I have been thinking of getting a job teaching English in East Asia, but the problem is, my Japanese is beyond minimal. So I would like to ask people who have had some exposure to such work on this forum: how do you guys do it?
E.g. how do you explain:
the English way of expressing multiple nouns
the difference between Simple Present and Present Progressive
the “university student” and “student of the university” structures
to people whose native language has no or fairly different equivalent structures?
Likewise, how do you go about teaching idiomatic expressions, like “go out” and “knock down”? Don’t you have to somehow use Japanese analogies to explain this?
So what I am trying to learn is, what are the mechanics of the teaching at eikawa?
do the students have a bilingual textbook that you can make them go to n’th page and k’th line of based on your own version entirely in English?
how do you explain why something a student said is grammatically wrong or bad idiomatic expression?
and anything else that you could explain about the process
Also, please understand that I have already seen statements online along the lines of “well, I am not teaching, I am entertaining” and stuff. Basically, regardless of how effective (or perhaps totally ineffective) the usual methodology is, I still would really like to learn how that works.
Thanks a lot ahead of time to everybody who responds. I really appreciate it.
During my time in Kyoto, I saw dozens of Eikaiwa companies that loved native speakers. It didn’t matter whether or not you were fluent in Japanese, as long as you spoke clearly and pronounce all of your words well they seemed happy to have you. They also prefer native speakers with American accents. I was hired at one company (I’m American, made sure to speak well at the interview) whereas my friend (English, talked fast, used slang and at times even hard for me to understand) never recieved a call back. They would probably pair you up with students who already know some English.
I was given a textbook. I taught people who were just beginning the basics. Luckily, I had 5 years of Japanese under my belt. Otherwise, I would have no clue how to begin teaching English through an eikaiwa without knowing basic Japanese. I think it would be extremely hard to do so.
As I said, there were dozens of local companies, and I know there are some huge companies (I regularly saw their commercials on television.) The only one I can think of now is the defunct NOVA, which recently went under due to its poor quality control of teachers. They were willing to take anyone and everyone, it didn’t matter if the teacher’s heart was in the work or if they even did a good job. However, a quick google will show you how that became NOVA’s demise.
Then there are really good programs like JET. My best college friend went back to Japan through JET. Unlike eikaiwa (which seems mostly part time), JET sets you up at schools to assist in English classes. They handle your visa, insurance, where you’ll be staying, etc. It’s also a contract for at least one year. I know a lot of people who go to Japan through JET who also have basic or minimal Japanese speaking abilities.
I’ve only given eikaiwa lessons (usually 1 on 1 or 2 on 1) at a small local school and I speak Japanese. So my experiences were a little different from what you’d go through.
I’ve had friends who’ve taught for the major eikaiwa chains, though. From what they’ve said their lessons were very regimented, and they just followed their textbooks, not deviating from their script. The chains also had native teaching personnel, who I imagine were there to assist non-Japanese staff.
When teaching eikaiwa you usually aren’t teaching grammar, you’re providing conversation practice. Your students have already studied English grammar for years in school so have a pretty good grounding and can understand simple explanations in English. The goal seemed to me to be as much to encourage the Japanese students to use what limited English ability they already had in conversation as to actually teach them more English.
thanks a lot for replying. Still, could you (and maybe also anybody else in here) please clarify a few points from what you have written:
suppose I want to give a short assignment to students, like write a sentence kinda like “Mariko goes to school every day” or say it out loud. Could you quote here what you would say in this situation to get the point across?
did you ever have to deal with explaining idiomatic expressions (“come up”, “run out” etc)? or this just wasn’t ever a part of the curriculum?
you say in one job you had a textbook. What sort of textbook was it? Did it have Japanese explanations for students? Did it have English explanations for you about what is being explained? I.e. basically how did it work?
you say some companies hired if you could just speak clearly. Well, suppose I can speak clearly. So, I come to class, and what do I say, if let’s say I want to teach Present Progressive? How did those instructors manage? Do you know?
you say that if you are lucky you get students who know some English. Let’s say if we look at 9th grader type students - how much English would they know? Do they already know the basic tenses? Or do they need to be taught from the beginning, from Simple Present and upwards?
are middle and high school students expected to be able to write half a page of English text? do they write anything at all in English classes?
Don’t the eikaiwa companies handle most of the paperwork once they hire you?
