Question # 17. What are the ESL students like when teaching in Japan?

Question # 17. What are the students like?

Two eyes. Many, however, have four. Button noses and smiles are the standard in my experience.

Some schools want teachers for pre-schoolers. Pre-schoolers will often learn the English for something BEFORE they learn the Japanese.

Elementary school kids spend all day in class and every other Saturday at school, too. They go to swimming class, tutors for math, calligraphy or just tough it out at kumon, and then think they will learn English, too by spending an hour or two a week with a foreigner incapable of explaining anything to them.

Middle school kids have exposure to English and many think 'This is a pen' is a greeting.

Good high school students can have an excellent vocabulary but will never recognize the word when you say it to them and are petrified if you ask them to try say it. Still, there is a foundation there that can be built upon.

College kids have six years of English behind them and still cannot put a sentence together orally or understand more than 3 words in succession spoken by a native speaker. But…there is a foundation there.

Businessmen can be very good English speakers when they are drunk. All Japanese have the same middle name – scared-to-death of making a mistake.

OLs – office ladies are good students with dreams of going overseas and a motivation to make the best of it. They are also paying for the education themselves and don't want to waste their money….usually.

Housewives will feed you well but learn little…it's social time for them.

In any event, the Japanese are teachable. They are intelligent and capable. They have idiosynchrizies….can't physically hear the difference between light and right and will take off their clothes to get in a bus (bath) but they none of the obstacles to mastering English are insurmountable.

I will gladly teach and see progress in any serious Japanese student.

The key is for them or the teacher to find a motivation for them to learn English and a way for them to put aside their inhibitions.

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