In my article, Part-time Work in Japan, I mentioned English conversation lessons as being one of the main ways in which foreigners in Japan try to earn money. This is hardly surprising. After all, it seems so easy. Be a native English speaker, advertise yourself as such on a special English lesson website, wait for students to come in drove begging you to speak to them in your amazing natively English way, spend an our talking to them at a cafe, and get paid roughly 2000 yen for your efforts. Some of the students might even pay for you coffee and travel costs.
To this I would say, yes, sometimes it can be just that easy. But do not be fooled. Often it is harder than it looks, for a number of reasons. While not wishing to discourage people from seeking out this line of work, I think it is well worth pointing out the possible difficulties one might incur in trying to teach English part-time.
- Finding people to teach.
This is probably the worst, and definitely the most frustrating, problem of them all. You thought that teaching English sounded like the best, easiest way to earn money in Japan? Well, so did every other native English speaker in the country. It is an incredibly competitive market, and some people will set up profiles on every English lesson website they can find and not get a response for months, or at all.
To attempt to overcome this obstacle, I recommend offering negotiable fees (Japanese people like bargains as much as anybody), submitting legal documents to any website that offers it (over a secure connection, of course) in order to prove to potential students that you are a trustworthy person, posting a friendly-looking profile picture of yourself and, if possible, writing about the kinds of lessons you can offer in both languages, English first. If you just write in English prospective students might not be able to understand it, and if you just write in Japanese they might doubt your English ability, and/or be somewhat insulted at you possibly insinuating that they do not know how to read English. Other than these small measures, finding prospective students is very much pot luck, I’m afraid. Good luck.
- The student not being able to converse in English.
Say a prospective student gets in contact with you, sending you an email in clumsy but relatively understandable English. You figure that his/her English is pretty good, but a little flawed in places. You arrange to meet up with them, and when the both of you sit down you ask them a question, and they stare at you as though you have just asked them to explain the principle theories behind nuclear chemistry in under five seconds. Congratulations – your student cannot speak English.
This is pretty common in Japan. Most Japanese people learn the bulk of their English in middle and high school, and in Japanese middle and high school very little speaking happens in any class, let alone English. What you therefore end up with are a nation of people who can read and write basic English pretty competently, but cannot really speak it.
Fortunately, this is not necessarily a difficult obstacle to overcome. Your student after all knows English, and knows how to speak. Your job here is to combine those two skills and have them speak in English. The key here is to start off simply: Ask them to talk about themselves, about their hobbies and interests, any questions they might have, etc. Encouraging your student to speak is the most important thing here. Half of speaking a foreign language is about confidence, and if the student feels that you are a friend and you are not going to laugh at them for having clumsy English, they will be more apt to speak. There is no singular method for tackling this possible obstacle, but I would say that it is important to be aware of the obstacle’s existence.
- Your student cannot even write in English.
Japanese people wanting to learn English come in a variety of flavours. The younger students (16 to early 20s) are generally going to be the aforementioned good-writer-bad-speaker type, as the English they learned in school will still be relatively intact in their heads. Students any older than this will have probably all but forgotten their high-school English. Unless a non-native speaker of any language is in contact with other speakers of that language on a relatively frequent basis, that language ability starts to fade.
If your student appears to be like this, conversing with them straight away will probably not do very much for them. What you are saying will sound like gibberish to them. Before more fluent conversation is possible, it is likely that you will have to become their grammar teacher. Teaching the grammar of your native language is not as easy as it sounds, because although you yourself know the grammar, you have never had to consciously learn the rules of that grammar. You simply acquired it as a very young child. If you are a native English speaker like me, for example, consider how you have always known to change the form of the verb according to the person: “I know”, “You know”, “He/She/It knows”. Non-native speakers do not innately know about this rule – they have to be taught it.
The easiest way to teach English grammar, I find, is to compare it with Japanese grammar. I will talk about common differences between the two languages in my next article, Differences between English and Japanese. If you are a learner of Japanese you probably know these differences.
Another useful thing to do is ask your student if there are any grammar points in particular that they wish to learn. Your student might, for example, say that they want to learn how to say longer sentences (in which case relative clauses and conjunctions would be important), they might say they want to know how to give directions (in which case talking about prepositions, and the subtle differences between ‘on’ and ‘above’ or ‘over’, might be a good starting point), or they might say that they want to learn more conversational English (in which case, you would do well to talk about word shortening in words like ‘don’t’ and ‘gonna’).
The bottom line here is that you might need to start off as a grammar teacher before you can become a conversation teacher, so be prepared for that possibility.
- Not knowing what to talk about.
This can be surprisingly debilitating. The thing about learning is that it happens most efficiently when you can relate what you are learning to something that interests you. For example, when I am learning a new grammar point in Japanese I try to think up examples relating to my family, or to my pets. Linking the grammar point to something I am interested in helps me to remember it.
Conversation classes are no different. For this, I recommend that you take some time to learn about your student before you try to teach them anything. Find out what their hobbies are, why they wish to learn English, do they have a husband/wife/child/pet, etc. Having found out about your student, you should try to engage them in conversation about something that you know interests them. For one thing this makes the student want to speak more, which is what the class is all about. For another, if there is some new grammar point you end up teaching them while conversing about that topic of interest, they will most probably remember it better because they can associate it with something they like. You can encourage your student to remember in this way as well.
In short, English teaching might seem like the easy option for many, but it is important to bear in mind that your students want to learn, and in many cases simply talking to them in English might not be enough for them. Don’t forget, your students can quite easily say that they do not want lessons from you anymore, so you have to make sure that they are satisfied with your service if you still want to be paid. But if you manage to figure out an effective teaching method, English conversation classes are an incredibly rewarding experience, and well worth trying while on exchange if you are considering a career in teaching in the future. Good luck and happy teaching.
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