Computer-assisted native-speakerism (CAPTs)

Recent years have seen a proliferation of computer-assisted pronunciations trainers (CAPTs), both as stand-alone apps and as a part of broader language courses. The typical CAPT records the learner’s voice, compares this to a model of some kind, detects differences between the learner and the model, and suggests ways that the learner may more closely approximate to the model (Agarwal & Chakraborty, 2019). Most commonly, the focus is on individual phonemes, rather than, as in Richard Cauldwell’s ‘Cool Speech’ (2012), on the features of fluent natural speech (Rogerson-Revell, 2021).

The fact that CAPTs are increasingly available and attractive ‘does not of course ensure their pedagogic value or effectiveness’ … ‘many are technology-driven rather than pedagogy-led’ (Rogerson-Revell, 2021). Rogerson-Revell (2021) points to two common criticisms of CAPTs. Firstly, their pedagogic accuracy sometimes falls woefully short. He gives the example of a unit on intonation in one app, where users are told that ‘when asking questions in English, our voice goes up in pitch’ and ‘we lower the pitch of our voice at the end of questions’. Secondly, he observes that CAPTs often adopt a one-size-fits-all approach, despite the fact that we know that issues of pronunciation are extremely context-sensitive: ‘a set of learners in one context will need certain features that learners in another context do not’ (Levis, 2018: 239).

There are, in addition, technical challenges that are not easy to resolve. Many CAPTs rely on automatic speech recognition (ASR), which can be very accurate with some accents, but much less so with other accents (including many non-native-speaker accents) (Korzekwa et al., 2022). Anyone using a CAPT will experience instances of the software identifying pronunciation problems that are not problems, and failing to identify potentially more problematic issues (Agarwal & Chakraborty, 2019).

We should not, therefore, be too surprised if these apps don’t always work terribly well. Some apps, like the English File Pronunciation app, have been shown to be effective in helping the perception and production of certain phonemes by a very unrepresentative group of Spanish learners of English (Fouz-González, 2020), but this tells us next to nothing about the overall effectiveness of the app. Most CAPTs have not been independently reviewed, and, according to a recent meta-analysis of CAPTs (Mahdi & Al Khateeb, 2019), the small number of studies are ‘all of very low quality’. This, unfortunately, renders their meta-analysis useless.

Even if the studies in the meta-analysis had not been of very low quality, we would need to pause before digesting any findings about CAPTs’ effectiveness. Before anything else, we need to develop a good understanding of what they might be effective at. It’s here that we run headlong into the problem of native-speakerism (Holliday, 2006; Kiczkowiak, 2018).

The pronunciation model that CAPTs attempt to push learners towards is a native-speaker model. In the case of ELSA Speak, for example, this is a particular kind of American accent, although ‘British and other accents’ will apparently soon be added. Xavier Anguera, co-founder and CTO of ELSA Speak, in a fascinating interview with Paul Raine of TILTAL, happily describes his product as ‘an app that is for accent reduction’. Accent reduction is certainly a more accurate way of describing CAPTs than accent promotion.

Accent reduction, or the attempt to mimic an imagined native-speaker pronunciation, is now ‘rarely put forward by teachers or researchers as a worthwhile goal’ (Levis, 2018: 33) because it is only rarely achievable and, in many contexts, inappropriate. In addition, accent reduction cannot easily be separated from accent prejudice. Accent reduction courses and products ‘operate on the assumption that some accents are more legitimate than others’ (Ennser-Kananen, et al., 2021) and there is evidence that they can ‘reinscribe racial inequalities’ (Ramjattan, 2019). Accent reduction is quintessentially native-speakerist.

Rather than striving towards a native-speaker accentedness, there is a growing recognition among teachers, methodologists and researchers that intelligibility may be a more appropriate learning goal (Levis, 2018) than accentedness. It has been over 20 years since Jennifer Jenkins (2000) developed her Lingua Franca Core (LFC), a relatively short list of pronunciation features that she considered central to intelligibility in English as a Lingua Franca contexts (i.e. the majority of contexts in which English is used). Intelligibility as the guiding principle of pronunciation teaching continues to grow in influence, spurred on by the work of Walker (2010), Kiczkowiak & Lowe (2018), Patsko & Simpson (2019) and Hancock (2020), among others.

