of just two distinct nationality groups who spoke their own language outside of classes all the time. I have heard of just such a thing happening many times in my time in TEFL and what it all boils down to at the end of the day is expectations. Expectations are set by a combination of need, reputation, image, price and delivery. Any one of them can fail at any time for any number of reasons. The key is to manage students’ expectations to make sure they are realistic and then to exceed them. Unfortunately there are a lot of hype merchants who chase a quick buck in this industry. That’s why a lot of online discussion by teachers is about who is bad and what they have done to be that bad. TEFL staffrooms are always feisty and insurrectional places (but fun), and often hard to manage for the DOS. Why is that? I have always wondered why? The conclusion I have come to is that there are a lot of teachers who feel they should be paid more and appreciated more, and they are right, they work hard, they are at the coal face and they give it their all and then they have to sit in a meeting with a manager telling them to run off fewer copies. It’s crap. But the solution, more so than ever before, is in the hands of teachers, because of technology and what it offers. If all the energy spent moaning was channelled into doing something positive with the position of trust that teachers have with their students, they might find that they don’t need the ‘middleman’ half as much as they thought they did. At the start it will be tough, but momentum is a wonderful thing and who has the numbers? I think it is underway, that good teachers will work with loyal students wherever they can and wherever they like, be it in a classroom of a large chain or in a McDonalds in Shanghai. Space to teach is space to teach and it is everywhere, the tools teachers lacked (premises, student recruitment networks, accreditation, agents, etc.) are being provided by technology and technology as we all know has the effect of making one person more productive than ten who don’t have it. That’s why home working has come about, why there are more sole traders (eBay) and people making money from their passions and hobbies and as someone not a million miles away from this blog page told me a short while ago…’money follows the passion, not the other way round’. Money isn’t everything, but if good and passionate teachers like Sandy could go it alone in the ‘Third World/Middle Ages’ (that sounds terrible Sandy, but you know what I mean), then it is only going to get easier for those who don’t quite have his guts and drive but lack none of his passion and skills.

By: Sandy

Sandy — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 18:11:40 +0000

PS: I guess that should be “Myddle Englyshe”, really.

By: Sandy

Sandy — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 18:10:59 +0000

“…back into the third world/ Middle Ages.” As somebody who actually once made a very good living as an independent English teacher in a former ‘third world’ country, I can’t complain.

And I do like that bit about returning to the Middle Ages. It’s about time we started teaching everybody the REAL language of Shakespeare … and before. Anybody fancy working for “The Renaissance School of Olde Englyshe”?

By: Alex Case

Alex Case — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 12:34:51 +0000

This is my crystal ball if online teaching becomes almost necessary to make a TEFL career:
- Successful teachers will be able to make more per hour than crap ones, but crap ones will also be able to make a living by not caring about a high turnover of students because there is always another sucker on the internet.
- It will be a lot more difficult for students to choose good teachers than it is for them to choose good schools, because a newspaper is hardly going to cover a story about one teacher and the good ones will quickly find their schedules full and so will not be an option for those looking for a teacher for the first time. A CELTA and degree will also be even more meaningless, and students will have no way of judging a teacher before paying them for a lesson.
- Young teachers who think they are invincible will be able to undercut older teachers by not bothering with health insurance or pensions and by dodging their taxes. Schools and good teachers will be able to charge more than these young whipper snappers, but if they can charge twice as much as the lowest per hour price and the lowest price is going down, so will their wages.
- Individual teachers undercutting schools will result in schools having to do away with health insurance, pensions, fixed salaries etc in order to be able to compete. The present state of the TEFL market is like a market- everyone pays a little for their stalls and the punters aren’t fussy about a guarantee of quality so real shops with rents and staff to pay can’t compete. The majority of teachers doing so online is like allowing people to sell off the ground in front of the market stalls, i.e. back into the third world/ Middle Ages.

By: Karenne Sylvester

Karenne Sylvester — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 19:03:49 +0000

Seriously long post but FASCINATING. Well done.

I totally agree with:
So it strikes me that we should be teaching learning strategies to language learners or at best providing them with structure and support within which their own brains can work it out for themselves and latch onto the cognitive clues that enable them as individuals to store and produce new language again, effortlessly.

Absolutely…
My crystal ball tells me that the majority of people engaged in TEFL will one day, very soon, realise that what they currently do doesn’t work as well for them as it could if only they embraced the future themselves and started taking matters into their own hands.

It’s time for the Black Swan my friends… (Nassim Taleb) Read it if you haven’t yet.

By: David V.

David V. — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 08:37:29 +0000

I’m knackered after readişng that.

Anyone questioning the professionalism of TEFL should check out this methodological breakthrough:,

http://www.eltworld.net/blog/2009/01/i-cant-compete-with-this/