Job Discussion Forums

[Mark]

Yeah, being an ALT can be frustrating. I think the OP's situation is worse than average, but it's probably not unheard of. Even at a good school, though, it can be frustrating.

I think everything makes a lot more sense if you realize that the point of English class is not to teach the kids to speak English. The point of English class is to prepare students to pass the English portion of the entrance exams. The entrance exams do not test the students' ability to communicate in English.

That's basically it. ALTs are a lame attempt to try and include some communicative content.

The criteria for the exam system seems to be:
1) The teachers understand the exam and know how to prepare for it
2) The exam should look really complicated but should have lots of cheats so that students can pass it without really understanding very much

At my school, the students spend most of their time translating extremely complicated English readings. They translate words and phrases into Japanese (or rather the Japanese teacher does and they copy it down) until they have a translation of the whole thing. I guess they do this because translating really complicated stuff seems more impressive than reading stuff that the students can actually understand.

My students actually had to read Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. I mean, come on! Most of the students can't string two sentences together, but that's their reading! But this is the sort of training they need to pass those exams.

As for the kids, I think they'll be a lot more friendly if they feel like they can communicate with you in Japanese. My rule is that I'll repond to Japanese if I understand it, but I'll answer in English. The kids understand more than they can say, so that usually works out.

But I have a lot of sympathy for the students here. Their English classes are difficult and require a great deal of memorization. And, on top of that, they don't actually learn to communicate and can't use English for the things they might enjoy (movies, TV, music, etc.). It must be very frustrating for them. Not to mention that English classes are mandatory, so kids who want to speak English are mixed in with kids who don't care.

My school has an English conversation elective and that was a pretty good class. I made it English-only and based it around communicative tasks. The kids were willing to speak English and the class size was limited to 14. It was nice because that was an actual language class.

[Brooks]

things are changing because university entrance exams have a listening component.
So, at high schools at least, foreign teachers are needed to teach oral skills, since high school teaching focuses on tests.
The schools that refuse to budge and want the ALTs to be merely human tape recorders are pathetically behind the curve.

[Mark]

True, but I don't know that ALTs are really needed to teach listening skills. Japanese teachers can teach test-taking techniques and practice with recorded listening exercises.

At my high school, students do oral communication in 1st and 2nd year and then the third year is mainly reading/translation. But they mainly do reading/translation, grammar and listening activities in 2nd year despite the name of the class.

Thankfully, I'm allowed to plan my own lessons and I do communicative exercises with the 2nd year classes I teach. But, unfortunately, the third-year classes are reading classes, so I'm limited to designing reading comprehension activities for the horrendously difficult readings the students have to do.

I chat with the students as I walk around the class while they're doing their activities so they at least get some experience communicating. Despite all the problems in the system, quite a few of them are pretty good. I guess it goes to show that some people will learn regardless of the kind of class they're put in.

[Brooks]

well, if ALTs are not here to teach listening skills, then what should they teach? Speaking? Pronunciation? Culture?
I assumed they were hired to teach what Japanese English teachers can`t or aren`t willing to teach.

If JTEs would speak English in class, they could teach listening skills better, but in reality I think native teachers are here to do that.

I feel obligated to teach listening in class, but I am not an ALT.

[Mark]

I see what you mean.

I just meant that ALTs aren't necessary to teach the listening skills necessary to pass listening tests. Assuming the JTE can actually speak English well enough to understand the tape or CD that the class is using.

I think ALTs are here mainly to give the students a chance to interact with a foreigner in English. Beyond that, it seems like every school has its own ideas about what the ALTs are expected to teach.

[Brooks]

ideally of course, if JTEs were all quite competent in English, people like us wouldn`t be needed. But I don`t see that happening.
My current boss got his MA in TESOL from the US. But there aren`t many teachers like that.
Next year I will be teaching a listening class to 12th graders, although there will be Japanese teachers doing this as well.

[Willy_In_Japan]

In my opinion, native speakers (ALTs) are needed in class to teach pronunciation and natural ways of expressing yourself.

