In the reading materials, there are questions that which is the better teacher, NESTs or NNESTs. According to the apple book, both groups have advantages and disadvantages. Then, the author concluded that the balance between NESTs and NNESTs is very important in order to complement each other in their strengths and weaknesses.
Therefore, organized collaboration, team teaching have become well researched area in recent years. The author says that team teaching initiative has been developed in Japan. That is called JET program (Japan Exchange and Teaching Program).
I worked in junior high school in Japan for one month as teaching practice. There are native speaker of English as JET program. As far as I observe the class, team teaching program was dysfunction. There are some reasons.
First, the native English speaker is not professional of teaching English. Those who graduate American university can be a teacher in JET program. In other words, JET program ignore the prior majors of teachers. Everyone who has a bachelor’s degree can be a teacher.
Second, NNEST don not know how to do team teaching. It is not rare for Japanese English teacher who can not communicate foreigner in English. They can not plan the class with foreigner. This is very ridiculous.
Even though most of the JET systems in Japan are dysfunction, Japanese government continues to pay 3000 dollar per month for each teachers of JET program.
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2 comments:
Wow! What do you think should be done so that the JET program could have optimal benefit for Japanese EFL learners?
I think team teaching usually causes difficulties because teachers from different countries have different educational background, different experience with teaching, and different approaches to teaching. In Ukraine, for example, syllabus and lesson plans are very restricted. They are all written before the beginning of the year, certified, and can not be changed. If an observer from a governmental institution comes to class, he expects the teacher to lead the lesson according to the lesson plan for that day.
That is why, when foreigners come to volunteer as teachers in a school, they have to follow the ready lesson plans, and they don't have much freedom of adding their own activities in the class.
In addition, what I have noticed, foreigner usually feel uncomfortable working with one more person while teaching. They think that it makes them look unprofessional.
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