Unfortunately, intelligibility is a deceptively simple concept. What exactly it is, is ‘not an easy question to answer’ writes John Levis (2018) before attempting his own answer in the next 250 pages. As admirable as the LFC may be as an attempt to offer a digestible and actionable list of key pronunciation features, it ‘remains controversial in many of its recommendations. It lacks robust empirical support, assumes that all NNS contexts are similar, and does not take into account the importance of stigma associated with otherwise intelligible pronunciations’ (Levis, 2018: 47). Other attempts to list features of intelligibility fare no better in Levis’s view: they are ‘a mishmash of incomplete and contradictory recommendations’ (Levis, 2018: 49).

Intelligibility is also complex because of the relationship between intelligibility and comprehensibility, or the listener’s willingness to understand – their attitude or stance towards the speaker. Comprehensibility is a mediation concept (Ennser-Kananen, et al., 2021). It is a two-way street, and intelligibility-driven approaches need to take this into account (unlike the accent-reduction approach which places all the responsibility for comprehensibility on the shoulders of the othered speaker).

The problem of intelligibility becomes even more thorny when it comes to designing a pronunciation app. Intelligibility and comprehensibility cannot easily be measured (if at all!), and an app’s algorithms need a concrete numerically-represented benchmark towards which a user / learner can be nudged. Accentedness can be measured (even if the app has to reify a ‘native-speaker accent’ to do so). Intelligibility / Comprehensibility is simply not something, as Xavier Anguera acknowledges, that technology can deal with. In this sense, CAPTs cannot avoid being native-speakerist.

At this point, we might ride off indignantly into the sunset, but a couple of further observations are in order. First of all, accentedness and comprehensibility are not mutually exclusive categories. Anguera notes that intelligibility can be partly improved by reducing accentedness, and some of the research cited by Levis (2018) backs him up on this. But precisely how much and what kind of accent reduction improves intelligibility is not knowable, so the use of CAPTs is something of an optimistic stab in the dark. Like all stabs in the dark, there are dangers. Secondly, individual language learners may be forgiven for not wanting to wait for accent prejudice to become a thing of the past: if they feel that they will suffer less from prejudice by attempting here and now to reduce their ‘foreign’ accent, it is not for me, I think, to pass judgement. The trouble, of course, is that CAPTs contribute to the perpetuation of the prejudices.

There is, however, one area where the digital evaluation of accentedness is, I think, unambiguously unacceptable. According to Rogerson-Revell (2021), ‘Australia’s immigration department uses the Pearson Test of English (PTE) Academic as one of five tests. The PTE tests speaking ability using voice recognition technology and computer scoring of test-takers’ audio recordings. However, L1 English speakers and highly proficient L2 English speakers have failed the oral fluency section of the English test, and in some cases it appears that L1 speakers achieve much higher scores if they speak unnaturally slowly and carefully’. Human evaluations are not necessarily any better.

References

Agarwal, C. & Chakraborty, P. (2019) A review of tools and techniques for computer aided pronunciation training (CAPT) in English. Education and Information Technologies, 24: 3731–3743. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-019-09955-7

Cauldwell, R (2012) Cool Speech app. Available at: http://www.speechinaction.org/cool-speech-2

Fouz-González, J (2020) Using apps for pronunciation training: An empirical evaluation of the English File Pronunciation app. Language Learning & Technology, 24(1): 62–85.

Ennser-Kananen, J., Halonen, M. & Saarinen, T. (2021) “Come Join Us and Lose Your Accent!” Accent Modification Courses as Hierarchization of International Students. Journal of International Students 11 (2): 322 – 340

Holliday, A. (2006) Native-speakerism. ELT Journal, 60 (4): 385 – 387

Jenkins. J. (2000) The Phonology of English as a Lingua Franca. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Hancock, M. (2020) 50 Tips for Teaching Pronunciation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Kiczkowiak, M. (2018) Native Speakerism in English Language Teaching: Voices From Poland. Doctoral dissertation.

