VIPKID - A 6 month update.

As you probably already know I have been teaching for VIPKID since the first week of October of last year. I am about to hit my 6 month mark and am entering into my second contract. In these past 6 months VIPKID has changed dramatically.

For the better!

Since I began 6 months back, these are the changes that VIPKID has fully implemented:

No more 15 class minimum. You can teach as little as you want or as much as you want. But like any job be prepared to only take on as much as you can handle as the 6 class cancellation/no show policy is still in place. Additionally be aware of your ability to constantly produce top-notch output. These kids are excitable and their energy is felt even through the screen. You will suffer teacher burn out much faster if your focus is to teach as much (and earn as much) as fast as possible. Take it easy, only teach what you can handle. Recently I went back to doing early mornings. My son is old enough now that he generally sleeps through them and rarely wakes up which means I've been able to take advantage of those peak (98% booking rate) classes.
For instance, my work week currently looks like this:

I take alternating Mondays and Tuesdays off to sleep in and refresh myself.

You don't have to wear orange. They decided that you are no longer required to wear an orange shirt unless you want to however it is highly recommended to promote teacher unity within VIPKID and the families and students that depend on us. I often bemoaned the color when I first started but now you'll never find me teaching without my official orange VIPKID shirt.

International TESOL Association partner. VIPKID is now an official International TESOL Association partner which is a BIG deal in the world of ESL teachers. Membership in TESOL, especially as a partner, means that you are the cream of the crop.

Background Checks. VIPKID has realized that children are especially vulnerable to online exploitation. They now require that all of their current teachers and all new incoming teacher pass a background check. This is a huge deal because it helps to safeguard these children. I often see things I wouldn't normally see while teaching because of the cultural differences, Mia has no problem going to the potty while holding her iPad to take class. Grandma doesn't mind changing clothes in the background. And more, much more. On top of this VIPKID is one of the first foreign education companies to require this.

Pre-VIP. In the past few months VIPKID has rolled out their Preschool Curriculum. These lessons are specially designed for the 3 - 5year old crowd that had been *somehow* sneaking into the regular VIPKID curriculum and (amazingly) finding it too difficult. With the addition of Pre-VIP there are even more options for teachers to expand their hours. I have found myself being booked for odd daytime hours (I am PST) as while my regular students are in school, these little guys are at home and free to take their Pre-VIP kid lessons.

I requested to become a Pre-VIP kid teacher because of this and, yup, I'm now officially a PreV teacher as well. I get roughly 8 to 10 PreV a week. 

Jack Ma Foundation - Rural School Project.VIPKID is now running a pilot program where VIPKID is being offered to groups of students in public schools! The teachers are required to know at least a little Mandarin Chinese (because the locations are rural, meaning the teachers and students will most likely  know very little to zero English. Another requirement is the ability to be able to teach for 1hr time blocks instead of the usual 25m. So far it is off to a good start!

Teacher Phone App and the Teacher Browser: VIPKID now has a fully interactive Teacher App (you cannot teach from it) that you can use to check your schedule, cancel classes, review previous teacher and parent comments, and receive notifications from. The Teacher Browser allows you to teach your classes independently of Firefox or Chrome. I love using it and ever since I started using it I have had very few IT issues and you can access all your usual teaching tabs through it as well. I use it for every class I teach now.

Incentives. Every month VIPKID offers additional bonus incentives. You can work extra classes or aim to get top notch ratings, it is different every month but most people can earn a little extra cash. Right now for the month of April they are making it rain (cash) by offering up to $5 extra per class taught over your usual amount for the "peak peak times" (BJT 7:00, 7:30, 8:00, 8:30pm) which means if you taught only 5 classes you can get up to $5 extra for every class you teach beyond that.

Does Pronunciation Equate Fluency?

Pronunciation.

The elephant in the room when interacting with speakers of English as a foreign language. In teaching ESL, and especially when working with children, this is something I often see stressed over and over. They really like to beat that horse and make sure he is good and dead. And I can understand why this is such a hot issue. After all we can look to popular media to see examples of pronunciation faux pas being the main stereotype for all peoples of certain countries/regions. And the students and their families know this. They are very much aware of the profound effects their accents have on their English and how they are perceived because of it. We only have to look so far as our everyday social media.

Facebook is splattered with meme after meme. South Park City Sushi is by far the most racially charged example of this. The TV series, Fresh off the Boat, follows a Taiwanese family’s adventures in America. The actress, Constance Wu, speaks with a slurred English accent that is often over exaggerated for the show. In films, TV, social media and even in books individuals with a non-native English accent are often the butt of all jokes. And they are almost never the heroes. Even Glenn of the Walking Dead (as portrayed by Steven Yeun) was on the receiving end of racial slurs despite having a perfect American accent both on and off the film set!

