I wrote briefly about The Big Four eikaiwa a while ago, but now that I’ve been here for a while and I’ve talked to different teachers, it’s time to be a bit more in-depth. These aren’t going to be the be-all-and-end-all descriptions of eikaiwa but hopefully they’ll give you a bit more info.

First up then is AEON. They are small, but big enough to throw around some advertising – mainly on trains but occassionally on late-night TV. I always find it amusing to see three or four eikaiwa posters next to each other on trains. They usually are NOVA (of course), AEON and ECC.

AEON however, takes a slightly different approach in its ads. NOVA or ECC always show blonde-haired women in their instructor roles. AEON on the other hand, has many posters of Japanese men and women.

Some of these are meant to depict satisfied customers (One train poster shows a young woman saying “I want a fast car, I want a expensive handbag, but most of all I want to succeed at English!”) but apparently many of these poster models are meant to depict instructors too.

Yes, AEON actually hires Japanese people to teach English. The Japanese instructors teach very low-level students, so that if necessary, explanations in Japanese can be made. After the students are deemed capable enough, they are then moved onto foreign native English speakers.

One Japanese AEON employee tells me that there are 4 Japanese instructors at her branch (a few are part-time) and the rest are foreigners (who are all full-time. No part-time foreign instructors are hired at AEON).

The foreigners that are hired by AEON are offered accommodation and if they accept, then rent is paid for, up to a certain amount. The difference and any utility bills must be paid for by the tenant.

AEON branches are not very visible. There are no big, illuminated signs everywhere and are quite often hidden away in some empty space in an office building or shopping mall. They are usually located near a train station though.

AEON is one of the eikaiwa that does allow fraternisation (that is, drinking and socialising) with paying students outside of school hours. As far as I can tell though, it is not expected of instructors to socialise.

Overall, after drilling many AEON friends, there have been few complaints about the company. The foreigners like the working conditions and the offer of rent being partly paid for, while the Japanese employees like the option of working part-time or full-time.

The only complaint I have heard is that training for some things like Kids Classes takes too long and requires the instructor to go on a kind of camp where social life is apprently inhibated. Other eikaiwa like NOVA seem to complete all their training in a day and during work hours. Oh well.

Link:
AEON recruiting page
Wikipedia’s article on AEON

A friend of mine who works for Nova in Yokohama has told me a bit of company gossip. It seems that the company who made 70.6 billion yen in sales in 2004 and has 50% of the eikaiwa market share is still not happy and is cutting back costs further.

As of January, the only supplies that will be paid for in the 600+ branches around Japan are paper, light fittings and cleaning products. That means no pens, staplers, highlighters and so on. My friend also said that he was given a biro pen with his name written on it. If he lost it, he had to buy a new one himself. If it ran out, he had to prove there was no more ink before another one was provided.

He’s apparently been getting revenge by using up the ink quickly by vandalising the desks in the branch. That uses up more cleaning product too, you see. He hopes to run out of ink in a month.

Geez, I’ve heard of cost-cutting measures but surely in a teaching environment, cutting stationary is a bit much?

Link:
Wikipedia’s article on Nova

The eikaiwa do have a good point. The Japanese education system focuses on grammar, reading and vocabulary when teaching English. This means that many Japanese people are left hanging when they actually try to speak English to a foreigner. So the philosophy that eikaiwa teach conversation skills, not grammar, is sound. The focus is on talking, not textbooks.

But after working for one of The Big Four eikaiwa for nearly five months now, I’ve come to the conclusion that Japanese students are 80% of the time there because they want to have fun. They’d like to meet some foreigners, or use their English skills for meeting foreigners outside the eikaiwa (necessary, when schools like Nova ban their instructors from socialising with students outside the school).

I have met many students who have said that their reasons for studying English are that they “want to meet foreigners” or that “English is cool”. I also have a 85 year old woman who comes once a week to giggle and talk in Japanese after being told to “Please repeat: May I have a window seat, please?”. Is she there to learn English? Of course not, she’s a widow with nothing else to do.

Another reason they come in is to socialise with other Japanese students. And that means gossip. Oh, the gossip. They will invent all kinds of theories and stories about you and your life and why you came to Japan. I found the best way to combat this is to tell them all exactly why you came to Japan, who your boyfriend is and how many cats you have. If the reason is silly, like “I came to Japan to watch lots of anime“, then they’ll love you for it, even if they laugh about it.

It’s an expensive way to socialise and have fun, especially if they are students of one of the Big Four. But you can’t fault the eikaiwa. They do genuinely try to teach English. The fact that the students often aren’t interested is a side issue.

We were sent an email about teaching in Japan – feel free to send more of your own!

Hello,

I’m 19 years old and earning a degree in Celtic Studies at a
university in Canada, though I live in the US. Recently I’ve been
giving serious thought to a career teaching English in Japan, but I
have several concerns which you may be able to help clear up.

