(Part 2) Top products from r/teachinginjapan

I have lots to say about this so bear with me for the long post.

>since the students are more motivated

Be careful about this. I think that you’ll find, and other people who teach at Japanese universities will agree with me, that most university students are not particularly motivated to study English.

The vast majority of English classes are compulsory general education classes (一般教育 ippan kyoiku), not working with English majors. Most of your classes will be 1st and 2nd year compulsory oral communication.

The students have no choice about taking these classes. They don’t even get to choose which section of the class they take or who the teacher is. Their department will literarily tell them that they are taking the English class Monday morning 1st period with Smith-sensei or 5th period on Friday with Jones-sensei whether they like it or not.

Let me put it to you this way. Did you have to take a foreign language when you were an undergraduate? How motivated were you to study French or Spanish? These students are the same. Except it gets even worse.

Japanese universities are well known for using the ‘escalator system’ meaning that students pass no matter what. This is getting better, but it is still common at many universities that they only way a student fails is if they that don’t meet the attendance requirement. Students know this so sleeping in class, doing other work, not doing their homework, etc. is common.

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being the lowest, I’d say that most students are about a 4 or 5 when it comes to studying English.

>and the pay is decent

It is very important to have a sense of perspective about this. There was a book published in 1993 called A handbook for teaching English at Japanese colleges and universities. It’s long out of print, but if you can find a copy of it, it is well worth the read. In this book one of the authors talks about compensation, and notes that you can expect to be paid between four and six million yen. It’s now 2017, twenty four years later, and you still expect to be paid between four and six million yen. Salaries for non-tenured foreign English instructors have remained flat for decades.

Now compared to the amount of money that eikaiwa teachers and ALTs make, four to six million yen sounds pretty good, and when you are young and starting out it is. In your 30s, it’s great. In your 40s, it’s ok. In your 50s, it’s not enough. My point is that you need to be prepared that your salary with be flat.

>To achieve this I'll need to study through distance-learning for a MA in TESOL (maybe Leicester).

Two things.

First, don’t automatically discount going home and doing your grad work. It might be cheaper, faster and easier to be a regular grad student. Many universities still have programs where they employ grad students to be an instructor in their pre-academic program and waive your tuition for grad school. It’s often a 24 month program, and you come away with not only your degree, but also two years of university teaching experience.

Second, choosing a grad school is not like choosing an undergrad. Cost and convenience should never be your first consideration. There are three things you should be thinking about.

First, connections. You should not pick a grad school that has no connections to Japan, especially your professors and your sempai. Being able to pull into an existing network will put you at the head of the line for hiring. Two programs that have very good Japan networks are the Birmingham program and the Temple program. The Birmingham program was one of the original distance learning programs for applied linguistics and there are many graduates in Japan. They have a support network in Japan for people enrolled in the program and they have their own private networking events at the JALT conference, etc. The Temple program has many Japanese graduates who sit in powerful positions in departments all across the country. One department that I know of all of the tenured staff are Temple Graduates and any Temple grad who applies for either part-time or full-time adjunct work is basically automatically hired.

Second, Japanese universities love graduates from brand name universities. In a sea of applications of people with generic grad degrees like Leicester, people with degrees from Standford or Harvard or Cambridge will get pushed to the top. Now these types of universities are hard to get into, and not all have TESOL or applied linguistics programs, but they are worth looking into. I know of a person who recently got tenure, not because they were particularly good, but they had Harvard on their resume and the university couldn’t hire them fast enough.

Third, you should take the long view of your career. If you are really serious about making a career of university teaching, you need a PhD, and you should be thinking about how your master’s fits into that. Some master’s are better than others when it comes time to do a doctorate. For example, an MEd TESOL is not as good as an MA applied linguistics.

>Next year I'll join a new eikaiwa since it's closer to the work I want to do in the future

You mean that working as an eikaiwa teacher is more similar to working as a university instructor than being an ALT? Because it isn’t. I’ve sat on many hiring committees and we’ve never particularly valued eikaiwa work. Don’t get me wrong, we didn’t think too highly of ALT experience either, but one of the things that we were always looking for was someone who could navigate a Japanese educational bureaucracy. ALTs talk to department secretaries and school principals, eikaiwa teachers don’t. It’s true that eikaiwa teachers are in-charge in the classroom, but they don’t learn the skills that university teachers need. Things like writing a syllabus, understanding grading systems, evaluating students fairly and objectively. Eikaiwa teachers generally don’t do any of that.

The work that you can get without an MA that is closest to university teaching is working at a senmon gakko.

>After that I'll apply to nearby small universities, likely working part time at first and as I gain experience I'll become employable for a full-time position.

It will really depend on where you are, but most small universities are hard to get hired at. They don’t have a lot of jobs. Instead, you should be looking at so-called starter universities which hire recent MA grads without a lot of experience or academic publications. These types of universities are usually medium to large sized, low to mid ranked private universities. Get to know other university teachers in your area and they’ll tell you who the starter universities are.

>Completing the MA will also give me the ability to work in a variety of universities overseas in the future.

Once again, you need to be careful about this. An MA usually only qualifies you to teach at a university in an EFL capacity. If you want to go home or to another English speaking country, you will need a PhD. Also, many universities in western Europe or the middle east require PhDs.

>Is there anything I'm misunderstanding here?

Generally, I think you’ve got it right, but there are some nuances. Please see above.

>Is what I plan to do realistically achievable?

It's definitely achievable, many people have more or less followed the plan that you have outlined. One of the things that you are missing is Japanese ability. The more Japanese ability you have, especially reading, the more desirable you are. Universities any where in the world are huge bureaucracies, and at Japanese universities 99% of the people working in the administration don’t speak English. You can expect an onslaught of memos and emails and meetings in Japanese. Administrators don’t look to kindly on teachers who miss deadlines or fail to get their paperwork done because they don’t understand Japanese. You need to be factoring in language study into your plan.

>Any warnings to give?

Yeah. I don’t have any hard statistics on this, but in my decades long anecdotal experience the average career ‘life-span’ of foreign English instructors in Japanese higher education is about 8 to 10 years. I’d say that less than 50% of people make it past 10 years and less the 10% make it all the way to retirement. There are a lot of reasons for this, some of which I’ve already talked about, flat salaries for example, but there are other reasons too. Most people work on limited-term contracts and because of this they are constantly job hunting which is exhausting. People who don’t publish get pushed out. Ageism is a real thing and the older you get, the less likely you are to get hired. To put is bluntly, if you’re not tenured by 50, you’re not going to be.

Also, and you really need to understand this, higher education in Japan is a declining industry. The number of children being born every year is falling and the number of 18 year olds peaked in 1992. For the last two decades most universities have been muddling along and hoping for the best, but that isn’t a solution. We are rapidly getting to a make-it or break-it point where plenty of Japanese universities are not going to survive.

I highly recommend that you read this article about the future of Japanese higher education before you decide to make a career of it.

Good luck.

I'm a big fan of this book. When I first started out, I would check what grammar I was teaching before the class, and read up on it in Swam's book to get a good grasp of it. Found it quite informative.

I have been getting a lot of use out of Passpost 1 2nd edition.

https://www.amazon.co.jp/Passport-Second-Level-Student-Book/dp/0194718166/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2OTM2U98H66SC&keywords=%E3%83%91%E3%82%B9%E3%83%9D%E3%83%BC%E3%83%881&qid=1563529502&s=gateway&sprefix=passport%2Caps%2C260&sr=8-1


It's all travel English and while it isn't usually too hard for most Japanese each section ends with a role-play that can be fairly difficult.