If someone got a bachelors in say like, Arts. How are they qualified to teach students if they don’t have any teaching experiences or classroom management skills?
What if the person has a bachelors in teaching? Do they get the better spotlight pick for hiring?
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Oh, here we go!
I can’t speak for eikawa work, but part of this is just that ALTs aren’t teachers. The Japanese word for ALT is 英語指導助手, which translates to something like English Instruction Assistant. The goal isn’t to teach the class, but to assist someone else with instruction. Ultimately, being successful as an ALT is less about your knowledge of education, and more about other aspects of your personality. The bachelors degree requirement is only for visa procedures.
As for your other questions, I’ve had mixed opinions on whether or not having a degree in education helps with hiring. I’ve even heard that it hurts. The logic being that people who have backgrounds in education are thought to be more likely to butt heads with JTEs.
Well, they aren’t qualified to teach, actually, which is why people without a degree related to ESL won’t be able to get a job in a professional context.
However, you can get a job teaching for a conversation school or at an ALT dispatch company, because those are non-professional contexts and thus don’t require any qualifications.
Those contexts are unskilled jobs where you will get juuuuust enough training to function within the limited parameters of what you will be allowed to do.
Basically, if you work as an ALT, you’ll get a bit of training when you arrive, and then you’ll be told what to do by your supervising teacher.
And if you work in a language school, you’ll get a bit of training to teach you to follow the set lesson structure that is used in that particular school.
Keep in mind, this is not professional ESL training. It’s not done by professionals, and it’s not following what is considered best teaching practice. It’s paint-by-numbers, and is just enough so that your lesson doesn’t go totally off the rails into chaos.
If by chance you are interested in being a professional teacher, you should look into getting TESOL qualifications – CELTA, TrinityCert, MATESOL, etc.
They’re not. ALTs are not teachers. Eikaiwa is closer to a juku than a school, so eikaiwa teachers are more akin to tutors.
Some eikaiwa will prioritize interviewees with an education background, BUT many will then throw their basic lesson plan in which students simply listen and repeat… So, a waste of a more qualified person.
They’re not. That is what the Japanese teacher is for. The ALT is subordinate to them and follows orders about what to teach and present. At least in theory, anyway. In practice you get many situations where the ALT is forced to teach the whole class as a T1. This can be due to laziness or lack of communication with the JTE or due to administration not understanding the ALT’s role and/or being duped by shady dispatch companies that promise the world.
All that said, the Japanese Ministry of Education seems to believe that having ALTs is important enough to put funding towards so there must be some value.
*We’re not teachers, we’re service providers* (Eikaiwa). We ‘teach’ people how to communicate in English so our only necessary ‘qualification’ is that we’re native speakers.
I *do* have a degree in TESOL but Eikaiwa is just a gateway for me. I don’t know if my degree helped: I was hired during the Pandemic when the need was high because other teachers abandoned ship.
I’m made so much money “teaching” in Japan. Ya’ll need to get a life.
They aren’t. But they do meet visa requirements.
That’s the neat thing…they aren’t!
You dont need a degree in English or education to be a teacher here. I’m not talking about ALT job.
Even a Japanese person doesn’t need a degree in education to teach in private schools. Most of the private schools offer training and provide a temporary teaching licence. There are also programs such as “Teach for Japan” where people who aren’t trained educators are sent to public schools with teacher shortages. You can get a short term license and renew it yearly or every couple of years.
If you are interested in ALT work, like JET, the information you are looking for is this:
Can you potentially adapt to the foreign environment and be a good representative of your culture for the children?
Do you have practical experience in the classroom setting?
Will you continue to provide exchange opportunities between Japan and your home country even after the end of your employment?
90% of people from my region and cohort that I met either had a degree in Japanese or Education. Anyone who didn’t, like myself, had some sort of teaching experience. I was an SI and tutor for most of college, for example, and took classes from the school’s TESOL masters program to get a certificate / had student teaching experience through said program, and volunteered for a high school Japan / USA sister city program as a member of the board for the organization.
So if your question is really ‘what should I be doing to make myself better for something like say JET?’ then the answer is build a resume that shows your ability to teach and enthusiasm for culture exchange. If your question is “what should I be doing to get a job in Japan doing Eikawa / ALT work for a dispatch company?”, breathing is a good start. Taking regular showers is optional from what I’ve heard.
Thirty years teaching experience in Japan, both at a vocational school and at several universities. At the university level, an important qualification for hiring is academic research papers, usually three or more (but two may be enough in some cases). If a candidate has the papers, a Masters and is a native speaker, they can be hired, particularly where there are few candidates. This is becoming more rare, but it’s absolutely a thing on the belief that contact with a native speaker and use of an appropriate textbook are “good enough.” The university where I’m at now in Kanagawa hired a teacher part-time with no ESL qualifications (but some experience working at other universities). I’m not personally in favor of this hiring practice, but the teacher I mentioned above is doing fine. So if you’re a Lit, History, Economics or Philosophy major and have some academic papers, and some teaching experience, you have a chance.
Most people can learn to do anything. Having a degree proves you can study successfully at a degree level. Beyond that, teaching is simply acquiring knowledge of the subject, acquiring knowledge about teaching and acquiring classroom experience. Not everyone is good at it but it’s not rocket science either.
If I were hiring, I’d value a teaching degree, but I’d be more impressed with relevant experience and professional accomplishments. If you had an MA in Educational Leadership, I’d laugh directly in your face
The degree isn’t to teach English, it’s to get a visa. You can teach English without a degree if you have a spouse visa or permanent residency.