Firstly, I’m like any penniless college student, and by the time I’m
finished with my BA I’ll have wracked up around $50,000 USD in
student loans. Is it realistic to work in Japan AND expect to earn
enough to start paying off these loans?

Also, how likely is it I’ll be able to obtain a work VISA for more than a year?

Thanks for your time,
Rachel

Hi Rachel.

If you plan to graduate before you travel to Japan, then the degree that you have will allow you to get a work visa for Japan, without too many troubles. You will, however need a company in Japan to sponsor your visa. This may mean getting a job lined up before you arrive in Japan, but getting the visa after you’ve arrived is also feasible, just more difficult.

In most cases, visas are only issued for 6 months or a year – you will need to extend it when it gets close to expiration, but this is not too difficult. I’m not entirely sure of the rules of Canada or the U.S. but I suspect you can continue renewing it until you are considered too old to work in Japan (I think the age limit is 45?). Check with your local Japanese Embassy for better details.

About your student debt – there are many teachers in Japan in the same situation as you. And while they may grumble at having to send home their hard-earned money, or grumble at the lousy exchange rate, that’s all it is. It is still affordable to live in Japan while paying off a debt at home.

Hope that clears up your concerns.

Cheers,
Chidade

I have a useful link for you. While I haven’t actually been asked questions like this too often by students at my eikaiwa, some teachers have had private students ask these. Either way, it helps to know exactly what to say if the question “What’s the difference between saying ‘every day’ and ‘everyday’?” pops up.

While you might be able to answer it, if you’re like me, you’ll tend to explain things the long way round, which may sometimes cause more problems than you had to begin with. So, keep this link in your bookmarks, read through it once of twice. It may just help you out in a tight spot.

Learn English is actually a German website designed for German students, but still readable.

Link:
Common Mistakes in English – learnenglish.de

While you teach students, you’ll have many occassions where you have to correct a student that says something like:

“I see my favorite television show after school”

“That’s good“, you say, full of genkiness, “but in English, we say ‘I watch television’”

“Ah sousousousousousousou. But why ‘watch’ and not ’see’? What does it mean?”

“Errr, well…..”

It’s a very difficult thing to explain, especially to low level students, and you may be tempted to just yell “IT JUST IS!” but before you do that (and get fired), try this instead:

When you see things, you are aware of what is happening around you, using your eyes.

For example, I can see a cat there.

When you watch things, you are absorbing what you see. ‘See’ is more passive than ‘watch’. You also watch something for a longer period of time than you would see something, particularly if it is something that is constantly moving or changing, like a TV show or a movie.

For example, I watch my favorite TV show everyday.

Perhaps for very low-level students, it’s best to use time as a reason. If it’s something that goes for a long time, like a TV show, the use watch. If it’s something that’s quite short, like, ‘I can see a cat there’, then it’s see.

That tactic may fall over almost immediately but it’s a quick method to placate a low-level student for something that is far too difficult for them to understand.

You can use the past tense (saw, watched) in much the same way. Until the example of “I saw a movie on the weekend comes up”.

“Why don’t you say ‘I watched a movie on the weekend’?” asks your befuddled student.

“Ah well, you can indeed say ‘I watched a movie on the weekend’ and you would be correct!”

“Yes, but why do some English people say “I saw a movie on the weekend’?”

“IT JUST IS!”

Mums and Dads around Japan are signing their kids up for English classes faster than they can be provided. It may be seem to be smart thinking to get your kids started on English as soon as possible, but I really wonder if that’s necessary when the child is only two years old and barely speaks anything, let alone English.

Yes that’s right, TWO YEARS OLD. That means that kids classes are often interjected with bouts of nappy-changing and vomiting. And that’s just for the toddlers. The older ones are just like kids anywhere else in the world. They run around, they scream, they hit each other for no apparent reason, they cry, they wet themselves.

Somewhere in all that, comes the actual education, even though most of us instructors are not formally qualified (besides the mandatory eikaiwa training, which can range from 8 hours to 3 days).

Most kids classes are about songs and games, which is meant to be some sort of “learning through fun” technique. The kids are encouraged to sing along or repeat what the instructors says. There are usually worksheets and report cards, but they don’t seem to mean much.

The main idea of kids classes, particularly for young kids, is to simply expose them to the language. It’s at this age when they can pick up new languages with no troubles at all. I question how useful the kids classes at eikaiwa though. Once a week for an hour doesn’t seem like enough “exposure”, especially if they speak Japanese for 70% of the lesson and completely forget what they learnt the moment the step out the door.

From what I hear from students, English is compulsory curriculum now in Japanese primary schools anyway. So these kids classes are really just a complementary add-on to what the schools are teaching…except it costs a lot more.

