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A comment on Japan adding mandatory programming education to all elementary schools. Parent comment

Re:Japan adding mandatory programming education to all eleme... by laurieg on Tuesday May 24, 2016 @02:50AM (#11759441)
The assistant language teacher programme has to be blamed in part for these teachers. For those who don't know, Japan imports lots and lots of young people to be assistant language teachers for 1-5 years. They provide them with very little training and the quality varies wildly. Some are excellent teachers and essentially run classes. Others are "human tape recorders" and just provide pronunciation models for pupils.

After this programme was found to be not having much of a positive effective, the government decided to double the number of teachers they ship in from other countries.

I think they could improve English education in a number of ways: Either train up the teachers from abroad more thoroughly and give them a chance to stay much longer or send all Japanese people who teach English to study abroad for a extended period.

Edit: auto-correct glitches

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Re:Japan adding mandatory programming education to all eleme... by marak830 on Tuesday May 24, 2016 @02:59AM (#11759470)
I think you are spot on with that. The amount of training I received was very very minimal. My current company gave us one day training - most of that time was doing paperwork for the company. While I'm experienced(just over 4 years now), there were quite a few first time teachers.

As an ALT I have seen some pretty badly run English programs in the school(eg I turn up, and they have no idea what class they want me to assist with, or leaving me for hours without work to-do - I generally try and make worksheets, lesson plans or extra material for the students to read around the subject matter, but that very rare gets used at some places.

I have even been at a school where all the English teachers were on holiday, no one really spoke English in the school and had no classes for 4 hours. It can get a little depressing.

But other English programs are amazing, one of my current schools I have written at least 40 pages of material to assist the students/extra study(voluntary), and they have informed the students, who contacted me directly for copies of that work. (I wish I was at this schoolfull time!).

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