Ever since Americans and English people could communicate without translation

Probably from all the British people that went over all those years ago.

Obviously they developed their own english dialect, but it’s still considered english.

Actually the accent they speak is related to the common English language in Britain at the time. They used to pronounce the ‘r’s like in Cornwall. Then the French hot Britain and dumped the r’s. But yea I guess the Americans has taken on some of its own ideas, just like Ireland did

Funnily enough, that’s why British Language Schools were established. People in Asia became tired of sounding like Americans. Want to speak “Queen’s English”.

yarrah , dish is a pure dishgrace

So nursing in Australia is another example where Irish people have to prove that they are native English speakers by taking an additional exam ( that’ll probably involve expense) that Canadians, Yanks, Kiwis and Brits don’t need to take?

I’m sure plenty of other examples abound the world over.

Clearly, this is something that our Department of Foreign Affairs should be rectifying by informing these countries of the fact that English is the native language of the Irish.

England and America separated by a common language…

I don’t blame the Thai teaching council. I blame the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs.

It’s because there has been a far higher proportion of Irish non-teachers with no certification or a weekend certification, and who don’t know their ar*e from their elbow in their supposed area of expertise. The schools and other parts of the industry haven’t imposed regulation, and the government is sick of the complaints from ripped-off students. Pity the teacher has to bear the costs, but regulation of some sort was sorely needed.

Chris, that’s a load of nonsense! You aren’t a Saffie, are you?

lol, very good JC. But I think TCT must had stumbled across Jackie Healy Rae interviews on the RTE player!!

They don’t do anything, they’re extremly unhelpful. The Dept of Foreign Affairs are only interested in getting investment into Ireland, but seem to have their blinkers on with the other actual responsibilities of diplomacy.Basically, the mercs and percs set enjoy brown nosing wealthy clients, but don’t want to know or care about concerns of ordinary citizens

I read about one Irish guy who was in Egypt during the revolution and how he was horrified to discover the Irish embassy had no contigency plan fior evacuating its citizens. They actually told him, with a sneer, that “you’ll just have to stock up on supplies from a shop”.Funny how the shops were all closed, and gun battles were raging. All the other European countries had desks and stands set up at the airport and docks to get their citizens out.

I too have found that dealing with Dept of Foreign Affairs people is very un-irish; there’s an attitude of contempt, a sort of “who are you?” sneer, an arrogance probably inherited from the Bertie and Harney days, that hasn’t left our diplomatic outposts given that the staff are for nearly five years. While we’ve loosened ourselves of the delusions of grandeur that were rife in Celtic tiger years,our lads and lassies abroad still probably fancy themselves as little princlings.F— em is what I say. Eventually they’ll have to come home, and it’ll be a hard landing for them all. Pompous good for nothings

wasn’t there an article about educating their kids, a number of weeks back claiming huge amounts of money for educating them abroad?
Think they need a good kick up the A%$e or clip round the ear!!
Should we not charge any people from these countries that put unfair charges like this obviously stupid one on people entering this country to level the playing field and then repay our own who have been charged these stupid fees!
I for one am sooooo sick of trying to listen to doctors ect that NOT JUST I can’t understand!
In theory something like this makes sense but only if your language is not actually english so i say what goes around comes around!!

Just wait until you see the standard of some of the teachers out there. It may make you change your mind. The gobsh**es and chancers claiming to be teachers are the ones that are ripping you off.

Oh I agree, the amount of people passing off as teachers over there who can barely spell their name is crazy. But surely with all the papers to show I have done all my training in teaching they can believe that I can speak English to the required level. It should be either/or, either produce sufficient qualifications or do the test.

Unfortunately, many schools worldwide don’t check qualifications, whether valid or even existent, and many teachers simply lie about their certification. They don’t regulate, because regulation would push up costs and these schools tend be about eaking out profits from tight margins.

But its not just Irish teachers that do that. People from all around the world do. Just makes no sense that Ireland is not on the list but places like Canada and Wales are when they use other languages a lot more than the Irish use Irish.

True, but like I said, Ireland’s gone from having a very good EFL name in the nineties to having an extremely bad name today. The standards of other nationalise has remained steady in comparison.

