Archive for the ‘ALT’ Category

… was called Ranald MacDonald (no relation to the most famous American clown in Japan*, I believe) and was also the first English teacher to discover that Japan can be both an adventure and safe and pleasant, being at least as useful to the Japanese for sending positive reports back home as he was for telling them about the rest of the world and “internationalizing” them. Sounds just like the average JET teaching assistant.

 Other interesting similarities and differences include:

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2007 was yet another year in which the world of TEFL made its way into the consciousness of the general public for all the wrong reasons (a crack down on teachers in Korea, English teaching sex offenders etc. etc), and Japan did its fair share of damage to our industry’s repuation too: (more…)

Why is education usually such a national and personal priority in Japan?

Why is which university you go to so important in Japan?

Why do Japanese students fall asleep in class?

Why are Japanese Junior High School kids so different in class to Japanese Elementary School kids?

Why are academic standards in Japanese schools dipping compared to the rest of the world?

Why are Japanese kids so well behaved?

Why are juku cram schools such a big thing in Japan?

Answers to all these mysteries on the Japanese education explained page on my new blog Japan Explained FASAQ.

According the the IHT, font of all wisdom, the Chinese are asking people to dob each other in for making mistakes in English:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/22/opinion/edterril.php

I’ve always been a bit of a classroom discipline fascist, but even I think that is going a bit too far…

In other Japan or teaching related news, the British are soon going to be taking on the salaryman habit of reading rape manga on the train, apparently:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/21/arts/gnovel.php

Japanese Railways show that Anglo-American short termism hasn’t reached some parts of the economy yet, with a plan to introduce a new train by 2025 (by which year Virgin Trains in England are also planning to get today’s departure from London Euston to its destination in Glasgow):

http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY200708230070.html

Either that, or it was yet another quiet news day in Japan…

Meanwhile, in Malaysia Gwen Stefani does cover her body (but not her mouth, unfortunately) and her concert goes off without scandal:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/22/arts/peepthu.php

 The article doesn’t say, however, if she kept to the rules saying female performers may not “…jump, shout,…or throw things are the audience”. Made me wonder how ALTs (Assistant Language Teachers) in Primary schools would cope under the same restrictions, but lack of time means I will have to keep that repressive fantasy to myself for the time being…

Another example of foreigners who come over to Japan and can’t be bothered making an effort because it’s just Japan, as also seen with many British and American rock bands (e.g. Supergrass- in it (Japan) for the money indeed!)

Rants aside, here is the next part of my serious attempt at examining why there might be so many bad teachers in Japan. Having already examined why worse teachers might come out to Japan, now it’s time to examine:

Why do good teachers leave Japan?

Note that this is now the new, improved version of this post, organised by categories and with the proviso (as demanded by the punters on Rave’s ESL Au Lait) that it is possible that some bad teachers leave for some of the same reasons:

Personal Reasons

• Women often leave because of the lack of dating opportunities
• Those that don’t have this problem still find they lack female friends due to female friends leaving
• Lack of progress with learning the language and/ or making Japanese friends makes people want to try somewhere “easier”
• The lack of a summer break like most schools in Europe take means, strangely, that people are likely to think their time is up after a year and leave at the same time as all their friends do- usually at the end of a one year contract
• The difficulty of meeting new people, especially in big cities
• Wanting to be accepted as a local but realizing it will never happen
• Not wanting your children to go to a Japanese school or university

Career Advancement and Personal Development

• Many Japanese institutions have a visible or glass ceiling at how far non-Japanese can climb up the ladder, meaning people leave after reaching a certain level or don’t bother sticking around to get promoted because they know it can only lead so far
• Lack of opportunities to take further qualifications in Japan, e.g. even people in Tokyo who want to do a DELTA must do so by distance learning, inconceivable of in any other capital city I know, there are no CELTA courses available, and the local MA in TESOL courses often demand some level of Japanese and/ or don’t have a good reputation abroad
• A lack of people, even DoSs, with a DELTA who can help you when you take a distance course
• The lack of opportunity to become a trainer on such courses
• Workshops you can go to are often aimed at a very basic level of teaching knowledge and therefore unlikely to be of interest to experienced and qualified teachers
• The lack of a clear, obvious career path into other, better schools etc. University jobs, for example, are usually not advertised, the well respected chains like Bell and IH they people sometimes move up to elsewhere do not exist, and the British Council is shrinking its operations.
• One of the steps forward in terms of pay can be to take an Assistant Language Teacher job, but as this means teaching with another teacher it often doesn’t feel like a step forward in terms of your career
• You can earn and/ or save more elsewhere
• The lack of opportunity to teach exam classes other than TOEIC or to become an examiner (for example, the British Council in Tokyo is not accepting applications for IELTS examiners)

The other staff

• The negativity of the other teachers
• A feeling that “If all these people can do this job without complaints and/ or and get paid the same, maybe I should be doing something else”
• Managers who are younger and/ or have less experience and qualifications

 Not feeling at the centre of the “TEFL world”

• The materials used by schools are often 5 or more years behind those used in Europe
• Because Japan is not a big market for the UK and US ELT publishers, work like pre-publication testing is not often available

The students

• The fact that the students don’t seem so seriously interested in learning the language and so make limited progress- only studying half an hour a week, using company classes as a chance to relax because they are overworked, not doing homework or anything else in English outside class etc. etc.
• If students are happy just to be entertained you don’t feel like you are being pushed to improve

The materials and other resources

• The lack of teaching technology such as Interactive Whiteboards, or even sometimes OHPs and photocopiers
• The lack of quality of the locally produced textbooks etc. that you sometimes have to use
• The idea that even while your ability to teach Japanese students is improving, your ability to teach other nationalities is possibily getting worse

