THE total number of people living in South Korea on E-2 visas, issued to native English speaking teachers, amounted to 21,105 in March — up more than 2,000 from a year ago, according to data released by the South Korean Ministry of Justice, the JoongAng Daily has reported.
South Korean official analysis shows that, as the global financial crisis deepens, more English teachers are arriving in South Korea or choosing to extend their stay in the country to escape the gloomy job market in their home countries. While there are no independent data on how many native English speakers renewed their contracts, interviews with recruiting agencies for teachers of English as a second language and teachers themselves revealed an upward trend.
Footprints Recruiting, a teachers placement agency based in Vancouver, Canada, said it placed 100 more teachers in South Korea from last September to February this year, compared with the same period a year before. “We have definitely noticed a surge in applications recently,” said Ben Glickman, head of Footprints. Gone2Korea, another Canada-based recruiting agency, said there were few open positions at the popular Sogang Language Program campus in Gyeonggi, because most of the teachers there had re-signed their contracts.
According to South Korean educators, the nation’s English language fever makes positions for foreign teachers relatively abundant, even in the face of an economic crisis. For foreigners hoping to return home and find jobs in education, there appear to be few prospects.
