Teaching ESL Online: new trend helps keep Filipinos at home

(previously published at the Mill Woods Mosaic, March 15, 2011 issue)

The Korean Engkey is egg-shaped like Eve, the trigger-happy robot in the animated film Wall-E, but it acts like the surrogate in a sci-fi movie starring Bruce Willis. The surrogate is a robot remotely controlled by the individual it represents. It’s created to look like its operator, and it performs whatever tasks he wants it to do.

However, the Engkey is not the product of some scriptwriter’s imagination. It’s a real robot designed by the Korean Institute of Science and Technology, and remotely operated by English teachers from the Philippines. Twenty-nine of these have been deployed in several South Korean elementary schools to teach the English language.

The Korean authorities say these teacher-bots make learning more interesting to their students, while hiring experienced teachers from the Philippines to operate them doesn’t cost them too much. Apparently, the salary rates of the Filipino online English teachers are the lowest anywhere.

Naysayers are already expressing doubts about the long-term psychological effects of learning from robots on Korean children, as well as the prospect of numerous Korean teachers losing their jobs to these bots. The government promises, however, that the Engkey will only be used as reinforcement and will not replace real teachers at all.

This piece of news about the South Korean teaching innovation caught my attention for two reasons: teaching English as a second language is a popular job among English speakers nowadays, and I know people who are doing it both in Canada and in the Philippines, in person and online.

Forget about the Engkey; teaching ESL to other Asians has become a big part of the Philippines’ underground economy. Countries like Japan, China, South Korea, Thailand and Vietnam have decided that learning the language is an important part of their growth, and in conjunction with that, ESL teachers have become in demand.

The Philippines, whose school curriculum required teaching kids English from nursery level, is well placed to share around its fluency. There is, you’ll be interested to find out, a network of agencies all over the Philippines that internationally hire out the services of ESL teachers online through Skype.

Getting an ESL teaching position in the Philippines is not easy, however. An aspiring teacher is first meticulously tested for command of the language; after passing, she is then trained and vetted by the agency that recruited her, and then given a chance to hold demo lessons for her prospective students via Skype. If the students liked what they saw and heard, she got hired.

I know the drill, because my daughter Maricar is currently employed by one of those agencies. She now talks regularly to her Korean agent, discussing students, hiring and paying new teachers, and synchronizing hours. Maricar, who has always chosen not to work outside the home, times her online lessons to coincide with her kids’ school hours, or after they’re home and already in bed.

Maricar loves sharing her knowledge. She enjoys her interaction with her Korean students because they usually set the tone of the lessons, and in some cases they end up discussing current events, political ideas, or interpreting common English idioms and expressions. But most of all, the job allows her to earn money in the confines of her own home. Did I mention she also get paid in US dollars?

I’m impressed with this new job trend in the Philippines. Very pleased for Maricar indeed, but nevertheless envious and feeling hard-done by. Maricar is helping her husband support the family and feeling good about doing it. She gets her three children ready for school in the morning. She helps them out with their homework at night, has dinner with the family, and hangs out with them on weekends. Things I have never been able to enjoy when my own kids were growing up because I needed to leave the country to find work.

If this trend keeps growing --- and I have no doubt it will since there is much demand for ESL teachers among other Asian countries --- the English-speaking Filipinos have a lot to be happy about. They’re sitting in the midst of potential customers totalling over one-and-a-half billion people. With those numbers, there can be only increasing opportunities for teaching in the near future. Which, I daresay, will help many fluent, English-speaking Filipino mothers work from home and stay with their own kids, as opposed to what many of the older mothers like me had done in the past.