JET’s not really comparable to eikaiwa in a lot of ways. It’s a lot harder to get into, and the application process is quite drawn out (6 months, IIRC). Its quite hard to make generalizations about as the program really only serves as a matchmaker between local school districts and program members. Almost everything regarding your responsibilities and daily life is dependent on the local school district, which means that two program members can have vastly different experiences.
thanks for your answer. I posted my follow up before your response rendered, so some of the questions you probably already answered.
Frankly, I did not know that JET is different from eikawa, I am new to this. So I was asking a generic question about Engrish teachers, nothing specific to the program.
I understand from your post that high school students and adults actually know basic tenses. How about vocabulary usage and idiomatic expressions usage? Do they know that? Do you need to explain this stuff?
You say that the primary goal of Engrish teacher is manage conversation. Questions:
how do you deal with mistakes? do you just ignore them, or is there a way to explain that Mariko should say “go to school in the morning” and not “in morning go to the school”?
are there some sort of written tests/assignments done by students? or is it all just chit chat, with one teacher and 20+ students?
The most advanced tense that a 9th grader (3rd year of junior high school) learns is the use of participles. They already know the basic tenses.
I haven’t taught high schoolers for an extended period of time, but I did teach junior high school students for 3 years. In my experience they were only very rarely given writing assignments of more than a couple sentences in length.
I’ve seen Japanese high schoolers studying impressively difficult levels of vocabulary for their college entrance exams, but its a little difficult to generalize because English education varies considerably based on the level of the high school. In my personal experiences now dealing with Japanese college students, most can read intermediate level English texts aimed at native speakers, but even relatively simple idiomatic expressions can throw them off. They know some, but English just has too many for them. Some idioms can be quite difficult to explain even if you know Japanese, but a lot can be broken down to something that they can understand, like “to kick the bucket” = “to die”.
Depending on the student, I used different approaches. A lot of Japanese can be shy about speaking in front of others in Japanese, let alone English, so you have to do all you can to encourage it. Generally I would only correct a student’s English if it was a serious mistake that made her meaning hard to understand. You also have to be very careful not to laugh when a student unintentionally says something hilarious (though they will not be so kind when you make a mistake in Japanese). When the lesson has a small number of people and they know each other you can be more open in correcting students. Somewhat related to your “entertainment, not teaching” comment, my boss’ guideline was that I should do whatever made the student comfortable. The people who come to eikaiwa are generally interested in English as a hobby, or because they’re going to be traveling in the US, entertaining someone from a foreign company, etc. If they can get their meaning across, that’s enough.
In my experience there were no assignments or tests. At the big schools you won’t necessarily have the same students every week. I occasionally had students ask me for a homework assignment, but a lot of time they’d come back without it done.
Good foreign language teaching never requires the use of the students’ native language. Sometimes it can be helpful to throw out a word here and there, but it is never, ever necessary. Think about it. You didn’t learn English from explicit instruction. You learned it from following the example of speakers around you. And frankly, the vast majority of primary and secondary school “English” teachers aren’t even capable of accurately describing grammatical points like the present progressive. They just know what sounds right.
Let’s look at an example. If I wanted to teach the progressive aspect, I’d make sure that we’d had a previous lesson on activities and hobbies. “Go shopping” “go hiking” “read a book” “watch a movie” etc. This can be done with flashcards. (Whenever possible, it’s better to anchor the target language vocabulary to pictures rather than native language vocabulary, so that there is a direct mental relationship. It speeds things up if students don’t have to filter through their native language by translating every word.)
So let’s put things in context. “What do you do on the weekend?” “I read books on the weekend.” “What are you doing this weekend?” “I’m reading a book this weekend.” “What are you doing right now?” “I’m reading a book.” And voila. One small distinction is introduced. This sort of technique works with everybody, European or Asian or whatever.
What it requires is a great deal of thought and preparation on the part of the instructor, or good materials supplied by the school or language company. Or both. What it does not require is a knowledge of the students’ original language. And I say this, having some experience teaching English to Japanese students (although I’ve had a lot more experience teaching German to Americans).
ETA: If you have an opportunity to use Rosetta Stone software, you’ll have an excellent idea of what I’m talking about. It’s expensive, but it’s all entirely steeped in communicative language teaching. No use of the native language required.
