Understanding our Job

The following is an essay that I'd written a few months ago for English Journal (English 香川県中学校教育研究会), a publishing that circulates around the junior high schools of Kagawa Prefecture, including my city here of Takamatsu. However, the essay was unfortunately misfiled and missed publishing, so I've been asked to resubmit for next year's edition. Seeing how my feelings about my job here, as with most anything else, are under constant change (i use this oxymoron with a passion)
, though, I've decided to go on and put it on the blog here so it's at least 'out there.' The teachers I work with probably won't get around to reading it, but I think I'm getting the message across in some way or other to those I wish to know.

In any case, I hope my opinions here are taken well. I've certainly never meant offense by them.

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Understanding our Job

Kelsey

November 1, 2006

There is an essay called “how to treat your foreigner” in the 2004 edition of English that I think deserves special attention from those who are wondering what the job of the Assistant Language Teacher really is. In it, Gregory Senyshyn shares his opinion concerning the treatment and recognition of ALTs in the workplace. I can feel his quiet disappointment through most of the essay, especially when he relates his school principal’s message regarding Mr. Senyshyn’s enthusiasm toward teaching:

I was afraid of teaching (because I had never done it before) but I was going to do my best. Then my principal came up to me and said[,] “You are not a teacher. Let the teachers teach. You are an assistant. You assist.” (English 2004, p.13)

While he comments that this was “one of the truest things [he had] heard in a long time,” I feel a tinge of offense by the statement and know that it is an emotion that is connected to my small regrets that accompany present classroom teaching situations with Japanese English teachers (JTEs) day to day.

Along with the comments I have heard from a variety of other ALTs, inside and outside of Kagawa, first- and non-first-years, I decided I would take this writing opportunity to express my own concerns with the current English teaching practices I have encountered in my few brief months here. Most of what I write may have nothing at all to do with many ALTs’ situations with their respective JTEs. (This includes my own situation to some extent, about which I would like to say I have never enjoyed a position as much as the job of an ALT.) I hope, instead, that my essay is taken in the broadest sense, that I mean only to describe a general atmosphere that underlies a multitude of special cases with varying degrees of the good and the bad. I hope that what I write is taken only as passionate critique and not as a grudge against my teaching colleagues or our Japanese supervisors. I mean no offense, only feedback.

The End of a Means: the Teacher in the Assistant

First and foremost, Assistant Language Teachers are not tools for the classroom. (If there is an acronym that stands for Assistant Language Tools, one of the two should be changed immediately to avoid confusion.) We are not pronunciation machines. We are not spell-checking machines. We are not more efficient worksheet or test correction machines (although I think that most of us are happy to help correct more difficult assignments every now and then for the sake of the students’ grammar). However, there is a renowned tendency for Japanese English teachers to ask for their ALT to read a list of vocabulary words in front of the class (or record their voice for speech contestants) and little else. For the lazy ALT, this is a terrific bargain: read a few words out loud a day and just sit back the rest of the time. For those of us who are here for what we were hired to do, though, this is an abuse of our abilities and proffered services.

I likewise find the remarks by Mr. Senyshyn’s principal regarding his beginning passion for teaching to be inconsiderate and untrue. I will be the first to admit that I have no official teaching degree as deemed by either my country’s or Japan’s government. My experiences with teaching only encompass my twelve-plus years in school, in the role of the student, and the odd jobs I picked up throughout my college years teaching English and designing activities for elementary- and junior high school-level students. The teachers who currently head the classrooms in our Japanese schools have given many years to studying methodology and student psychology, which includes some conventional teaching practices and perhaps even some not so conventional practices. They have worked years more in school offices, under rotating authorities and with fellow teachers. They have innumerable more experiences with heading a classroom and managing the classroom social relations and ambience. That counts for a lot with which most ALTs probably cannot compare.

By the same token, however, ALTs are, by definition, teachers, in that we actively facilitate an environment for learning in a particular academic field. (We are not, for this reason, called Language Teachers’ Assistants, or some other title that implies a secondary and passive resource that supplements [or adds to] the teacher’s already ‘nearly sufficient base of knowledge.’) Our expertise in the field we are designated to teach is inherent to our nativity to an English-speaking culture and the academic achievements by which we were selected. We are not random tourists picked off the streets and asked to give advice when needed on points of grammar and speech contest entrees; we are educated persons who have been trained in the best environments for our own English communication abilities, and I would think that mere calls for advice alone is an insult to our developing professions. ALTs are walking, talking opportunities for native English education.

Bilingual Society Class

Let us consider for what reason we ALTs are (or perhaps should be) here in the first place.

There is something to be said for a school to have applied for an Assisted Language Teacher. It is important that we consider the motives. If the school means for the ALT to be an additional feature to the current agenda of the English teachers, this is an unfortunate abuse to the ALT’s service. The ALT should not merely be added to what is already presently planned to be taught; the services of the ALT should to some degree or other become part of the curriculum. This is not meant to be an intrusion to the busy and complicated schedules of the Japanese English teachers, but there must be given both time and resources for the ALT to perform what she was hired to do. If teachers merely give ALTs whatever extra time is left over to ‘play a game’ (which seems to connote as a childish form of lesson review), provided there is time to spare, then I believe the school has wasted its money and hospitality on the ALT. As I have written, ALTs are opportunities. Our ‘games’ are in fact artificial environments for creative language comprehension. No matter how many times the vocabulary cards are flashed, the students will never understand how the words they learn are meaningful unless they are offered a meaningful situation by which they can make the words relevant to real life.