At my Junior school, there is a listening component to the High School Entrance exams. I can't tell you how perplexed I was when no one understood me when I said "girl', because I didn't say it in a Katakana way!

I have virtually banned Katakana pronunciation in my class, and it helps their listening, because they don't think that "goo reee new" is a colour, and "Kay key" is a nice treat. No wonder a lot of people look totally confused from a simple question after three years of English study, because they don't recognise the "English".

I taught them how a native speaker says 'girl', and the word is prominent in our current song 'Dancing Queen' by Abba. I no longer have students mock me as if I am making noises when I say 'Hello girls!' anymore.

I don't know how many people have taken a foreign language in school, but I took French in High School, and German in University, and I recall there being listening and speaking exercises. I don't know why it shouldn't be the same here.

[Brooks]

yep, I agree.
Where I work, of course I teach oral skills and culture, but the main thing is that the students improve their knowledge of English.
English should be taught as the living language it is, and not as a dead language like Latin.

[Mark]

I agree as well. I've only worked at one high school and all the English teachers speak English extremely well so I haven't been at a school where the teachers speak to the students in katakana English.

[jesszilla]

Thanks for the moral support, folks. I think at this moment that's what I need more than anything just to make it through to the end.
Let's see - on the topic of exams, I'd have to disagree with you, Mark. I've heard this stated before, that they teach to the exams, but I've looked at many of the exams. I've looked at the prefectural public school exams, and many of the private high school exams in my area. I haven't seen any of the achievement tests, but I would assume that the English portions of the exam are probably similar.
From the exams I've seen, reading and listening comprehension seem to be the biggest portion. In my language learning experience (Japanese is my 5th language) I find memorizing grammar to be practically useless in that regard. In my opinion, they need practice with top-down comprehension strategies - skimming and scanning to find a main idea, guessing new words from context, listening for key words and then for details, etc. I think that this is exactly the kind of thing that ALTs should be excellent for. If we write short simplified English accounts of our experiences, or find short native texts that kids can practice on (i.e. advertisements, weather reports, etc) then the students can practice exactly the type of top down comprehension skills that they need, instead of the bottom-up translate-every-word approach, which takes four hours to find the meaning.
Some of the exams I've seen also have questions on pronunciation, stress, and intonation. ALTs can be helpful with that too, I think. We can do minimal pair exercises to emphasize differences between sounds in spoken English, homonyms and homophones like "their" and "they're", "present" (noun) and "present" (verb), etc. Also, my teachers have indicated that they don't really understand anything about phonics rules - I think ALTs can be great help with phonics too - the different sounds of "ea" in "bear" and "dear", etc. These are all specific skills that they need for the exams I've seen. I haven't seen any exams so far that require them to explain which part of the sentence is the "kakokei" (past tense) or the "genzaibunshi" (I can't remember what this one means, but it's a grammatical term in Japanese).
Willy_in_Japan, the binder idea is a good one. I've been jotting all of my ideas down in various notebooks, and the worksheets and lesson plans have accumulated in various places, but I haven't collected them all in one place. I've already started planning my first few weeks of lessons for next term - I wrote my lesson plan and activities stuff for my self-introduction lesson, and I've been collecting a bunch of interesting phonics and listening activities for warm-ups for first year. I definitely need to put it together in a more professional way, though.
I have also decided to make word searches, crosswords, anagrams, etc. to go with the lessons, but we'll have a new textbook starting in April, so I can't do that until I get the new book. I am making a bunch of supplementary semantic set word games, though - colors, body parts, occupations, and so on.
I've also been spending a lot of energy on elementary school lesson plans. The ones we did this year were pretty lame, and I didn't have much input, since I only received the topic/theme of the lesson the day before, and I never had any opportunity to discuss with the HRTs. But I've decided that I'm just going to prepare a bunch of lesson plans and be EXTREMELY proactive about cornering the HRTs and making suggestions.
hivans, I've been looking at JALT. I keep an eye on the events schedule on the web page, and it doesn't look like the Chiba branch has a whole lot going on. I was planning to go to a couple of the workshops in Yokohama branch, though. I should probably attend a regular meeting just to check it out. Thanks for the suggestion.
