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GambateBingBangBOOM
Joined: 04 Nov 2003
Posts: 2021
Location: Japan
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 Posted: Sun Oct 02, 2011 1:55 am Post subject: |
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| Mr_Monkey wrote: |
Compulsory, university-level EFL fares little better: massive classes full of switched-off kids who would rather pick their nose and eat it than study English. Japan's dismal performance on international standardised assessments is testimony to this.
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Companies like Rakuten realise that they can't rely on the compulsory education system to furnish the necessary language skills in their employees. |
I agree. But I think aside from the archaic teaching methodology, the main problem is simply the exam system in this country. And the washback of that is that it's virtually impossible to fail an individual course. If a student doesn't learn what's expected, then they pass anyway, and will continue to pass with the assumption that the following entrance exam will catch them if they haven't done the work on their own or at a juku later. That's an appalling way to run an education system because it means that meaningful assessment only occurs every three years (leading to entrance exam 'hell'- they have 'forgotten' what it is that they 'learned' in prior years but have an exam on it... because they never actually learned it in the first place), and once in university, it may not occur again (other than their final thesis). So students simply don't study.
The way I think of it is that companies like Rakuten may be going a little over the top, but basically I think the movement towards English ability in new employes by companies (if it actually is occurring large scale) basically boils down to "Can this person actually use English to the level they have been taught to use it by the end of high school, if not through first year compulsory university?", which basically means "Did this person actually learn what they were supposed to {which is the same as saying Is this person actually as educated as the country expects everybody with a university education to be?} and so can help our company in a global market, or did they just cram at the last second to pass the entrance exam, and then drink a bunch of cola and play video games for another few years? "
I think if students were to be failed and actually have to repeat the course for not achieving a 50% or 60%, and they knew that they would be required to actually use the language to the level in the workplace (so English wasn't just a gatekeeper to university), then the average level of ability would jump up very quickly. And I think that that would be much easier to implement for the government than to try to change the education system itself. What it boils down to is that they need to protect their hierarchy and top down way of doing things (the government to the school administration to the teachers) because that is a large part of what this entire culture is, but they could still require students to learn by acknowledging that you can have excellent teachers (one straightjacket they are dealing with is that the system assumes that teachers are highly trained and care deeply about their students, even though that isn't necessarily the case- it's the fear of 'somebody' {like the media, especially the foreign media} finding out) but if a student doesn't feel like studying (and how many junior high school kids want to study? If they can't do junior high school English, then senior high school English is going to be a massive problem) then they just won't because there can't be any meaningful consequences of that (except possibly removal from club activities) for up to three years, and that's far too distant to expect a child to care about.
The problem with placing the blame on the archaic methodology is the number of people who are successful at learning the language through it- and many of them aren't even involved in English education at all. I've known computer science majors who have really good English- better than a lot of JTEs, and have never been outside of Japan and never even gone to an eikaiwa, but they just studied it as if it were a computer language they were learning. If they try, they can learn the language that way, but most students in this country just don't try. |
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Glenski
Joined: 15 Jan 2003
Posts: 12844
Location: Hokkaido, JAPAN
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| Posted: Sun Oct 02, 2011 6:35 am Post subject: |
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| GambateBingBangBOOM wrote: |
| The way I think of it is that companies like Rakuten may be going a little over the top, |
Agreed.
| GambateBingBangBOOM wrote: |
| but basically I think the movement towards English ability in new employes by companies (if it actually is occurring large scale) |
It's not large-scale.
| GambateBingBangBOOM wrote: |
| basically boils down to "Can this person actually use English to the level they have been taught to use it by the end of high school, if not through first year compulsory university?", |
I'm sure you realize that the problem here is that after junior high, there is very little and sometimes zero teaching done in high school to afford communicative spoken skills to students. What little it offered is token, and it may not even be given a grade, certainly not any sort of grade equivalent to that given to math, geography, or Japanese language studies.
| Quote: |
| which basically means "Did this person actually learn what they were supposed to |
So sayeth MEXT, anyways...
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| {which is the same as saying Is this person actually as educated as the country expects everybody with a university education to be?} |
"The country"...meaning who exactly? MEXT again? Not with the nebulous guidelines they give!
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| and so can help our company in a global market, or did they just cram at the last second to pass the entrance exam, and then drink a bunch of cola and play video games for another few years? " |
Well, they didn't cram at the last minute for entrance exams. Some start as early as 3rd grade HS. The problem lies in the format of the exams themselves. No oral testing whatsoever except in rare cases.
Of course, after they enter college, it's cola and video games, coupled with club activities, circles, and such which are meant solely to build another "old boy network". For the most part, grades are unimportant to students and to employers. Even the recent push to insert GPAs into college systems is doomed to fail if the way grades are given remains the same. (That is, if little Takashi slept through his classes and didn't pass, he will only have to beg to write a report in order to pass.)
