Interviewing for a teaching position in Japan... Help/Advice

[Mr Srippery]

Hello,

I have an interview in about three weeks for a teaching position in Japan, and I need to bring a few things to the interview I was helping someone might be able to help me with.

I need to bring a 30-minute lesson plan and teach five minutes of it. Now, I have no formal teaching experience and have never had to draw up a lesson plan of any kind, so I'm not exactly sure how to go about doing this. I was thinking I would just make a basic outline, like I did for my English papers in school (utilizing roman numerals, a, b, c, etc...) but I'm not sure if that's standard practice.

The e-mail I received says...

"Most Japanese adults have studied some English in the school system and have basic reading and writing skills. Your target audience will be made up of other candidates. However, they represent Japanese students who speak and understand English at a beginner level."

I don't know what the "beginner level" is, and maybe they will be able to tell me, but as far as my lesson plan goes, I was thinking I would just go over something relatively simple, such as the proper usages of 'a' and 'an,' or is that too basic for a "beginner level" student? I know some native English speakers that have trouble with it, after all.

Also, can anyone recommend any courses I could take to help make me a better teacher? I've seen some TEFL courses offered online, but I'm not sure if those are as "good" as others. So, if anyone call give me information on that I would appreciate it.

Arigatou gozaimasu,

Srippery

[Taurus]

There is some useful information here and here.

If you send me a pm with your email address I can send you an example of one of my lesson plans so you can have a look, if you like (although I'd recommend you only look at it as an example of structure/layout rather than at the content since my lesson plans are far from expert and are designed for students who are very reluctant to participate).

I think that if you don't know what level your students will be, it would be a good idea to make a lesson plan that is geared towards finding out, or one that is scalable (ie. with questions/activities that are a bit open-ended so that they can be attempted by students of different levels).

I think a/an is fine, by the way - I teach Senior High School students who have been studying English for between three and six years and plenty of them still get it wrong.

[Mr Srippery]

Yatta! Guess who's going to Japan

[winterpromise31]

Congrats!!

[Javizy]

I've been wondering what English lessons are like in Japan. I hear lots of bad things and speak to learners who make the most god-awful beginner errors after years of ei-kaiwa classes. Do they expect you to just stand at the front talking for an hour? Would they stifle you if you tried to teach things in a more modern and effective way?

This book will teach you everything you'd learn on a CELTA course for £900 cheaper. It tells you how to teach the different skills in different ways, and explains how to do things like give instructions, check meaning, correct errors, stage lessons, etc. Things that would seem simple, like giving instructions, actually take a surprising amount of practice to get right, and this book will help you avoid lots of common mistakes.

I also recommend this grammar reference, and this book on phonology.

[Taurus]

I've been wondering what English lessons are like in Japan. I hear lots of bad things and speak to learners who make the most god-awful beginner errors after years of ei-kaiwa classes. Do they expect you to just stand at the front talking for an hour? Would they stifle you if you tried to teach things in a more modern and effective way?

Like everything, it depends (you can stop reading here if you want - I didn't intend to go into quite so much detail in the rant that follows!). I don't think English lessons in Japan are any worse than, say, French lessons in England. I don't think the problem is the way English is taught; the problem is that understanding/speaking English has almost no practical benefit for the vast majority of Japanese people. In my experience, Japanese people who need English will learn it, well - people who are attracted to English-speaking cultures; people who work with foreign companies; people who have to pass English exams to get into good universities (although for this latter category there isn't so much of a requirement to speak English so much as understand written English).

The problem with eikaiwa is the same problem with classes anywhere - that speaking English for one hour a week and forgetting about it for the rest of the week is not enough.

As for what is expected of English teachers, that will vary, but I work as an ALT in a Senior High School (ie. 15-18-year-olds) and I'm given pretty much free reign with my lessons. But I only see my classes for 50 minutes a week, and they receive the rest of their tuition from Japanese Teachers of English (JTEs), so it's not like I get to plan a full curriculum. And most of my students have no interest in English: the first-years are made to study it; and the second- and third-years sometimes choose to study it to get out of serious lessons.

So I tend to stick to playing games like pictionary and charades, because anything that requires the students to voluntarily write or speak in English will usually just be met with a wall of silence and inactivity, or the kids will just chat to each other in Japanese. And while pictionary and charades are fun for the kids, they're not getting much out of it apart from reinforcing vocab and sentence patterns that they then won't bother to study outside of class.

My most successful classes are grammar lessons with a small class of third-year students. Every lesson I teach them a grammar point and then play a team game to reinforce it by forcing them to use the target grammar. But if I had completely free reign and more time with the students, I would also watch a shitload of movies (though with more prep-work than we do when we watch movies at the moment); I would set the students reading assignments in their own time; give them free reading time in my classes; and do lots of rote repetition of sentence patterns.

I also have a one on one conversation class with a 12-year-old girl, but she is very motivated and she knows the grammar and vocab already, so I spend those lessons just trying to get her in the habit of talking and listening - watching movies, playing DS games, playing pen-and-paper games etc. rather than actually 'teaching' her anything.

The one thing that did shock me was when I was sitting in on one of my JTE's classes and he tested pronunciation by writing a word on the board in its constituent syllables and then asking the students where the stress should be placed - so the kids were practicing their pronunciation without ever having to even speak. Oh, and the classroom discipline stumps me, too. If I had my way, any kid who is found to be sleeping would be made to stand; and any student who doesn't finish their work would stay behind after school until they do it (not necessarily as punishment, by the way, but so that I can spend time with them to work out why they aren't completing their work).

So yeah, bad things happen in English lessons in Japan, as they do anywhere - but my own pet theory is that there are a lot of young English teachers who come over here straight after graduating, without very much experience of teaching in their own countries (or, indeed, working in their own countries), who rage about the way things are done in Japan because they don't know how things are done in their own countries.

They come out of western universities believing all the rhetoric about meritocracy and freedom, and they think they have all of the answers because someone told them they're good at writing essays. And when those people come to Japan they bellow about how badly things are done here - not realising that actually it's pretty similar to how things are done at home. Every western workplace I've ever worked at is just as rigidly hierarchical and opposed to freedom of expression as any Japanese workplace that I've experienced, and just as ruthlessly inefficient.

So I don't think there is a simple solution to teaching a language to students who 'ought' to learn it (rather than those who 'need' to learn it); I don't think Japan has found the solution yet, but nor has any other country.

[Javizy]

Interesting perspective. I've only taught adults who were there because they wanted to learn, and since they were in the UK, they had an immediate practical need for the language. It's in stark contrast to what you describe. That's why doing CELTA appealed to me, since the aim is to teach adults at private colleges or in further education. Thinking back to when I did German in school, it was pretty much exactly as you describe. The communicative approach may be effective, but it's just not going to work if your students don't want to be a part of it. Even so, it sounds like you're doing your best to move away from the full-on lecture format.

You have to feel sorry for the people who really want to learn English and go to these ei-kaiwa places though. There's no reason why proper communicative lessons couldn't work with a room full of adults eager to learn and paying for the privilege. They seem more interested in trying to charge people £100 for a £20 textbook than actually teaching them English though. I wonder if there are actually any colleges that teach classes with standards like you'd find here. There definitely are in other countries, because my tutors talked about teaching in a number of them.

[untmdsprt]

Here's another reason why you may want to rethink your desire to teach English in Japan:

http://blog.gaijinpot.com/kuchi/english ... ptcy/8139/

Items like this is just giving me more motivation to pass the JLPT and get out of teaching English.