Why aren’t there more CELTA qualified teachers in Japan?
After getting illuminating, intellectually piercing responses to this question on Rave Spelling’s ESL Au Lait Japan forum like “because no one cares” (Only possible response- okay, so why does no one care!) from self-proclaimed well-qualified and experienced “real teachers” before they started throwing around personal insults and got the topic locked, I have no choice but tackle this point on my own. Here are three ideas below:
- Because the managers from most schools haven’t gone through the Cambridge teaching qualifications system themselves, they are unlikely to demand a CELTA of their teachers. For example, if you see your CELTA or DELTA as a proof of your own professionalism you are more likely to demand the same of your teachers or see the value of it on their CV. It is noticeable that chains of schools with overwhelmingly British management are more likely to ask for CELTA, and this seems to me the man reason why.
- In a similar way, because no schools in Japan sell TEFL teacher training courses like the CELTA (because of reasons like the cost of living here making it cheaper for people to do one in Thailand or at home), they don’t need to demand it of their teachers to boost the status of their own training courses.
- In Japanese companies there is a tradition of taking on new graduates without specific qualifications for their job in order to train them into the company’s own way of doing business while they are still young and impressionable, and being trained in someone else’s way of doing things might even be seen as a negative. In government and other Japanese-owned schools it seems possible that that attitude stretches also to the English teachers. In a similar way, you can see from the link below that MBAs are much less popular in Japan than in Europe or the USA.
www.referenceforbusiness.com/encyclopedia/Int-Jun/Japanese-Management-Techniques.html
More ideas please from my TEFLtastic tribe:
August 22nd, 2007 at 2:21 pm
I like the third point a lot, never really thought about it but looking around my own employer i can totally see the logic in effect – it’s also a lot easier for school managers with little understanding of the job and what it requires to make demands of teachers which are pretty ridiculous.
I cant really think of much else apart from what you said and i dont have that much experience about Japan. But if anything I would say Japanese students’ expectations in general and attitudes towards learning English (more as a hobby then anything else from what i see day in day out), as you’ve pointed out before, also probably contribute to this.
August 22nd, 2007 at 2:53 pm
I don’t know about Japan, but if it’s anything like South Korea in this respect then I’d suggest that it could also be because of the staggering number of teachers from North America, where RSA CELTA isn’t a big thing. Why ask for a qualification that isn’t in the tradition of most of your potential employees?
Plus, I think that for those of us who started out with a CELTA background, we were brainwashed into considering it as the one true way. But that’s not necessarily true.
Indeed, if CELTA’s still training teachers to use a mainly product-teaching approach – on an IH RSA CELTA course in 1996 they drilled into me Test-Teach-Test, the nasty spawn of the equally nasty PPP and the hideous approach used by 99% of course books – then it can be argued that CELTA and DELTA are not all they’re cracked up to be, anyway. Not that I’m aware of any kind of international standardised alternative, though.
August 22nd, 2007 at 4:08 pm
It’s for-profit education in Asia.
Most students come because their companies/parents decide it will be beneficial for them. No argument brokered.
Some come for a social gathering, some for a status boost, some for career reasons, some out of genuine lingustic interest.
Teaching methods here are a couple of decades “behind” – even the communicative approach (born of the 60′s/70′s) is massively controversial and sparingly used in Asia.
Hence – why bother? Why bother hiring, training, supporting or retaining career-minded, serious, professional EFL teachers? Why bother, when you can obtain a year-long contract with a native-speaking college graduate(who’s loud, personable & keeps your students happy), for less money?
It’s, sadly, the nature of EFL in general. Long-term (~10 years), I’d imagine a professional school, with well-trained & serious staff alongside the requisite higher prices, would do well. In the short-term? A cheaper school with 22-year-old white people & shiny colourful books will make more money. Are school owners educators or businessmen? Generally the latter…
[For the record, I have, and swear by the merit of, a CELTA]
August 22nd, 2007 at 11:32 pm
Appy Linguist- good point about the number of Americans, who if they do anything often do an MA TESOL instead. Apparently Malaysia demands an MA minimum for an English teaching visa, as do some middle eastern countries, but Japan is hardly likely to go down that route. Leaving teachers with nothing…
PPP I will deal with shortly.
S- All those things are true, but many of them are true for Europe as well. Also, I am not sure that a 22-year old with no qualifications does keep the punters happy, at least not as much as someone with the same personality and qualifications go.
This should all go in “Why so many bad teachers” thread, but it has just occured to me that the other factor in Japan is that some people prefer teachers who don’t know the culture or speak the language because then they can explain Japan to them and they know they have to speak to them in English because they don’t understand Japanese- and hence the communication is more “real”.
August 23rd, 2007 at 4:05 am
Alex,
You are still wrong. The main reason CELTA is not used in Japan is because of the lack of need for it. Elementary schools prepare kids for junior high, which prepares kids for high school, which study only for college entrance exams, and only the Japanese teachers provide the crux of the English grammar education. Foreign teachers serve only as mouthpieces in most cases. That is, kids need to hear natural English, and even “need” is a relative term because most of the entrance exams don’t even have a listening or speaking component.
Eikaiwas. Well, they don’t teach grammar, and the main point there is the socializing that most students want, whether with each other or the teacher. Serious study is not the norm.
Universities. They are just overcrowded eikaiwas. Not many teach serious English.
International schools only require teaching credentials and experience from your home country, no CELTA.
