- A big class size: 30 〜 40 students each class.
- The differences in the students' capability of English language is striking.
- Teachers are always too busy to spare enough time for lessons. Because they have to play variety kinks of roles; such as consulting a student and his/her parents, managing a homeroom, guiding students for the future course, taking charge of club activites, doing school duties assingned to an individual teacher, having an experimental class and so on.
- A New Course of Study focuses on the communicative English and the MEXT prescribed that English high school teachers in Japan should primalily conduct an English class through English.
- Some students are never interested in English language. They think that they don't need English for their life. That is, their motivation in English is really low. On the other hand, other students are indulge in their learning English and won the devate competetion or won the championship in the speech contest.
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| The cherry blossoms in my neighborhood. |
New semester starts in April in Japan. April is the new starting point for the freshmen and every students have their hopes up.
We, teachers, also hope that all the students will attain their goals and graduate from the school with delight. We teachers think that our main job is helping the students grow up to be a good member of the society. It is not just teaching English, but also fostering human nature through English teaching or other school activities.
This is a very impressive song by Naotaro Moriyama 'Sakura'. Click here.
Thank you for a most informative post, Fumiko! It sounds as though teachers in typical Japanese schools are kept busy and have greatly varying levels of student motivation to contend with. Do you sometimes have native teachers working alongside you? I'm wondering what that would be like, if so.
ReplyDeleteThank you for posting your comment, Phillip. I'm really glad to look at it, though I have never posted in your Blog. Sorry abour that. Well, I would answer your question. In fact, many native speaker of English have come to Japan to teach English in every public secondary level school in Japan. They go to some schools once a week, to others 2-3 times a week, and in a few public schools full-time native English teachers work. One native English teacher has to teach at a few different schools. Uaually we have a team teaching (a Japanese teacher as a main and a native English teacher as an assistant). That's why they are called 'EAT' (English Assistant Teachers). I tried to cordinate the place and time to talk about lesson plans with EAT, but some teachers are reluctant to hold preliminary discussions because they are very busy. I think it very important to build up the relationship between Japanese teachers and native English teachers.
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