For a multitude of reasons, I had
always wanted to travel to Japan and see what it was like to live
here. For various other reasons, I started wanting to be a teacher.
In the last year of college, I found out about the JET Program and
other exchange programs that hire assistant language teachers
(hereon, “ALTs”) to live and teach in Japan. Hastily, I set into
motion my plan to become an ALT by receiving training for a TEFL
Certificate and going through the long and stressful JET application
process. Now, over two years since my process first began, I have now
been an ALT for more than a year. All I can say about my position in
this society and education system is: it is peculiar.
I remember when I found out about this
job. I wasn't really sure what an ALTs job description was, and there
were stories with extremely varying accounts. At orientation, the
best our advisers could tell us was the dreaded keyword: ESID (every
situation is different). While I've been here, I've been struggling
to determine what exactly an ALT is supposed to do. At some of my
schools, particularly the elementary school, I actually do something
resembling teaching. At others, I sit in the teacher's room all day
lazing about, reading interesting articles online or writing on my
blog. Sometimes, I am so desperately bored that I write what is on my
mind for no particular reason, as I am doing now. I ask if they would
like me to do anything, but they tend to avoid bringing me to class.
I do things like put up interesting displays on my ever-growing “ALT
Wall”, but only because that seems to be the only way I can get
some connection to the students. Over and over, I've asked myself,
“Why the hell am I here?”
My supervisor put it very simply. “You
are here to assist your JTEs (Japanese Teachers of English) with
whatever they request.” It sounded easy enough, but we slowly
encounter a sort of paradox. From my experience, most of the JTEs I
work with don't want assistance from the ALTs. I'm under the
impression that they believe they are fine teaching English on their
own, and that ALTs are unnecessary. Most of them have been teaching
for much longer than any ALT, so they can surely handle themselves
better. They've gone through their rigorous testing and certification
to become a teacher, so they must be experts in their fields. We must
ask: why do the JTEs need assistants like us in the first place?
The answer is this: the schools have
been mandated to have an ALT by the national ministry for education
(MEXT). An authority outside the confines of the school, maybe even
beyond the scope of the local board of education, is requiring them
to have an ALT, whether they like it or not. But why do their
authorities believe ALTs are necessary?
I thought maybe we'd be here as
pronunciation models. JTEs and Japanese people in general have pretty
messed up accents due to the relatively few vowel and consonant
sounds in their native language. I thought, “maybe we're here so
the students can hear what real English sounds like.” It seemed
plausible, until I remembered that the textbook comes with a CD read
by a native speaker. They don't really need something as expensive as
me to display correct pronunciation. Most JTEs have me read passages
from the textbook, but when I'm out visiting another school (which is
the majority of the time), they use the CD. Some JTEs are so out of
the loop that they'll use the CD instead of me even when I'm
standing RIGHT THERE NEXT TO THEM. Well, I'm obviously not needed in
that department.
Another ALT offered a solution: we have
been brought here to be conversation practice partners with the
students. It sounds like a good idea, except we are given almost no
opportunities to actually talk with the kids. There isn't an assigned
time where the students can talk to me, nor is there an assigned
place to talk even if they wanted to. I don't get a room or an
office, and in between class, lunch, cleaning time, and the various council and class meetings, there isn't
enough break time to have a conversation. Skill-wise, I can probably
only speak to 3-4 kids per school in anything resembling English.
Others get completely flabbergasted at the though of speaking
anything but Japanese, and avoid the ALT like the plague. The ALT
that suggested this answer works at the biggest school with the most
affluent students in the city, so they are more serious about English
and have an English Club. Even then, the club attendance is quite low, so
not many students actually get “conversation practice”. I'd love to
have more conversation time with my students, but if we really are
here for that purpose, we are hardly being utilized at all.
Someone else, the translator and
international relations coordinator in the office, guessed that we're
here to display our culture. Only someone with a cultural background
such as us can explain the cultural differences of our home
countries, right? True! However, like the previous hypothesis, we are
hardly ever used for that purpose. I am rarely asked to explain
cultural aspects of America, unless they want me to describe a
holiday and the accompanying traditional activities (and even that is
rare outside elementary school). We aren't even allowed to maintain
our cultural societal behaviors, as we are expected to conform to
Japanese societal norms. This includes taking shoes off indoors,
bowing, using polite and humble speech, saying itadakimasu and
gochisousama during
meals, waiting to eat lunch until everyone can start, starting and
ending class with an official greeting, etc. How effective can we be
in spreading cultural behaviors if we're expected to act Japanese? I
can only really explain cultural differences on my ALT Wall, but how
many students actually read it? Some ALTs aren't even given the
privilege of having wall space (I had to personally ask for one)!
Surely this cannot be the answer.
The real reason ALTs are deemed
necessary is this: even though English is a required subject from
middle school through college, Japan is surprisingly poor at English.
Among Asian countries, Japanese people actually score the LOWEST on
the TOEFL test. That is truly abysmal...
The government knows this, and
they attributed it to the fact that the English teachers in this country
(traditionally a job held exclusively by Japanese natives) are,
alone, not doing a good enough job. Their solution was to bring in
“experts of English teaching” from the outside: ALTs. Yes, the
licensing system tells teachers they are competent enough to be teachers, but the ministry of education tells them they are not
competent enough to teach without an “expert” by their side. Do
you see the paradox here? How can they be competent and incompetent
at the same time?
This is the confusion my JTEs have, and
they are not entirely wrong to be confused. Their own government has
given them a teaching license, so they are officially recognized as
competent, even if some aren't. At the moment, the teachers are
mostly tested on knowledge of their field, while teaching methods and abilities are largely ignored. The requirements to get a teaching
license need a revamp to make sure their skills are up to par. One of
my teachers told me once that she had applied to be a teacher at a
local eikaiwa, or private
after-school tutoring academy. She couldn't meet the standards for
that position, so she settled for being a public school teacher.
WHAT??? The public education system is picking up the rejects???
Beyond that, these “experts of
English teaching” brought in from the outside aren't even required
to be experts of English nor teaching. I went through the effort to
obtain a TEFL certification from a rigorous and prestigious (read,
expensive) institution because I thought that was the only natural
decision. Another ALT in the city has a masters degree in TESOL. Many
of the other ALTs, however, do not have any teacher training or
experience whatsoever, in English or any other field. While a few of
us are very qualified to teach English, the majority of ALTs are
merely English native speakers. They are neither experts of English
or experts of teaching, so the JTEs tend to stereotype all ALTs as
“merely foreigners”.
This is the peculiar situation of the
ALT in Japan. We are brought here under the assumption that JTEs
cannot fully function without us, but the JTEs believe that we are
incompetent commoners who function merely as assistants (or audio players). In most cases in reality, both the JTE and the ALT are incompetent and unqualified, combining to form a tag-teamed powerhouse of failure. This
confusion over who exists for whose sake and the constant grapple for
authority in the classroom is why the ALT system and English
education in general is in a dead jam. The ones who suffer most are
the students.
*Disclaimer: These are my experiences
working as an elementary and junior high ALT in a somewhat large city
in a very rural prefecture. I do not claim that my situation is the
same as any other ALT in a different location or at a different
school level (especially high school). As I mentioned before, ESID
(kill me now).
