Why Poland employers are afraid of hiring any foreign nationals?

Definition of racism checked - and although not overtly so, I still think it's a racist comment as I interpret this as: "we don't like you because you're not Polish and if you don't like our treatment of you then leave". In other words we are only going to have this prejudice against you and you must accept it.

As for letting it go - I have, I know there's nothing I can do about it (and it was only a few small minded parents) but it helped to vent a little! :o)

Maybe because here the clients decides what they want, not any PC rules ? Well, If you don't like It...

It could have been true in the very narrow sense of the parents' behaviour. But I'm more inclined to assume that they wanted a teacher who would be able to explain the complexities of the English language and grammar to their children in Polish (not a very justified expectation, in my view). If you knew Polish sufficiently well to do so, then I should say you're right, they behaved like racists. But if you didn't know Polish well enough, I'd say their motives were more likely to have been "educational" rather than "racial".

i don't think so. Maybe you've simply been at schools with low standards?
Some of the best teachers of english in poland are, imo, polish. Not all but some of the best, I really don't know your experiences and don't care to try and validate whose experience is more, uh, legitimate but for the record...

Don't like the message, so attack the messenger. How very Polish of you.

For the record, apart from two small in-company operations a worked a couple of hours a week at and a two month mistake with one of the world's largest language schools, all of the schools I taught at were PASE and/or ME inspected and approved. Thank you for sharing your opinion, but perhaps the professional experiences of people who actually know what they are talking about carry slightly more weight.

Yes, you are right, they will use Polish to teach them, for sure no misunderstanding.

In the phrase "teacher of English" the emphasis should be put on "teacher" rather than "of English". Of course, he or she should know English very well, but it's not necessary for them to be fluent in English to be a good teacher. For example, my Polish teacher of English at the office where I work and where our employer pays for our lessons of English twice a week, isn't so fluent, but he's very good. I mean his methods are good, so he's able to teach you a lot even if he's sometimes not as fluent as, for example, myself. I imagine a native speaker of English may not teach you much if he's not a good teacher; you may simply be delighted to listen to the Queen's English of his/her during the lessons, but it would not necessarily mean you would develop this kind of language yourself; it's even possible that you may not progress much beyond the actual level of yours (especially if you don't make the effort in the learning yourself).

They are there to use and hear English, not Polish. Besides, a good teacher should be able to give instructions without any hassle. I've had to teach absolute beginners and you just find a way to get your instructions across. Furthermore, some of the best native speakers I have worked with speak a bit of the local language so they can use it sparingly.

Yes, of course a Polish teacher who is not fluent in English will be able to prepare students for CAE and CPE!

Harry is making good points. I'm gonna teach a very good conversation teacher CPE and she is not so confident about it. I've tried quite a few things in advance and a lot of it is news to her. A sharp native teacher uses and feels those expressions and can understand the material much better. Even CAE is not done effectively and I know this first-hand.

Non vitae, sed scholae discimus, Harry? [Translation from Latin to English: Does everyone learning English does this for passing CAE or CPE only?]

I think Harry's point is that schools require their teachers to be flexible, Ziemowit. There may come a need to teach a variety of courses, Cambridge included. If a teacher doesn't have the tools/know-how then it curtails their options. I may be required to teach LCCI courses and I'm ready to do just that. Does your average Polish teacher have that skill?

That's neither here nor there (although obviously a lot of people do want to have qualifications with which to prove their command of English): the fact remains that a teacher who is not fluent in English will simply not be able to prepare students for CAE and CPE.

Quite normal - as far as I can gather, there's a weird thing in language learning where many poorer students want to have someone that is native to their language. I don't understand it, and the vast majority of such students are awful - but it's the way it is.

It may simply have been that the parents felt unable to talk to their teacher - which is fair enough, they're paying for the class.

It's no different to the way that some students will complain and moan about male teachers because all they want is to drool over the female teachers.

Any top notch English program needs both local teachers and native speakers of whatever language is being taught. Ignoring one side or the other is .... not good.

