Advertisement
If you have a new account but are having problems posting or verifying your account, please email us on hello@boards.ie for help. Thanks :)
Hello all! Please ensure that you are posting a new thread or question in the appropriate forum. The Feedback forum is overwhelmed with questions that are having to be moved elsewhere. If you need help to verify your account contact hello@boards.ie
Now Ye're Talking - to an English language teacher in Japan
Options
Comments
-
-
-
-
-
-
Advertisement
-
Thanks for the interesting AMA.
Are there any common questions or misconceptions about Ireland/the West that you've noticed? Is there a cultural aspect to your classes, or are they purely language orientated?
Similarly, had you any preconceptions about Japan or the people that turned out to be false once you'd started living there?
How's the sense of humour, or are things strictly formal and polite among colleagues/students?
Are your wife and kids enjoying their time here, or is their list of things they miss about Japan longer than yours?
0 -
RobertFoster wrote: »Thanks for the interesting AMA.
Are there any common questions or misconceptions about Ireland/the West that you've noticed? Is there a cultural aspect to your classes, or are they purely language orientated?
Similarly, had you any preconceptions about Japan or the people that turned out to be false once you'd started living there?
How's the sense of humour, or are things strictly formal and polite among colleagues/students?
Are your wife and kids enjoying their time here, or is their list of things they miss about Japan longer than yours?
As I mentioned before about Ireland, very few people know much about it. Most misconceptions would come come confusing it with Iceland, England (even New Zealand once).
As for 'The West', yes, there are planty of misconceptions. The one on which all others are founded is that there are really only two places in the world, 'Japan' and 'The Rest', and that people from 'The Rest' will share many similarities in the way that Japanese people do.
I met Japanese people who didn't know that people living in France, and Germany, for example, have their own languages, rather than English. There seems to be an assumption that everybody eats chips everyday, that most people are aggressive, and that everywhere is dangerous. Also, people were surprised that not all Europeans they met in Japan were tall and blond.
Again, I want to point out that there is so little immigration and even tourist numbers are pretty low compared to a country like France, so apart from television, movies, etc, there is not much exposure to or education about The Rest. Still, I am not sure if I met proportionally more people with a lack of some fairly basic geographical and cultural knowledge than I have met in Ireland. You can bump into people who don't know stuff you thought everybody knew anywhere and everywhere.
Classes were mostly language-focused, although students are very often keen to learn about the culture (I think their awareness of how much there is to learn is being raised). It would be introduced informally though, in my experience, apart from classes to prepare students for a study-abroad program in a particular country, which would focus on culture and day-to-day life for obvious practical reasons.
EDIT: These days, many textbooks, and particularly those designed for the Japanese market, address this by making some of their units about specific cultural/geographical topics. It wouldn't be unusual for a textbook to have a unit about Food of the World, or something like that, with activities/projects for students to work together to research and share information about the food in a country of their choice. There might be a unit on capital cities with the same tasks also - even if it is not explicit in the textbooks, most teachers will use the unit as an opportunity to get the students learning about the wider world.
Perhaps I was naive, but I didn't expect the place to be so damn crowded. The size of the buildings, the numbers of people, everywhere. It shocked me. I expected stuff like electronics to be cheaper. I had no idea baseball was so massively popular. And I had to learn to recognise how Japanese students respond to teaching - how they express confusion, how to give feedback, how to understand when they are not happy with something. But you need to learn that in any new teaching environment.
Most of my colleagues have always been teachers from the countries where English is spoken as a mother tongue. In language schools, those colleagues were mostly young people, just out of university. It was all very relaxed and great fun - the problem was getting people to stop drinking in time to be able to get up in the morning. At university, the jobs are better, so the staff tend to be a bit older and more serious about teaching as a career. Still, the foreign teachers' table was usually the most realxed and lively one in the communal prep area.
The students' English is often so low that jokes go down a bomb - humour is something that often has a shared cultural understanding, and the students are not familiar with it at all (think of what is needed to understand 'So this blond girl walks into a library', for example). Also, punchlines often are a play on words of some kind, or perhaps reading between the lines, while the students are still struggling with the literal meaning. I would still suffer from much the same problems in a Japanese language conversation - a slightly pained expression on my face knowing there must have been a joke, but not quite getting it.
My wife and kids love it in Ireland. We just spent the day at my parents' house in the countrywide, with their dog and cat and big back garden. We went for a walk down the country lanes, found some frogs, saw an empty bird's nest made of moss, ate some wild blackberries. Stuff that is a million miles removed from Japan.
Sure, they miss stuff. My wife misses certain foods/ingredients she can't get here, and she really missed 100yen shops (I can't believe I forgot to mention these treasure troves earlier in my list of things I missed), and also laments Ireland's range and quality of restaurants. My kids mostly miss some of the friends and the zoo we used to go to pretty regularly. But they are making friends here also.1 -
This discussion has been closed.
Advertisement