Kiczkowiak, M & Lowe, R. J. (2018) Teaching English as a Lingua Franca. Stuttgart: DELTA Publishing

Korzekwa, D., Lorenzo-Trueba, J., Thomas Drugman, T. & Kostek, B. (2022) Computer-assisted pronunciation training—Speech synthesis is almost all you need. Speech Communication, 142: 22 – 33

Levis, J. M. (2018) Intelligibility, Oral Communication, and the Teaching of Pronunciation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Mahdi, H. S. & Al Khateeb, A. A. (2019) The effectiveness of computer-assisted pronunciation training: A meta-analysis. Review of Education, 7 (3): 733 – 753

Patsko, L. & Simpson, K. (2019) How to Write Pronunciation Activities. ELT Teacher 2 Writer https://eltteacher2writer.co.uk/our-books/how-to-write-pronunciation-activities/

Ramjattan, V. A. (2019) Racializing the problem of and solution to foreign accent in business. Applied Linguistics Review, 13 (4). https://doi.org/10.1515/applirev2019-0058

Rogerson-Revell, P. M. (2021) Computer-Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT): Current Issues and Future Directions. RELC Journal, 52(1), 189–205. https://doi.org/10.1177/0033688220977406

Walker, R. (2010) Teaching the Pronunciation of English as a Lingua Franca. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Multilingualism, linguanomics and lingualism

