Job Discussion Forums

[alexcase]

Hoser- a good point, sharply made! A couple of posters here could learn that a criticism is much easier to take if it is wittily and pithily put!

I should point out that I started these additional threads to try and please said couple of people, who claimed their problem with the original one was the question. Now I understand they actually enjoyed getting riled and won't make the mistake of pandering to them again.

So please ignore this thread if you wish- I can't really give a reason why anyone must spend any more of their summer answering my questions if they don't want to (apart from as an excuse to stay near the aircon), but if they do want to I am still genuinely interested in hearing any info, links or pet theories.

[stillnosheep]

[Mark]

OP, you already mentioned the best thing that could be done: have to government create a Language Instructor Visa category that could only be obtained by people who have some minimal international teaching credential, ie the CELTA or its equivalent.

However, it's also been pointed out that this won't happen because nobody appears to care. If schools thought that high standards were a selling point, they'd implement them and then advertise based on that.

What you have now is school's simply claiming to have high quality, but not defining what that means. Students, apparently, also do not investigate exactly what high quality means when it's used in advertising.

I used to work at an eikaiwa, and one day one of my Japanese friends (who had no connection with the eikaiwa) was going to meet me after work. He got there early and was bored, so he went in and took the sales pitch from my eikaiwa without telling them that he knew me. Much of what he was told was complete unfounded b.s., but he was given lots of colorful graphs that "explained" why the system was foolproof.

You can't completely blame the industry. Customers get what they pay for. If the consumer is uninformed and unwilling to become informed, what can you really expect? There's nothing stopping Japanese students from reading up on language acquisition and then making informed choices when choosing a school.

[Glenski]

MOD EDIT

Alex,
None of what you propose will happen. You have lived and worked here for 4 years. You should realize that. More than I have explained why.