Javizy wrote: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.
