Teaching Telephone English

What do you do?

I often get asked this question and every single time I have an internal debate of how I would explain it. If I say I’m a teacher, they would ask what school and I would have to explain how my entire job works. So usually I just say I work in something like a call center. But sometimes when I do, they ask what company and what account, so I would have to explain all over again.

Telephone English. That’s a term many Koreans know, since it originated in Korea some decades ago to fill the need for convenient, hassle-free english lessons. An english teacher would call a specific student at a specific time and conduct classes over the phone. Sometimes, it becomes like a phone-a-friend thing, because students (especially professionals) take telephone english classes simply to have someone to talk with in English, and practice.

When I first applied for this job, I thought it was a one-on-one, face-to-face tutorial. Since I have already done that as a University student, I thought it would be easy. But when I figured out it was over the phone, I was like, how in the world will we be able to understand each other?

In our Language Center, we have students as young as six and as old as sixty who study English with us. When asked why telephone English was such a succesful industry, my boss (a Korean woman) said that in Korea, people don’t have opportunities to practice their english. They study grammar in school and in special academies, but that’s where it ends.

In the Philippines, we can watch English programs and movies and do not require subtitles. On the streets, you can see signs in English, you can hear english songs on the radio, and people probably cannot say at least two sentences with no English word in it. Actually, there are many words that we don’t have a tagalog term for, or if we do, we don’t know what it is. So it’s normal to hear something like “Paki-abot naman yung toothpick, please.” (Can you pass the toothpicks, please?). It’s Taglish. I didn’t know what toothpick was until I heard in a game show a couple of weeks ago that it’s called “panghinuki.”
The medium of instruction in schools is English. I have previously worked in a preparatory school and all students (ages 4-6 years old) are trained to speak fluent English. Even the janitors, drivers, and security guards should speak English, so the students will imitate them.

So, in short, Filipinos are able to speak English because it’s all around us. I think, despite recent decline in English proficiency, we are still the largest English-speaking nation in Asia. To those who have violent reactions, that’s a different issue altogether, so I’d rather go back to what I was saying before.

In Korea, people do not have many opportunities to use the grammar rules they meticulously memorized in school. But in this age of globalization, English becomes ever more important.

Many professionals need to master English as many Korean companies are now multinational. In our Language Center, we have many students with top positions in a big Korean company who study English for the sake of communicating to their American colleagues or superiors. High-ranking military men (I have a General and a Colonel) study English on the phone because they are in an alliance with the US good communication skills is a must in the army. My General even practiced a speech he was going to give to the American soldiers with me. These people have no time to go to English classes so they study in the comforts of their own homes, usually very early in the morning, or very late at night.

Many parents have also enrolled their children in telephone english classes. I did not realize how big an industry this is,until I started seeing numerous ads in the papers calling for telephone english teachers. In the Philippines, it probably began a couple of years ago, although it has been going on in Korea for quite some time. Our students know that they’re studying with Filipino teachers, and they were quite impressed. Once a student (a professional) asked me whether English was the first language in my country.  Another one asked me why Filipinos are good in English.

A side information: There’s a Language Center in Ortigas Center where the teachers pretend to be Americans. Now I totally disagree with that kind of deception, but because of that they get paid more. However, I’m proud to say to anybody that I’m an English-speaking Filipino.

Now, the question is, how does the class go? Well, it’s relatively easy. The students have books, and the teachers do too, so after the initial Hi’s and Hello’s the teacher is just going to ask the student to go the a specific page and that’s it. Although, it’s a little tricky to give instructions, especially to children. You have to be really descriptive, but at the same time keep your instructions simple. So for your 11-year old. “Kindly read the examples inside the box for me, please.” will get you nowhere. This one is better:”Look at the red box. Please read.”

 

Our youngest students study alphabet and phonetics. My youngest baby Hee Son (Pictured above) is eight years old, has been studying for four months, and can read very, very well. She started not knowing the alphabet. Her previous teacher did all of the work. Hee Son was transferred to me just about a week ago. Now it’s my duty to take her level up even more.

Many times it is difficult to explain certain words which would have been easy in a face-to-face class becausea teacher can do hand gestures. A phone english teacher has to be very creative. It may rattle you if your student read the sentence “The apple falls.” and asked “Teacher, what is “fall?”

“Uh, like when, like, you know, things when you drop them…”

“That’s gonna pose another question. “Teacher, what is ‘drop?’”

So here’s a good way to explain it without having to explain webster-style.

Teacher: Hee Son, get you pencil. Put your pencil in your hand. Put your hand up. Open your hand. (Wait for the sound of the pencil hitting the floor.) What happens to the pencil? The pencil falls.

With advanced students with more extensive vocabularies, it will not be as hard as it is with the kids.Teachers are even more afraid of having beginner students than advanced ones. And in ESL class, we don’t focus on grammar. We don’t  say “The verb must agree with the subject blah blah.” We just say “Okay, Ji Su, when we use He, She, or It in our sentence, we will add -s- or -es- to the action word, okay. Just like the example in the book. She looks happy. We have the action word look + s. LOOKS. Okay, Let’s try number 1.”

These children have already learned these grammar rules in school and explaining them using boring terms is just going to make the class, well,boring. Telephone English is something the students look forward to because it’s fun. (Our students in our company, at least.)

We also play games in our classes. Believe it or not, we do Hangaroo, old school style. First we ask the students to draw a kangaroo and they have to erase body parts each time they make a mistake. A favorite in our office is the bragging game. Teachers and students say the craziest things trying to upstage each other. Here’s what happened when one class(The student is 14 years old):

Teacher: You know what Candy, George Bush is my boyfriend.

Candy: Oh really? You know what, teacher? Las night, after you, George Bush went to my house.  Uh, what? what?(pretending to be talking to someone) George Bush? What did you say? I’m beautiful? Oh thank you!

This job is full of laughs, and I have never lasted this long in any other work. It’s very rewarding to be a teacher, especially when you see great improvement in your students. I’ve worked with many kids (and adults) who could not string together a coherent sentence, but became very talkative after a couple of months.
Telephone english classes focus on conversational skills, and simply by being able to talk in English everyday, students become more confident, more conversant, and more expressive in the global language.