School #1 has 12 classrooms and I have too many students in the afternoon and early evening. School #2 has 14 classrooms and is not at capacity but is also doing very well. The sweet thing about afternoon students is that they pay an extra $10,000NT (registration fee) a year over and above the monthly tuition. But operating costs for afternoon kids are higher. Food and transportation costs (I have three vans and have to rent two big freeway buses...and those bad boys are not cheap). I'd say yeah, the "right" way sells.

School #3 is in the works and all I gotta do is plug in the system and train the new staff.

I see night classes dying a slow death.

There are three kinds of classes besides an English class that have the potential to be big sellers but I won't bore you with the details of those.

I've seen some of these schools and there are some aspects about them I like, but I think it can be done in a much better way. Now, I haven't seen all such schools, but as the blog says they are all very much alike, I'm generalizing what I've observed to the system as a whole.

The Good

The real strength of the school is in student accountability. When students fail to perform there are consequences. Students who do not put in the effort are not promoted. If parents don't like it they don't bully the staff into promoting the kid. Either the kid changes or the parents take him somewhere else.

The foreign teacher has complete control of the class and doesn't have to worry about parents complaining to management that they are getting too much homework or that the kid isn't having enough fun. Instruction is geared towards learning and time isn't wasted on needless entertainment.

Discipline is good. Students understand that their parents will support the decisions of the teacher and they take the class as seriously as they do their classes at school.

Students learn correct pronunciation. From what I have seen this is absolutely the best aspect of this kind of school. Kids have correct pronunciation drilled into them and it works great.

Overall, this sort of class will naturally produce better results than a class where discipline is poor, there is little accountability to the foreign teacher, and teachers are asked to keep the students happy first and teach them second.

The Bad

In the schools I've seen the program is extremely teacher centered. There is a lot of individual practice, but in a classroom with 30+ students each student speaks once in 15 minutes time with the exception of choral repetition.

Instruction focuses on only a couple of the senses. Very little (I saw none) visual or kinisthetic activity is used. Very little of the students' experience or background is utilized in teaching.

Learning is generally about the language, not aquiring the language. Students will repeat a rule a dozen times and can tell you why something is wrong by analyzing it, but when they start producing they are full of errors violating those exact same rules. After a few months of the same drills they'll eventually start to monitor out the errors, but no faster than at some of the larger chain schools.

Students learn accuracy, but at the cost of fluency.

In Closing

I don't think going back to the nitty-gritty is a bad idea. The "let's have fun" approach of the large chain schools is clearly not performing as well as they would like you to think. But there is a lot of good that has come about in the last 50 years in the field of L2 learning. Going back to "drill and kill" is ignoring all of that.

I'd like to see a more student-centered approach based on teaching language in context applied with the same kind of accountability and focus as the foreign run schools talked about in this thread.

Right. God forbid your boss hold you accountable for what you teach and expect you to actually do more than just show up. I suppose working for a loud-mouthed, know-it-all Korean laoban who doesn't care what you do as long as the parents keep paying is a much better situation to be in. That is, if you're into the trained foreign monkey routine.

Some of us, though, happen to be real teachers who don't have our necks bent over how many piles of cash we can rake in for the least amount of effort.

I've seen many of those schools and IMHO they have shit materials, they are specifically designed to cram as many students as possible into the classroom, and the kids are treated in an abusive way that would almost have you arrested in the West. It is the easy way to make a lot of money. One has to ask is this what you want for your child? I know there are clearly many Taiwanese who feel that it is right to drill the kids until they are bored to tears with the one sentence pattern being passed around 35 students, but give me a break. It's crap.

I don't know what the other school owners do and my school is fairly humble, but I don't do that and never will. Yes, I have lots of homework (I'm only 4 hours a week/child), if you don't do it I have a dention class you must attend on Saturday or you are booted from the school no questions. However, that is essentially my only rule. It works like a charm, but the kids don't have to wear jackboots in school and I wear flipflops.

That's just not my case. I get paid well for what I do because I do a good job. I already know what I'm going to do before I go in each day. It just works itself out. My lesson plans are done before the book is introduced and students' progress is done with checklists. No reason to break your head with weekly lesson plans and extra paper work. Report cards and test results are done automatically with my in-class computer. Having an internet connection, CD burner, projector and screen add to the enjoyment of the class. I can show pronunciation diagraphs, burn educational programs and give them to the students free of charge, etc. The possiblities are endless. I do the same conversational exercises as the hard-core schools, but with fewer students it's much more benefical.