If you do teach kids, either at an eikaiwa or at a private school, you have to be able to tolerate kids. For those that can’t (or, like me, are borderline), take solace in the fact that the classes generally don’t go on for longer than an hour.

I’d also recommend drawing small cats or monsters instead of the smiley faces generally awarded for good work. They’ll love it and always remember you for it.

There are many, many private schools around Japan. Cram schools are probably most common but there are also many primary and secondary schools here. I often wonder how they are regulated, because many of them are made up of a single room in an office building. After I had the opportunity to teach at one the other week, I only wondered more.

The school I taught at was an international school. The kids had been born or had lived for a period in an English-speaking country, and now that they were home with their families in Japan, they were sent to international school so that they wouldn’t lose their English skills.

So, the first thing you notice is that you are not teaching them English. They already speak it as fluently as a 7-year-old could. You actually teach them things like math and spelling.

Which is a slight moral dilemma for me….I don’t have an Education degree, I’ve never been trained to teach primary school kids. Heck, I hadn’t even been trained for Kids Classes by my eikaiwa!

But apparently I was deemed qualified enough to teach them just this one time. I taught spelling and math, we played a few games…and then I taught them about the U.N. Security Council.

Yes, you read it right. I had to teach a bunch of seven and eight years olds about the U.N. Security Council, UNICEF and the WHO. Why? I have no idea. It’s just the curriculum for this month at the school.

I don’t think I did too badly teaching them that, but I still wonder why someone felt that it needed to be taught to these kids. Most adults would have trouble understanding the intricacies of the United Nations. These kids just weren’t interested, and I can understand why.

Especially since I let slip that I watch Naruto every week, and then that’s all they wanted to talk about.

Oops.

A letter from Eydie:

hi, im 17 and i live in canada.

im deciding to go on to learn Japanese and eventually get a degree in English.

i want to go to Japan to teach english at a school, any school may it
be elementary or high school.

would it be wise for me to start at this age? would i survive with the
pay i will get teaching english? is it hard to find a job there as an
english teacher. i dont know anyone who lives in japan, only a
godfather of mine, but i dont know him. please reply =/

Hi Eydie,

Teaching in Japan is a pretty well paying job, and unless you have an extravagant lifestyle, you should probably be able to save some cash on the side ;)

The main obstacle in front of you is your age. To work in Japan you need a work visa or at least a working holiday visa. To get a work visa in Japan, you need to have completed a degree in anything. To get a working holiday visa, (at least, in Australia) you need to have completed at least a year of tertiary studies.

I’m pretty sure the rules for Canadians are similar to the rules for Australians, but you may want to check the Japanese Embassy in Canada website.

There are many websites that will help you find a job, and once you’re there in Japan, there are dozens of classifieds published offering English teaching jobs.

But again, you’ll need a work visa (it’s more difficult to find work on a working holiday visa – you’re only allowed to work part time) so maybe you should consider doing a Japanese degree, or at least a year of it, before heading off to teach English?

Good luck with whatever you decide to do.

Take care!

Regards,
Chidade

Anyone, please feel free to email questions (chidade AT gmail DOT com) and I’ll try answer them as best as I can.

Japanese students are willing to learn. Making them laugh is a different matter. Some of them are what we in the staffroom call super genki and will laugh at anything you say, even if you were serious. Others laugh out of nervousness. Others laugh when you laugh, because you’ve given them the cue.

It’s been interesting trying to get laughs out of students. The higher level students are ok, occassionally they’ll get a word joke – an amazing feat since they are, after all, speaking their second language. My proudest moment was when I managed to get a laugh with this pearler:

‘Ok, please try to complete this sentence: “People think that London is just a concrete jungle, but actually….” got it? I’ll give an example. “People think that London is just a concrete jungle, but actually…there are no monkeys”‘.

AND THEY GOT IT!! Well, 2 out of the 3 students got it. And those two could actually explain the joke in English to the third. *sniff* I was so proud of them! *sniff*

For your students to understand plays on words is a pretty rare thing indeed. Sarcasm will never make sense to them. Very often, you will get that intense look that means ‘…nani?’ so it’s best to avoid sarcasm altogether.

If you want to make your students laugh, the best technique is to go for the ridiculous. And that may mean losing some dignity. Most stand up comedy in Japan is based on silly antics. Waving your arms around in class and yelling will get their attention at least, if it doesn’t make them laugh. Another tip is to say things that are obviously silly, like “There are many dangerous animals in Australia” and they’ll nod and say “Ah, yes, sharks and crocodiles” then you can counter with “Yes but the deadliest of the all is the KOALA!”

It’s silly and quite often juvenile. But if you can make your students laugh and enjoy themselves, then it’s more likely that they will stay your students in the future.