Eigo Noto and the Role of ALTs

A lot of people come to Japan expecting their assistant language teacher position to require a lot of work and responsibility, only to find themselves sitting in the staff room for hours each day. On the other hand, a ton of ALTs have no teaching aspirations and get frustrated when their schools have the gall to expect them to do anything. I'm somewhere between the two examples, in that I came to Japan expecting a lot of work, but am actually okay with it when they don't give me anything to do. After all, my main goal in coming to Japan is to learn Japanese, and the fewer classes I have to teach, the more time I can dedicate to studying.

A popular saying among JET Program participants is "every situation is different." I've witnessed its truth. When I was on Uoshima, I taught between zero and three lessons per day, though one class was probably the daily average. Most weeks, I'd teach about 8 lessons, three or four of which were prepared by my teaching partner. The remaining classes required my own lesson planning and teaching. Given that there was only one person per class, I wasn't able to recycle much of my lesson material. While it was nice to have complete freedom in the lesson planning stage, it consumed a lot of my time and caused a lot of stress.

Here in Imabari, I teach at five different schools, three of which have class sizes between 25 and 40. At four of my five schools (including both of my junior high schools), lessons are generally prepared by the English teachers, and I just show up and participate in the lesson.

The Ministry of Education has developed Eigo Noto (English Notebook), a two-volume set of English textbooks that kids all over Japan are expected to study during fifth and sixth grade. The books come with an audio CD an interactive CD-rom companion that can be played on a laptop hooked to a projector as a teaching help. It also comes with a teacher's manual that has lesson plans written in Japanese, so that the Japanese homeroom teachers that are forced to teach English with an ALT won't have to stress about preparing a lesson. They merely need to refer to the guide, which breaks everything down into lessons.

Of course, it doesn't always work that way. There are plenty of occasions at the elementary school where Eigo Noto lessons supposedly prepared by the teacher are new to both me and the teacher with whom I'm team-teaching. During those awkward times, I do my best to take control of the lesson and relieve some of the pressure on the other teacher. Even though things aren't perfect, they usually work out just fine in the end, even if there's a little discomfort. Just having a lesson plan to follow, even if it's lackluster, is still a good start.

Two of my three elementary schools use Eigo Noto, and one of them is expected to, but consistently leaves me hanging. At that school, it's basically all up to me, and that puts a lot of wear on my body. I usually have to teach four large classes each time I go (which is less than many other ALTs, so I guess I can't complain). The problem with that school is that the teachers don't know how to use Eigo Noto. When I teach fifth and sixth grade there, the teachers are expected to have prepared a lesson beforehand, yet they generally come to me and ask if I've prepared anything. I'm perfectly happy with preparing lessons—I just need to know in advance. The preferred method, however, would be for them to be involved with the lesson planning from Eigo Noto, so that we could both have an idea of what the heck is going on in our lessons.

Anyway, all this is just a long way of saying that Eigo Noto, which I have previously poked fun at, is useful. It's a very convenient way to help Japanese teachers who can't speak much English to prepare English lessons for use with an ALT.

Given the dearth of qualified English teachers in Japan, the Ministry of Education has to settle for the next best thing: a standardized text and ALTs. Given the high cost of hiring and transporting ALTs, they're forced to split us up between a bunch of schools. Not all ALTs, mind you, teach at a lot of schools, but most do. Because of differing ALT usage, it makes sense that the Ministry of Education wants Japanese home room teachers to have enough materials to teach without an ALT, while still making the lessons ALT and native speaker-friendly. I fully support this model, since there's likely no better solution.

Now that I've given this disclaimer, I'd like to talk about some of the shortcomings of Eigo Noto. If you want to teach kids effectively, it's important that you correct mistakes in the text and other teaching materials. I'll break it down as a separate post, so that people who don't care about why I'm criticizing the book don't have to read this post to get to the good stuff.