As for Japanese study, I've been taking a community ed class, but I've had a lot of problems with it. The class only meets twice a month, and it moves s-l-o-w-e-r than molasses. There are only 3 students, my boyfriend, myself, and one other woman. The other woman has been in Japan for 13 years and basically doesn't really have any interest in studying Japanese. She comes to the class only to placate her husband. Unfortunately for us, this woman does no homework or study, and so she never understands what we're doing, so the teacher caters the speed of the class to her. We've been accomplishing maybe 2 chapters in Japanese for Busy People I per month.
The other problem with this situation is that my boyfriend and I finished Genki I before we came to Japan, and we should have started at least with Japanese for Busy People II right when we got here, but there isn't a higher level class, so we're stuck.
We've been using Minna no Nihongo for self-study, which is great, but I would really benefit from some feedback from an instructor. I have no problems with comprehension, so I can do the reading and listening, but I have no one to review any production tasks, like writing or speaking. So I understand a great deal of Japanese, but I don't have much practice using it.
As far as dialogue memorization being used by the CIA, I believe that's true. That's how the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California teaches languages, anyway. Several of my Arabic instructors at the University of Arizona had previously worked at DLI. That was a component of my Arabic language instruction, but I think it only works well in the beginning stages, when you need to acquire those first 500 words quickly. After that, I think it's really necessary to have communicative tasks to do, or else you lose motivation.
I do speak Japanese with the kids a little bit, but the homeroom teachers tend to yell at the students if they catch them speaking Japanese with me. At lunchtime, the homeroom teachers are very stern...I think they feel that they have to show me "important guest"-level politeness, and therefore the students should be speaking English for my comfort, and also for their educational benefit. The end result, though, is that the kids just don't speak to me at all unless the teachers aren't around, which is practically never. As cornishmuppet said, these kids definitely don't want another English lesson during lunch, and I certainly don't want to force anything on them. I would like them to communicate with me one way or the other!
I had a blast learning all my languages, and I only wish that there had been a native speaker available to me when I was learning Spanish in junior and senior high school. What I'd really like is for the kids to discover the joy in learning languages and communicating with someone from another culture, because it's something that I myself enjoy.
I also think that many people hated French, German, Spanish, whatever, because they are expected to make the leap from memorizing grammar or memorizing monologues and then implementing these things into natural-sounding conversation. I think that if English (or any foreign language) were taught in a more conversational way, with questions and answers, exchange of information, and interesting topics, that more people would learn to enjoy it.
I liked Spanish and French in high school and college, but when I learned Arabic in the intensive summer program at Middlebury College, I fell in love. It was the most fun I've ever had in school, because they made it interesting and relevant, and we didn't do stupid textbook drills. We wrote short essays about our families and the people important to us. We had debates on the status of languages other than English in the United States - bilingual education, official languages, English as a second language. We did 20 minute presentations on our hobbies and interests - I did mine on tarot card reading. I wrote a paper on Clive Barker and horror movies. We wrote poetry and sang songs, all in Arabic. And we did all this in the first 9 weeks of our language learning - I didn't know ANY Arabic at all before I entered the program. I really feel very strongly that if the students are given the leeway to express themselves that they can really learn to enjoy language learning. And this is the kind of experience that I'd like these kids to have. Unfortunately, there is absolutely zero chance of this happening!

[jesszilla]

PS Willy_in_Japan, I didn't mention this before, but your classes sound great! Those are definitely the kind of classes I have in mind.
Unfortunately, cornishmuppet, there isn't really much hope of getting hired directly by our BOE. Maybe if I do a TEFL cert next summer. We've asked, but the response hasn't been very promising. My immediate ALT supervisor gives me great feedback, but her immediate boss will be changing positions in April, and someone new will be in his place, so it's a matter of seeing how the politics shake out at the end of first term (July). But I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
Sorry once again for the long windy posts, and thanks for the positive feedback, all.