Job Discussion Forums

[gaijinalways]

I had a bit of a jolt this morning after talking to a full timer at one of my unis. She told me about teaching a class for preparation for teachers planning to obtain certificates to teach in government junior high schools in Japan. Interestingly enough, this course which teaches ESL theory is all taught in Japanese with bilingual material. When I asked the teacher why it's 100% taught in Japanese, she repeated a few times that it is a "content" class. I then agreed with her that the teachers don't necessarily need to "teach" this knowledge to students, but still I found it odd that this is considered as an English class when the amount of English used in the class is pretty minimal. Actually, the few times she admitted to using English was when the ESL linguistic terms were not available in Japanese.

Just to relate a problem with teaching this class in another department. An "all English" department with students who finished that class, reported to a Japanese teacher in a post-course interview that they understood very little of the high level ESL theory due to poor comprehension.

Comments please....

[gaijinalways]

I would like to add another teacher training related question to this thread. In teacher training (and related prep. classes for teaching English and English language related classes ), how much of this is done in English in the country you're working in?

What percentage of these courses should be taught in English in your opinion?

[fluffyhamster]

Well, you've more or less answered a lot of this in the second paragraph of your first post: if students are taught the content in English, it makes it difficult for them to understand, which would rather seem to defeat the purpose.

But in an ideal world of course, the students would have a high enough level of English to be taught the content of such courses in English, as is the case in other countries (not just English-speaking ones) around the world. And there would be a pleasing underlying consistency in teachers of English having such a sufficient grasp of the language. (As it is, one has to wonder if there are any serious examinations of especially the oral abilities of some JTEs, given their comparatively poor English).

Generally though I think that teacher training should as regards at least the theoretical components be done in the language of the country the teacher is studying in (and most likely a native of).

[BadBeagleBad]