Well, like I said before, it depends on the eikaiwa you sign up with. I really liked the one I went through because they seemed less shady than others. I got a textbook and the students got the equivalent and we just did a few pages each day. I taught high schoolers and elderly Japanese salarymen. I had friends that were employed through other eikaiwa geared towards little kids and from what they told me (and what I saw when I almost went to get hired by their company) it looked like nothing more than being a glorified babysitter.
I was only employed for 7 months, as I was doing this while studying abroad and attending university.
I had the help of my electronic dictionary, which saved my butt for quite a few things. Even if I was unsure which of the words selected was the translation I wanted, I could just show my students the list of words and they’d get the idea of what I was trying to say. Even though I had 4 years of the language, I couldn’t imagine trying to teach without some type of dictionary; I’d imagine without one a lot of the time would be dead air as I frantically search for an explanation in my head.
Although I didn’t have to, I made lot of charts and graphs. Charts were really useful in conjugating verbs. I always set them up similar to the T-charts I was taught in Spanish class.
I eat We eat
You eat
He/She/It eat(s) They eat
And so on. My students who were working with the book were just learning time and present tense. I was teaching them also how to do present progressive (“I am walking”, showing the two verbs and how it’s always the second one that changes) and contractions during the last few classes.
The present tense of English is tricky. I sat down and tried to figure out why I liked it, and then one day one of my professors hit it spot on. We have no such thing as the present tense. We use the progressive in its place. When you think about it, our present tense is more of a habitual. I walk to school. I eat pizza. I watch television. We never use this tense when we are doing the thing in the present, we always use progressive.
Anyways, I was lucky enough not to have to teach them the hassle of that.
I would also point out the format of an average sentence, or where certian words can go in a sentence while still sounding right (i.e. I often come here/ I come here often).
The book I used was weird in that there was no Japanese at all. It seemed like a generic “One size fits all speakers!” kind of book all in basic English.
It’s hard to tell if your students will speak English well or not. It’s just like anywhere else in the world, some kids will flourish in language classes while others don’t really care for them. I don’t know too much about the level that students should be at by the 9th grade, but I’m sure there are more knowledgable people on the Dope that will pop in here soon.
I’ve taught English to Chinese people for a while and it’s definitely possible to teach solely in English from the ground up, though I think it works best with kids, the younger the better. For example, I have taught tenses, using no Chinese, to 4-5 year olds who had zero English before my class. Obviously, I only introduced tenses after they had some foundation of vocabulary and sentence patterns. The important thing in my experience is associating the tense with the context. One game I’ve used just involves me asking questions like “Is he eating dinner?” vs. “Does he eat dinner (sometimes I add “every day”)?” about a student that is miming some sort of action. If he’s miming eating, then the answer to both questions is “Yes”, while if he’s miming, say, kicking a ball, then the correct answers differ. Since it’s a competitive game, they want to win, and the brighter ones will figure out the pattern for the correct responses (and thus the pattern for this particular usage of grammar) pretty quickly. Then you start in with other activities so that they have to produce the patterns differentially, as well as recognizing them.
Now, at this stage, learners generally don’t fully get it yet; it’ll be a long time before they know what the tenses really indicate. But that’s fine, as this is the way native speakers learn it, as well. You get context and more context until the rule becomes pretty obvious, though it may remain silent and in the background for a long time. At some point, with these young language learners, they’ll be taught the rule explicitly, but hopefully it will have clicked before then.
The problem with most English teaching in China is that students are taught in Chinese for most of their lessons, grammar is taught as a list of strange, non-sensical rules, and the teachers themselves often don’t have a great grasp of English. It’s not about communication at all, which is at odds with how human beings are wired to pick up languages.
Here in English as a Second Language programs in the States, the teacher very often does not speak the native language(s) of their students, nor do the students all speak the same native language. I think in language instruction, the instructor not speaking the student’s native language is the norm, not the exception.
I thought you were a linguistics student or something? One of the first things I learned in my “Teaching English as a Second Language” course back in undergrad was that we learn second languages in a completely different way than we learn native languages.
Has this been shown untrue in the last ten years or so?
Also, do you know of any studies regarding Rosetta Stone’s effectiveness? I always assumed it was kind of a sham, but that was pure assumption on my part. Looking around, I find nothing significant either pro or con as to whether it actually works. (A couple of ten year old reviews of specific language editions is all there is on Wikipedia.)