Nationalities.

Totally on the same page as you…..got soo tired of explaining I was not English or American in many parts of the world I simply stopped trying…the department of foreign simply seems to exist to guarantee a pension to political appointees……people know where Iceland us in most places but mention Ireland and you’re met with blank stares…very frustrating

Aspiration is one thing. Reality is often different.

Agree totally with you :)

It’s a good point about minimal qualifications for ESL teaching, Karswell – teaching really isn’t as easy as some might think. However, the TOEIC isn’t a teaching qualification – it only measures a person’s ability to communicate in English. So if a school requires its teachers to be native speakers with an approved teaching qualification that means a person would have to sit the TOEIC *and* a take part in a training course. Expensive stuff!

@ Jennifer – it isn’t fair that the teacher has to pay for this out of her/his own pocket, it should be the school’s responsibility to maintain a minimum standard industry-wide. But they don’t. In most countries, you don’t need any qualifications or certification to set yourself up as a teacher or as a school, and those countries that do have minimum requirements rarely enforce them. Every industry needs some form of regulation to ensure a minimum level of quality. Without this it’s the students and the skilled teachers who suffer.

I know – some schools don’t enforce the need for qualifications and it does a disservice to the students (who, after all, are usually paying quite a lot of money for the service), as well as meaning teachers get paid less and work in worse conditions.

You raise an interesting point about who should pay for the English proficiency test. If English isn’t a person’s native language then they would have to provide for their language classes and the test, which seems fair enough. If a person’s native language is English (as is the case with most Irish people) then they obviously won’t need language classes… and paying for a test to prove you can speak English just seems ridiculous.

Market forces decide it seems. If the test costs more than the job would bring in, people wouldn’t take the tests. Overall there must be a benefit if people are still willing to go through the process. If they want more teachers to apply they could easily suspend this seemingly poorly conceived testing process. Obviously there are enough people applying that they feel comfortable that they can hit them with this surcharge and still get enough applicants. Deffo frustrating though…

@ Jennifer – late reply. I’d disagree with you on your suggestion that only non-native speakers should have to take and to pay for the competence exam. I’d far rather see a situation where anyone who applies for an English language teaching position must take the exam. As for the matter of payment, I’d follow on from what the commenter above has said, it may be unfair to expect the teacher to pay for the exam themselves, but on the other hand I wouldn’t be against this if it deterred chancers from bluffing their way into a job they’re not capable of doing. As I wrote below, I’d be very interested to see a cross-section of Irish people taking the exam, and the grade they would be rewarded. there’s an assumption here that there is no chance whatsoever that a native-English speaker and self-proclaimed teacher wouldn’t achieve an almost perfect score. I’m not at all sure that such an assumption is valid. It is possible that there may be in fact a small minority of failing grades. Think global, act local? If I was you? In comparison to?

I’ll hazard a guess based on my time living in SoCoDu…

“OMG, totes not impressed by this focking discrimination loike! But Doddy will pay my, loike, fare there anyway so it’s no biggie. Not as if I actually, loike, need to teach or anything. And I’m only going because of the Full Moon Porty anyway which will be totes amazeballs!”

Lol @ Ryan, worst part is while reading it, i did it in a D4 accent.

bleedin word purfect, dey r just shite sturrers

If you going to teach, you should be a qualified teacher. That’s it. I can’t work as a physiotherapist just because I can walk, run and lift things. An English speaker is not automatically an English teacher.

. . . and a qualified teacher is not necessarily a good teacher.

@ Sean – An unqualified teacher is not a teacher. Not everyone with a driving license is a good driver, but as a general rule it’s safe to assume that a person with a driving license is more likely to be a better driver than a person who doesn’t have a driving license.

The same applies to the other native English speaking nationalities. I think you’re missing the point. This is not about teaching qualifications, but simply about which nations apparently have to prove they speak English natively.

