This blog will be about teaching English in Japan and will provide tips and information as well as teaching materials and ideas.





First of all I will provide a bit of information about teaching in Japan for people who are not familiar with the industry.





During the past 10 or so years, English learning has become a major preoccupation for Japanese people. Japanese has been a compulsory school subject for the total 6 years of Junior High and High School all across Japan for many years, but until recently, few Japanese people could actually speak Japanese. This was because Japanese schools generally teach English using by focusing on studying grammer and translating sentences back and forth between English and Japanese. They did not teach speaking, and although they studied listening, most Japanese people also were not good at understanding spoken English. Over the past 10 or 15 years, English conversation or eikaiwa schools have grown in popularity. These are attended by Japanese people wishing to learn spoken English. Often this is given as a kind of cause and effect by eikaiwa students and the eikaiwa industry. That Japanese schools could not teach spoken English and so students are going to eikaiwa schools to fill in this gap.




The first question I think is why English and why now. Japan is a largely monocultural population now as it has been in the past, and of the small proportion of non-Japanese who are now part of the population, the majority are Asian migrants not from English speaking countries. It is of importance in business of course and as companies become more international and foreign businesses establish branches in Japan or Japanese business overseas it becomes necesarry for employees to share some common language. However, Chinese languages are also important in business but have not experienced a similar boom. I will also make note that Japan went through its economic miracle years in the 80's while remaining largely monolingual although it is true that today's more globalised world is a very different business environment.

Many of the students are not learning English directly for business, many are learning just for travel or fun. English learning is also very fashionable at the moment, it's also seen as making you cool and interesting if you have foreign friends and have been to a lot of countries. Many people talk about these things as a point of pride, like it is an accomplishment. Basically I think it is buying an image, the fact that having even peripheral contact with the Western world brings status shows how high regard the Western world is currently seen in Japan's eyes.

Nova schools shut down

Nova, the lagest eikaiwa chain in Japan, which employs about 5000 foreign residents, has filed for bankrupcy protection and temporarily closed all of its schools due to its financial difficulties. The signs on it's ubiquitous station-front eikaiwa schools continue to be lit up, although the offices usually full of office workers and students taking lessons after work are empty and dark.

As most of the workers are dependent on Nova for their visa in Japan, they will probably have to go home unless Nova can strike a deal to be taken over by another company, one likely candidate being HIS, a travel company. The students too, stand to lose out, as they pay upfront for a pack of one-year, two-year, or three-year's worth of lessons.

In fact these upfront payments on lessons are one of the major factors which caused Nova to collapse financially. After a student sued Nova early this year for a refund after he cancelled his lessons, and won in court, Nova found itself having to make backpayments on refunds to students. At the same time, the bad publicity in the press meant few new students were joining Nova, and this had been their only source of income.

I was briefly employed by Nova early this year, before quitting due to other work. At that point, they were also low on teachers. In fact, as I understood it at the time, they saw this as one of their main problems, as it meant that it was incredibly difficult for students to be able to book lessons, as they were always at full capacity for students.

Nova has had a lot of anti-Nova publicity on the web for years, which makes me wonder if this is why they were finding it difficult to get teachers. From my personal expereience of how I was treated by them, they were honest and definately better than some other eikaiwa schools in Japan. However I did come across people who'd been promised they'd be placed in certain areas in Japan before they took up the job in their home country, only to come here and be told there were no guarantees.

Some managers while I was there also were speculating on whether they would get any more teachers coming in, and talked as if the stream were about to dry up.

As I said, in my personal experience with Nova I was not betrayed by them. However, the school did charge, as most of the eikaiwa schools do, more than four times what the teacher earned where the class was a private one-on-one lesson. Anybody looking at this would have thought Nova would be making a windfall, as it was squeezing students and teachers as far as possible in each direction. It would be ironic if the entire reason they failed was because students and teachers felt ripped off and all pulled out at the same time.