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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.

The comprehension approach is a test of short-term memory retention and doesn't actually teach learners how to listen, so practicing listening comprehension questions over and over won't help her pass the test. If that is all you do, then her performance on the test date will depend entirely on her familiarity with the topic and her ability to remember the passage word for word, which is up to chance alone and therefore is not a skill that can be taught or an ability that can be increased. If you want to increase her overall listening performance on the whole, then you need to do more than just have her listen and then answer questions.

Research has shown that an effective way to increase comprehension is to combine coginitive and metacognitive listening strategy training. That is, you need a balance of bottom-up and top-down skills training, along with strategy awareness training.

Bottom-up listening includes things like word recognition skills, phonemic awareness, and word segmentation skills. In other words, you need to train her to understand a word when she hears it, and recognize words in connected speech. One good book for that is Top-Up Listening (Abax): http://abax.co.jp/product.php?id=5&catid=6


Top-down skills means using context and real-world knowledge to interpret what you hear. Things like predicting, inferring, understanding cause and effect, and so on. Here is a link with some ideas: https://www.cambridge.org/elt/blog/2016/01/13/teaching-listening-4-teaching-top-processing/

As for metacognitive training, you basically increase her awareness of what strategy she is employing so that she can consciously chose the most effective way to approach a passage. That is, she can chose whether she needs to listen for gist, listen for detail, and be aware of things like genre and text organization can help her know where to find particular information.

As an example, when the listening task is a short lecture, she will know how lectures are organized, know to listen for sequence words that will clue her in on the organization (first, I will talk about.. next I will discuss...) and then she can focus on hearing key words and phrases in that order.

If you want more ideas for teaching listening, I highly recommend Michael Rost and JJ Wilson's book, Active Listening: https://www.amazon.com/Listening-Research-Resources-Language-Teaching/dp/1408296853

It has TONS of great ideas for how to train learners to listen better.

My initial advice is to do everything in your power to avoid this. Unless your current instructor is a serious hotshot. Push hard to outsource the teaching/curriculum to a well known vendor. They simply have access to a helluva lot more resources (e-learning, correspondence courses, etc.) and know-how than you'll ever know. It won't come cheap.

Now that that's out of the way, let's discuss reality.

First off is the admin side. You'll need to confirm just how often employees will be able to attend lessons, how often you'll be able to hold lessons, and are there any rules/regulations regarding attendance, achievement, etc. You'll also need to make sure to have meeting space booked and ready to go beforehand, but you're probably already doing this with your regular teacher. You'll also want make it known to management what kind of results they should expect after 1yr, 2yrs, 3yrs because it's bound to be unrealistic.

As for curriculum itself, I would aim for a combination of workplace english, and TOEIC prep (vocab, grammar, and test taking strategies). How you weave these together into a cogent program is the tricky part.

My coworkers and I disagree on this, but I would recommend avoiding TOEIC prep with the lower level groups (under ~400) at first. I prefer them to focus on one thing at a time, get comfortable with an all-English environment, and interacting with each other as much as possible. Throw TOEIC at them too early, and they're bound to be overwhelmed and discouraged. Popular materials here are Business Venture, Passport to Work. Four Corners, Interchange, and Smart Choice are nice for general English as well.

Once you get into the higher levels, you can start mixing and matching. For that, I would want some kind of test prep book with Japanese support:

https://www.amazon.com/New-TOEIC-Official-Test-Exam/dp/4906033342

Obviously, you can use this for mock tests and whatnot. But you can also use the listening and reading tasks as a springboard to other communication tasks.

It's also nice to have a grammar book geared for TOEIC, and possibly a vocab book. There are countless materials here. You'll want to put the guys on a self-study schedule for these, and spend a bit of time on it either each lesson or every other lesson. A possible flow for one of these lessons might be 20-30min grammar task review and practice (hopefully interesting). ~60 min of communication practice with/without TOEIC materials. 5-10min smoke break somewhere in there. Then use the remaining time for whatever (vocab review, relaxing discussion, work-related help).