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| they could still require students to learn by acknowledging that you can have excellent teachers |
Teachers follow the system instead of bucking it.
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| The problem with placing the blame on the archaic methodology is the number of people who are successful at learning the language through it- and many of them aren't even involved in English education at all. I've known computer science majors who have really good English- better than a lot of JTEs, and have never been outside of Japan and never even gone to an eikaiwa, but they just studied it as if it were a computer language they were learning. If they try, they can learn the language that way, but most students in this country just don't try. |
What percentage of those computer science majors are we talking about here? I have worked at university now for 5 years and can count the number of seriously motivated language learners on 1 or 2 hands. Most had some experience living abroad, but even for those who did not, they actually had something else going for them in terms of motivation. The question here is why doesn't everyone have that same motivation if they didn't live abroad? Too many factors at play, and I don't have an answer, but since the percentage of such students is so small, I don't think you can use the answers to apply a better system to the rest.
Students need to fail, yes.
Students need to have better entrance exams, yes.
Students need to have grammar-translation courses in HS stopped. (Even a lot of university "literature" classes are G-E, not really literature courses.)
JTEs need to be trained better (if at all) in EFL strategies and theory, and required to live abroad for 3-12 months before teaching.
Grading in university needs to be stricter. |
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rxk22
Joined: 19 May 2010
Posts: 1629
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| Posted: Sun Oct 02, 2011 11:57 am Post subject: |
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Thanks for your thoughts Mr. Monkey.
Guess let me add. I also feel that JTs don't try to improve their English. Whatever it was when they got the job, that's where it will be. I even knew one who over the summer break, his got worse.
Seems like the Japanese can't implement policies dealing with change. Like take over time. The Japanese worker per hour is actually pretty unproductive, so they work a lot of OT. But if they, as a lot of companies wanted to do, was have them work the regular 8 hours, with having more productivity per hour, and less hours overall. Yet, what happened was that all the workers just stayed after work, and did OT off the clock. So, everything changed and yet nothing did.
Much like me becoming a FLT instead of being an ALT. Nothing changed on any meaningful level. |
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Glenski
Joined: 15 Jan 2003
Posts: 12844
Location: Hokkaido, JAPAN
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| Posted: Sun Oct 02, 2011 2:23 pm Post subject: |
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Part of it is working more efficiently, yes. But part of it is cultural.
1. Rule of thumb: don't leave before the boss does. (and he might not leave because he doesn't get along with his wife!)
2. There may be business to attend to in the bars after work. That is where the real business deals are sealed.
Doing OT "off the clock" is pretty standard for salaried employees, whether in a business or a school. |
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Mr_Monkey
Joined: 11 Mar 2009
Posts: 661
Location: Kyuuuuuushuuuuuuu
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| Posted: Mon Oct 03, 2011 2:44 am Post subject: |
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| gaijinalways wrote: |
| I agree. But I think aside from the archaic teaching methodology, the main problem is simply the exam system in this country. And the washback of that is that it's virtually impossible to fail an individual course. If a student doesn't learn what's expected, then they pass anyway, and will continue to pass with the assumption that the following entrance exam will catch them if they haven't done the work on their own or at a juku later. That's an appalling way to run an education system because it means that meaningful assessment only occurs every three years (leading to entrance exam 'hell'- they have 'forgotten' what it is that they 'learned' in prior years but have an exam on it... because they never actually learned it in the first place), and once in university, it may not occur again (other than their final thesis). So students simply don't study. |
Yes. My uni kids are in for a shock on Wednesday when I tell them that whether or not they do their homework this term will have an impact on their score and that their performance in the homework and classroom work will count towards 50% of their final mark.
The assessment system in Japan lacks consequences. However, there are good reasons for this - classes stay together from cradle to grave, so to speak; failing a kid would fundamentally break that system. One could argue that it's fundamentally broken anyway in that it encourages teacher-centred classroom practices to keep the class at the level of the slowest student, but it seemed to work during the economic miracle, and there is much to be said for inclusive practices in the classroom on a social level rather than an academic one. The current (although I suspect soon to be defunct) model promoted in education in the UK is differentiation - classes are not group-streamed, but rather streamed internally by tailoring the activities the students undertake - i.e. altering the materials with extension activities to keep the stronger students challenged, or adding pre-activity tasks to scaffold the learning of weaker students. It sounds great on paper, but in practice it's very time-consuming for the teacher. I don't know if it would fly in Japan, particularly with the inadequate teacher-training here.
