A few little things you might need to know before teaching English to Japanese kids
The Bulletin (Issue 43)
Although there are fewer kids about as Japan’s aging demographics kick in, there’s still a good chance that children will constitute a major number if not the majority of your students. With that in mind, here are a few basic points that might help you if you are thinking about teaching kids.
It’s helpful to know the school years in Japan (they run from April to March) and how they correspond to kids’ ages:
Three years of kindergarten (Year 1 from age 3, to Year 3 from age 5).
Six years of elementary school (Year 1 from age 6, to Year 6 from age 12).
Three years of junior high school (Year 1 from age 13, to year 3 from age 15).
Three years of high school (Year 1 from age 16, to Year 3 from age 18).
Four years of university (from age 18 to 21)
There are scheduling issues with teaching kids. In our area at least, kindergarteners can’t get to English class until 3:30, elementary school kids 40 minutes or more after that. Bukatsu after-school clubs are de facto mandatory and start to kick in from Year 4 of elementary school and continue through junior and senior high school. So don’t expect junior high and older kids to be able to make it to lessons until 7pm at the earliest, and high-schoolers even later. And school clubs love filling weekends with endless tournaments and concert competition rehearsals that, bizarrely, Japanese prioritise over learning English in lessons they’ve paid for. Go figure?
Then there is competition from juku cram schools. Every year they seem to be targeting kids at a younger and younger age. Currently, we start losing kids to cram schools from Year 4 of elementary, but I expect the pressure from cram schools to increase perhaps all the way through elementary school. What can you do about this? Either out-cram the cram schools (good luck with that), or, what I do, offer something distinctly different — focussing on enjoyment and fluency. As a result, sure, we lose some kids to juku, but many more stay with us and attend juku classes too. Fine by us as it means we can leave the tedious grammar and test English to the cram schools and we can get on with parties and field trips.
But the pressure is there to show some kind of results. If you teach kids, make sure when they leave your school they can at least read and write as well as handle basic speaking and listening tasks that should be the mainstay of your lessons.
More thoughts, on team teaching youngsters, here and general pointers on how to teach English to kids and adults, here.
What are your experiences of teaching kids? Any tips or problems you’d like to share? Leave a comment if so. On Friday’s Staffroom podcast, I’ll address the age-old problem of what to do when a prospective adult student says they just want to do conversational English… but have nothing to say. Until then.
Patrick