The "English Training Program for Japanese Teachers" launched by Temple University Japan Campus (TUJ) in January 2023 has been completed. 1 current Japanese English teachers who were selected from a large number of applicants participated.
The ``English Training Program for Japanese Teachers'' run by the TUJ Graduate School of Education is aimed at Japanese teachers in elementary, junior high, and high schools in the Kanto and Kansai regions to improve their English teaching skills with an emphasis on communication skills. Two courses were implemented with the aim of improving English language teaching skills: the ``English Teacher Skills Improvement Course'' and the ``English Teacher Scholarship Course.''
The "English Teacher Skills Improvement Course" is offered in two formats: face-to-face seminars and video lectures/demonstrations. Participants were able to participate in either or both, with 2 people taking the face-to-face course and 75 taking the video course.
71 people took the "English Teacher Scholarship Course." Of these, 54 students attended one lecture (1 hours) in the special lecture series sponsored by the Graduate School of Education. In addition, 12 students took the TESOL (English Teaching Methods in Education) master's course course titled ``Adapting and Developing Language Teaching Materials.''
Mr. Tsuyoshi Kurosawa of Dalton Tokyo Gakuen's middle and high school English department, who took the English Teacher Skills Improvement Course, English Teacher Scholarship Course, and Special Lecture Series, said, ``The biggest thing I learned from taking this training was how to encourage students. "I have been adhering to that principle for a long time, but after attending many lectures I was able to reconfirm that it is correct."
Chiho Nakagawa, a junior high and high school teacher and head of the English department affiliated with Kogakuin University, took the English Teacher Skills Improvement Course, English Teacher Scholarship Course, Special Lecture Series, and Language Teaching Materials Application and Development Course. ``It made me think about how to approach English education as an individual and how to teach English effectively.Also, this training was rich in diversity of identities, and the class focused on that point.'' "I felt that it was also valuable. I was taught the importance of properly analyzing various things, and what kind of results the analyzed data can bring."
This program is supported by the U.S. government through the U.S. Embassy in Japan, with full tuition paid (no participation fee), and is also sponsored by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.
TUJ has offered a Master's degree in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) since its founding in 1982, and has expanded over the past 40 years. Approximately 1,700 master's degrees and more than 200 doctoral degrees have been awarded. This grant from the U.S. government can be said to be in recognition of our long-standing promotion of graduate school education (master's and doctoral programs).
