Teaching at Junior High School
From HyogoAJET
This is a general guide for teaching at Junior High Schools (JHS).
Contents |
General Tips
- Be a friend to the students and make them feel relaxed around you (joke with them, show them cool stuff from your country, talk about music/TV you like, etc.)
- Present things with visual aides, funny stories, trivia, animated gestures, etc. Just keep things interesting.
- Move around your classroom, don't just stand at the front.
- Use a big, clear, loud voice. Project presence.
- Choose your words, but use natural English (to let them get used to hearing it).
- Hang out with your kids (lunch, hiru yasumi, cleaning time, clean up after events, club activities, go to the student meetings, etc.)
- Monitor Japanese pop culture to know what things your kids are interested in.
- Maintain a log of your classes, so you know what you have and have not covered.
Activities
These are stock games and activities that are very easy to prepare (in many cases you don't have to prepare) and the kids really enjoy them.
- Baseball: a very simple, yet fun team-based game that lets you mix in various degrees of English difficulty.
- Castles: divide class into teams, draw 3 castle towers on the board for each team, 1 person from each team goes up to the board and tries to spell a word you give them, the quickest to finish correctly gets to erase one tower from an opposition team, the last team standing wins.
- Whisper a word to a student and have them try to get the other students to guess the word by describing/explaining it using other words.
- Hangman, the classic spelling game.
Shyness
Probably the number one complaint of most JHS and SHS JETs is that their students are too shy and do not speak out in class very much. The following are some recommendations for dealing with and breaking through the shyness barrier.
Don't Pressure
Avoid putting your kids on the spot, individually. Let them answer questions as a group or with a friend. There are usually one or two kids in each class who are pretty fearless (i.e., probably a loud mouth) who won't mind answering you directly. Use them to get a response to your questions so the other kids can see what you are trying to say.
Make Class INTERESTING and FUN
Talk about things that your kids are into or curious about: the latest TV shows, music, what it's like to travel internationally, video games, the differences between JHS in Japan and the ALT's home country, etc. When the JTE wants you to introduce a grammar point or something technical rather than just use the textbook example entirely, branch off into your own examples and conversation. The only way to hold the kids' interest is to make them motivated to listen to you. The best way to do this is to try and relate to their life. Remember when you were 13, 14, 15 years old and what things you were interested in.
Other Tips
Make the kids sit in a circle when you are teaching them. This facilitates discussion better.
Disruptive Students
If students are acting up (talking, throwing things, generally being annoying) and the JTE doesn't do anything about it, there are some things you can try to calm things down and make the class flow smoothly. In some cases, however, there may actually be little that you can do so in those cases you just have to do your best and try to make the class as fruitful as possible for the kids who are trying.
Apply Pressure
One of the most effective is to make the troublesome student stand out. Japanese don't like to stand out in a crowd. If you shine a light on them it often will quiet them, at least a bit. Stand near the student making the noise, raise your voice to talk over them, ask them questions directly, etc. Be careful to only take this so far, as some trouble makers will just feed off the attention even more.
Ignore
As annoyed as you may be at your JTE's not responding to the disruption, in many cases simply ignoring the troublemaker is often the best solution. Constantly responding to their outbursts feeds them attention and makes them more likely to do it again in order to keep receiving that attention.
Teaching Points
- Don't underestimate your kid's abilities. With a little patience and effort, even a poorer English student can be made to communicate.
- Try to understand and relate to your student's lives. Understanding the motivations and pressures they have is key to effectively teaching them. Put in the time to talk to them and study contemporary Japanese culture.
- Don't forget that you play dual roles at school: you are a teacher and the resident foreigner at your school.
- Chat with the other teachers and staff. Try to build good relations with them as that will make your life and work at the school a whole lot easier.
Other Resources
- Teaching Resources: a list of sites and resources for teaching, maintained on this site.
- Teaching at Senior High School, Teaching at Elementary School