Hope this helps, but the first advice still stands. Try to get out of it.

The First Days of School: How to Be an Effective Teacher

This book plus a few others on classroom management gave me everything I needed to be a motivated and effective teacher.


The fact that you are reaching out and making an effort to become a good teacher means you are already on your way there. Good luck.

I did a class once where we focused on drawing faces. It was a fun way to teach different emotions.

I found Ed Emberley's Drawing Book of Faces pretty helpful. He lays out basic principals for beginners and provides these cookie-cutter face parts that students can pick and choose. They're all quite easy and cute. With the more beginner level students, we also talked about different kinds of lines and shapes to further vocabulary. It's a bit hard to get any speaking in an art class though, so if that's your goal you may want to plan something that allows for it.

These are the main grammar books I use in my classroom. The books have great insight on most rules of English usage. It's available in both Japanese & English.

https://www.amazon.co.jp/%E3%83%9E%E3%83%BC%E3%83%95%E3%82%A3%E3%83%BC%E3%81%AE%E3%82%B1%E3%83%B3%E3%83%96%E3%83%AA%E3%83%83%E3%82%B8%E8%8B%B1%E6%96%87%E6%B3%95-%E5%88%9D%E7%B4%9A%E7%B7%A8-%E7%AC%AC3%E7%89%88-Basic-Grammar/dp/4889967656/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1540272129&sr=8-4&keywords=Basic+Grammar+in+use

I use both the Basic and intermediate books religiously. I have both Japanese and English versions as well and they are a godsend.

Hope you find it useful!

A great book for lesson planning and learning to create students who master information is called Improving Student Learning One Teacher at a Time by Dr. Jane Pollock. It's focused on American public school teachers but it is applicable to all areas of teaching. It teaches you how students learn best and how to structure lessons around that. I've met Dr. Pollock in person many times and she is really intelligent and knows what she's talking about!

This series might be nice to have on hand:
https://www.amazon.com/Intermediate-Communication-Games-Jill-Hadfield/dp/0175558728

That's one, but I think you'll see Advanced and Elementary/Beginner also nearby.

There are two more in a side series, called Grammar Games 1, and Grammar Games 2, but I am unable to find them online for linking.

Tho these question lists need some really serious editing, they're good for brainstorming for discussion classes:
http://teflpedia.com/Category:Conversation_questions
http://iteslj.org/questions/

As you edit those, you can adapt them to different levels, strict discussion, or maybe if you want students to write answers to certain questions.

I teach at the elementary level, so for student souvenirs I ordered some scratch and sniff stickers and also scented markers to grade their worksheets. The novelty of smelly stickers and markers is something they really don't have much of or even know about here in Japan, so the kids are always mystified that these stickers smell like mint chocolate chip, cherry, nacho cheese, etc. It's kind of a culture point too since I tell the kids that I received these stickers all the time from my homeroom teachers growing up :)

The Frameworks of English: Introducing Language Structures

This is about structures in English and how they form coherency. Very useful to shape a view of how we form sentences and the meaning behind it.

Understanding Second Language Acquisition (Understanding Language)

This is a general book that covers SLA. It covers a lot of topics and I think it's a solid beginner book.


Just so you are aware both of these are very useful resources I used during my master's program. But, they are very boring at times.

Just found some reviews at:


Amazon Japan: https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/B0743CCX53/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_ep_dp_ljXDzbAV5B76X


Amazon US: http://tinyurl.com/y3r8flsr


Amazon UK: http://tinyurl.com/yxwolrn2

I use these: https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/1107539331 and also the one kunisan92 recommended.

More than enough content to last you a year. Use the book along with your own conversation practice/activities.

長光 Bostik 粘着ラバー ブル・タック 45g https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/B0010ZMQHE/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_K3JRDbVVWSS49

Essential Grammar in Use

https://www.amazon.co.jp/Essential-Grammar-Answers-Interactive-eBook/dp/1107480531/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_1?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=RH4YPHHEP24QBCNTEPXT

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.