Teaching English in Taiwan

There’s an immense demand for living and teaching English in Taiwan. You’ll come across plenty of teaching opportunities and as a teacher you will get a chance to observe Taiwanese culture first-hand and besides teaching English here can be quite lucrative. Here’s all you need to know about securing a job in this small island-nation.

Credentials

You need to be a native or near- native English speaker with an under graduate degree —a BA or BS in any subject. A TEFL certificate or prior teaching experience is helpful, but not necessary. It is advisable to anyone interested in teaching English to pursue a TEFL certificate because doing so will improve your skills and make you more marketable, but you simply don’t need any prior training to be a teacher here.
(Note: be sure to bring your actual college or university diploma—not a copy—with you. Your school, which should secure your work visa on your behalf, will need it to apply for your Alien Residence Certificate, or ARC.)

Salary & Benefits

Most foreign teachers work at chain English schools. You can expect to make between 500 and 700 New Taiwan Dollars (NT) per hour in the classroom—that’s around $15-$21 hourly wage. You can make even more for private tutoring, university teaching, or kindergarten work (though you’ll get fewer hours that way).

At a chain English school, you’ll probably work about 30 classroom hours a week (not including perhaps an hour of prep time per day, which isn’t paid). If you make, say, 600 NT per hour and you work a normal load, that comes to about to about US $2,000 per month after taxes. And for that sort of wage, Taiwan’s cost of living is low.

Types of Teaching Jobs

You can look for a teaching job at the number of schools in Taiwan. You can apply as a Kindergarten teacher – this will require you to teach for a few hours in the mornings. There are numerous chain English schools also known as “cram schools”, which have several branches throughout Taiwan’s main cities and mostly want teachers for the afternoon and evening hours. You can apply in the universities (where you can teach if you have an MA or a Ph.D.), where hours vary. You can even try your luck in the international schools which would be a full time job.

Although kindergartens and language schools operate year-round and hire teachers on a rolling basis, two times of the year are slightly better than the others for arriving: July or August, when many schools have a few weeks’ summer break, and January, when schools close for a week in observance of Chinese New Year.

Job Search

If you are a lucrative candidate, you shouldn’t have trouble finding work. You may look for job ads online. You might want to arrive and then look for a job, this might take some time. Check out the newspapers as they carry plenty of job options in the Classifieds Section. You may even go to schools and personally enquire.

Other Benefits

There are numerous cultural benefits to teaching in Taiwan; here are two that stand out: first, you’ll have the opportunity to try your hand at learning Mandarin Chinese. Chinese—comprised of Mandarin and the related dialect Cantonese—is the world’s most widely-spoken language. Second, you’ll also have a chance to observe a fascinating political situation up close: China considers Taiwan a renegade province that must be brought back into the fold (by force, if necessary), while most Taiwanese citizens think of Taiwan as an independent country. It’s intriguing to see how people here identify themselves: they’re ethnically Chinese, but most of them have a well-developed sense of national pride.

Be prepared for cultural differences in educational philosophy. Compared to Taiwan, teachers in the West enjoy a large degree of autonomy in the classroom—they’re largely free to employ the activities and teaching methods they feel are best suited to the material. Here, though, most chain English schools’ curricula are highly regimented, and in the classroom, a high value is placed on repetition and memorization. Expect to prepare and have approved daily lesson plans, and understand that you’ll be required, for example, to cover specific page numbers during each class.

Read your contract carefully before you sign it; English schools typically want a year’s commitment, and you should be sure you’re comfortable with the terms to which you’re agreeing.

Health Insurance

Universal health coverage is provided for legal alien residents, so as a teacher, high quality medical services are widely-available and quite inexpensive. (Dental care is especially good: you can get your teeth cleaned for about $3.)

Links for More Information

General Resources

TEALIT, which stands for Teaching English and Living in Taiwan, is an excellent Web site that features job listings and other helpful hints on moving to and living in Taiwan: (www.tealit.com).

And Scott Sommers’s Taiwan teaching Web log is a great resource for up-to-date information on teaching here: (scottsommers.blogs.com).