Job Discussion Forums

[rxk22]

Anyone else bothered that Japanese teach English to Japanese? I was an ALT, and now work at a kiddie eikaiwa. A lot of times it's just the JTE there teaching the students. Now that'd be fine, but every single one that I've met makes a great deal of mistakes. From just saying things like "theses" to using "the" incorrectly every time. Why ever bother learning from JTEs in general, as they just seem to pass on the same grammatical mistakes to a future gen of ESLers.

Why do they do this? They have a massive amount of English speakers here, solely to teach English, why augment that with something that hinders the student's learning?

Just been bother me a lot lately

[Mr_Monkey]

One could also argue that a great many of the native speaking teachers in Japan also do a great deal of harm to their learners.

Being a native speaker does not, indeed can not, guarantee that one is a competent teacher of one's L1. Given that Japan does not require such demonstrations of basic competence in its native speaking foreign teachers as a validated introductory teaching qualification (however imperfect that may be), it is no stretch of the imagination to assert that there are hundreds, if not thousands of incompetent native speaking teachers of English in the country with no idea of either appropriate methodology or the sensitivity, knowledge and experience to grow into the job.

Gaijin in suits, arguably, do just as much damage.

Yes, one should expect someone teaching a language to be competent in it (a definition of competence is worth discussing here), but your choice of 'the' as an example of a grammatical mistake propagated by poor language skills of JTEs isn't a very good one: one would think that with all the thousands of native-speaking teachers around that the mistake would be rectified, but, mysteriously (if NESTs really are better at teaching English), it still abounds. That suggests that there's something else going on here.

There's no evidence to support the hypothesis that native speakers make better teachers of their language. Indeed, the most competent speakers of English I've ever taught have been European, and have been taught in their secondary education systems by L2-speaking teachers.

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with Japanese teaching English to Japanese.

[G Cthulhu]

[fluffyhamster]

What would really help IMHO would be improving the quality of the English textbooks used in Japanese schools - they could/should:

-be more descriptive and less prescriptive
-be more representative of spoken as opposed to written English
-be richer, provide more input, practice etc
-where necessary provide more succinct and functional explanations in Japanese of English grammar and usage etc than most JTEs are capable of formulating

If they did all that, then there would be less need for JTEs to frantically make up for an inadequate book's faults, and also less need for AETs to help (help complicate?) the learning process.

Regarding the learning (or if you prefer, the acquisition) of items such as articles, yes, there are limits to what teaching can achieve, but no serious teacher will ever really stop looking for better ways to teach them (regardless of what SLA theories may say); bad teachers however (and this certainly includes the linguistically-incompetent of the non-natives!) probably won't be able to discern any real consistencies in (others') usage, let alone a solid approach and way through pedagogically (and to be genuinely solid I believe that pedagogy has to be built on firm linguistic ground - firm in not only the textbook but also the teacher's head/competence).

So it's not so much a question of native versus non-native teacher being the best ('There can be only one!'), but more a matter of supporting the teacher(s - when they must do "team teaching") to the max, so that they can be the best teacher(s) possible. Japan hasn't really supported even its JTEs properly, let alone (=nor then) its AETs (and how could it when the JTEs are still in the picture - and let's not forget, like the other posters have mentioned, that the bar to becoming an AET is not set at all high!), but at least Japan has done more (or at least tried to do more, muddy and flawed though the reasoning often may have seemed) than the UK say in financing and developing FL education, certainly at the state school level!

[Bread]

Unqualified foreign teachers' teaching skills aside, a quick scan of the atrocious number of spelling and grammatical errors on this very forum proves that their English skills aren't any better. For example:

"Why ever bother learning from JTEs in general, as they just seem to pass on the same grammatical mistakes to a future gen of ESLers. "

Oh, was that a QUESTION? Shouldn't there be some kind of MARK to indicate it's a question???

"Just been bother me a lot lately"

BEEN BOTHER? How about BEEN BOTHERING???

