Chinese Teacher Program

Mandarin Chinese, the official language of the People's Republic of China and the most widely-spoken of numerous Chinese dialects, is suddenly hot in American schools. With China projected to become the world's leading economy sometime this century, the importance of learning Mandarin Chinese is being recognized at the national and local level. Public and private schools are beginning to add Mandarin to their roster of foreign languages or expand Chinese programs already in place. Some estimates that as many as 50,000 children nationwide are taking Mandarin in school; the ambitious New York-based Asia Society projects that by 2015 5% of American high school students will be learning Chinese.

Despite the fast growing interest in learning Chinese, the number of existing school programs is small and the present educational infrastructure that would enable these schools to meet this demand is inadequate. According to the Asia Society, a steady supply of highly-qualified Chinese teachers is one of the key factors to building a strong infrastructure that is able to sustain supply and demand simultaneously.

Teachers hold the key to the making or breaking of a program. Due to the non-alphabet-based orthographic nature of the Chinese system, the teaching of Chinese language is particularly demanding in the United States. As is true with any language-teaching professionals, to become a Chinese-language teacher requires specialized, rigorous training and ongoing professional development. The shortage of qualified Chinese language teachers is the major roadblock to building a sound infrastructure for Chinese language programs in the United States.

As a specialist in educational staffing, the Educational and Professional Resources (EPR) seeks to assist U.S. K-12 schools in exploring different staffing models and solutions to meet the demand for highly qualified Mandarin-Chinese educators. EPR recruits Chinese language teachers all over the world, and our teachers meet the No Child Left Behind Act requirements for highly-qualified teachers.

Our teaching candidates typically:

  • Speak Mandarin Chinese at native level
  • Read, write, and speak English fluently, having at least 20 credit hours of English at college level
  • Hold a bachelor or master degree in education (usually a degree in Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language)
  • Have completed professional training in linguistics and culture, developmental psychology, teaching pedagogy, etc
  • Have at least one year of formal experience in teaching Chinese to non-native speakers, including supervised student teaching as part of the required college curriculum
  • Hold a current elementary or secondary teaching certificate in own country
  • Hold a current U.S. teaching license (e.g. K-12 world language license, secondary Chinese Language license, secondary Language Arts license, and/or ELL endorsement)
  • Have all credentials translated and evaluated by a U.S. accredited agency
  • Are eligible to work in the U.S. legally, or meet the eligibility criteria for an H1-B work visa

For more details regarding our Chinese program, please contact Jeremy Liu at (505) 979-1939, or email contact@recruitteachers.org .

 

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