Welcome to ALTing: Junior High School and you
After covering some basics about working with your teachers and working with elementary school students, it’s time to graduate to junior high school (JHS). These students are in what us Americans would call the 7th through 9th grades and the students are aged 12 to 15. Much like in 5th and 6th grades, English is an academic subject that is graded and tested. In JHS, the “academic subject” knob is turned up past 11 and ripped off. These kids study hard for those all important high school and college entrance exams. There is some evidence these exams contribute to the emphasis on vocabulary and grammar (Otaka, 2011) in spite of the increased emphasis on speaking, listening, and communication brought on by the 2020 Ministry of Education changes to the English curriculum (Nemoto 2018).
As a junior high school ALT, your duties may include checking and marking student work; helping your teachers grade tests; making worksheets; collaborating on lesson plans; and leading games and activities in class. You might be asked by a teacher to help prepare students for the EIKEN exam. One of my teachers had me help her prepare students for the EIKEN by circling the correct answer for her on practice tests. I also sat in on practice sessions when I could after school to help the students a few times. You may also be asked to come to school functions such as sports day and culture day in an official capacity (I attended sports’ day for one of my junior high schools). That’s quite a bit of responsibility, but your core responsibility being a linguistic and cultural contact for your students still remains. With this in mind, let’s get into what working in a junior high school can be like.
Working with Japanese Teachers of English
Teachers in JHS focus on teaching one specific subject. Science teachers teach science. Japanese teachers teach kanji. Japanese teachers of English (JTEs) teach English.
Just like in elementary school, you may have mixed experiences. Sometimes, the teacher will make a plan and will just need your help and presence. Other times, you and your JTEs will collaborate and create a lesson plan. Sometimes, a teacher will be so up to their eyeballs with administrative work, they may have no time to actively plan with you beyond a 5 minute warning before class about what you’ll be doing that day (we’ll offer some ideas to help you with those classes in the “Recommended Activities” section). Many JTEs may ask you to bring a game or activity related to what the vocabulary and grammar the students are learning at the time. Others may ask you to be a human tape recorder. Each teacher is different (ESID strikes again!), so keep that in mind while you work with them. You may find yourself having a healthy working relationship with some of your teachers. Others…well, so long as you two can get through class and the students are learning, mission complete.
Planning with your JTEs
ALTs are ideally supposed to collaborate with their teachers about the lesson plan. Depending on how often you are at a junior high school, this may be very easy or a little more difficult. For example, I teach at two junior high schools and I visit each one once a week. So long as the teachers give me an approximate idea of what the students will be doing from one week to the next and I can show them an activity or talk through an idea with them, we’re set. If you work at a junior high school multiple times a week, you will have more contact with your JTEs and (hopefully) more time to plan. Being proactive about discussing class also really helps because it shows that you’re engaged and ready to teach.
At the very least, your JTE should have a plan to teach and they should let you know about the material the students are learning. Just being there to spot check the students’ work and engage in conversation with them is enough sometimes. However, there are ways to improve the planning situation. Being proactive and asking the JTE what the students will be learning about the next time you’re at school gives you an idea of what is coming. This information gives you a chance to find or make an activity. It can also give you a chance to ask for feedback about your idea(s) from the teacher. Proactive communication beats reactive communication. Alternatively, it can help to bring in a review activity from the unit students are currently working in or a previous unit if you can’t talk to your teacher about the next lesson for some reason or another. Whether you’re covering new material or reviewing old material, a lesson plan is still a plan and you’re always better off with one than without.
Working with students
This brings us into working with the students themselves. Just like with elementary school, every class has its own energy and own dynamic. Some classes are full of jokers. Others are quiet and serious. Don’t be fooled though; even the quiet and serious classes still appreciate a fun quiz game or self-expression activity. And those jokers just might have a serious streak in them. In the classes themselves, some students will be willing to try English and others will be more quiet and shy. While the students work, it helps to wander around the classroom and see if they’re struggling. Many times, students appreciate help and being told when they get something correct.
Outside of the classroom is where you can really build a relationship with your students. Cleaning time is a really good chance to interact with the students. No one will ever refuse an extra pair of hands during cleaning time. If you can, help the students serve lunch and/or eat with them. These little things show the students and the teachers that you care about the school and people within it.
If you have time and energy, visiting clubs after classes are done for the day is something you can do. It can really bring a smile to the students’ faces. Participation is not mandatory, but it is fun. Just visiting one club for ten or fifteen minutes is good enough. However, if you find a club that you want to participate in, try getting involved. I like to work with the volunteer club at one of my schools. It helps the students and gives us a chance to practice English and Japanese together.
Recommended Activities; What to do and how to do them.