You will get hired for sure but it depends on the (type of) school if you will get a higher salary or not.
The short answer.
– They aren’t teachers.
– the bachelors isn’t a work requirement. It’s a work **Visa** requirement. (If it wasn’t for that, they would probably allow any native English speaker)
– they don’t need teaching experience since they aren’t meant to lead the class. Just assist.
– same for classroom management. That’s the home room teacher’s job.
For actual teaching positions in a private school/university/ specialized schools and (sometimes) for direct hire or Juku, you’ll need qualifications (specific degrees, licensing, etc.). Also, the higher the prestige the more publications you’re expected to have.
Alt/Eikaiwa work is considered entry level in Japan with a very low skill ceiling. That means it also has a shallow mobility cap. If you want to move up or double your salary, it’s usually advised to use your free time to learn or refine new skills so you can change industries or go for management/directorial positions. However, that can be a hard hill to climb since you’ll need to do research on how to get to the position or occupation you want or have to do additional schooling.
Unlicensed ALTs are usually relegated to assistant roles, as other respondents have described.
There is no qualification for paraeducators like you see in Canada, the UK and other countries. Anybody who can clear the Ministry of Justice bar (English medium education for a specified number of years and a BA in anything) can get a job as an ALT, an English assistant to a qualified teacher.
There are a small number of school boards on the Japanese curriculum that may take qualified teachers and grant them special licenses.
Some of the few boards of education that will take qualified non-Japanese applicants are Ibaraki and Saitama Prefectures. You’d need Japanese language skills to cope with the recruitment process. As far as I can tell, they only hire in country (anybody can correct me if I’m wrong). The employment conditions are on par with Japanese nationals.
I have worked in private high schools for decades next to non-Japanese teachers who have subject preparation and/or TESOL qualifications of all kinds. Conditions vary. It’s a polite way of saying you could be paid peanuts or ample enough to support a family.
ALTs aren’t hired on silly things like teaching skills, knowledge of education, or effective communication skills. Why would you even assume such a silly thing?
Requirements are that you’re ikemen/kawaii and genki. Blonde hair and light-skin are not required but highly preferred!
That silly BA in Media Studies thing? Whatever just hand that in to the visa people, if it checks out and you’re legally allowed to work in Japan – congrats you’ve been hired!
TBH, teaching at conversation class level is not rocket science. If you have a degree, it just shows you have some critical and analytical skills and a fair degree of commitment. Being good at this kind of teaching is more about patience, creativity and being flexible.
It doesnt qualify you to teach, but youre also not supposed to teach, you’re supposed to ASSIST. Now, does this always happen? No. I was an ALT at an elementary school for 3 years and the teachers and school just clearly didn’t give a shit about English. I was lucky if the homeroom teacher showed up half the time. So I just did my best and tried to make lessons fun.
It reminded me of gym and music class when I was in elementary school. Those were clearly required classes that my school just didn’t care about.
Visa
As others have said, the types of jobs for which a random bachelor’s will suffice are not typically all that challenging. They don’t usually require much knowledge of syllabus design, for example. You’re either given materials and lesson plans or you’re just assisting a Japanese teacher.
To be honest though, when you do a degree in teaching, you don’t learn any secret knowledge which is unavailable to mere mortals. Anyone can become a good teacher through experience, observation (both observing and being observed) and a bit of reading. I obviously learned a lot about the ins and outs of TESOL in my degree but I think it probably accounts for a much smaller fraction of my ability to do my actual job than my experience does.
I honestly think any budding teacher who has the right sort of attitude could just read Scrivener’s Learning Teaching, spend a couple of months doing what he says under occasional observation and end up a pretty competent teacher. If only more people did that.
Just curious, if you graduated from Harvard for an example and did not major in education, would you be less qualified than a Japanese with a teaching degree in English to teach English?
I was hired as an Eikaiwa teacher at GEOS straight out of university with a Bachelor’s degree in political science. They gave me four days of “teacher training” in my home country (Canada) that was actually mostly devoted to learning how to complete paperwork and how to sell stuff to students rather than how to actually teach. Then they put me on a plane to Japan and plunked me in a classroom the day after I arrived.
I was definitely not qualified to teach anything at that point and I gave some egregiously incompetent lessons during my first 3 months or so. So bad that now, more than 20 years later, I still cringe when I think back on them and feel quite guilty for the students who actually paid for them.
After those 3 months of learning from mistakes my teaching improved significantly and I think after that point I could have been considered “qualified” in the sense that I knew what I was doing and could handle a class with competence.
Eikaiwa is not a particularly difficult job, but its also one that has a steep learning curve. I think the majority of people hired into those positions for the first time, like me, are definitely not qualified for it, but have to learn quickly.
Lot of people saying that it’s a visa requirement, just want to throw in that if you have experience teaching, it’s not a requirement. I got a visa (I assume) based on the 6 years kindergarten experience I had in England prior to being hired at an eikaiwa. I don’t have a degree. (I do have an NVQ in early childhood education though, but it’s a qualification that doesn’t even seem to exist outside of England.)
You can hopefully read and understand English from a decent level. Literally, that’s it.
They aren’t. The ALTs are just supposed to be a foreign face who can say words with a native accent and entertain the kids.
Eikaiwa workers are salespeople meant to use their foreignness to sell English classes and materials.
There are exceptions but I knew a guy who was qualified to teach and was rejected from JET twice because of it. One of the people in charge of the JET interviews for the area let it slip that they didn’t want qualified teachers since they’d upstage the Japanese teachers. They want assistants who are foreign