Students also benefit from both (if not at the same time then at different times). Ideally local and native-speaking teachers can complement each other as they tend to have different strengths and weaknesses.

Well, I might have been wrong in saying that my teacher isn't "so fluent". Here we come to the question of 'fluency". I think there's no clear distinction between "fluency" and "non-fluency". Is the native speaker always fluent? Not necessarily so. In the 1980s I met a Polish war veteran in a UK hospital who had been living in Britain since the end of the war and who was happy to hear me talking in Polish to him. The problem for him was that due to the lack of practice he was not able to respond in that language, though Polish was his mother tongue he was using every day until the age of 20. Was he fluent in Polish? No, he wasn't; and it was despite the fact that he was "born" into Polish.

Józef Korzeniowski, better known as Joseph Conrad, was he fluent in English? Yes, he was; and he was probably much more fluent in it than the vast majority of the so-called native speakers of English when it comes to writing. But after having opened his mouth to speak, he used to be immediately recognised as a foreigner, such a strong one his Polish accent was.

For me, fluency means that one should be at a near-native level. In that sense when I say "not so fluent", I mean you can recognize them as foreign to English when they speak. Despite that, my Polish teacher is fluent, although it may not necessarily mean that he knows all the proverbs and sayings in English as well as a native speaker would have.

One who is reasonably well educated and uses English on a daily basis will be. While your parallel with the Polish veteran is interesting, it in no way applies to a language teacher who is using English at least five or six hours per day.


Accent is only important if it prevents people from understanding the speaker (see the generations of Polish teachers who taught that "The ket set on the met." is correct). The problem with Polish teachers is that the vast majority of them make mistakes with grammar ("I just don't know what should I do.", "I've told you last week", etc) or vocabulary ("These shoes didn't cost much, they were on promotion. Which is good, the credit I took from the bank for my flat is really expensive now the exchange rate has changed, and the building administration have put my rent up too!" etc) or both. Natives just tend to have less idea what grammatical structures are called (or when to use what) and more chances of turning up to work hungover or drunk.

no that is an attack on your little anecdote. If i had called you a ____(use your imagination) then I'd have been attacking the messenger. learning the difference between such things saves you from coming off as a ___ (use your imagination).

PASE or ME inspected? Wow, somehow I'm not impressed, like I said maybe the standards where you taught were low. Do not pretend the esl industry is rife with competency.

Have a nice day.

For everyone else. A polish teacher of english doesn't need to be 100% fluent to prepare students to pass the cae or even the cpe tests. Not being 100% fluent doesn't suddenly mean they can't speak of lick of english. Try to imagine there are ranges of fluency.

Ziemowit
Exactly! and to top it off, it's the english bloke at an international meeting who will always be the least understood, in english, by every other delegate from every other country.

So you clearly know nothing about TEFL in Poland. What a surprise to see a Plastic Pole shooting his mouth off while knowing bugger all about what he's talking about.

This sentence has reminded me of another one: "Ze mazer iz in ze bazroom" (The mother is in the bathroom) quoted to me by a Swiss student whom I met in Scotland many years ago. Such was the pronounciation of his Swiss teacher! As our English accent was somewhat better than that, we both laughed a lot at this pronounciation while walking across wild hills around Ullapool. But we laughed even more when we walked onto a remote Scottish farm where we found five people having their afternoon tea and their gateaux: the three women were wearing blue jeans and the two men were wearing skirts, Scottish skirts, true, but skirts in contrast to the women wearing trousers!

PlasticPole? Me? Good lord man, that's a laugh! Then you follow it up with beautiful and no doubt unwitting irony:


Ok, ok, ok enlighten me ___(use your imagination); what's the significance of such "accreditation," when was "accreditation" garnered, how difficult would it have been at said time to garner them and how in the world would being versed in such esteemed knowledge reflect on an individual's ability to determine who is or is not a very good teacher of english?

