It’s official: English Teaching is a Mickey Mouse Job

Disney English schools are not new, but I’ve refrained from commenting about them until now. And, to be perfectly honest, it’s hardly breaking news that TEFL is a Mickey Mouse endeavour for the most part.

Today, however, I stumbled across an article worth discussing over at SFGate (Now, SFGate, by the way, turns out to be part of the San Francisco Chronicle’s stable of online properties; not, rather disappointingly, a portal where I fully anticipated finding Richard Dean Anderson swashbuckling his way from page to page, looking perturbed-yet-handsomely-in-control by some kind of parallax anomoly in the space-time continuum vortex calibration field about to wreak untold havoc upon some innocent pre-Bronze Age culture… or some such. Alas.)

Anyway, Disney English is apparently doing a roaring trade if you’re to believe the PR that this “news” story is based on.

The article states that “Disney charges between 3,000 yuan and 12,000 yuan for the programs”. That’s not chump change in China. Okay, it doesn’t say how many classes are involved. Maybe it’s good value over a long period of time. The lessons are twice-weekly according to the article, but it doesn’t say for how many weeks. Whatever the case, it’s still not pocket money.

This, I thought, was an interesting reversal of roles:

Classes typically last 45 minutes and are taught by a native English-speaking “trainer” — certified in teaching English as a foreign language to children — and a Chinese- speaking assistant.

It did make me wonder what type of training the “trainers” receive. It could be perfectly legitimate, of course. Or it could be done by one of those, ahem, Mickey Mouse 21-day learn to teach English by the beach type providers. If I were a betting man…

It’s clearly a good thing to be motivating the kids by getting them to play games with a PURPOSE (i.e. save the princess from the fire-breathing dragon or whatever) although I’m not convinced that vocab such as “defeat”, “defend” and “celebrate” are particularly high-frequency items that children need to know.

Here’s another link to the article

Do you know anything about these schools or have any first-hand experience with them? What do you think? Could they be a long-term winner? Leave a comment below…

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2 Responses to “It’s official: English Teaching is a Mickey Mouse Job”

1. Jennifer says:

   May 23 at 11:39

   It's a really great idea, assuming that the program is hiring quality workers.

   This says loads about where China is going economically. I hope the West can keep up!

   (Also, it's nitpicky I know, but Chronical -> Chronicle)

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   Reply
   • Leslie says:

     May 23 at 19:47

     Yeah, lots and lots of pundits agonising over China's short-term future and whether they're going to stumble.

     We all know the likely long-term outcome, of course; provided the Middle Kingdom can avoid the same mistakes their "economic-miracle" predecessors, Japan and Korea, both made, spiralling their respective economies into mired and lengthy recessions.

     China also looks on nervously at the US dollar and the massive cache of foreign currency equity they've got sitting there.

     Anyway, I don't want to turn this into a discussion of China's economic position, especially… (a) coz I'm far, far from an expert on the matter and (b) this post is about…

     "M-I-C… K-E-Y, M-O-U-S-E!"

     Dang, what's Deng done? Mao’d be spittin’ not-french-fries!

     

     Re: Chronicle… Thanks. Good to have a proofreader around here. And a healthy degree of pedantry is always welcome!

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     Reply

Autum Cleaning Continues

The autumn cleaning (here in Sydney) continues for your reading pleasure. Here are some more articles from the archives (that didn’t get binned in the clean-up):

• Motivating Students and Engaging Them with the Topic

This article deals with a perennial problem and gives an example of how to overcome it with some fairly simple “tricks of the trade” that can be applied to almost any lesson.

• Conversation Class Ideas: Getting Your Students to Talk

This one addresses the issue of “Why won’t they talk, dammit?!” And, again, it gives an example of how to take a fairly standard approach, give it a few simple tweaks, and come up with something much more likely to get off the ground. Not foolproof. Not guaranteed to work everytime. But pretty darn reliable in my experience!

• Meaning First - How else are they going to discuss things?

Also dealing with conversation classes, this article goes over one of my bugbears in conversation lessons (or activities) based on some kind of text, e.g. short newspaper article or recorded conversation or video snippet, etc. There are (as is my wont) some sidenotes and tangents, but overall, I think this one is definitely worth keeping. I hope you agree.

• Giving Negative Feedback & Responding Appropriately

Are you behaving like Dr Bunsen Honeydew? (Watch the video to see what I mean) Re-reading this article, I could see that the issue of responding to students is one that gets me fired up. This article generated some fruitful discussion, too. I’m still shaking my head about Cary’s experience in Chemistry class.

More articles from the archive to come soon. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy these ones and please share them with colleagues who’d be interested.

Cheers!

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Spring/Autumn Cleaning at EFL Teacher Training

I’ve decided to do a bit of spring cleaning around the site (well, autumn cleaning for me here in Sydney, Australia, actually! ). So I’m going through and “pruning” a lot of things and tidying up some of the backend elements (e.g. adding a recent comments widget and a blog archive widget in the sidebar and the “Suggest a Topic” link beneath each post).

I’ve also decided to put links in the sidebar to the stuff that I decide to keep, starting with these articles from the archives:

• What is TEFL/TESOL?

This first one was inspired by a question from a reader. It’s a simple answer to the question, but raises a few questions worth mulling over.

• Free TEFL Lesson Plans

This one isn’t a list of links for free lesson plans so the title may be somewhat misleading (sorry about that). It’s more of a rant about why I don’t tend to give out free lesson plans and why I’m not a fan of coursebooks.

I probably need to go in and edit that article back to make it more coherent, truth be told. One step at a time, though!

• TEFL Test Design

And this one gives you three simple tips for designing better tests. There’s a lot that can be said about test and quiz design and I think I’ll do a more in-depth series on it at some point.

Feel free to leave your comments or questions on these articles and if you like them, please share them on Twitter, Facebook, etc. Next weekend I’ll be doing some more cleaning and bringing you another short list of lessons from the attic!

I hope your own spring cleaning is going well. What are you currently sprucing up or planning to overhaul? Leave your comments below…

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