I think you’re conflating two things. It’s true that the mental mechanisms in adults and children are assumed to be vastly different. Children have a built-in capacity for language learning that is lost upon reaching adolescence. However, even given the obvious differences between a developing brain and a developed brain, the goal even in second language acquisition is to maximize exposure to the target language. So it’s not precisely correct to say that it’s “completely different”. It’s different, but adult learners still learn best if they’re put in an environment saturated with the target language.
The problem with adult learners is that we can’t assume that even saturation will produce a fluent speaker. When I was a grad student, my concentration was actually German (not linguistics, I just picked up a lot along the way). I now have two shiny degrees in the subject, but I would never be mistaken for a native speaker. Maybe if I lived there for many many many years, and put active effort into fixing my accent and those niggling grammar details, I could manage it. But it’s just too late to accomplish that level of fluency without strenuous effort. Even given this difference in learning, though, it remains true in second language acquisition that the best method for learning is to maximize exposure. The catch is finding a good communicative teacher who can open the door.
And I don’t know any studies about Rosetta Stone, but I used the first level of the software before, and I can tell you unequivocally that it is not a sham. It works. And I’m not gonna lie about this. I am somewhat ashamed to say that it’s clearly a better teacher than me if I’m having a bad day. It’s expensive as hell, though, and it’s the only program I played with, so I don’t know how it compares to other software choices.
No. I spotted a mistake in the reasoning you expressed. Most of what you’re saying is surely correct, but this particular bit of reasoning was invalid.
You said that one should know that no native language instruction is necessary for an adult learner, because no native language instruction is required for a child learner. But that doesn’t follow. Since the mechanisms of learning for children and for adults are quite different, it could easily be that no explicit instruction is necessary for children, while explicit instruction in a native language is necessary for adults.
What I recall from the class I took (long long ago so my memory may be hazy) is that for adults, there should be a lot more immersion than there typically is, but it also helps to give them explicit pointers about grammar and usage and so on. For children, these explicit pointers have no effect, but for adults, they can be helpful. This certainly fits with my experience.
I think that the point is that, with adult learners, you can offer shortcuts through teaching grammar in prescriptive ways. This is how we condense, for example, learning German into three or four semesters of college work, sufficient to have you speaking and reading at a level equivalent to at least a 14 year old.
But even the 14 year old learned some of his language prescriptively. That’s why first graders start learning about nouns and verbs and such. “I before E, except after C” and all that.
Young enough kids learn second language the same way they learn the first. But even teen-agers thrust into HS in a language they know nothing about usually pick it up in a couple months. I once took a German course given by a well-known Swiss writer (Adolph Muschg) that was designed for a mix of non-German-speakers and was intended to be given in German only. (It wasn’t, since everyone in the class spoke enough English and he wound up speaking English most of the time, telling stories. He was a wonderful raconteur and the course was thoroughly enjoyable, but I learned no German.)
Okay, I see what you’re saying. I did take it as given that the similarities between adults and children are sufficient to justify the comparison. That happens to be true in this case, but I glossed over that to reach my main point.
And it is also true that tips in the native language can be useful at times. But there can be a high cost. The vast majority of the time, this comes with the unfortunate side effect that lazy teachers (and I was as guilty of this as anyone else when I was a beginner) can rely on native language explanations as a crutch when their students would be doing much, much better with 100% target language instruction. As soon as you give yourself an inch, you give yourself a mile. But as soon as a teacher says: “Fuck it. I’m gonna do this thing in German (or whatever) for the entire semester”, that comes with a noticeable improvement in teaching.
It takes away the crutch, creates some classroom ingenuity to try to figure out how the hell you’re gonna get across the idea of two way prepositions without explaining in English what they are. Unfortunately, when I was a TA, I didn’t have a lot of time for that sort of ingenuity. It’s hard enough doing grad work, let alone grad work and quality classroom management. Afterward, I got a faculty job trying to help other TAs (where I’d just been) try to achieve that same balance. You gotta empathize with their plight, while also trying to encourage them to make the same jump to a 100% target language classroom. (English is for office hours after class.)
Thankfully, the OP won’t have this problem. Teaching where you don’t know the language means there’s no crutch. You just gotta figure out everything else.
I think you’re missing one key aspect, though-- the interest level of the student in learning the language. One of my Spanish teachers in HS had a rule that no English could be spoken in the classroom. For me, this was great, because I was motivated to learn. But the “lazy” students struggled. I can’t say for sure, but I suspect that some would have learned more if they were given explicit instruction in English. You could get that from the text, but remember, we’re talking about “lazy high schoolers” here. Text? What text?