Activities in junior high school are pretty different from activities used in elementary school. While the students study hard (those high school entrance exams are pretty darn important), it’s important they still get a chance to practice and have fun with English. It’s also good to have some activities ready just in case you end up having to take a teacher 1 (T1) role for some reason.
Activity 1: Quiz games.
Need to review for a unit test? Or do you need a refresher after New Years’ break? Then it might be time for a quiz game.
There’s plenty of ways to make quiz games. If you need something fast and quick, making a 10 to 15 question quiz on a PowerPoint like program is a decent option. I use a Jeopardy template I swiped and modified from ALTopedia. I organize students into groups. Each group gets a white board and a team color. One group will choose a question, but all the groups get a chance to answer and earn points. We usually go in a circle to let each group choose a question. We usually get through 10 to 12 questions like this and it takes a whole class period. For faster quizzes, I just present questions in a particular order and make each one worth 10 points, with half points awarded to answers with one major mistake. Sometimes students usually get the right idea, but sometimes the execution is wrong. Half points award the effort and what they did right while also keeping things fair for teams that get an answer 100% perfect.
You can test for things like vocabulary, grammar, spelling, and pronunciation using quizzes. Be sure to use plenty of pictures to give the students hints. Including some English (like starting letters or starting grammar) and/or kanji (particularly helpful for 2nd grade and 3rd grade vocabulary) are other options.
Activity 2: Shiritori
This is a classic-ish Japanese game that is good for warm-ups or cool-downs and it helps students review vocabulary. I picked up this idea from Tofugu. Got a blackboard, chalk, and some students? Then you can do shiritori. Short on time to prepare for class? A little shiritori never hurt anyone.
English shiritori works by writing a word starting with the last letter in a previous word. Here’s an example.
Mario → octopus → spaghetti → interesting → green → night.
It can help to organize the students by rows. Move students around if you have to to make things more even. Make some columns on the blackboard; one for each group. Give the students a starting word or letter and tell them its shiritori time. This is a game they’ve likely played since elementary school, so they should be familiar with the rules. The rules I play by involve points and not repeating words. Nouns, verbs (in any tense), and adjectives are ok. Words that are 3 letters or less long are worth one point; 4 to 6 letter words are two points; and 7 or more letter words are worth three points.
Activity 3: Drawing games.
A game/quiz I like to do with students involves drawing pictures. You can use flashcards or a PC; either way, it’s meant to help students review vocabulary words. This can be particularly useful for lower level classes as a reinforcement exercise because seeing an image and matching a foreign word to it can help the learning process. This can be done as a whole class exercise with a few volunteers to warm-up or review at the end of class.
My process involves using a PC. I typically put my students into pairs or groups of 4. I have a PowerPoint presentation with animations to make pictures appear and disappear. One person in the pair/group draws a picture while the other(s) put their head down. After a short amount of time (typically 1 minute), everyone puts their heads up and takes a guess.
If you don’t have a PC or there’s a technological failure, you can try using flashcards or writing/drawing on the blackboard. Letting a couple students draw pictures and having the class guess could be some good fun. Or you could make it a team game; whatever team guesses the word first gets points. This version can be done on shorter notice and can work as no-to-low prep activity to help with vocabulary recall.
Activity 4: Making mini-talks.
At some schools, students may have a little pocket book full of English and Japanese sentences with one-to-one meanings. Some of these books even have little dialogues at the end students can read that usually link back to the grammar point. However, not all grammar points are covered and practiced with these dialogues. What to do?!!
Let the students write and perform their own mini-talk. This helps them practice writing (good for vocabulary and grammar) and speaking. They can perform it in front of their classmates or simply read it aloud at their desks.
Mini-talks require some extra preparation on your part. There need to be two roles, a worksheet for the students to write on, prompts, and some scripts to get the students started. For example, the roles could be a waiter and customer at a restaurant. The prompt could be ordering food or correcting a mistake. Scripts could include…
“Excuse me.” “Thank you.” “What would you like?”
“I’d like…” “That’s ___¥.” “We have ______.”
These scripts should be somewhere students can read them, be it on a slide or on the worksheet in a little word-box. Let students know the help is there.
Lasly, when I give mini-talks and prompts, I let the students preview all of them before drawing one from a jar. This helps give them ideas about the kinds of things they will write. Once they have a prompt, let them write. Walk around and check on the writing process. If some students are finished early, ask them to read their mini-talk to you and give them some feedback.
Activity 5: Think-Pair / Speak-Share
This can be done with very little prep time, and is good for “last minute planned” classes. Give the students a simple prompt question. Something along the lines of, “Which do you like, sweet or salty food? Why?” or “What movie do you like? Why?” You’ll need to adjust the questions and kind of questions depending on the English ability of a particular class. Having an envelope or jar full of questions or a list of questions you can choose from in a pinch can be very beneficial. Even simple questions like “When is your birthday?” or “What is your dream pet?” can be useful speaking prompts.
