Job Discussion Forums

[blue jay]

japantoday > national

Gov't to boost number of assistant English teachers


Wednesday, August 11, 2004 at 05:33 JST
TOKYO � The government plans to boost the number of native speakers of English who assist in English classes at public elementary schools to about 1,000 in fiscal 2006, up from 73 in the current fiscal year, home affairs minister Taro Aso said Tuesday.

Aso, minister of public management, home affairs, posts and telecommunications, told a news conference that the number of assistant teachers will initially be increased to about 400 in fiscal 2005. (Kyodo News)

I thought this might be of interest to anyone out there is looking for jobs in the future & were wondering what the prospects were like.

blue jay

[Glenski]

Be prepared to teach the Japanese teachers how to teach. The last edict from the government didn't give them the opportunity.

[PAULH]

Just to support what Glenski said

Elementary school teachers are trained to teach 6 or 7 subjects, not including English
They are not trained to teach English, which is not even an official subject in elementary school but an elective option. Some schools only have English once every month or two months and the class is not even about language per se.
Japanese elementary school teachers are not trained language teachers, and know nothing about communicative language teaching methodology, and 95% of them do not speak any English or enough to conduct a lesson.
(the foreign will teach the lesson but the Japanese teacher will still head the class). 70% of them receive no prior pre-service training in language teaching methodology.
Many of the ALTs hired to teach in elementary school know next to nothing about how to teach children or how children learn languages.
Many of them also speak no English which should make it interesting as 1000 ALTS being brought in from overseas will probably speak no Japanese either and know nothing about working in a japanese elementary school.

[Hondo 2.0]

One of my long-term goals is to get a M.Ed. in second language education. I'm going to research team-teaching methodology as it relates to second-language acquistion in adolescent and pre-adolscent learners. I'm going to design an in-service training program, and market it to MEXT. Maybe this will be the thesis for an Ed.D.

[Celeste]

I work at an Education Centre in Kyushu (in service training for teachers) and part of my job is to teach elementary school teachers how to teach English. So far the biggest problem that most of my trainees have had is that there is currently no curriculum to teach from. Last year, the English research group at our centre designed a curriculum for teachers in our city to use, and those who are using it are having a much better time of it than those who are trying to think up something to teach every week or two. THe skills that I am teaching include rudimentary pronunciation, useful classroom commands, games and songs, and how to put together a lesson plan that works. (I teach this in 3 sessions of 3 hours each. In my opinion it is not long enough, but we make do with the time we have.) There are no Monbusho standards for this sort of thing. Every education centre in the country is doing something different. There are also no guidelines from Monbusho on what the role of an ALT should be in the classroom. I find that they avoid giving any clear directives or guidelines so as not to catch any of the blame if something goes wrong. Unfortunately, this means that a lotof their documents are vague and thigs go wrong because no one is sure how to interpret what they are trying to say.

Small rant- sorry.

[Gordon]

My hat is off to you Celeste. That looks like a demanding job and especially wthout any guidelines to go on. The one benefit is that you have some freedom to try what you think will work rather than being forced to try something you know will be doomed to failure. It must be difficult to teach someone how to teach English if they don't know how to speak English. How would you like to teach Japanese in Canada? It would be a scary thought wouldn't it?

[EricCC]

I would just like to know how much these jobs are going to pay and what the qualifications are. I had a friend who worked in Japan in the late 90's in a similar situation. He was paid over $30,000 a year with free room and flight to Japan and at the end of his stay. Is this just a thing of the past....

[Glenski]