It seems you have more information than me on the area of teacher-training: you wrote that the system "assumes that teachers are highly trained..." - can you elaborate on this? My experience is that the teachers are barely trained at all initially, if, indeed, one can even call it training. Are you talking about CPD programs for in-service teachers?
| Quote: |
| The problem with placing the blame on the archaic methodology is the number of people who are successful at learning the language through it- and many of them aren't even involved in English education at all. I've known computer science majors who have really good English- better than a lot of JTEs, and have never been outside of Japan and never even gone to an eikaiwa, but they just studied it as if it were a computer language they were learning. If they try, they can learn the language that way, but most students in this country just don't try. |
I'm not sure I agree here. As Glenski pointed out, the numbers that learn this way are likely statistically negligible (it would be interesting to know though). Moreover, computer languages give feedback - if you get the expression wrong, the whole program is likely to break, or run until that function is called, whereupon... it breaks. Software development environments - even simple HTML editors - highlight different functions and, critically, highlight badly-formed expressions. I would suggest that learning to program taught those students to think in a highly logical and analytical manner, and taught strategies that are highly applicable to language learning for them. Such autonomous learners are the exception rather than the rule.
| glenski wrote: |
| Well, they didn't cram at the last minute for entrance exams. Some start as early as 3rd grade HS. The problem lies in the format of the exams themselves. No oral testing whatsoever except in rare cases. |
I would go further to suggest that there is little testing of communicative competence at all, in either receptive or productive skills. Translation does not necessarily test communicative competence.
There is pretty good research showing that an appropriate test of lexico-grammar is broadly predictive of communicative competence. I understand that Cambridge ESOL have enough data from their Main Suite exams to show that the reading, writing, speaking and listening components of the FCE, for example, are largely unnecessary. They keep them in because of the backwash removing them from the exam would have.
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"Construct validity"? Help me out here.
As for a practical activity, that is debatable, too. Established (veteran) teachers may be comfortable sitting back on lesson plans and lecture notes that have collected dust for years, or they may have unsuitable grading practices (show up and you pass), none of which are really all that "practical". I shudder to think of the lessons that my own university's old man of the sea English teacher provided and left his students woefully unprepared for the next level of studies! |
Construct validity. Basically, the insistence on publications is no guarantee of quality of teaching. If a university cares about teaching....
A master's degree without practicum (as the majority of master's degrees are) and published papers provide little evidence that the teacher is actually competent. Yes, it's a problem in other countries too. I suggest that for EFL in Japan, the problem is worse.
In the counter-example you give above, yes, those practices aren't particularly practical - laziness isn't an indicator of classroom competence. Perhaps they don't even constitute 'teaching', as they certainly don't encourage any learning.
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| Insisting on publishing papers should have merit, I think. In EFL, just what research a teacher is doing to publish may be practical or theoretical (just like chemistry or physics). So, as long as the papers are in peer-reviewed journals (preferably international ones), they will be worthy of the research done. If not worthy, they will not be accepted. Universities here have their point system for promotions that go over all publications with scrutiny to confirm how many points they get. The problem (and I think you agree with this) is when institutions hold publications above anything else to determine a teacher's merit for promotion. |
For full-time tenured/tenure-track positions, sure. But when the contract to be awarded to the teacher is a two-year, no-renewals deal (for whatever reason)? Publications are indicative of good researchers, not teachers. Whether it's a criticism of Japanese universities or universities in general isn't particularly important, it's still critically relevant to EFL education in Japan.
| Quote: |
Students need to fail, yes.
Students need to have better entrance exams, yes.
Students need to have grammar-translation courses in HS stopped. (Even a lot of university "literature" classes are G-E, not really literature courses.)
JTEs need to be trained better (if at all) in EFL strategies and theory, and required to live abroad for 3-12 months before teaching.
Grading in university needs to be stricter. |
Yes. |
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rxk22
Joined: 19 May 2010
Posts: 1629
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| Posted: Mon Oct 03, 2011 4:44 am Post subject: |
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| Glenski wrote: |
Part of it is working more efficiently, yes. But part of it is cultural.
1. Rule of thumb: don't leave before the boss does. (and he might not leave because he doesn't get along with his wife!)
2. There may be business to attend to in the bars after work. That is where the real business deals are sealed.
Doing OT "off the clock" is pretty standard for salaried employees, whether in a business or a school. |
I think they both meddled together in the 40's/50's, when Japan was truggling to get back on its' feet. Then, if you and your co workers did some OT, you physically made more things. As it was factory/production work, being done. So it was helpful.
Now, if you and your coworkers do some OT, chances are that only slightly more will get done, then if they were to do it in 8 hours.
Not sure how much business actually does go on at bars, but I bet it doesn't account for all the nomikais.