You have probably heard the following joke, or a version of it. What do we call a person who speaks three languages? A trilingual. And a person who speaks two languages? A bilingual. And someone who only speaks one language? An American. For the joke to work, even mildly, the listener has to buy in to the idea that multilingualism / plurilingualism is a ‘good thing’, and that too many Americans are monolingual.
Not everybody would share these views. Some would prefer the US (and other countries of immigration) to be more of a language graveyard than less of one. Negativity about multilingualism can be extreme, as in the wrath of those on Twitter who found a Coca Cola advertisement profoundly un-American, supportive of communism and terrorism. The advert in question showed a multicultural bunch of people sharing a Coke in perfect harmony while singing a multilingual rendition of ‘America the Beautiful’. To make things even worse, the commercial was shown at that homage to all things American, the Super Bowl.
Enthusiasm for multilingualism is, in part, a liberal reaction to the reactionary monolingualism of the ‘if-you-can’t-speak-our-language-go-back-to-your-own-fucking-country’ variety. Countering the post- 9/11 rise in monolingual linguistic prescriptivism in some countries (Cameron, 2013), tolerant multilingualism indexes visions of perfectly harmonious communities and the rhetoric of human rights and autonomy (Gramling, 2016: 205). It values diversity for its own sake.
It is also, in part, a reaction (see, for example, the Wikipedia entry or Maher, 2017) to a number of clearly widespread myths and misconceptions (e.g. that multilingual societies are less harmonious than monolingual ones or that bilingually raised children are cognitively disadvantaged). Going further than mere rebuttals, advocates of multilingualism argue, with some evidence, that it is good for critical and creative thinking, beneficial for problem-solving and decision-making, makes us more open to new ideas, more tolerant, more embracing of divergent thinking, and it can help stave off dementia. What is there not to like?
Most enthusiasts of multilingualism will list and expand on all the advantages of multilingualism that I have already mentioned, but many will also be interested in its market potential. Linguanomics, the title of a book by Gabrielle Hogan-Brun (2017), is the exploration of the economic aspects of multilingualism, the links between linguistic diversity and economic growth, and the ways in which linguistic capital may be converted into monetary capital. Citing Hogan-Brun, a blog post (Hardach, 2018; see also Hardach, 2021) for the World Economic Forum suggests that companies which invest more in languages do better in export markets; that countries with better language skills have higher GDP; and, therefore, countries should do more to tap the ‘vast, linguistic resource [of] migrant families’. Diversity has become human capital. Multilingualism is not just an end in itself, but a tool ‘in global collaborations to make the world a better place’ (Stein-Smith, 2021b) primarily through economic growth. In this framing, becoming multilingual (i.e. learning another language) is acquiring the ultimate 21st century skill (Stein-Smith, 2021a), so long, of course, as the language has value in the market place. English, for example.
Like all 21st century skills, multilingualism appears to have a readily obvious meaning, but does not, in fact, lend itself easily to a simple definition. Perhaps the defining feature of all 21st century skills is precisely the lack of precision, allowing the idea to be embraced by different people, from critical theorists to investment bankers, for different reasons. The European Commission (2007:6) defines the term as: ‘the ability of societies, institutions, groups and individuals to engage, on a regular basis, with more than one language in their day-to-day lives’. It leaves unanswered the key questions of what a language is, which languages are being referred to, and in which aspects of people’s day-to-day lives. But answers of a sort can be found when we look at the reasons for the European policy of multilingualism. In addition to the importance of diversity and respect for identities, the policy is intended (1) on a collective basis, to contribute to European unity (reflecting the EU’s motto ‘United in Diversity’) and (2) on an individual basis, to develop human capital and job mobility.
Can a policy of multilingualism be both a celebration of diversity and a tool for linguanomics – the development of human capital through languages? Problems arise when we look for the answer to the question of which language. Are we differentiating languages and dialects, and, if so, how? When the European Commission (2005: 4) says that it would like all European citizens to have ‘practical skills in at least two languages in addition to his or her mother tongue’, it’s fairly clear that this means ‘foreign languages’. And if part of the purpose of learning ‘foreign languages’ is to develop human capital, the language of choice is likely to be English most of the time. A particular kind of English. Closely related is the question of what is meant by ‘mother tongue’. If your home language is not the national language of the country in which you live, you’re unlikely to get much help from European states in developing your competencies in it. In practice, when development of human capital is weighed against diversity, the former takes precedence every time. Multilingualism in this European context is overridingly concerned with languages associated with nation states and is tied ‘to a future anterior of successful language learning among new citizens’ […] it ‘fulfils all the characteristics of neoliberal self-making: horizontal, voluntaristic, entrepreneurial, opportunity-rich, privatizable, decentralized, team-oriented, and, at turns hopeful or mute about structural poverty and other forms of socio-economic precaritization’ (Gramling, 2016: 204). In other words, interest in diversity may only be skin-deep: advocacy of multilingual policies may, in fact, be mostly about ‘targeting the anxiety within the [white, privileged, monolingual] majority about social and linguistic pluralism’ (McNamara, 2011: 38).
‘Language’, ‘diversity’ and ‘multilingualism’ are all strategically deployable shifters (Moore, 2015): their meanings shift in relation to the purposes for which the terms are being used. Multilingualism can stand in opposition to the bigotry of people in MAGA caps, but it can also stand in opposition to ‘unassimilated’ monolingual, migrant populations who haven’t learnt the language of the ‘host nation’. This is all rather problematic for those who do not want their espousal of multilingualism to be associated with xenophobia or a neoliberal agenda, and for those who want to dissociate diversity from human capital (Flores, 2013). Multilingualism, therefore, needs to be disambiguated, so that the multilingualism that is oriented towards social justice is not appropriated by those whose main interest in language learning is linguanomics (Katznelson & Bernstein, 2017).
This, I think, is what is behind the so-called ‘multilingual turn’ in applied linguistics, a turn that tries to bring social justice to the fore. In an attempt at terminological smash-and-grab, critical applied linguists set about reclaiming the term (May, 2013; Conteh & Meier, 2014). There are differences in interpretation between them (Meier, 2017), but the common denominator is a desire to redefine ‘language’ – not as a fixed and largely territorial system owned by native-speakers, but as a dynamic, complex, social, deterritorialized practice owned by its users. There is ample evidence to indicate that various forms of linguistic intermixing are more characteristic of everyday spoken communication than the orderly use of what we might call ‘monolanguages’ – separate, individual, named languages. The multilingualism of the multilingual turn contends that lingualism (Block, 2013) – the belief in the existence of monolanguages – is contrary to the evidence, and must be dispensed with in order to get away from the social injustice of native-speaker norms, of accentism, and linguistic prejudice.
In this light, the term ‘multilingual’ is problematic. It denotes countability and plurality. If we want or need to distance ourselves from lingualism – the idea of languages as bounded entities (e.g. English, Hebrew, Xhosa), ‘language’ needs to become a verb: ‘languaging’ or ‘translanguaging’ (see my previous post). The multilingual turn has led us to translanguaging and ‘few voices in applied linguistics have found fault with this positive counter-distinction of translanguaging over multilingualism’ (Gramling, 2021: 29). It is translanguaging, rather than multilingualism, that is now being offered as a, even the, theory of language (Li Wei, 2018).
For a strong critique of the idea that named languages (like English) do not exist, you could do worse than read a recent post by Geoff Jordan. Or you could simply try asking someone who’s about to take a TOEFL exam what they think of the idea (Gramling, 2021: 26). Even if we cannot clearly define the boundaries of what constitutes a named language like English, we cannot simply disinvent it. Our lives can be shaped by language exams, our online interactions are shaped by our choice of named language, and many of us invest a significant part of our identity in a named language. You may go along with Li Wei (2021) in disapproving of lingualism, but it won’t be going away any time soon. Quite how we are supposed to dispense with lingualism also remains less than clear. Perhaps Li Wei might begin by trying to get rid of the PGCE in Languages, or the MAs in TESOL or French at his own university, or its language proficiency requirements for students from countries that are not ‘majority English-speaking’. I suspect, though, that his institution’s linguanomic dispositive of multilingualism might prevent that happening.
Lingualism is at the heart of much English language learning, of English medium instruction, and of Li Wei’s own university (UCL) where nearly half the student body has paid to benefit from the linguistic capital that is on sale there. Lingualism may be (but is not necessarily) ‘indifferent to social justice, migration, asylum, refuge, immigration, decoloniality, or liberation from the strictures of monolingualism’ (Gramling, 2021: 66), but multilingualism of the translanguaging kind is unlikely to make much of a dent in our monolingualising world, either. It certainly isn’t going to help anyone who has to take a gate-keeping language test (Cameron, 2013). For all the noise about translanguaging in TESOL, it’s worth noting (Gramling, 2021: 70) that the overwhelming majority of current research into multilingualism comes, not from TESOL or applied linguistics, but from computational engineers and Natural Language Processing specialists. Compared to multilingual linguanomics, the ‘multilingual turn’ is a very niche affair. Most people have never heard of it, and never will.
Academic handbooks on multilingualism stretch to over a thousand pages, and there are countless journals devoted to the topic. Attempts have been made to condense the topic to 130 pages (Maher, 2017), and even 15 pages (Cenoz, 2015), but multilingualism is a discursive construct, a category in the process of continuous reinvention (Gramling, 2021). Discourses about monolingualism and multilingualism are what Deborah Cameron (2013) has called discourses of ‘verbal hygiene’ – the normative practices through which people attempt to improve languages or regulate their use. Such discourses, whether coming from xenophobes, neo-liberals, or those with more liberal perspectives, are:
linked to other preoccupations which are not primarily linguistic, but rather social, political and moral. The logic behind verbal hygiene depends on a tacit, common-sense analogy between the order of language and the larger social order; the rules or norms of language stand in for the rules governing social or moral conduct, and putting language to rights becomes a symbolic way of putting the world to rights (Cameron, 2013: 61).
Cameron adds that verbal hygiene is a response to the anxieties of a specific moment and place, and that we should be wary of assuming that preoccupations about, say, multilingualism and monolingualism will have the same symbolic meanings in different times and places. With that in mind, I know I need to be careful about the way I react to the writings of Li Wei, Ofelia García, Nelson Flores, or Guadalupe Valdés. Their professional worlds of the ‘multilingual turn’ in bilingual and immersion education in mostly English-speaking countries hardly intersect at all with my own professional world of EFL teaching in central Europe, where rejection of lingualism is not really an option.

