The Importance of Listening

The importance of listening is something that every person working in business is taught very soon in their career. Indeed the importance of listening is a lesson my Mother used to constantly bring to my attention as a young boy. And at Smith’s School of English knowing our language coaches are all listening to their students is extremely important. Hi, its Mark Smith here and I’m the main language coach at Smith’s School of English Fukushima, Osaka and this is a short blog about the importance of listening to our language coaches and students. 

All students who join Smith’s school of English first receive a leaflet at their trial lesson. Within the leaflet, there is a very important graphic that shows that at Smith’s our language coaches are working to achieve 70% of student talking time in every lesson. Smith’s School of English has two primary Golden rules. The first is to always be fair to students which begins working hard to be the best monthly tuition bases language school in Japan. The second is that every coach at Smith’s School of English works hard to achieve 70% of student talking time in every English conversation lesson. 

In order to achieve 70% of student talking time in every English lesson, we must first learn one very important lesson. That lesson teaches us that we are not English teachers. In Japan, we clearly accept that the business of teaching the English alphabet, English grammar and vocabulary is the job of the Japanese education department and they are good at it. Of course, the teachers at the Japanese education department need to speak a lot in order to teach English, beginning with the alphabet and of course with dozens of students in every classroom, there is little time for students to actually speak English.  

Once we clearly identify and accept that we are not English teachers because we don’t need to be, we need to decide what the real job should be in every English School classroom in Japan.
Here at Smith’s School of English, we believe our job is to Coach Communication Confidence. Further, we believe that this confidence may be found through having students use the skills acquired at school in a trusting and supportive environment to speak English.  This is what we do. We provide a trusting and supportive environment and we listen. We listen and support as students do their best to speak English.

And you know what? Our students improve quickly.