My kids have homework: spelling, sentence writing, grammar, and reports (depending on the level). If they don't do it, they get a hard time. If they can't survive, they're gone. I have a way of making slackers leave. Don't have time for them. If the parents want me to teach them, they have to follow my rules. My way or the highway.

I could go on but I think I've proven my point.

What makes you more of a teacher than me. Give me a fucking break.

Oh, by the way, my boss isn't hard-assed. He's quite friendly. Sure, enrollment is his number one concern but he is also a teacher. Are the hard-ass buxibans doing it for free? I don't think so. I know I'm not.

Imani I am surprised at you. As a good teacher you should deplore the kind of sense-less repetition that sustitutes for pedagogy at these schools. Yes, homework and discipline and accountability are important, but to any school. And any school that works, regardless of their teaching ideals, will enforce discipline and accountability.

I know at your school you do a lot of free reading. You encourage students to read at home and to take pleasure in reading. You do this, one because free reading is the best way for students to improve their language skills, but two, because reading is an important part of being a human being. And as a teacher you know that teaching skills and knowledge is only part of your job.

These schools, AFAIK, do not allow free reading, certainly not during class time, and I doubt any student who comes from such a system would naturally wnat to pick up a book for enjoyment outside of class. The problem with these places is they are turning out a product, which is an appalling way of considering a small child's education. Students I have tutored who go to such schools report the stress they feel. And no, their level has not been any higher than other kids at other cram schools.
Guys, I don't know why you think these schools are so different from cram schools. They aren't. They are distilled cram schools. Potent and effective like cheap grain alcohol. But to follow up on fox's point, and to make an analogy, would you want to drink such shit?

As fox asks, would you send you child to such a school? To learn piano, or soccer, or any other extra curricular activity that is meant to round out a child's education, not supplant it?

We criticize the Taiwanese for being rigid, for being unable to think creatively and then we set up our own schools that just reinforce the habit of blind obedience to authority.

puiwaihin good post, except I would argue that many of your good points are also bad.


Children learn best when they are motivated to learn. Fun helps motivate children. It's that simple.

The brain is designed to disregard random information that is not contextualized or presented in a way that connects with other areas of knowledge or interest. This is not hocus pocus but the confirmed results of the last 20 years of brain research. Drilling and repetition are extremely inefficient ways of learning because the mind wants to disregard what is being presented.

Exactly: games, stickers, candy and pizza. I play a game for a whole 50-minute class teaching grammar to middle school students with dice and a board. They don't get any less out of it than if I were teaching straight from the book. They learn more.

I am with Muzha Man on this. I think that he has made good points here.

I certainly hope that these schools are not just likea certain school I know of. If they are one and the same style, and I would suspect that they could be. I don't approve at all.

If they are different and achieve results without putting kids through hell... more power to them. I don't have any information on the schools in question at all, so I can't talk about them. I do know a tiny bit about the school I linked to above, and that is enough to put me off.

The end does not always justify the means.

If I ever go the way of the school above... well, give me one bullet, a gun, and some time alone.

What I do seems to work. Heck, I even have parents that have buxibans that secretly send their kids to my classes. Perhaps I am missing out on the big bucks by not following this pattern. I think I'd rather keep my self respect and sanity.

I guess what I posted can be read two ways. I would like to put emphasis on the word "needless". Entertaining classes are good, but "needless entertainment" wastes time better spent on meaningful exercises.

I mean entertainment for the sake of making the kids happy, not for the sake of teaching them. The opposite end of the spectrum from the foreigner run programs has kids playing games where there really is no chance of them learning the target language.

I strongly believe that children learn better when they are highly motivated, and fun activities can provide that motivation. But there has to be some sort of educational goal. Many games that are played in classes have no connection to the material being taught and do nothing to assess children's learning.

That was what I meant by "needless" entertainment. I didn't mean that making the class enjoyable or entertaining was unimportant.

So, in that respect I would call the schools being discussed not including games that fail to educate a positive thing, but then on the negative side I should add that they de-contextualize the material and don't provide children with a desire to learn.

Amen