It’s clearly not fair, but Irish EFL teachers are suffering from their own success. In the 90s, many of the Irish EFL teachers were fully qualified teachers, usually with a Bachelor’s degree and HDip – they were fully trained teachers with a knowledge if their subject and if teaching methods. This tailed off during the boom years, and now the market is full of people claiming to be teachers but without any teaching knowledge or even competence in the language. I’ve been involved in this business, and still ave many links to it. I’m not criticizing the Irish as a people, I’m one if them myself, but the two nationalities swamping the industry with people who are incompetent are Ireland and South Africa. It’s dragging down standards and forcing the skilled teachers to accept lower pay levels and lower working conditions. This exam is no long-term solution, is a botch-job fix for a larger problem of an unregulated industry. , but, as payment of the exam fee does not guarantee a passing grade, it might hopefully make people think twice about thinking TEFL is money for old rope.
I’d also be very interested to take a group of random Irish people and get them to take this competency exam. People here seem to be assuming that, as native speakers if English, the exam is just a formality without any possibility of failure. It would be very interesting to see if that is in fact true, or if there is a significant failure rate for native speakers. It wouldn’t surprise me to be honest. I think many people have a false sense if entitlement towards this profession, to the point that they equate it to manual unskilled labour. This is quite insulting to those people who ave spent years studying and improving their skills; they are trained professionals.

It doesn’t explain the American situation. There is no official language declared for the USA and in theory you could only speak Spanish (as some do in the States) and would not have to take the language test. It sounds like they’re really only interested in teachers from the exempted countries and want to discourage other nationalities.

Sure I do be speaking english all the time!

Along with the rest of ye/yous ;-)

the standard of spoken English of many English people is terrible “I fink, innit” ?!!?

Some news readers in RTE don’t know how to say the letter “R”. It is meant to be pronounced as “are”. Every other English speaking country pronounces it correctly. It is a letter of the alphabet so the pronunciation should be standardized really.

@Jack In England, they pronounce it “aah” so you’d be wrong there. Equally, the letter h is pronounced differently here to the UK and U.S.
The way we speak English in Ireland (Hiberno-English) has developed with a number of influences (Gaeilge, Norman, Middle-English etc.) and it’s all the richer for it. And anyway, you don’t hear the same English in London as you do in Cardiff or in Glasgow either and it’s great! ‘Twould be pretty bland and boring if English was the same all over. Better it be bastardised than standardised!

Roisin. The English do not pronounce the letter ‘R’ as aah. They pronounce it like the word “are”. I’m not suggesting we standardize our accents but we should pronounce the letters of the alphabet correctly. Especially if we’re teaching English as a foreign language.

We speak English better than the average Canadian,Kiwi,Aussie or Brit.

Can you back this statement up? I’d believe that Canadians would have the best language level of all the countries you’ve mentioned.

Evidence please, Paul.

@Karswell, large parts of Canada are french speaking and about 10% of the population are classified as French speakers only.

@ John – Yes, I’m very much aware that Canada has a large French-based culture. That in no way changes my opinion that of the nationalities named above, Canadian speak and write in English the most clearly, concisely, and with less grammatical errors and parochial slang. Just simple things like “I drove well”, not “I drove good”, “Think differently” not “think different”, “of course” not “for sure”, the difference between “then” and “than”, etc. just simple, basic stuff, but it’s not acceptable to claim to teach a language if you yourself don’t use the language correctly. Many students are studying for internationally recognized exams, it’s unacceptable that they lose marks because their teacher didn’t know his/her subject. Canadians are pretty good at this, the other nations’ variations of the language tend to be more garbled and let certain standards slide. Not a good thing if the aim is to teach people “international business English”. Perhaps it’s because they have a strong bilingual culture that they are more careful with their words. And before you say it, yes, I’m aware I’m making some sizable generalizations.

@ Karswell I agree with everything you say. However, may I point out that ‘think differently’ and ‘ think different’ are both grammatically correct! :) It’s also like ‘drive safe’. These are known as flat adverbs. Apple are right in their slogan!
The American English ‘for sure’ is just informal usage for ‘certainly’ or ‘of course’ and isn’t actually incorrect. Of course, it shouldn’t be used in business English!

Smiley: I don’t need to provide evidence. Its self-evidently true. An official from the Thai Teachers’ Council would only need to walk down Grafton street or O’Connell Street or down the main street of any town in the Republic of Ireland, or through a Connamara village or any other village in the Gaeltacht and he’ll/she’ll realize within a minute that English is the native language of the Irish.