After presenting the question, give students 30 to 60 seconds to think of their answer by themselves. Then, give them another 30 to 60 seconds to share their answer with a partner or a group, usually someone sitting next to them. Feeling crazy? Tell them to share their idea with the person sitting in front of or behind them. After giving them a minute to talk with their partner(s), get the class’s attention. It’s time for the students to share their ideas with the class. Ask for volunteers and give them some time. But if there are no volunteers, pull teacher powers and call out someone’s name or student number. 80% of the time, you’ll get an answer. To make things more “fair” ask the first student to select another student (any student!) in the class or from a certain row. Do this 3 or 4 times to finish up the sharing part of the activity.
Activity 6: Spelling games
Spelling games are a decent way to reinforce vocabulary and practice linguistic accuracy. All you really need is a student textbook.
In the back of the textbooks is a glossary (in the New Horizon series of books my classes use, it’s called the “Word List”) of English words complete with their Japanese counterparts. Choose a word from the unit the students are studying or from a previous unit and write the Japanese for that word on the board. Draw a picture if you want to. Good pictures are cute and bad pictures are funny, so it doesn’t really matter. Either way, you’ll elicit some reaction from the students. Put some dashes (one for each letter in the target word) under the Japanese and/or picture and let the students guess one letter. Tell them they need to raise their hands and speak or else it’ll become a shouting match of letters. A demonstration of the rules can help the students understand. Any letters that are wrong should be placed somewhere in a “wrong letters section” on the blackboard; I usually designate the “wrong letters section” with an X in a square. Correct letters should go on the appropriate dash.
Up the stakes by drawing a snowman and “melting” (erasing) a piece of him away with each letter the students get wrong. Watch for students that’ll sabotage the class’s efforts; they’re a wildcard that can up the pressure if you use that energy the right way. If for some reason you don’t like snowmen, you can draw a flower or some dango instead.
Other things you can try
There’s plenty of other things you can do with your students. If your students have penmanship books, then ask your JTE about having them write three or four sentences at the bottom of a page as a diary that you can check. Or you could start an ALT post (another idea I acquired from Tofugu). Get a little box from Daiso, some notepads, and tell the students they can write letters to you and that you will write them back. I do this with my students and I always look forward to responding to their notes.
If you’re more artistically inclined, you might try making an English board. Talk to your JTE or another teacher at your school(s) to see what materials and space are available for an English board. You can make holiday themed boards, food themed boards, or summer vacation boards. Get a piece of paper and see what ideas you can come up with.
Closing thoughts and words of encouragement
Teaching at junior high schools is a bit challenging sometimes. Sometimes the students sleep through class. Sometimes the JTEs are just too busy to properly collaborate with you. But so long as you show up, do the work, and keep trying, seeing the students smile and watching them learn is worth it. And they have ways of making it worth it. Every once in a great while, a student leaves a thank you note in my post box telling me that they like English and that it’s all my fault. I always write them back telling them how happy their note made me.
Enjoy the little moments when you help the students’ clean, serve lunch together, and spot check their work. Play a round or two of janken with them in the halls. Make a few silly jokes in broken Japanese. Lament how difficult English is, but keep encouraging them to try anyway. Help them make some positive memories because school can be a real drag. Sure they ain’t little and cute like elementary school students, but they’re only young once, and you’re their teacher for only so long. Not many people get to interact with and leave a good impression on young people, so enjoy the experience and savor it for the privilege it is. Heaven knows; you just might inspire them to boldly go and explore a new part of the world for themselves one day.
Works Cited and Extra Reading
大高博美 — Otaka Hiromi. (2011). The backwash effect of the entrance exam on English language education in Japan. Ex: エクス: 言語文化論集, (7), 161–184.
Nemoto, Alison. (2018). Getting Ready for 2020: Changes and Challenges for English Education in Public Primary Schools in Japan. The Language Teacher (42.4). https://jalt-publications.org/articles/24344-getting-ready-2020-changes-and-challenges-english-education-public-primary-schools
Poonoosamy, Mico. (2020). Critical views on the aspirations and tension in implementing the 2020 English Education Reform plan. Josai International University Bulletin (28.2). 151–160.
Richey, Micheal. (2014). What to do when you’re placed in a bad school. Tofugu. https://www.tofugu.com/japan/jet-program-bad-school/
Roux, Peter. (2016). Reforming English Education in Japan: A Survey with Elementary School Teachers. 佐賀大学全学教育機構紀要/佐賀大学全学教育機構 [編], (4), 123–136.