References
Block, D. (2013) Moving beyond ‘Lingualism’: Multilingual embodiment and Multimodality in SLA. In May. S. (Ed.) (2013) The multilingual turn: Implications for SLA, TESOL and Bilingual education. New York: Routledge. pp. 54 – 77
Cameron, D. (2013) The one, the many, and the Other: Representing multi- and mono-lingualism in post-9/11 verbal hygiene. Critical Multilingualism Studies, 1 (2): 59 – 77
Cenoz, J. (2013) Defining multilingualism. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 33: 3 – 18
Conteh, J. & Meier, G. (Eds.) (2014) The multilingual turn in languages education: Opportunities and challenges. Bristol: Multilingual Matters
European Commission. (2007) Final report: High level group on multilingualism. Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities
European Commission (2005) Communication from the Commission to the Council, the European Parliament, the Economic and Social Committee, and the Committee of the Regions. A New Framework Strategy for Multilingualism, COM(2005) 596 final. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52005DC0596
Flores, N. (2013) The Unexamined Relationship Between Neoliberalism and Plurilingualism: A Cautionary Tale. TESOL Quarterly, 47 (3): 500- 520
Gramling, D. (2021) The Invention of Multilingualism. Cambridge: CUP
Gramling, D. (2016) The Invention of Monolingualism. New York: Bloomsbury
Hardach, S. (2018) Speaking more than one language can boost economic growth. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/02/speaking-more-languages-boost-economic-growth/
Hardach, S. (2021) Languages are Good for Us. London: Apollo Books
Hogan-Brun, G. (2017) Linguanomics: What is the Market Potential of Multilingualism? New York: Bloomsbury
Katznelson, N. & Bernstein, K. (2017) Rebranding Bilingualism: The Shifting Discourses of Language Education Policy in California’s 2016 Election. Linguistics and Education, 40: 11 – 26
Li Wei. (2021) Translanguaging as a Political Stance: Implications for English Language Education. ELT Journal, ccab083, https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/ccab083
Li Wei. (2018) Translanguaging as a Practical Theory of Language. Applied Linguistics, 39 (1): 9 – 30
Maher, J. C. (2017) Multilingualism: A very short introduction. Oxford: OUP
May. S. (Ed.) (2013) The multilingual turn: Implications for SLA, TESOL and Bilingual education. New York: Routledge
McNamara, T. (2011) Multilingualism in Education: A poststructuralist critique. The Modern Language Journal, 104 (1): 430 – 441
Meier, G. S. (2017) The multilingual turn as a critical movement in education: assumptions, challenges and a need for reflection. Applied Linguistics Review, 8 (1): 131-161
Moore, R. (2015) From revolutionary monolingualism to reactionary multilingualism: Top-down discourses of linguistic diversity in Europe, 1794-present. Language & Communication, 44: 19 – 30
Stein-Smith, K. (2021a) Multilingualism as a Global Competency: Skills for a 21st Century World. Saarbrücken: LAP Lambert Publishing
Stein-Smith, K. (2021b) Multilingualism for Global Solutions and a Better World. Journal of Language Teaching and Research, 12 (5): 671-677