Why, oh why are you attacking Irish speakers AGAIN Paul? Did we have some sort of influence over the decision made by the Teacher’s Council of Thailand? No, we didn’t. It simply reflects on the poor investigation concluded by the TCT into which countries are native English speaking countries (I personally don’t think that official languages has anything to do with it – the UK has only one official language and that’s Welsh, with English simply being a de facto official language without any legislation; Canada is officially bilingual – French and English – and with tens of other languages afforded official status in their respective territories and provinces; the United States has no official language with English as the native language of only 78% of the population; New Zealand has three official languages with NZSL, English and Maori, etc.) and reflects poorly on the Department of Foreign Affairs here. It has nothing to do with us Irish speakers. And for the record, I know several Irish speakers who find it very difficult to speak English (granted they are all 55+). As an aside, why are other native English speaking countries not on the list, such as Jamaica, the Bahamas, Belize, etc. I think there was more to this decision than simply picking on one small country in the north west of Europe simply because Irish is mentioned in the constitution. Somehow, I doubt they even read the constitution.

I think it’s plausible that the Teachers’ Council of Thailand read Article 8 of our Constitution which states that Irish is recognized as the first official language and English is recognized as the second official language. In the absence of countervailing statements regarding the facts on the ground from our Consulate in Thailand or our Embassy responsible for Thailand which is based in Malaysia, the Teachers’ Council of Thailand will draw the logical conclusion.

@Niall
English *
;)

Sorry colleagues..lol pre emptive texting

Sh@t, I really wanted to be the first today to use that comment” another slow news day at the journal”
Ah well, maybe tomorrow.

May be a slow news day for you, but to others, this is considered news-worthy.

Actually, I think Jennifer has reported a very important and consequential development. And, this, I fear is just the tip of the iceberg. Reams of governments the world over are possibly thinking that English is not our native language when, in fact, it is. These governments are then formulating policies and regulations which mean that Irish citizens living in those countries will have to prove that they’re native English speakers in order to work in certain jobs which will probably involve additional expense and inconvenience.

Well Paul, a large proportion of the Canadian population speak French! So it is not necessarily to do with official languages, as Canada is legally just as bilingual as Ireland is.

I found the article interesting and I feel that our many TEFL qualified people thinking of going abroad to teach would also…

Idea: if you are not interested, suggest you don’t read it? Saves time all around.

A state exists to serve the people. Today, Irish people exist to serve the State.

@ Paul – you’re simply incorrect regarding spending on the Irish language: “As for the Irish language, we spend a billion euros a year promoting its use.” In reality, only 2% of government spending is on promotion of the Irish language, as TV presenter Manchán Magan showed in his research.

The Founding President of the University of Limerick, Professor Ed Walsh, said we spent a billion euros a year teaching Irish last year.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_of_the_Irish_language

@ Paul, English is the de facto language of the state.
O’Cuiv’s native language is Irish – without doubt. To suggest otherwise shows ignorance, disrespect and calls him and his like liars. Because native speakers will often speak English to facilitate a guest or tourist doesn’t mean they dont carry on speaking Irish when the person leaves. That most of them can also speak equally good English isnt in doubt either.
Not teaching Irish isn’t going to save a billion. The teachers (which make up the bulk of this money) are going to have to be paid anyway. And most of the grants in Gaeltachts go to job creation. Granted we can teach an alternative but how that would radically improve the educational system is fairly doubtful.
Paul, you are an Irishman lacking any Gaelic aspirations.

Some of us do speak irish. And many who dont speak it, respect it.
And lets not forget that enabling and protecting those who want to use Gaelic was among the reasons for the establishment of the Irish Republic – Perhaps, and correct me if i’m wrong, but would you prefer to go back to being part of the UK?
By the amount of anti-Irish language commentary south of the border i really feel the DUP would be able to make quite an impact in elections down here….

I am glad that I speak English and I’m proud to be a fluent English speaker. Some people want us to be ashamed of it. ( including you probably )
You probably think it’s a good thing that we can’t teach English in Thailand.