But is pronunciation really that big a deal? Especially in this era of acceptance?
VIPKID has been an amazing opportunity and I feel that it has a direct hand in many of the changing views these kids and their families have. VIPKID is taking part in spawning and entirely new generation in China. But would not a learning platform for kids be the perfect place to begin to spread the acceptance of native accents as being the beautiful, interesting, and uniquely diverse thing that it is? Much like how they are currently trying to spread cultural diversity through acceptance of skin colors and tones by introducing new learning characters from around the world. Are not natural accents also a part of this cultural diversity? I speak with a Southern accent as I am originally from Tennessee. I’ve only lived in California for 3 years and will soon be moving back South so any accent I lost will quickly be picked back up again. I try not to use words like ya’ll and ain’t when speaking with the kids online but I have slipped several times and used those words to which I simply explained that they were conjugations from my Southern American English dialect and that although not everyone uses them they are still acceptable words and my accent is an acceptable English accent (Yes, I HAVE had parents ask me about my accent).
When I was earning my MAT in ESL our instructors stressed over and over that we are not supposed to stress pronunciation.  These days the ideal was to build up conversational and academic vocabulary and that pronunciation was an issue of the past, and issue that was often self corrected with continued exposure to the language. We were taught to allow pronunciation errors because to try and correct them too much would not only work against the students learning but would also create an air of “you’re accent is wrong, your native language makes you flawed, you should have been born speaking English” and that is not the message we want to send. Now then, I understand that the correction of pronunciation is very important to the parents of our Chinese students for the reasons I wrote above...they don’t want to be made fun of. They don’t want people thinking they are less superior to anyone else simply because they cannot pronounce certain letter combinations. Correction of pronunciation is the number one comment that pops up when searching the VIPKID teacher forums, facebook pages, websites, and especially the parent comments. Teachers have been given bad ratings by parents simply because the teacher didn't correct their student enough. I am one of those teachers.

Recently I was give a "3 apple" rating which isn't terrible but it isn't good either. The "apple" system is what determines if parents want to attempt to book your classes or not. Her only comment was that I didn't correct the pronunciation enough. And I will swear that100% hands down that this student did not need to be corrected. She spoke fluently enough that despite a few unusual blending of certain VC/CV words I could understand her 100%. She didn't need to be corrected. In fact, stopping to correct every single little slight would have stopped the lesson completely. Why and when did correct pronunciation overtake actual language learning?

I think my main point though is that many parents (and teachers) seem to equate pronunciation with fluency and this is how we end up with students that can read the sentences with great clarity of pronunciation but then are unable to speak in a more natural sounding conversation. There is so much stress placed on pronouncing every. single. word. that there is no time to actually practice conversation and I think this is a mistake. A huge mistake. Even native English speakers don’t speak the way we are often trying to get these kids to speak.

I shared this (nearly) exact post on the VIPKID teacher forum to see if others had any opinion on this, one teacher had this to say:

"I agree, but only to an extent...the difference for me is not necessarily an "accent", but rather the actual pronunciation of the word. There is a difference. I have many students that say "to-mah-to" instead of "to-may-to", I don't correct this, but I do say something to them so that they know that the way they say tomato is how it is pronounced in England/Britain, and that in America and Canada, it's pronounced as "to-may-to". My mother has an accent, and when she speaks, it's just an accent, she's pronouncing the words properly, but with an accent....with the exception of two words: "crown" and "brussels sprout". She says "clown" instead of crown, and when she's speaking, even with her accent, mispronouncing crown is a problem....do you wear a clown on your head? When I correct her, she says "crrrrrrown" pronounced properly, but with an accent. Our students are learning simpler words, of course, but there's no denying that there's a difference in the words "but", "bat", and "bet"....not only in pronunciation, but in meaning as well."  - NS 3/18/17

To which I also agree with NS to a certain extent. This is something that I think about often, the difference between accent and mispronunciation. I've experienced this very misunderstanding when working in the public school system. I had students that were failing their reading tests because mainstream teachers continued to give them low marks because they felt that their accent meant they did not know what they were reading. They failed to take their accent into account. Naturally, when the students were later able to test with a trained ESL teacher, their scores went up! Those students absolutely understood what they were reading. Of course this is not always the case, but it happens so often that I seriously begin to wonder how we are training teachers and how we are portraying the acceptance of accent among non-native English speakers. I feel that many ESL faux-pas are directly related to pronouncing the words wrong but that context smooths over most of these potential embarrassments. There are words (such as those NS pointed out) that we don't use without some kind of conversational context behind them. I feel that some over eager teachers don't really understand the difference between an accent and mispronunciations to the point that over compensate with the corrections. Yes, it might make Mom happy to see you spending so much time on pronunciation but it makes the student feel miserable and then learning English becomes just another chore. I just feel that somehow, someway, something should be said that Yes, our teachers will work on pronunciation but mainly on where it directly impedes communication.

Another VIPKID teacher, I will call her CA, shared a wonderful book author with me. His name is Paul Seligson and he writes often about non-native English speakers. She has even attended his workshops. Carla shared that:

"Similar to the way we learn to play a musical instrument or ride a bike, we learn language by a process of trial and error. Mistakes are unavoidable, a natural part of the learning process and often evidence that the student is experimenting and attempting to communicate. If we're too negative about them, students won't say anything, so we need to be careful how we react."
Then he poses a question: "Is your aim ACCURACY or FLUENCY? This will make a big difference. If it's pure ACCURACY and they're all making far too many mistakes, then the activity is probably too hard, and you should find a simpler one". If it's pure FLUENCY, aiming for students to use what English they do know and can say to exchange ideas and information, them making mistakes is acceptable, indeed inevitable. However, what they can't do accurately they can often do fluently".  - CA 3/18/17

 I couldn't agree more with this. 

So, how do we tell the difference between accent and mispronunciation? This will be the subject of another blog post at a later time.

***I hope to continue this discussion on the teacher forums and add additional viewpoints as more are added. This is an issue that I feel is very important as it directly effects not just the VIPKID students but students of ESL.***