TEFL, platform capitalism and coronavirus

Online teaching is big business. Very big business. Online language teaching is a significant part of it, expected to be worth over $5 billion by 2025. Within this market, the biggest demand is for English and the lion’s share of the demand comes from individual learners. And a sizable number of them are Chinese kids.

There are a number of service providers, and the competition between them is hot. To give you an idea of the scale of this business, here are a few details taken from a report in USA Today. VIPKid, is valued at over $3 billion, attracts celebrity investors, and has around 70,000 tutors who live in the US and Canada. 51Talk has 14,800 English teachers from a variety of English-speaking countries. BlingABC gets over 1,000 American applicants a month for its online tutoring jobs. There are many, many others.

Demand for English teachers in China is huge. The Pie News, citing a Chinese state media announcement, reported in September of last year that there were approximately 400,000 foreign citizens working in China as English language teachers, two-thirds of whom were working illegally. Recruitment problems, exacerbated by quotas and more stringent official requirements for qualifications, along with a very restricted desired teacher profile (white, native-speakers from a few countries like the US and the UK), have led more providers to look towards online solutions. Eric Yang, founder of the Shanghai-based iTutorGroup, which operates under a number of different brands and claims to be the ‘largest English-language learning institution in the world’, said that he had been expecting online tutoring to surpass F2F classes within a few years. With coronavirus, he now thinks it will come ‘much earlier’.

Typically, the work does not require much, if anything, in the way of training (besides familiarity with the platform), although a 40-hour TEFL course is usually preferred. Teachers deliver pre-packaged lessons. According to the USA Today report, Chinese students pay between $49 and $80 dollars an hour for the classes.

It’s a highly profitable business and the biggest cost to the platform providers is the rates they pay the tutors. If you google “Teaching TEFL jobs online”, you’ll quickly find claims that teachers can earn $40 / hour and up. Such claims are invariably found on the sites of recruitment agencies, who are competing for attention. However, although it’s possible that a small number of people might make this kind of money, the reality is that most will get nowhere near it. Scroll down the pages a little and you’ll discover that a more generally quoted and accepted figure is between $14 and $20 / hour. These tutors are, of course, freelancers, so the wages are before tax, and there is no health coverage or pension plan.

