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Welcome to the A to Z English Podcast.
My name is Jack and I'm here with my co host Social.
And today we're doing a topic talk episode.
And we're talking about the future of ESL or the future of EFL, English as a second language or English as foreign language.
And I've got a lot of opinions about this social because my job is here in Korea, I teach at a university.
And so I'm always listening and trying to predict what the future of the industry might be.
Because it kind of greatly affects my livelihood, my ability to have a job and earn an income.
And I've got my opinions about it.
What are your opinions about the future of ESL?
What do you know, I haven't been in the industry nearly as long as you have Jack.
So I kind of I feel like by the time that, you know, because of my age, I'm younger and everything, by the time I graduated college and everything like that, that the industry was already taking a nosedive while I was, you know, in college, I would say.
And, you know, the writing has been on the wall for a while that there's especially during with the pandemic and a lot of people doing the nomad lifestyle and teaching classes online.
And then there were certain difficulties with getting visas and staying in different countries during the pandemic.
And there were, you know, a lot of complications because of covid that created a ripple effect of a lot of systemic changes that were, I think, already kind of on the on the fringe before, but definitely kicked up during and after the pandemic.
And how do I say this?
I'm not really sure about the future.
I do know that it's not as lucrative a business, you know, as it used to be.
I would say definitely people who are in ESL now, it's kind of like a labor of love.
And it used to be that, you know, 20 years ago, you're starting pay in a job like what you would get paid in Korea was the same as what you get paid now.
And of course, it went a lot farther 20 years ago.
Yeah, yeah. Things are more expensive now.
Inflation has basically cut that by a third.
Yeah. The buying power of that same quantity, it's just not what it used to be.
Right. So I don't know.
And I think that also dissuades some people from, you know, taking the route of moving to another country because it takes a lot of money, which a lot of people also aren't aware of to move out to another country.
Yeah. In Korea, like you get an apartment provided and you get a lot of benefits, but just the visa process alone, plus they reimburse you for your flight ticket after like a year of contract, but you have to pay the money upfront.
And a bunch of those related charges, you know, we're talking about hundreds or over a thousand dollars.
And then, you know, your pay is just so, so I think it makes a lot of people question whether they want to be like work to the bone in some of these jobs.
Yeah. Yeah. So I think it, I think on both ends, both for, you know, schools that are hiring teachers from outside of the country.
When they, I think it's also become a thing of why should I go through the hassle of hiring someone from outside of my country and paying for their health check and paying for their visa sponsorship and all, and, you know, making sure they are who they say they are doing background check and receiving
all these documents and processing them.
Like why should I go through all this trouble when I can get someone in my own country with thanks to globalization and better education tools, they might speak, you know, perfect English, and I can just get someone who already knows the culture as well and who I won't have to worry about, like holding
their hand and walking them through the process of moving to a new country.
And from the teacher's perspective, it's like, why should I uproot my whole life?
I mean, a lot of people do anyway, because of the adventure aspect, but at the same time, it's like, why should I uproot my whole life to make minimal pay?
You know, when I could just vacation there instead or, you know, whatever.
So I think both of those things have a or having an impact on the current market.
What do you think? Yeah, no, I think you're right on.
I think you're on target there on the mark.
There's a couple, there's kind of two different boxes that I am thinking about the two two kind of categories.
The first one is what you're talking about.
It's like, there's plenty of capable people in Korea and Japan and China who speak English very well who can teach, who are Chinese or who are Korean or who are Japanese, that can teach people in their own country.
You know, they're like, why do you need to bring in an expensive foreigner to teach English when you can get just the same quality from someone from your country and it's probably much cheaper to, you know, you can avoid all the other expenses, you know, the travel expenses and the bonuses and stuff like
that, that they have to offer to attract people from other countries to come here.
Also, I think the the fascination with like English is starting to wear off a little bit.
Like it's not, I don't know, it's not as, how can I say it?
People are thinking like it's not like indispensable now that you know English.
Yeah, yeah, right. It's not as special as it maybe once was or, you know, I mean, I think it's more of a, I think people are learning it because English is still the de facto international business language.
Like that's the way companies or people in companies will communicate with each other internationally, they'll use English as the common language.
But that takes me to the other side of the issue, the other part of the issue, which is the technology.
You know, you can you could write a form letter in seconds using chat GPT in perfect English.
Whereas before you have to see really hard and understand all the grammar and then write the letter yourself, you know, now you can it'll just spit out a perfect English form letter or any letter for you immediately.
If you just type in a few prompts, and that's a big change.
That was a big game changer, I think.
And the other thing is I think the technology is going to get better.
Like apps like Papago or Google Translate are able to take a foreign language and translate it into English in a very almost perfect manner.
Like it's quite accurate.
And it used to be really not accurate, inaccurate, it used to be used to be nonsense.
It was really funny, actually, when I would read essays that were translated through Google Translate because right, you know, yeah, it was so obvious, right?
