Teachers Under Attack in Advertising?

I noticed these ads on the Shanghai Metro recently:

teacher-attack1

妈妈, [Mom,]
Tom老师
教我的发音 [The pronunciation Teacher Tom taught me]
Amy老师说不对! [Teacher Amy says is not correct]

teacher-attack2

妈妈, [Mom,]
今天外教 [today the foreign teacher]
把我的名字 [got my name]
叫错了三次

“Dada English” is one of a new wave of Chinese online English learning platforms which includes “VIP KID.” What makes these platforms special is that they all purport to offer native speakers as teachers, and many of them are from North America or Europe. (I understand that some of the competition uses mostly teachers from the Philippines.) The first ad above emphasizes 欧美外教: teachers from North America and Europe.

What about the Chinese teacher of English? A resource long known to be often “less than perfect” with regard to native-like English abilities and yet nevertheless a crucial component of the educational system, is not even a part of the discussion these ads are trying to create. Rather, it’s a matter of where your foreign teacher is from and how professional he is.

I’m really curious if there is enough of the right kind of labor in North America and Europe to keep these business models afloat in the long-term. I suspect it’s going to be a lot harder building and maintaining a team of online freelance English teachers when those teachers are not Chinese or physically in China.

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John Pasden

John is a Shanghai-based linguist and entrepreneur, founder of AllSet Learning.

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