How do you get your foot in the door without marketing yourself entirely on your own?
There are some companies out there that advertise positions like these on a contract with hourly pay. Do you think they are reliable? Are the amount of hours copious enough? Perhaps you end up only tutoring 4 or 5 hours per week.
I am somewhat confident in being able to teach English in Japanese, as opposed to teaching English in English. I have experience in teaching English grammar to adult Asian students, hacking multiple choice exams, and teaching English composition for testing purposes. But I am not native level in spoken Japanese. It’s not at N1+. I don’t know if employers, students, or worse their parents, will be that much more demanding because there is a service aspect to these jobs. On top of that you have to be responsible to improve their scores, or else students can’t justify spending money on tutors.
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This is what lots of Juku/cram schools do. Sadly, you’ll be competing with Japanese teachers who have experience in teaching this kind of subject matter.
I’ve done test prep (IELTS,TOEFL,EIKEN) but it was always private with students looking for top scores and wanting very specific help (mainly speaking). University campuses are good places to pick up students as cram schools don’t cater to them so well – the focus is for students getting in to University.
You can try a website like [hello-sensei.com](https://hello-sensei.com)
I’ve never used it myself, but everyone I know who has, had a mediocre experience. The truth is that there are too many people trying to be tutors and not enough students.
Yes, there are many test prep services. They use Japanese teachers because the goal is to pass the test not learn the subject. For kids the service is called juku.
I teach TOEIC test taking to my private students.
Honestly I took TOEIC myself first, and I also have a bunch of the books.
For how I got students, purely word of mouth. I do good work and I get offered students all the time.
I just charge by the hour and do most of my lessons over zoom. Some students want more time, so I book them more. If they are very demanding of time I increase the rate, because I’ll be turning down other students to fit them in.
The point is to use as much Japanese as necessary for them to understand, but mostly use English. I’ll speak English until it seems they didn’t understand or needs something clarified, then I’ll explain in Japanese. If you’re having students going for TOEIC or Eiken just exposure to vocabulary is very important, so covering a wide range of topics in English will help prepare them best.
I also teach a lot of things like suffixes and prefixes and word origins so that when they see a word they don’t know, they can take a guess at its meaning.
This is what I do exclusively. I got my job (at a cram school) by having taught several of these tests to native and international students in the U.S., having done academic counseling for U.S. university bound high school students in another Asian country, and having an advanced degree and qualifications. I replied to a job ad for my current role and the company decided I was exactly what they were looking for.
I teach TOEIC LR and SW full time in Japan. Though I’ve also published several TOEIC LR SW books on both in Japan. I agree with previous posters. Use English up until they don’t get it. Particularly with grammatical structures such as part of speech, conjunctions, and synonyms. I wish you luck with your teaching. Part 7 can be a slog but it’s important. It’s immensely rewarding and somewhat exciting to see how they do. Perhaps a first step is taking the tests yourself. Invaluable.