The government touts its “initiatives” to better the education here, but if you’ve been here even a few short years, you know how wishy washy that is. Heck, the current administration just did a 180 on putting English as mandatory in elem ed schools!
CELTA is just not needed.
Oh, and your “here” link is dead.
August 23rd, 2007 at 4:53 am
You make a good point about students wanting a genuinely “foreign” teacher – it does lead to much more realistic, useful communication in such cases.
And you’re right that many of my points also apply to Europe, and anywhere where EFL is taught, really. Perhaps a key difference in Asia is that more students here *are* willing to accept an unqualified, unmotivated teacher. Two reasons for this which spring instantly to mind:
- A white face is still something of an exotic novelty, and works as a marketing tool, too.
- Compared to Europeans, many Asian students have less experience of learning foreign languages, and have been exposed to fewer different teaching/learning methods and approaches. If someone doesn’t understand or care about the benefits of feedback and language anaylsis, of the pros and cons of a task-based approach, the reasoning behind using pair- or group-work… well, they (be they student or school owner) won’t invest time & money in finding a teacher who does, either.
True, a qualified, able teacher will generally get better feedback from students than an unqualified one, but students & companies are willing to accept a fairly low standard a lot of the time.
I hope this doesn’t sound overly critical or cynical – I love this profession and this part of the world, and am all for anything which could improve the standard of EFL here – but it’s difficult not to be cynical sometimes.
August 23rd, 2007 at 5:41 am
Joe, I don’t argue with any of your ideas. The reason why I have chosen not to mention them is simply because I think they are well known and I was hoping to add something to the debate. Which is factor is the main one is where you need to get into statistics and research, neither of which are my strong point despite my scientific background. As this is just a blog and therefore mainly a hobby I choose to do the brainstorming myself and leave the bell curves to someone else…
I have some experience of most of the situations that English is taught in Japan and I find in all of them that the skills you pick up in the CELTA leads to happier students and management, if with a little adaption for each situation. The question is why this does not lead to more of the teachers who have such skills teaching in such situations. I think the reasons are probably many and varied.
Do some Eikaiwa reallly not have a grammar syllabus at all? I must say I have only heard of one where that was true, and they still had a syllabus but based more on functions and sentence stems (something that seems to work well in Japan). I know of one school that has banned “free con” lessons because the management have realised that although students think they want it, they also think that it is a “disposable lesson” and feel free to drop out anytime with the idea they can pick it up later without losing out on anything.
I think they are right that there is no need for English in Elementary schools, btw, although they have no doubt made their decision for all the wrong reasons.
Can’t find a link in this post, maybe using the word “here” in the intro is confusing, will change it to “below”.
August 23rd, 2007 at 5:50 am
S- I agree with both of your points. The one of students not knowing what pairwork is and so not demanding it is particularly apt- although keen Japanese Elem and Junior High teachers are sometimes ahead of the Eikaiwa in things like this and using phonemic script (if only the keen ones), which is quite the opposite of places like Spain.
A completely different way of looking at the question is that by coincidence a few things happened in Japan that have no particular connection to the culture in general but have affected the whole industry. For example, there might well be no more reason for the “success” of Nova than the personality and business plan of the founder, which has gone on to lead to the “Novation” of the whole industry.
Ditto with a few specific decisions in some government department somewhere that set the whole country on a particular track. No idea about this in terms of English teaching (maybe no one does yet??), but I know the whole of the American occupation was full of moments like this you can’t fully understand modern Japan without knowing about. If there is a juicy book about the inside workings of the Japanese education ministry in either Japanese or English I would love to hear about it.
August 26th, 2007 at 1:18 pm
Interesting discussion especially for a n00b like me.
I’ll stick to being a geek for the meantime and clarify the broken link thing Alex:
“In a similar way, you can see here that MBAs are much less popular in Japan than in Europe or the USA.”
You’ve linked the word here in that sentence. The link has your url before the link hence why it’s broken. This normally happens when the html tag hasn’t been properly written and is missing one or more components (ie a
August 26th, 2007 at 1:20 pm
dammit… here’s the other half, hopefully this works :(
(ie a
August 27th, 2007 at 8:05 am
Sorry Laurent, I really shouldnt laugh but seeing me as not the only one having technical problems made me guffaw so much I disturbed the other teachers I think. Anyway, this is also my third try but I think I fixed it. How the person who asked me for this data could be in Japan for so long and not have known that MBAs are less popular here than almost anywhere else I dont know! Unless they were taking the words Lack of MBAs to mean zero???
August 27th, 2007 at 2:01 pm
I
August 27th, 2007 at 2:03 pm
BWAHAHAHAHAHA man i should just quite while im ahead…
This is what i wrote this time:
I heart computers ;) i figured out what made the comments cut off but cant remember what i wrote. Glad it made you laugh tho!
PS: using an open triangular bracket seems to cut off any text after it. I used it to make a heart this time. Last niht i used it as an example… *goes off to make a cup of tea*
August 28th, 2007 at 6:23 am
I really tried not to laugh this time, but I think you take this week’s prize as the Mr Bean of Computing. I will no doubt be reclaiming my crown from you soon though…
August 28th, 2007 at 2:10 pm
*waves fist angrily at screen*
September 12th, 2010 at 8:55 pm
[...] would probably agree it’s better than nothing. A few years ago, Alex Case posed the question “Why aren’t there more CELTA qualified teachers in Japan?”. Alex being Alex, he decided to have a go at answering the question himself. And Alex being Alex, [...]