A former Filipina nurse won't be as good as a former English nurse at teaching English

There are lots of good teachers from the Philippines, Vietnam, South Africa and other places. But equally, there are a lot of very bad ones. For example I often see example IELTS writing essays from Vietnamese teachers who sound like they asked ChatGPT for an answer. A native teacher who isn't particularly invested but understands the language is generally more beneficial than someone who's invested but has only scraped a 7 IELTS.

Generally a former Filipina nurse won't be as good as a former English nurse at teaching English. Same way I would prefer to learn Vietnamese from someone native to the country than I would my Vietnamese friend who spent his whole life in the U.S.

There are a lot of foreign teachers who simply don't care. And people often conflate that with a truly native speaking teacher who does care and actually fully understands the language. When those two are compared, many Vietnamese teachers can't match up. Because of course they can't. The requirement to graduate as an English teacher is a 7.0 IELTS from the Hanoi Pedagogical University for example. That's competent in communicating. But you can still achieve a 7.0 IELTS with a 6.0 speaking and lots of errors in your other three skills. And then there are the older teachers whose abilities are also not as good because they were qualified 5,10, 20 years ago and didn't make much effort to improve their English in the intervening time. They have bad pronunciation and they make no effort to remedy it.

I think that Vietnamese teachers need to be paid more but also given the responsibility to improve their own English ability at the same point. English centers need to attract more foreigners to actually teach how to communicate in English more effectively. They need to try to focus less on raking in as much money as they can squeeze out, and reduce class sizes while increasing learning time.

I know a center that I would cover for from time to time. The boss would teach with 30 kids in class and god knows how many learning online via webcam. Making literally about VND20 million (US$808) per class while the students were making next to no progress.

But because when she started, she taught one kid who was already really good that went in to win a competition ten years ago, she got a good reputation that she's been riding off of and cashing in on for the best part of a decade. All the whole, the quality at that center declines.

It's frankly absurd. It feels like such a needlessly combative environment that hinders the people trying to make money as well as the students.

*The opinion has been edited by VnExpress.