Al Bartle (Owner/Teacher, Smith’s School of English – Okamoto)
Having bought the Smith’s English School franchise in Okamoto-Kobe Japan and begun teaching from July 4th, I have now been a coach of communicative confidence in Japan for 6 months. It has been challenging but very rewarding. It is quite a pleasure to work with the students every week to increase their confidence to speak English. I see them make small steps each week that show their progress toward becoming completely confident to use English and I am pleased that they have chosen me to help them on their journey.
It has not been easy for sure to grow the student body, however I did achieve my goal of increasing the school from 15 to 30 students by the end of December. Actually, I added 22 students while losing 7 of the original students from the previous teacher. However I still have 8 of the original students and several have been studying at this school for over a year and a half. A few of the original students, who are “Powerful” students that must call to schedule their lessons, have actually become much more attentive to scheduling their lesson each week which they were not so attentive to do before I started teaching them. They have also given me extremely good recommendations that the Smith’s head office has been kind enough to add to the current SEITO SAN NO KOE (Student’s Voice) page for the Okamoto school. Also, I have not yet lost any of the 22 students that I myself added.
As I said, it was not easy to grow the student body. I distributed over 27,500 flyers in 6 months. Over I distributed half of these flyers but I had flyer help approximately 2 days per week. The number of students joining is approximately 1 per 1000 flyers distributed although there were times when I got one student after passing out as few as 180 flyers. My best month was August 2007 during which the flyers I distributed netted 9 new students. That month I got approx. 1 new student for every 500 flyers I distributed. I truly believe that it important for the owner-teacher to do a large amount of flyer distribution himself or herself as this shows the determination and hard work that you make to add students. Most of those potential students who see you every day can easily understand that if they decide to study at your school you will make the same kind of great effort to coach them and increase their confidence to speak English. Many Japanese people who saw me and acknowledged my effort have often told me “GOKURO-SAMA”. Although teachers of the big chain schools are well meaning and may work hard to teach their students, they do not have anywhere near the same level of responsibility to acquire and keep those students. They do not have the “monthly tuition” factor to be concerned about. If the students get board with my lesson or stop feeling that they are learning or progressing, they will stop coming from the next month. It is that simple. It keeps me on my toes but in the end the students recognize how hard I work to help them improve and stay on for months and years.
So what kind of fun did I have this holiday season? My son, his wife and my granddaughter visited me for 6 days and we had a very nice Christmas with them at our home. My granddaughter is 13 months old and is just about to start walking. She speaks her own language now but it will be interesting to see which language she will speak first, being in Japan and hearing Japanese on TV and in every public place it may be natural for her to speak Japanese first. Here mother is French and sometimes speaks to her in French but usually in English. Her father is half-American and half-Japanese but he always speaks to her in English. So it will be quite interesting to see which language she will speak first.
This makes me realize how difficult it is for my Japanese students to get enough exposure to English in Japan. Of course if they make the effort to watch the news in English, watch DVD movies in English and take every opportunity to speak English with the foreigners they meet, they will succeed. Part of the challenge as a coach of communicative confidence is to get my students to a level where they are confident enough to start a conversation with a foreigner. Every day on the train I look at all the people and wonder how many of them are now studying or have studied for many years at an English conversation school. There must be many who have but I rarely see them make the effort to speak with a foreigner or practice their English. It seems very sad to me. And when I distribute the flyers, the number of young people, who should be working to perfect their English but will not even allow eye contact with me when I say “Good Morning” or “Good Afternoon”, is nearly unbelievable. After studying English for 6 years in junior and senior high school, absolutely all of these young people should be able to and want to return this simple greeting. If I were an English teacher in a Japanese school I would be completely appalled by this inability or lack of effort to return this common courtesy. I cannot forget my surprise at how differently I found the people in Denmark, Sweden and Norway were when I greeted them in English 32 years ago. Nearly everyone spoke English and was happy to have the chance to practice it. Of course their language has common roots with English and they have all of the sounds or phonemes in their own language so as to pronounce English, but they must be taught English in a much more balanced and effective manner than their Japanese counterparts. Japanese educators need to visit schools in Scandinavia to see how differently English is taught. I cannot help but think that Japanese English education, its goals and methods are still stuck in the Meiji period when it was primarily important to be able to read and translate technical books from America and Europe to learn about the new technologies necessary for Japan’s future at the time. It is high time to change the educational goals and get English education in Japan up-to-date and balanced between speaking/listening and writing/reading.
I think another way to improve the Education at the junior and senior high schools is to jointly develop some of the curriculum with assistance from the English conversation schools. There needs to be more of a balance between writing/reading and speaking/listening skills and less emphasis on grammar and translation. Well, that is enough complaining about the current Japanese system for English education. If they were doing it completely correctly, there wouldn’t be as much need for English conversation schools and I might be out of a job.
Recently I am getting a lot more high level students who want take the TOEIC and TOEFL or improve their scores on those tests. This is a great challenge to me as a CCC. I am starting to use TOEIC/TOEFL books and work with students to develop test-taking strategies as well. This is another area of coaching that is very challenging and exciting. It keeps me on my toes and makes me brush up on my own skills so as to better help my students. However, the standard Smith’s curriculum has a wealth of material to use with such students and very little needs to be added to give such students a very beneficial and enjoyable lesson that will help them to succeed on those tests.
The reality of my experience this holiday season was that I could not stop thinking about how to do a better job of coaching my students, how to better promote my school and how to make my students all into raving fans. It is exciting every day and I could not wait to get back to work. I enjoyed the time off but I felt like I was standing still so I went out and bought a TOEIC book to prepare to teach my high level students. I just could not sit still. I have never felt that way about any other job I’ve had in the past 28 years. So being a coach of communicative confidence is truly one of the most rewarding jobs a person could have. I am convinced of this. Cheers Mark.
Al Bartle