Anyhow, all sturctures get old, and become more or less pointless. Everything from Govts to churches to companies need reforming now and again. In Japan, they've needed somer serious reform for decades now. |
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Glenski
Joined: 15 Jan 2003
Posts: 12844
Location: Hokkaido, JAPAN
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| Posted: Mon Oct 03, 2011 9:36 am Post subject: |
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| Mr_Monkey wrote: |
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| Insisting on publishing papers should have merit, I think. In EFL, just what research a teacher is doing to publish may be practical or theoretical (just like chemistry or physics). So, as long as the papers are in peer-reviewed journals (preferably international ones), they will be worthy of the research done. If not worthy, they will not be accepted. Universities here have their point system for promotions that go over all publications with scrutiny to confirm how many points they get. The problem (and I think you agree with this) is when institutions hold publications above anything else to determine a teacher's merit for promotion. |
For full-time tenured/tenure-track positions, sure. But when the contract to be awarded to the teacher is a two-year, no-renewals deal (for whatever reason)? Publications are indicative of good researchers, not teachers. Whether it's a criticism of Japanese universities or universities in general isn't particularly important, it's still critically relevant to EFL education in Japan.
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I would just like a sincere honest answer here. I am not saying that publications make a good teacher. In your opinion, how should teachers be evaluated in an interview for that 2-year contract job? |
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Mr_Monkey
Joined: 11 Mar 2009
Posts: 661
Location: Kyuuuuuushuuuuuuu
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| Posted: Mon Oct 03, 2011 1:31 pm Post subject: |
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On the strength of their CV and interview - qualifications, verifiable experience, good references from previous employers, an in-depth discussion of teaching experience and pedagogical beliefs with reference to specific examples, and papers if applicable.
Would you rather have a DELTA holder with 10 years of experience in your classroom, or someone with 5 years and a master's? Under the current system, the more experienced teacher holding a practical qualification with assessed teaching practice is likely to be excluded from the job application at the CV filtering stage, despite having been a verifiably good teacher at least at one point in time. In this instance, having papers is a bonus.
Why should a teacher be a researcher? The two aren't correlates, hence my earlier point about construct validity. I know some great teachers without master's degrees. By the same token, I've worked with researchers (one PhD Applied Linguistics holder springs to mind) who couldn't teach their way out of a job, despite manifesting the classroom competences of a clam.
*edit*
Of course, I'd far prefer to see limited-term contracts disappear completely. I understand the laws regarding full-time contracts lead to the situation, but the result is effectively discrimination. |
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Glenski
Joined: 15 Jan 2003
Posts: 12844
Location: Hokkaido, JAPAN
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| Posted: Mon Oct 03, 2011 10:29 pm Post subject: |
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I agree with the qualifications you cited. I am not sure about "publications if applicable". They are always applicable, IMO.
You said "Why should a teacher be a researcher? The two aren't correlates...?"
I disagree. Yes, one does not have to be a researcher to be a teacher, but I think the reverse is true. Teachers need to be on top of the constantly changing environment in SLA and EFL. Do you want someone resting on his laurels of an advanced degree for years and years, yet has nothing else to show that he is not stagnating professionally after they wrote their thesis or dissertation?
The way unis in Japan work, as I'm sure you know, is to weed out the 20-100 applicants immediately based on whether they've completed the application materials (a reasonable method), and then to assign points to their publications based on various merits (again, reasonable). It's at this point that things get gray to decide who goes further. Personal contacts, being known in the community, and a well-written cover letter seem to be overriding factors a lot. The system favors the experienced, but what else is new in the whole wide world?
(Before you think that I'm sitting here with a list of peer-reviewed articles longer than my arm, let me tell you that despite teaching in uni a few years, I don't have all that many, so I too am hurting when I do job hunting. My reason for lacking publications is being so busy in my FT job, doing administrative things (managing a resource center), proofreading for the J teachers (I get twice as many papers as the other 2 foreign teachers combined, simply because the J teachers recognize I'm better at it), and working in a small staff (only 3 FT teachers and 3 PTers). I handed in paperwork for a promotion, but was told that "presentations" count for so little that they are almost not worth putting on the form, and that "peer-reviewed articles in international journals, especially as a solo author" are where it counts. Writing textbooks is hardly considered of value, it seems.)
Many teachers apply with degrees from inappropriate fields (got a reference to that somewhere here), so that tends to increase the load of applicants one needs to go through for the reject pile. It seems to be a common thing for teachers in Japan, so one has to deal with what one gets. Nobody really looks at letters of references in the initial stages, I think. They need to whittle down that pile of applications to something manageable before they decide on who to call in for an interview.
One problem that I've seen with many cover letters is that the writing itself is so bad, I wouldn't want someone to come in for an interview. If they have trained and studied to be an English teacher, why is it they can't write a simple thing as a cover letter without glaring grammatical and spelling errors, or without looking like an obvious form letter or copy/paste job? That is poor professionalism. |
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