Degrees

But they still struggle to PRODUCE grammatically correct English at any given time.

Yes. Knowing the rules and using them. Lots of slips twixt text-books and lips!!!

I did learn grammar in primary school - parsing was the bane of my life!  And I was more than glad to wash my hands of it when I hit secondary school.

There is so little of it that anyone actually needs to know for survival - pluperfect, gerunds, ligatures etc.  We are perfectly able to use (or ignore) them at will, without formally acknowledging their existence. Basics - verbs, nouns, tense etc are useful - but how much more is really helpful?

Yes, big-ass education here too.  I learned English grammar when in elementary school in the province of Quebec.  When in high school in Ontario, I was light years ahead of my peers when it came to English grammar.  I then became a French teacher, teaching French to English students.  Of course I taught grammar so that there would be some hope of producing something intelligible.  Problem was that I ended up teaching English grammar at the same time, something that was also a foreign concept.

Here in China, leave it to the locals who can relate in their own way, the grammar using Mandarin grammar and Manadarin concepts to serve as hooks for the new info.  Not that they can write or speak well, but at least they can teach grammar well.  After all, grammar isn't important.  I doubt if half the English-Speaking world has more than a foggy clue of English grammar and they communicate/converse quite well. 

There are a lot of useful English grammar aspects. Perhaps avoiding too detailed explanations is fine. But nevertheless for a non-native speaker you need to explain when and how one applies a certain rule. Some are capable of going along with the communicative method of teaching where you basically skip explanations and just keep practising drills and model phrases. But some need a logical explanation why here it's like this and there it's like that.

I was taught grammar when in elementary school, sure, and then just continued using it after that because it became second nature. I did not actually learn grammar until I took a very intensive language course to learn Russian. This is where my native speaker Russian teachers taught me and my classmates more about English grammar so we could understand what we were actually doing in Russian. Now I actually understand the grammar that I use without even knowing it. But the key is that you do not have to know the finer points of the grammar, but you do need the basics of your own grammar plus the grammar of the language you are learning to get a better understanding. The problem I find is that while the chinese teachers are great machines when it comes to explaining the grammar they are not so good at providing adequate examples and excercises that get the students comparing the different grammar points in the two languages so that the students have something to compare too and understand.
When I was teaching english here I was totally amazed at the students inability to understand what the simple structure of a sentence was let alone the meaning of what is a verb, noun, adjective, adverb, and pronoun. Yet these same students wanted to learn complex sentence structures because they wanted to get a high mark on IELTS.
English language learning needs to go back to the basics sometimes if the students want to get ahead.

Grammar was taught quite well at the school I attended in Britain.  Mind you, it was a Public School (Private School in US terminology).

I suspect teaching grammar is easy.  It's just a bunch of rules and exceptions that aren't strong on the "Why is this so?" scale.  But like any teaching, it's massively difficult if you don't know where you are in their curriculum.

My Celta course included much grammar teaaching, but there's a world's difference between teaching 8-10 interested latin america/european adults, and teaching 40 Chinese kids who want to go bezerk.

Hello

First post!

Right, um, don't know why i picked here, other than i'm teaching without a degree, getting on great with my students, they are enjoying their lessons, their parents are very happy and they are learning at a much faster rate than they did under their last teacher, who had a teaching degree and Celta.

I'n 5 months they have gone from making a basic grammar mistake in every sentence to actively debating. I'm hugely proud of them.

If you can engage and motivate the students and coax out a passion for learning while making the lessons fun and enjoyable, all that remains is a good knowledge of your native language.

I don't think any peice of paper should be the criteria for hiring a foreign teacher. Experience can be a bar to new teachers too, preferably I think we should be interviewed, unfortunately this just isn't practical.

There's no easy answer, but as things stand, luckily it's not impossible to get a start without a degree, and from that you can get good references and experience, and that will lead to higher paid jobs.

Welcome GSM.  I agree, a degree doesn't mean you can teach or teach well.  Not having a degree doesn't guarantee that you can teach either.  If you have an education degree, the chances are greater in the big crap shoot, that you can teach and have a solid background in the teaching-learning process.  Hiring someone with a TEFL-TESL-CELTA whatever certificate will also reduce the odds of hiring a dud - of course, no guarantee is given that the candidate can teach either.  If I was hiring I would go with the best poker hand that appears in front of me unless an interview tells me something that paper can never tell.  I hope we hear more from you in the future.  Cheers