How to be a good Eikawa teacher? Trained, certified, but not good enough.

15 comments

1. Just teach them exactly what they need to know to pass the test. It’s what the school wants, it’s what the parents want and it will make the kids lives a lot easier. It will make your life easier. Let the kids make their parents happy and proud.

2. There are a lot of contrasting points in your post.
   1. You said you are studying ESL in your spare time. Eikaiwa is EFL and the methods are quite different. I would focus on EFL.

   2. Being a “good” Eikaiwa teacher and teaching for eiken is also very different. Again, they use different methods.

   3. If your school has teaching materials and are getting upset with you, then stick exactly to wait the materials are. Don’t waiver away from them at all.

   Sorry to say but working at a school that will not let you be you in the classroom and is pushing you to strictly use their materials, you will not become a good teacher.
   The more you read about effective methods, approaches, and theories to EFL teaching, the more you will realise the materials are have to use are not good and you are not a teacher.

3. Teaching to pass Eiken is not teaching functional English. The reading and listening portions are almost entirely about vocabulary. So kids who want to pass Eiken need to be cramming vocabulary. Rather than teaching them general study skills, you should teach them Eiken skills/shortcuts.

   So, get very, very familiar with Eiken, and then teach them how to approach the specific questions that Eiken uses. It is extremely formulaic.

4. Teaching eiken is basically getting the kids to memorize sentences and vocabulary. Don’t go into any details or anything. Basic as you can be.

   Listening is whatever. That’s up to the kids.

5. There are different approaches depending on their reading level, vocab base, and reading comprehension.
   If they are having difficulty reaching, go through it with them word by word, then reading it again by yourself so they can follow along. This’ll help them recall those important sight words. It’s usually easier to understand a question at normal speed target than butchered 1/5th speed.
   With the lower levels, if they can read, specifically 5 and 4, I give them a chance to do it on their own, then I read it myself. I typically read wrong answers first so they get an idea how wrong it sounds. I’ll sometimes translate it to further help with comprehension.
   You need to help them enough while “dragging” them through the material. Keep spirits high work a positive attitude and they’re more likely to engage and thus do better. Sight words are important. Lots of repetition.

6. Dude, I get you. I have a kid coming from Kumon for eiken prep. If she passes she can leave kumon and join my school, if she doesn’t she needs to continue Kumon until April.

   I did the sneaky and taught her how to use anki. I request screenshots of the stats page every so often. But this wouldn’t work with a regular class or a class that isn’t your own.

   Honestly I think apart from 試験対策 (test… strategy?) the students’ vocabulary and knowledge just have to be at the level necessary to pass the test they’re going for. 🙁

7. In the past I found that the kids who passed tended to be those who were being supported the most at home by their parents. Once English class a week usually isnt enough, so if you can communicate that to the parents, then you may be in a better spot.

8. Be genki and do exactly what you’re told, those are literally the only requirements of being an eikaiwa teacher, and the only things that your employers care about

9. I use to teach Kindergarten ,too. I miss that elasticity of a young mind. In HS, most don’t want to study English 🙁

10. There is some good advice already posted but I’ll throw in my two cents. How long and how often do you have lessons with the students? Standard Eikawa I assume once a week for around an hour. What age are we talking about and what level Eiken? I just realized that it’s not listed. Of course it’s understandable that you have to do things as the school designates. Here are some ideas that might improve the situation with the students.

    Instead of teaching the kids, how about doing activities where students have the opportunity to use the language and interact with others and yourself. Students should be speaking as much as possible, but its ok if they aren’t ready to talk yet. Meaningful activities create a need for communication and provide motivation to listen and speak. I recommend reading “Teaching Young Language Learners” by Pinter if you haven’t already.

    If the students don’t study at home, how about encouraging reading? If they read books, at their level, they might come to enjoy English more and reading can help a lot with motivation and language acquisition. I’d check out Krashen and what he says about reading.

    That’s all I can think of at the moment but basically kids want to play games and have fun. If you can incorporate that into the lesson, that could lead to students enjoying what they are doing and motivate them with English. I really avoided talking about Eiken specifically as if students are acquiring English at a manageable level, the test should fall in line.

11. What level of Eiken are we talking here?

12. What Eiken level do they do?

13. Quit

14. There are books for studying Eiken and teaching to kids. As others have said, teach them what they need. Also, try to maybe introduce some language hints and grammar in Japanese so the kids can understand key concepts more easily.

15. I have also worked in a kindergarten and had experience in teaching Eiken to kids of various ages. My youngest being 3 year olds (nensho) for Eiken jr., 5-6 (nencho) year olds for Eiken jr gold/ Eiken level 5. Going to 2nd-3rd graders for Eiken level 3 and pre 2 respectively. I can say it’s difficult to effectively teach Eiken to kids, since it’s really more of teaching how to take a test.

    For my nencho kids I had 13 kids take the exam one year, and every single one passed. But it was only because I had to figure out methods that they could understand and create materials that could help them. The class was everyday after their morning lessons and it was only for an hour, so I really needed to figure out how to help them since I wasn’t their main teacher in the morning. I ultimately created several workbooks and reading materials that helped them read, and used the class to help with comprehension. Several weeks before the actual exam, I had to teach them how to fill out the test. They’re literal 5 years olds who’ve never seen a test before, much less one that required filling out a separate sheet that contained their answers. So that was also challenging. Combined with the fact that there’s a time limit, it didn’t give much hope if they could do it, but they did.

    It was bitter work but I was happy with the results.

    With the older students, i relied more on using Japanese to explain difficult concepts. Unfortunately these classes were once a week for an hour so it was impossible to gauge what they remembered from the prior lessons. As such, to not waste their time and mine, Japanese was a necessity. It also had the benefit of increasing my knowledge of Japanese. While an Eikawa “specializes” in English only lessons, I would say it’s nearly impossible for when you’re teaching Eiken. Unless the student attends an international school where they’re immersed in English at school and home, it would be extremely rough to explain difficult concepts and expect them to remember and practice at home.

    If you really want to become a better Eiken teacher, you might want to stop being a teacher with an eikaiwa mindset. You really have to open your mind on what the kids are thinking and their way of learning and attack from that end. To me, you have to be more involved in getting the material into their head and unfortunately that requires you to understand the material in a way that literal five year olds can understand. That doesn’t necessarily mean your students are that age, but should show you what the approach should look like when teaching your kids.

    My advice: use old Eiken exams and think of ways to dumb down the sentences. When teaching of new vocabulary you unfortunately just need to drill these. I always did quiz games on our down time to ensure they weren’t tripped up. You’d be surprised how many kids forget easy question words and things related to days of the week. For written portions of the exam, I always taught my kids how to turn whatever question they were asked into the answer. Since most of the grading is determined by the length of the writing in question, and general spelling, I focused more on simple patterns for writing.

    For example: If the question was “what is your favorite animal and why?” I’d tell my kids to look at the sentence and “steal” the words to make their own sentence. So their answer would look like “my favorite animals are dogs. Dogs are my favorite animal because they are cute. That is why dogs are my favorite”. In reality a really shit answer, but for the test, it works out well. As long as it makes sense and meets the minimum word count, that was a perfectly acceptable answer for level 4. Levels 3 and pre 2 are obviously more difficult, but they followed similar patterns of stealing the information they need.

    Edit: changed “that’s” to “that is” in the sample answer because realistically the kids need to pad out the word count as much as needed

    Frankly I’ve never worked in an eikaiwa, but if your boss expects older students to pass when they’re only learning in English, I’d say that they’d need to reevaluate.