TOKYO ESL-TRANSLATION

Current Jobs Conditions

The ESL jobs situation has changed quite a bit in Japan in the last few years. As a rule, qualifications have tightened up. A Master's Degree is useful. A Ph.D is ocasionally necessary.
Many full-time positions have been downsized to semi-full-time, or part-time ARUBAAITO. The listings I recommend always have a wide variety of placement types.Some are at Universities; some at language schools; some in public school; some in companies; some in Jr. Colleges or vocational schools. *That's a short list of the categories.

ESL Teacher Resources

Hey, ESL has a terrible, stale pedagogy -- bad from the beginning. Did you know that? If you look into the academic history of this discipline, you'll notice that a lot of it was slapped together by hacks; and that nothing that has ever managed to insert itself into its awkward, unseemly curriculum has never been consequently evicted. Check this mess out. It's what you'll be given to implement. But don't imagine it works as well in the classroom as the bigtime textbook hucksters promise your employer it will. By the way, your boss will usually be a businessman, not someone with any educational credentials. Please try to remember that when you're earnestly trying to explain to him why this stuff won't fly.
One of the unexpected perks of the currently sluggish Japanese economy is that some of the wilder "innovations" in English teaching have finally been wiped out. Gone is the Shinjuku 'English Hospital' where the foreigner English-speakers had to wear white lab coats and give the 'patients' 'English checkups,' and "Learn English Ski Trips" is out of business (I think... hum..). Anyway, the downside is that what's left is the most standard, unuseable old acorns of the much-praised and uniformly awful Audio-Lingual 'Direct Method' prettied up with some meaningless references to second-hand buzz words such as 'the ecclectic approach,' 'natural learning' or 'the communicative method.'

ESL Opinions

Some thoughts on the dynamic of Japanese English-language instructional methods and tendencies.

ESL Shareware

Computer-aided ESL and general computer interest is definitely on the rise here. A nicely thought out exchange program to the U.S. went online this summer. And lots of other attempts at distance learning and internet literacy are beginning to take off in Japanese schools -- some more inspired than others.

Tokyo Daze

A very raw description of what teaching English in Tokyo was like for one guy.

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