Yeah, it was like something like, you know, I don't know, it just just bizarre, crazy things that I that I that I that I read there.
And now, you know, now it's much it's much more accurate.
So you've got tools that are that are getting better and better for for people to translate.
And then finally, the, you know, in the future, I think, you know, it's going to be to the point where you might be able to put like an AirPod in your ear and and speak your native language.
And the other person that you're talking to is going to hear English in their earpiece, and then they'll speak into their device, and the other person will hear their native language.
And so conversations will be totally capable or possible between two people who don't speak any common language, it might not be smooth, you know, as smooth as doing it in real, real time.
But as the technology gets better, I think it'll it might become seamless, where the conversation is very easily had between two people using just using technology.
But I still think there's going to be a desire among a certain group of people to learn the language the old fashioned way, just for their own edification, you know, their own satisfaction of being able to say I'm a bilingual person, I speak English, and I speak Chinese or Spanish or Japanese or whatever.
And they'll be able to they'll get better positions in companies, I think, because they'll be able to sit down and have a negotiation, a conversation in English with someone.
And that that would be it'll still be a benefit for people.
But there's going to be other avenues that people can use other methods that are going to be not as good as as a as learning the language, but still allow them to communicate on some level.
And so, the more that these, this technology gets better and advances, the less you need there is for, you know, foreign imported foreign teachers to teach English in countries like Korea and China and Japan.
And so I just see I see it becoming less and less necessary between having local people do it.
And then also using the technology as it gets better.
And you put the comp, you combine those two together.
And it's, to me, it's like bye bye birdie, you know, like goodbye to my job, you know.
So I worry about that.
Not not that much because I'm already, you know, almost 50 years old.
So the age of retirement is not far away from me really.
So I think I'll be able to hang in there for the for you know, but I think I got lucky just I'll be one of the last of the groups of people of my generation.
My generation will be the last group that kind of does it this way.
And some new model and some new method is going to emerge.
And I'm not sure if that will include foreign English teachers or not.
I'm not sure. No one can tell the future, but I'm just a little bit concerned for young people teaching English in Korea, whether they're still going to have a job five, 10, 15 years from now.
I'm not sure. Are you?
How do I say this? Are you?
Are there are these positions like the one that you have?
Are they tenured positions?
Like We we're contract workers, you know, so we yeah, we get two year contracts and so that you know, we keep sign, resign and resign and resign to your contract.
So yeah, there's no there's no guarantee for me that you know, these if if it goes away, I have to you know, and I'll be I'll be kind of old to be looking for a new new career.
You know, it'll be very difficult for me to find another job.
I'm not I don't think I'm suitable really for anything else other than teaching English as a second language.
To be honest, it's all I've done for the last 20 20 years.
Right. Yeah, that's scary.
While to think about it's like, I, I didn't really realize that the positions were like a read, like, so what what do you mind me asking what position, like, what is it called?
Like, are you? Are you like a professor's aid or are you like, oh, yeah, so I my official position is profess Associate Professor.
Okay, so you're an Associate Professor.
So that's wild to me that you would have an Associate Professor on a two year contract.
Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of contract workers.
Yeah, 10 years really, you know, for the PhDs, you know, people who are doing research, you know, I'm not a research.
I'm not a researcher.
I'm a, basically a teacher, you know, I mean, I, I don't even like the word professor because, you know, in America, we don't, if you teach at a university, you are a professor.
I mean, that's basically the way that works.
We just have one word for it.
Here, you know, in a lot of countries, they have a lot of different names for the different levels.
And I don't know what all those are in Korean, but I know that my level is not, you know, it's not the high up level.
It's a, it's just a, you know, I'm a contract worker.
But, you know, the contract has always been guaranteed.
You know, I've never worried about not getting another contract.
The what I worry about are those things that I was talking about before is that when it gets to the point where we're no longer needed and the school really has to, you know, assess to whether this is even necessary anymore, given the new technology, given the skills of current teachers here in Korea,
you know, do we need these foreign, these foreign faculty?
And that is, you know, and I don't blame, I don't blame them either.
You know, I mean, it's just like, the way things progress and things happen, you become redundant, as we say in English, there's just no, it's you're not needed anymore, because there are other other things or other people that can do the same thing that you're doing.
And so you become kind of what's the word I'm looking for.
You become unnecessary, I guess.
Yeah, but, well, I have a counterpoint, actually, to this thought process that I just thought of as I was listening to you talking to this.
I think as someone who grew up as a balanced bilingual, I think the language, even if we get AI to perfectly simulate language and have a seamless conversation between two people, language is so cultural.
There's so many cultural aspects to learning a language.
And I think those will always be important to experience and master on so many levels, on economic scale, because like, if you're working in business or a client relations or whatever, you're going to have to know about the other person's culture, as an appreciative measure, so you can truly understand the culture
on a different level, like on a deeper level.
