68% of elementary school teachers lack confidence in teaching English+

TOKYO, Feb. 15 (AP) - (Kyodo)ﾂ―A majority of elementary school teachers who are about to start teaching English as a required subject to fifth and sixth graders this April lack confidence in teaching the subject and feel burdened by it, a recent survey by a private research body showed Tuesday.
The survey of teachers conducted by Benesse Educational Research & Development Center showed that 68 percent were not confident about teaching English and 62 percent felt it to be a burden.

The results indicate inadequate training, with the center describing the development of teaching materials and other preparations as "insufficient."...

...Schools devoted an average of 6.8 hours on training teachers for English classes between April 2009 and last summer, but 20 percent of respondents said they had received no training, the survey showed...

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How can you teach a class, when you lack confidence to teach it. With this students (and teachers), will start to dislike English... and foreigners (if you would stereotype it).

How is this in other asian countries, or non-English speaking countries?

I work teaching at elementary schools two days a week now, and here's my perspective anyways.

First is that some teachers, especially some of the older ones who may not have been interested in English aside from passing their exams can't really speak English or even understand it. They will pretend they don't understand very basic English fearing they'll be expected to translate more complicated English for their students, while other teachers seem to enjoy the challenge of trying.

I've said 'Canada is a very big country' and had a few older teachers look at me blankly when I looked at them to translate, so just translated it myself for the students, while others translate it themselves and more complicated stuff without much trouble.

I would say, given the relative newness of English being a required subject, that the teachers, even the more competent ones, would prefer a syllabus, even if some of the syllabus bores the hell out of the students. A very few are willing to let me put all my five years experience teaching elementary students into practice, and the results are usually quite good if there aren't a few students constantly making trouble (depends on the school, some are in areas with great parents, while others aren't).

In one school teaching grade five, were it not for three students paying attention, I would've felt I was talking to thin air in a class of 35 students, while in another, it was perhaps just two students QUIETLY not paying attention.

Furthermore, most Japanese as a whole have some sort of a mental block when it comes to English. Japanese are no less intelligent than any other people, and they can do very well when need is there (I've had business students who'll say they honestly hate English to me, but they have made for some of the quickest and best students due to their need), while most parents will put their kids into my lessons but won't review the lessons or even try to understand them cause 'English is difficult'. I'm sure their feeling is somehow conveyed to their children.

Really, English is mostly up to a teachers desire to learn English. If they feel English is too difficult (usually mental block), they'll avoid getting involved in my lessons, if they feel it's 'mendokusai, well it's the same result. Fortunately half the teachers understand well enough and can explain it well to their students.

Dutch,
What do you mean start disliking English? Trust me, they have disliked it for decades already!

Revenant,
At my university a veteran J teacher of over 30 years retired a year or 2 ago. He could barely speak English and taught a supposedly "composition" course, which never got past the grammar translation state of a few sentences.

In one school teaching grade five, were it not for three students paying attention, I would've felt I was talking to thin air in a class of 35 students

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Without any more context than that, it would be unfair of me to criticize how you teach, so I won't. I'll just say that I hope you don't do much speaking in your "talking". It's the students who need the speaking practice, but far too many "teachers" seem to enjoy the sound of their own voices and forget that.

@renevant, thanks for your post. I just can't believe that they only received 20 hours of training, and some even no training at all even though they decided to make English compulsory from this year, about 3-4 years ago.

I also used to work on ES here in Kobe (about 30 in total) and on most of the schools it was very hard to communicate with the teachers (especially in the beginning when my Japanese was almost zero). But there were always some teachers at the schools that could speak English very well, and they always helped me a lot.

I remember there was this one teacher, she actually tried to do the whole class by herself and almost ignored me the whole lesson, while there were other teachers that would just come up to me and say: "I got some homework to check, please look after the class for 45 minutes, ENJOY!!!" (the worst were the ones that would just sneak out of the class).

Glenski said:

Dutch,
What do you mean start disliking English? Trust me, they have disliked it for decades already!

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Lol, well I guess they would dislike it even more than now due to uninspiring teachers[/QUOTE]

@Glenski - That class of grade five is one of the worst classes in the worst school in this city, it's a notorious school in Okayama, and my YMCA boss, who's a PTA member of that school, said that they were discussing just how they could improve especially the grade five classes of that school. The class never even tried pretending they were listening to their homeroom teacher let alone me. Generally I try to give them plenty of time to practice speaking, but even getting this class to repeat a few new vocabulary words was impossible. Most but three kids were walking around, horsing about, and yelling at each other across the class.

Most of my classes go well, and most of the time I get them talking a lot in English. That class was one of a few exceptions.

@dutch Baka - Never had that happen before. I mean a teacher just kind of sneaking out for the entire class. Had a few sneak out for just ten minutes or so. I do get some that'll see English as a time to sit back and relax, and I also had one guy that forgot I was standing up there the entire class. He just got right into teaching and taught the entire thing himself, at the end of class he suddenly realized he had forgotten I was there.

So sad to hear all this.....Well, hopefully the new generations will do something about it in order to help their people to be more aware of English Language is indeed an official international language used widely in the world.....