# how do English teachers in Japan/Korea teach without knowing the local language? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [December 27, 2008, 6:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-english-teachers-in-japan-korea-teach-without-knowing-the-local-language/478818 "2008-12-27T06:01:30Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![An\_Gadai](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/d6d6ee/32.png) [@An\_Gadai](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/An_Gadai)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2008, 5:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-english-teachers-in-japan-korea-teach-without-knowing-the-local-language/478818/21 "2008-12-27T17:48:27Z")
> [@code\_grey](#): > > 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. [Engrish](http://www.engrish.com/) teachers? ---
**Author:** ![Frylock](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/ce7236/32.png) [@Frylock](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frylock)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2008, 8:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-english-teachers-in-japan-korea-teach-without-knowing-the-local-language/478818/22 "2008-12-27T20:32:00Z")
> [@Kendall Jackson](#): > > (English is for office hours after class.) I’m down with that. > [@](#): > > 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 have to plead guilty here, in a bad way. I taught English in Japan (JET program) for a year, and went in having no conversational mastery of the language at all. But I learned much of my conversational Japanese by trying to teach the kids English, _in Japanese_. 😛 I am certain I learned far more Japanese from those classes than any of the kids learned English. I’ve been a very bad boy. -FrL- (In my defense, I never really did have the opportunity to do much teaching at all. I was an “Assistant to the English Teacher” and that job description was accurate. If I’d been doing lesson planning etc I think I would have stuck to the English Only principle more rigorously…) ---
**Author:** ![Frylock](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/ce7236/32.png) [@Frylock](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frylock)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2008, 8:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-english-teachers-in-japan-korea-teach-without-knowing-the-local-language/478818/23 "2008-12-27T20:33:07Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > Text? What text? Fail the fuckers. What’s the problem? 😉 -FrL- ---
**Author:** ![amarinth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/3be4f8/32.png) [@amarinth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/amarinth)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2008, 1:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-english-teachers-in-japan-korea-teach-without-knowing-the-local-language/478818/24 "2008-12-28T01:52:08Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > 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? There’s also the inability of the instructor to understand where the student is getting lost. I’ve only taken one language where the instructor didn’t know the students’ native language. And there were a number of times where we would have a question, but be totally incapable of explaining our confusion to him (because we didn’t have the language skills to get it across) and he could tell we were confused, but couldn’t figure out about what. So we’d try to ask question A, and he’d answer question Q, and we’d say “no, no, no, **A** ,” and he’d answer question W, and eventually everyone would just give up because we had a lot more to learn and couldn’t get across what would have been fairly simple questions. ---
**Author:** ![even\_sven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/dfb087/32.png) [@even\_sven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/even_sven)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2008, 2:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-english-teachers-in-japan-korea-teach-without-knowing-the-local-language/478818/25 "2008-12-28T02:09:14Z")
I’m an English teacher in China with pretty minimal Chinese language skills. In China, foreign teachers are a rare and expensive commodity. So they rarely teach things like grammar. A non-native speaker can teach that just as easily. Why would you want your one foreign teacher to teach you something you could learn from a book? What foreign teachers are priceless for is teaching students to understand native accents and have conversations with each other and fellow learners. A lot of language use is cultural, and that is the part a non-native speaker can’t teach. My classes are mostly conversational. My students come in with a pretty solid foundation as far as grammar and vocab, but very little experience actually putting the language to use. So I teach them some lightweight cultural things and basically do my best to get them talking. I’ll correct a problems on a class-wide level (like if I notice everyone is screwing up a tense, I’ll do some drills with them.) But I don’t do a ton of individual corrections. My main goal is to get them comfortable talking and to overcome some of their shyness. ---
**Author:** ![Windwalker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/5e9695/32.png) [@Windwalker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Windwalker)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2008, 3:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-english-teachers-in-japan-korea-teach-without-knowing-the-local-language/478818/26 "2008-12-28T03:47:07Z")
> [@Frylock](#): > > I am certain I learned far more Japanese from those classes than any of the kids learned English. > > I’ve been a very bad boy. > > -FrL- Hehehe, I’ll admit that this sometimes applied to my time teaching English in China as well. As a teacher, I was pretty sensitive to everything my students said, and when they whispered Chinese translations for a given English sentence pattern, I couldn’t help but take note. Their whisperings, for some reason, tended to stick much more than stuff from my formal Chinese instruction (which was often stiff, boring, and ineffective, IMO). At some point, I started asking them to translate what they’d just said into English, both as an exercise for them, a pseudo-punishment for speaking Chinese, and a (sneaky) way for me to learn. And my youngest students (4-6) pretty much taught me all the weird animal names, fast food names, etc., but to be fair, they learned the English equivalents, too. 🙂 [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-english-teachers-in-japan-korea-teach-without-knowing-the-local-language/478818.md?page=1)