[fluffyhamster]

Personally I didn't find much in the OP's post that I'd exactly call 'atrocious', and I only really noticed the lack of the -ing on 'bother' once you'd pointed it out, Bread. I guess it was just a native-speaker slip rather than a genuine (="non-native") error.

Perhaps a more fruitful point to pursue (well, it's interesting to me!) would be how much more incapable the worst AETs would be of teaching Japanese (or any other foreign language) back in their home countries, assuming the governments there are tolerant (as tolerant as Japan's is?) of quite low/not quite high-enough levels of competence in the foreign language on the part of the teacher teaching it. The AETs would obviously then be putting themselves in the JTEs' shoes, but at the same time the value of having genuine native speakers acting at the very least as informants* would also become clear.

*Such informants wouldn't necessarily need to always be physically in the classroom - they could perhaps be mainly employed in having genuine input (i.e. far more input that it seems has been allowed thus far in Japan) into the production of better textbooks, or be involved in improved language testing (of not only pupils but periodically also the non-native teachers).

[PO1]

I don't think the major problems are teachers or textbooks. The problem is application. Rote memorization with no actual interaction does little to help learn a language. Students need to speak English daily, use it at home, apply it in every way possible. Will they do that? Unlikely. Is it possible? Maybe.

I can sit here and study kanji for an hour a day. Sure, I'll remember some of them just by memorizing. But if I never actually USE them, I'll forget them eventually.

That's one of the problems if not THE problem of why Japanese still keep making the same errors and have lower English scores than other countries.

Studying to pass tests does not a fluent speaker make.

[fluffyhamster]

Hi PO1. Sure, the methods and strategies used in learning a language are also important, but if the input (from model textbooks especially) is skewy or inconsistent then there will inevitably be questions if not problems sooner or later (and I should add that this applies to all nationalities of students, not just Japanese!). Plus a textbook that illustrated the simple pleasures of actually communicating might go some way to helping students understand and appreciate English for what it is (rather than just as a load of test rubrics), even if the actual eventual tests themselves didn't change quite as much (though how could they not, seeing as most tests ultimately boil down to testing what has been taught...so if you change the books you also [then have to] change the tests).

I could give you quite a few examples of skewy or inconsistent input, but if you've been in Japanese schools for any length of time (which it appears you have! Judging from the quick glance I took through your comments in your older posts) then you'll know exactly what I'm talking about, so I'll limit myself here to just a few:

Tag questions: A particularly bad example was It's a beautiful day, isn't it?, with rising intonation (?!) marked and audio-recorded on the tag isn't it?. Quite how a student would be able to make any functional sense of tags at all from this was beyond me (but perhaps that was the implicit purpose of that textbook - 'Students, ultimately stick with the plain Yes-No questions you already know. Tag questions are too hard, and no matter how well [or badly! - FH LOL] we might model and explain them to you, you will be in danger of sounding inappropriate if you risk using them yourself').

Then there is this absolute beauty (scroll down to the second link in the following post):
http://forums.eslcafe.com/job/viewtopic.php?p=881604#881604

[TokyoLiz]

[fluffyhamster]

[seklarwia]

As well as all that Monkey and Hamster have pointed out (apart from the non-compulsory bit), I also think that it is important that the teachers have a good understanding of the students' L1 as well as be competant in the target language.
This is not only so that they can emplain more difficult and less easily demonstrable aspects of the target language to the students, but also to be able to understand why the learners are finding aspects of the language difficult to understand in the first place.

I think that in many ways teaching lanaguages is comparable to translating:
It's always best to have translators working from the L2 into their L1 rather than vice versa. But a native speaker of the target language with no little to no knowledge of the original language of a piece is of little use, often becoming worse than useless as the piece's complexity increases.

A large number of the native English speaking "teachers" out here have little to no knowledge of the Japanese language, which is fine for teaching basic English but becomes more problematic as the level increases.

[GambateBingBangBOOM]

[rxk22]

[Glenski]

[Mr_Monkey]