Japanese English teachers in Calgary for training
Parents expect them to speak perfectly
The company that makes outboard motors and keyboards also teaches English to Japanese students, and this week 30 of its teachers are in Calgary for training.
The teachers are from Yamaha Corp., which aside from its vast empire of music products and motorbikes, has English schools dotted around Japan. As the push toward learning a conversational-type English increases in Japan, so too does need for competent instructors who have a decent handle on the language.
Yamaha is paying the Calgary Board of Education for a weeklong program it hopes will help its brightest teachers brush up on their English and learn how best to teach the language.
“Mothers or fathers’ expectations are really high these days for kids to speak, learn English, so the teachers must speak perfect English in terms of pronunciation, intonation,” said Mai Tanaka, a director with Yamaha English language schools.
The week includes workshops on pronunciation, us- ing puppets to teach, music and vocabulary development. There’s also an hour set aside for line dancing. So intense is the desire to learn English in Asia that Yamaha offers courses for children as young as 12 months.
Parents, in some cases grandparents, are taught how to play with the child in English. Peek-a-boo in English is a classic feature.
One of the major switches in teaching English in the past decade in Japan has been the move away from grammar drills to more a conversational use of the language.
But this brings challenges with it, one of the largest being to improve the abilities of teachers themselves.
“The big movement in a lot of countries has been to teach English in English,” said Sheila McLeod, director of the CBEs global learning services. It seems obvious. But McLeod said she’s been in classrooms in Japan where only a handful of English words were spoken.
“There’s been a lot of teaching of English that hasn’t been in English.”