There's so many reasons why I think that learning a language has a deeply cultural component that's important, that can't be replicated through AI, and that won't be able to be replicated through a person like, for example, a Korean person or a Chinese person teaching English.
Just like when I was in college, and I was learning Mandarin Chinese, we had a professor from China, visiting professor from China every year, and they would have two year contracts as well.
And they would be part of our class structure.
And I think it was really important because they brought cultural knowledge, cultural components, they brought expressions that were only used that like our professor who wasn't Chinese wouldn't have like really known, like he spoke Chinese, you know what I mean, but he still wouldn't have had that cultural
component because he didn't grow up in the culture, even though he had lived abroad, even though he spoke perfect Chinese.
He was lacking those cultural components that we got and appreciated so much from the visiting professor from China.
Yeah, that's a good point.
That's a great point.
Yeah. So I'm hoping, I'm hoping that there will still be institutions that value that, you know.
Because, you know, I'm kind of thinking about getting back into the ESL game.
I mean, I'm still in it.
I haven't left it because we do the podcast and we have the English corner.
But just getting back into it as a full time job, just because we've talked about this many times before, but, you know, a job in Korea is like life in a bottle.
And there are so many benefits that are hard to come by in a job in the US, like great healthcare, the pension, things that are just kind of becoming obsolete as benefits in any position in the US, whether it be entry level or even further up the ladder.
It's like, those kinds of benefits were for Gen Xers and older and you can't get them really anymore as a millennial or Gen Z entering the workforce.
And so I think that's something that's very attractive to me as someone looking to go back to teach English, you know, full time in a foreign country.
There are so many benefits that would be hard to come by here.
And yeah. So it's definitely something that I'm interested in.
And so I'm hoping that that aspect, the cultural aspect and the aspects of language that can't be replicated through AI, I'm hoping this will still be valued.
Yeah, I can keep a job.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, and I think that you might be right, you know, because we do the Idiom Academy.
I mean, how are you gonna, how are you gonna explain, how's AI gonna understand all the nuances of the language when, you know, and translate it in a way that's going to capture the nuance?
You know, a lot of the times when I explain an idiom or a phrasal verb meaning to a student, I have to explain the context of like the culture and say, like, well, in American culture, we do this.
And so because we do this, we say this.
And because this thing that we do kind of relates to what you're trying to describe, you know, metaphorically, we say this, but I mean, that's a lot of, that's a lot of frog leaping from the actual, you know, to the meaning.
And I'm not sure. I'm not sure that there's any AI, or at least right now, any translation device that's able to really capture, you know, specifically, the nuance of the of the meaning, or the context of the meaning necessarily.
And that might be the thing that saves us is the culture that you're not just teaching the language, you're teaching the culture and the two are, are kind of woven together like a like a rug, you know, it's you can't separate them.
There's a language is just a rich tapestry that weaves together so many things.
It's, it includes culture, history, expressions, and so much of language is also physical.
Like, there's so many gestures that are unique to, you know, different countries and different languages, like in in Spanish, in Mexico, specifically, I don't know about other Spanish speaking countries, but when we're agreeing with someone while they're talking, a lot of times you like replicate and head
nod with your index finger.
And so when foreigners see that, they're like, what is that gesture?
You explain, oh, they're agreeing with them, but they don't want to interrupt or whatever.
So they're, you know, and similar, like in Korean culture, when you hand things to an elder, you use both hands, because that's respectful.
There's so many tiny nuances, I think it would take it's going to take at least another like 100 years for AI to get all of that down, I think.
I hope so. So that would be great.
That would give me enough time, plenty of time to finish my career at the same institution.
Yeah, I mean, that's the counterpoint.
I mean, you know, I think in for simple sentences and easy stuff, it's going to be the translation tools are good.
But when it comes to, you know, the particular, you know, contexts, and the nuances, I don't know if there's any AI that can really capture that properly.
And so, yeah, that may be the the one saving grace for for our jobs.
Yeah. Yeah, well, let's hope that it is.
And I'm curious to hear from our students this time, I really, really want to know what you guys think about the future of ESL, because you guys are students of, you know, English as a foreign language, a lot of you guys are in our English corner, which shameless plug here, our English corner runs Monday
through Friday for an hour a day.
And we have a lot of we have a lot of discussions like this, this might actually be an interesting discussion deposit in the English corner, actually.
I'm very curious to know what you guys think.
So make sure to leave us a comment down below at a disease podcast .com.
Shoot us an email at a disease podcast at gmail .com.
Jack and I would love to get your emails and make sure you join the WhatsApp and WeChat group to join the conversation.
And again, if you were interested in our English corner, make sure that you message Jack or I or the eight is the English podcast on WeChat or WhatsApp.
And we'll make sure to get back to you with more information about that.
And I'll see you guys next time.
Bye bye.