It's probable that, knowing the industry, the standards where you were employed were low. I'm guessing the time frame was 5 years ago or more, the farther back the time frame you taught, the more likely it is that the standards weren't what they are today (which aren't all that high in an industry known for producing low standards). Based on that calculation I'm guessing you know less than what you pretend to. If this ruptures your ego then please respond as you like and I'll let you have the last word:)

Wrong.


Wrong again.


Wrong one more time.


Do feel free to keep posting: I'll be happy to point out that you know less than bugger all about a topic which you insist on mouthing off about.

missed this part didn't ya?

it's funny, how you don't actually post any real information, just your opinion stated as fact. I'm weary of giving you the benefit of the doubt. Your and my experience are different, just as you find my opinion to be "wrong," I find yours to be worthless. I doubt you'll bring any real level of debate to this discussion, simply more baseless and unsupported "opinion."



This is just you lying one way or the other, why am i wasting my time on you?
Have a nice day:)

For4 is not Polish, Harry. I still think that a student of sth should not be teaching it until relative mastery is there. I wouldn't have much confidence in teachers of guesswork. I would want to know and have faith in my teacher that they know.

Go check the PASE and MEN requirements from a decade ago and then compare them to now: they're the same. Idiot.


I started teaching in Poland in 1995. I stopped teaching here in 2007. I'm still employed as a consultant for recruitment and training (and do the occasional bit of teaching to keep my arm in). Tell us all about your extensive experience here.

You simply avoided the real question, regardless, what has this got to do with anything? you're just posting non sequiturs mixed with childish insults, why am i not surprised?

I wrote that I assumed your teaching experience went back a min. of 5 years.
You stated this was wrong.
I pulled up a quote of yours stating your experience goes back more than 10 years, you've now admitted this.
Point being, when you're dishonest until one proves you're lying then it's clear you're really a waste of time.

You've managed to post absolutely nothing substantiating your opinion in all this mess. That's fine though, it's your opinion and you can have your little opinion and I truly couldn't give a **** - it's you who throws a tantrum when something is posted which disrupts your embryonic grasp of the world.

Polish english teachers are just as capable, if not more so than native speakers in this country. In 5 years, native speakers will have a much harder time finding gainful employment here as they just won't be needed coupled with the tendency of Polish nepotism, if you can bring your yourself back to this assertion then please do. If all you can muster is childish and baseless remarks then

au revoir.

That is impossible. It also shows the typical arrogance inbred in Poland. Most of the Polish English teachers I met (I would guess around 100 or so in all my years, as a ballpark estimate) most ALL of them were not anywhere close to as good as they thought. Usually they had god awful forced accents and made stupid mistakes. Now I am not saying I speak Polish perfectly or even well but I also do not claim I could teach it as good as or better than a Pole could. That is just ridiculous.

I agree that Polish nationals are better teachers in the English language than those from the UK/ Ireland etc, the point being that Polish nationals are better able to link the Polish student into the English language, teachers who have come from Ireland/UK are arrogant and think they know everything, they are barely able to put two words of Polish together, further they knock and criticize everything Polish, I know of one school where the Irish teacher was given his marching orders and students threw rotten eggs at him when he left in a haste.

Sadly Polish nationals earn less that the imports. it should be the reverse.

Not saying there are some good Irish teachers etc.

Geez only a Pole would say a Pole is a better teacher in a language than a native speaker. You guys are amazingly full of yourselves.

And your story about rotten eggs being thrown really paint your culture in a good light. Savage behavior is so befitting of self proclaimed geniuses.

Would you then say that speaking a language on a native level automatically makes you a good teacher of that language, or just a good speaker?

You do understand the difference between the speaking a language and the ability to speak it?

This is what I think about teaching a foreign language.

Rule #1 - A native speaker speaks better in his/her native language than a foreigner.
Rule #2 - A teacher is as good as the teaching methods that teacher uses and the knowledge of the student's language helps a lot, especially in the initial stages.

Rule # 3 - Teaching skills do not depend on the nationality.

For a beginner I would recommend a competent speaker of a language (not necessarilly native). For advanced (in the case of the English language that would be after about a year or two) I would recommend a native speaker.