By TIANTIAN XIANGSHANG

Education Correspondent

BEIJING (China Daily Show) — An English teacher who hit the headlines recently after canceling a Saturday morning lesson appeared to be in further trouble today, after a routine background check found an apparent anomaly with his English-teaching (TEFL) certificate.

Earl Cooter, 33, of Delberville, Mississippi, told university staff in his application that he was a graduate of the University of Mississippi and had completed a four-month post-graduate course in Teaching English as a Foreign Language at the Mountainland Applied Vocational College.

“Because of the cancelling, so our dean had asked me several times to checking Mr Cooter’s certificate of the qualify,” said class assistant Zhao Wei. “Whereas, they had found no detail of the record of the enrolling or graduating ceremony. This made no sense totally.

“We had later discovered that the School of Mountain Applied Vacations had not existing at all. So we knew the possible of the fraud had been slippery through the security bypass of the reference had checked it.”

If true, it would mean that Cooter has been blithely teaching English, Applied Engineering and Sociology at Beijing’s No. 6 University of Horticulture & HVAC Repair without apparent difficulty for the last four years. The possibility has baffled university staff, who assured parents and staff on Friday that, if true, such a case of academic fraud would be unprecedented in the history of both the faculty and the Chinese university system at large.

“All English teachers in China are subject to rigorous background checks and professionally assessed as ‘Foreign Experts’ according to Chinese law,” said an official at the Exit and Entry Administration Bureau today. “It would be quite impossible for a incompetent, unqualified or unprofessional foreigner to be granted permission to work in China.”

Calls to Cooter’s mobile phone went unanswered and there was no response when China Daily Show reporters knocked on his apartment door.

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