Though the results toward upcoming high school examinations may not be immediately apparent in the ALTs method of unrehearsed dialogue and improvisational constructive thinking, teachers must trust that the overall benefit to the students’ English drastically improves if they allowed so-called tangients in the agenda for one-on-one interaction with (or student-on-student guidance by) the ALT. The time an ALT is in the classroom is an opportunity to improve the students’ English in a way that only a native English-speaking teacher can, and this way can be expected to appear somewhat if not drastically different from the normal routine of textbook and examination study.

On the other hand, of course, it has been said (and I have experienced) some teachers (who) are inclined to give complete control for the class period to the ALT. This is also an abuse. For one thing, the students are not the only ones capable of benefiting from the presence of the ALT. The ALT is an opportunity as well for the teachers: an opportunity for the JTE to improve their own English or learn foreign culture first-hand. The ALT also benefits from a team-teaching relationship with the teacher by observing different teaching practices and improving their comprehension in Japanese-foreign country relations. Also, while the ALT may be (as I have argued) some form of teacher, it is not within our job description to head an entire class for our assigned period. I am not saying it is not our job as an excuse; I mean that our job is specifically assistant language teaching for a good reason. Whatever lack of experience we may have as professional teachers, the point to our participation is to form cooperative relationships and teaching practices with teachers where both JTE and ALT, as well as the entire student class, can benefit.

Learning ‘Team’

Thus, I see this as the main purpose to team-teaching: both the Japanese English teacher and the Assistant Language Teacher benefit through their interactive dual planning and teaching practices, and, even more importantly, the students benefit through the consequent results of team-teaching in developing a meaningful environment that is ideal for English learning (that is, one where English is actually relevant). This is why I say that ALTs are not an addition to the present curriculum; we are intended to be merged into it, to be given priority that is not secondary to what is the current teaching standard.

We may see this as a big feat, for teachers and ALTs both, but I think that it is not nearly as difficult as it seems. After all, ALTs commonly work at several schools at once, so that their frequency of visits is the only real schedule difference with which teachers should be concerned. Also, much of what the ALT can incorporate into the curriculum can work side-by-side with the textbook. (I think that in fact most of our ideas probably come from the textbook, anyway!) In some sense, the difference between former and newly intended practices is not one so much of what is taught but how it is taught and who is the center of attention in the class period. ALTs are a key to taking the next step beyond translation and formulaic memorization, and into authentic dialogue and foreign experiences and activities that demand energies beyond sheer reading-and-writing ability. We (who really work to be good ALTs) strive to put the students in the center of attention, such that they become engaged in a sort of learning experience that is, to my knowledge, unlike any other subject’s in the Japanese education system.

In one of the teaching handbooks we received through the JET Program’s orientations, there is a terrific chapter in “Teaching Theories & the Four Language Components” that regards the two main approaches considered in the Japanese English education system. The more ‘traditional’ one, the Grammar Translation Method, depicts, I think, the curriculum standard instated since post-WWII reconstruction. By this method, English resembles mathematics more than a language, a subject of logical principles and formulas for which every question, or problem, has a designated response, or answer. The newer method, the one the JET Program invests in us ALTs to carry through, is called Communicative Language Teaching. The differences between the two are large: one is teacher-centered; the other is student-centered. One focuses on correcting mistakes and perfecting grammar; the other concentrates on building language knowledge through direct communication experiences. (Refer to pages 256-263 in Resource Materials & Teaching Handbook 2006. I recommend this read for ALTs and JTEs both.)

Whether either or neither of these methods seems to be the best way for ALTs and JTEs to get along and get down to business, the main point I wish to extract from it is the importance that is placed on the students’ experiences over the teacher’s control of the classroom. I am sure that there is a reasonable fear of relinquishing direct control over a room of young and sometimes unpredictable children and teenagers. However, this is what is being suggested in performing English team-teaching activities that encourage the kids to do more talking than the adults (and to, indeed, encourage a fun atmosphere for learning, even in grammar lessons). I strongly feel this should be a recognized stipulation by the school in application for ALT services from the start.

I would like to end with one point of complaint in counter-position to the ALT. I hear said about as frequently as the point that JTEs are often not giving ALTs the room or trust to perform, that ALTs themselves are sometimes unambitious or little willing to do half as much work as JTEs, and in the worst case, that they are downright uncooperative. To that, I hope that readers recognize that this essay is as much a critique for what I believe should be expected of ALTs as it is one for what I think is hoped for in Japanese teachers. A simple interest in Japan is not enough, guys. There is a legitimate criterion that is unfortunately not easy to screen in application interviews yet I hope is considered by all who hire and become employed: the language teacher’s genuine care for her or his students. ※