VIPKid, for example, considered to be one of the better companies, offers payment in the $14 – $22 / hour range. Others offer considerably less, especially if you are not a white, graduate US citizen. Current rates advertised on OETJobs include work for Ziktalk ($10 – 15 / hour), NiceTalk ($10 – 11 / hour), 247MyTutor ($5 – 8 / hour) and Weblio ($5 – 6 / hour). The number of hours that you get is rarely fixed and tutors need to build up a client base by getting good reviews. They will often need to upload short introductory videos, selling their skills. They are in direct competition with other tutors.

They also need to make themselves available when demand for their services is highest. Peak hours for VIPKid, for example, are between 2 and 8 in the morning, depending on where you live in the US. Weekends, too, are popular. With VIPKid, classes are scheduled in advance, but this is not always the case with other companies, where you log on to show that you are available and hope someone wants you. This is the case with, for example, Cambly (which pays $10.20 / hour … or rather $0.17 / minute) and NiceTalk. According to one review, Cambly has a ‘priority hours system [which] allows teachers who book their teaching slots in advance to feature higher on the teacher list than those who have just logged in, meaning that they will receive more calls’. Teachers have to commit to a set schedule and any changes are heavily penalised. The review states that ‘new tutors on the platform should expect to receive calls for about 50% of the time they’re logged on’.

 

Taking the gig economy to its logical conclusion, there are other companies where tutors can fix their own rates. SkimaTalk, for example, offers a deal where tutors first teach three unpaid lessons (‘to understand how the system works and build up their initial reputation on the platform’), then the system sets $16 / hour as a default rate, but tutors can change this to anything they wish. With another, Palfish, where tutors set their own rate, the typical rate is $10 – 18 / hour, and the company takes a 20% commission. With Preply, here is the deal on offer:

Your earnings depend on the hourly rate you set in your profile and how often you can provide lessons. Preply takes a 100% commission fee of your first lesson payment with every new student. For all subsequent lessons, the commission varies from 33 to 18% and depends on the number of completed lesson hours with students. The more tutoring you do through Preply, the less commission you pay.

Not one to miss a trick, Ziktalk (‘currently focusing on language learning and building global audience’) encourages teachers ‘to upload educational videos in order to attract more students’. Or, to put it another way, teachers provide free content in order to have more chance of earning $10 – 15 / hour. Ah, the joys of digital labour!

And, then, coronavirus came along. With schools shutting down, first in China and then elsewhere, tens of millions of students are migrating online. In Hong Kong, for example, the South China Morning Post reports that schools will remain closed until April 20, at the earliest, but university entrance exams will be going ahead as planned in late March. CNBC reported yesterday that classes are being cancelled across the US, and the same is happening, or is likely to happen, in many other countries.

Shares in the big online providers soared in February, with Forbes reporting that $3.2 billion had been added to the share value of China’s e-Learning leaders. Stock in New Oriental (owners of BlingABC, mentioned above) ‘rose 7.3% last month, adding $190 million to the wealth of its founder Yu Minhong [whose] current net worth is estimated at $3.4 billion’.

DingTalk, a communication and management app owned by Alibaba (and the most downloaded free app in China’s iOS App Store), has been adapted to offer online services for schools, reports Xinhua, the official state-run Chinese news agency. The scale of operations is enormous: more than 10,000 new cloud servers were deployed within just two hours.

Current impacts are likely to be dwarfed by what happens in the future. According to Terry Weng, a Shenzhen-based analyst, ‘The gradual exit of smaller education firms means there are more opportunities for TAL and New Oriental. […] Investors are more keen for their future performance.’ Zhu Hong, CTO of DingTalk, observes ‘the epidemic is like a catalyst for many enterprises and schools to adopt digital technology platforms and products’.

For edtech investors, things look rosy. Smaller, F2F providers are in danger of going under. In an attempt to mop up this market and gain overall market share, many elearning providers are offering weighty discounts and free services. Profits can come later.

For the hundreds of thousands of illegal or semi-legal English language teachers in China, things look doubly bleak. Their situation is likely to become even more precarious, with the online gig economy their obvious fall-back path. But English language teachers everywhere are likely to be affected one way or another, as will the whole world of TEFL.

Now seems like a pretty good time to find out more about precarity (see the Teachers as Workers website) and native-speakerism (see TEFL Equity Advocates).