THE UNQUALIFIED, TEACHING
(SIC) THE UNMOTIVATED, IN A HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT

ABSTRACT

This article launches a frontal assault on the current EFL teaching program in China that recruits unqualified people to teach (sic) EFL in China to unmotivated students who, for the most part, are assigned to English classes against their will and are expected to acquire English in a hostile environment.
Throughout China’s institutions of higher learning, numerous false assumptions provide the EFL program foundation:

1. Everyone in China needs to learn English.
2. Everyone in China wants to learn English.
3. Everyone who speaks English can teach English as a foreign language.
4. Anyone can administer a TEFL program,
5. The time honored TEFL methodology and pedagogy which has failed China over the past 20 years will eventually work if applied diligently.
6. There is no difference between second language learning and second language acquisition.

EFL teaching in China is not a program in need of fine-tuning, as some suggest. It is a program that needs to be scrapped, thrown on the rubble heap of failed programs. A complete overhaul is required, commencing with the basic EFL philosophy, including the foreign teacher recruitment and the student assignment systems. China needs to implement modern second language acquisition theories; concepts such as comprehensible input, comprehensible output and immersion to create a friendly English acquisition environment.
We conclude that the proposed major overhaul would not increase the economic outlay but would in fact save limited financial resources and apply them in a far more productive manner.

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