Recently, the Kagoshima prefectural education department hosted our annual mid-year seminars (school year starts in April.) While there, I participated in various workshops pertaining to my job, so while it’s more or less fresh in my mind, I’d like to give everyone a better idea of what my job is like here. Oh, and as a heads up, I’ll be using the acronyms ALT, Assistant Language Teacher (my job) and JTE, Japanese Teacher of English, quite often.
In Kagoshima prefecture, ALTs work at either the local level, like myself, or the prefectural level, like many of my friends. The prefectural level ALTs travel between the various high schools in their area, but local ALTs work in a mixture of Elementary and Junior High Schools. The specific amount of schools any one ALT teacher is quite varied. Some ALTs at large high schools only teach at one school, for example, but I have the fairly common set up of spending a fair bit of time at a base JHS (between two and three days out of a week) and the other days at a random selection of my other schools. Specifically, I teach at Miyanojo JHS more often than anywhere else, which is a school in the center of my town with a little more than 300 students. Besides MJHS, I teach at the much smaller, sixty student Yamasaki JHS, although never more than once a week. I also teach at eight different Elementary schools. Because of a Japanese law that dictates the distance an elementary school student can travel from his or her home to school, I have some schools in rural areas with tiny student populations, from 10 to 30 students as well as a larger school in the center of my town with 500 students. In other words, I hit the full gambit of varied educational experiences in my area, all of which changes depending on the day and where I’m meant to be. To put this in perspective, I’ve been asked to teach an entire elementary school how to count in English at a big event in the gym and today I had a lesson with only one student at my smallest school. I should also mention that I’m technically based out of my local Board of Education, BoE, which is the organization that I’m employed by and where my supervisor, Kawaji sensei, works.
So,I have the potential to refer to nearly a thousand students in my broader area as “my students, but that’s a bit of a loose term, because it’s not as though I’m their main English teacher. The fact of the matter is that my job is quite literally that of an assistant. My middle school students all have a main JTE that teaches their regular classes, and my job there is simply to assist them. So, I do a variety of things such as help prepare and execute fun lesson plans, work on special projects with students, answer JTE questions about English, work on things such as pronunciation and inflection, and eat lunch with the kids. So, for the most part, my job can be super easy. I don’t have long hours like the other members of staff, I don’t have to worry about students performance on tests, and I rarely grade papers, although I do help my JTEs check the students English notebooks. So, although I have grown to see myself as more or less a permanent fixture at Miyanojo JSH (Miyachuu,) and to a lesser extant at Yamasaki as well, I still am not really a member of staff at any of my schools. I’m an employee of the BoE making “school visits.”
In the middle schools, English education is compulsory for all students (which is also the case for high school students,) so students are learning basic grammar structure for English comprehension. I try to organize in class games and activities that allow students to practice English usage, but it’s the JTEs that control the class pace and main teaching methods. Because it is a compulsory subject, JTEs tend to focus on preparing students for written English exams that are a part of the process for being admitted to high school. Japanese middle school students, especially those in their third and final year, are extremely busy preparing for the tests that determine which high school they attend and, subsequently college and jobs. So, there is a lot of pressure on comprehension and very little on communicative English.
There are a number of major barriers to proper English education in this setting, but I’ll give you pronunciation as an example. Because of the emphasis on testing, ALTs, who are directed by the National program to assist in developing “communicative ability” are in the occasionally awkward position of trying to eke out class time we don’t really have any right to in order to work on abilities that aren’t easily tested. So, many students make do with “katakana English” or pronouncing English words by writing them out in Japanese syllabary, which can at times sound nothing like actual English. (“and” becomes “and-o” thank you becomes “san kyu” etc., and that’s just simple words!) The irony if this is that ALTs, who are constantly confronted with this sort of pronunciation, grow to understand it fairly well based on their own study of Japanese and time spent listening to it, which tends to decrease the incentive of students, who I can understand, to learn to pronounce English in a way that’s intelligible to English speakers that are not employed by Japanese school systems, despite my occasional insistence that I’m a spacial case when it comes to understanding them.
In contrast, the elementary school visits take a different extreme to the same result. Because the elementary education is ungraded and not compulsory, it’s really just prep for middle school and exposure to foreign culture and language. Students aren’t really expected to get very far with English at that stage. A major contributing factor to this problem is the textbook, which all ALTs such as myself are baffled by, called Eigo Noto. In the process of taking ideology to the extreme, the focus on communicative English, the text does not introduce the alphabet. So, the best opportunity to get students to read and imitate English sounds in a non-threatening environment by teaching phonics and the alphabet is wasted. It’s possibly to get students to speak English rather clearly with a bit of work, but since I see my elementary schools about once or twice a month, as soon as I’ve left the students have too much time to forget English or (worse) learn it from their teachers who have no English qualifications and often can’t pronounce the words much better than the students themselves. So, I settle for making English fun and getting students better accustomed to at the very least hearing English and, equally importantly, with the concept of communicating in a foreign language. During lunch and recess, I hang out and practice my Japanese and play with the students for the cultural exchange part of my job. It’s nice to give students a chance to ask questions, and it’s always amusing what surprises them about Americans. (A number of students enjoy running up, rubbing my arms because I have blonde arm hair and then exclaiming “ooo! Nice smell,” which is more or less like being a human scratch and sniff.) Those sorts of reactions certainly make one realize that the kids do, in fact, need exposure to foreigners, but actually getting students to improve in this setting can be daunting.
A few other problems that I’ll skirt over for the time being include classes that aren’t differentiated based on ability, interpersonal relationships between ALTs and JTEs, students’ incentives to learn, and time constraints. I can, and probably will, go on about my job in future posts, but I’ll end this one with this line of thought. Although there are some definite, and seemingly insurmountable challenges to effective English education, there is so much more to my job than the title of English teacher itself. Every time I go out in Japan and converse or otherwise interact with locals, I’m helping to foster internationalization and exchange. Another ALT said to me that a local woman she has become friends with used to be scared of foreigners, at the Japanese government really just wants us to live and interact with our communities. I know that I became interested in international travel and studies based on my interactions with foreign friends, and I hope that my engagement with the students on a regular basis convince at least a few of the importance of being aware of and experiencing other cultures. So, I may not be turning out students that can carry on worthwhile conversations in English, but it’s possible some of them will go on to develop a real interest in English or another foreign language. Maybe I’m helping to make my small town more acutely aware of the global context in which we are living in the 21st century. As always, thanks for checking in!