Not matching your training

• A lack of groups of 8 to 12 students that people are usually trained to teach on their CELTA etc.
• Very few classes with even one student who doesn’t have Japanese as a first language
• A lack of flaps
• A lack of preparation time or rest time between lessons
• A lack of a range of levels
• Having to teach a mix of ages

Miscellaneous

• The difficulties of working in a Japanese office
• Good teachers leaving becomes self perpetuating- because some good teachers leave the other good teachers don’t want to stay

Standard of living

• The chance to live in a more beautiful city elsewhere
• The chance to afford a bigger and/ or otherwise better flat outside Japan
• Being able to afford the time and money to fly home more often from other countries
• Lower tax and medical insurance in some places
• Not wanting to pay into the Japanese national pension system
• No high interest local accounts to pay your savings into
• The falling yen
• The difficulties in getting mortages (especially joint ones), credit cards etc.
• Because wages have been static at best for years, people who might have wanted to stay in teaching end up applying for management jobs to keep their wages climbing and then drop out completely due to the difficulties of being a manager and/ or not really wanting to be one in the first place
• The expense of exploring further afield in Japan and flying to elsewhere in Asia
• Although it is also experienced by most Japanese, the commuting, long hours, cramped accomodation etc. can be avoided by moving to another country
• Lack of provision for working mothers

If anyone has any suggestions on anything else I can add, please let me know. I should also point out that it isn’t as bad as the list above could make it appear- I am, after all, still here teaching in a big chain of language schools after 4 years!

There is a whole lot going on in this recent story about a feud over a foreigners’ cemetery in Seoul, but the thing that struck me most was how nationalism is tied up with almost everything is Korea. There are lots of reasons given for the nationalism in South Korea that often manifests itself as anti-almost-everywhere-ism, but the overwhelming reason for nationalism in any country is that it helps the ruling classes stay in power- just look at how theoretically internationlist communist leaders like Stalin and the present Chinese leadership used and use nationalism to cling onto their positions.

Whatever the country, there seems little you can do as a humble English teacher to tackle feelings of national superiority/ paranoid feelings that other countries are looking down on them/ strange mixed up combination of the two- especially as the school you teach in is unlikely to give you the power to pick the history textbooks they use any time soon. So, is there anything we can do to make our students and other people in the country we live in react to the rest of the world without so much of an attitude?

Here are some ideas:

• A good lesson on cultural assumptions etc. works like a good grammar lesson- they end up asking you for any information or opinions you have on the matter instead of you just sounding off while they think about something else.
• As a representative of foreigners in the country you need to be open to the culture you are in to prove that foreigners can be polite etc. by their standards, but not too open as this could be used as evidence that their way of life is inherently superior so all foreigners get to love it more than their own
• Just like a teacher that is going to teach grammar well, you need to be prepared. This means not only knowing their culture, but knowing your own and other cultures too. For example, if they tell you “In our country we…” you will then be able to say “That’s interesting, in (Thailand) they do the same thing”, and if they say “Why do they do that stupid thing in (China)?” you will be able to explain why.
• Never let a conversation on culture turn into a conversation on history.

Any more ideas? Comments below please:

David’s English Teaching World lays into the endless debate about L1 in the language classroom:

http://elt-teaching.blogspot.com/2007/08/teaching-approaches-using-l1-in-class.html

Some interesting points. I’d never thought about the link to the publishing industry of an English only policy before. In the majority of cases, though, non-native speaker teachers are using too much L1 in the classroom, not too little, and the case for using more L1 is again a native-speaker-based elitist argument that could easily be picked up as justification for outdated translation-based teaching in state schools, even though that is not the intention.

I have experimented with limited use and no use of L1, and I have never found the use of L1 to be a good thing in either the adult or children’s classes I have taught. The classic example given for useless avoidance of L1 is explaining something for a long time in English that could be translated in seconds. However, if your students see that you need to resort to Spanish to explain something to them, how are they going to believe they can explain themselves in English to you? Ditto for trying to get them to use a monolingual rather than a bilingual dictionary and write words to learn down in English rather than as translations- all great training to stop translating in your head.

Rather than choosing to translate by when it is quicker than using English, a much better choice is to translate when it is more accurate than using English. For example, a translation of the word into Spanish might be more accurate than a synonym in English, as there are never really two words in English with the same level of formality etc. I also use it when explaining plants and birds and when contrasting things like false friends. Even then, I prefer to show them the entry in a bilingual dictionary rather than use their language myself, so that they retain the illusion that they always need to use English to communicate with me- just like the best approach for the parent of a bilingual child.

That is it for use of L1- and certainly never to give the instructions for an activity, as this is the only language that is constantly recycled in class and so likely to be picked up naturally.

By the way, I think it’s very interesting how “Using L1 in the English classroom” sounds much more positive than “Speaking Spainish in the English class”, even though they mean the same thing.

One more little bugbear- why should I need to join Google blogs to comment on some blogs? Now that Bill Gates has gone good, Google are the new James Bond villians of the Internet, I reckon, trying to take over the world…

Something from Japanzine manages to make me laugh again, and this time with something that isn’t really offensive at all:

AWAKENINGS A true story about a passionate and somewhat unorthodox English teacher who struggles to cure students of ‘Eigolepsy’, a speaking disorder which strikes many students rendering them motionless and seemingly catatonic.  Using an unconventional teaching technique, he succeeds in ‘awakening’ several of them. At first he is buoyed by the success of his treatments and several exciting encounters occur as the classroom is brought back to life.  But later he is saddened when he finds that eventually they all suffer a relapse of the disease and he loses interest in trying to communicate with them. 

More here: http://www.quirkyjapan.or.tv/touristbusdown.htm