English Teaching Assistant

Around the start of June 2017, I got a part time job with Temple University Japan as an English teaching assistant. Around that time, I was also studying at their institution and took some Japanese courses there. One of my college friends who majored in Japanese invited me to work with him and I thought it would be interesting to try out. After undergoing an interview with their English Program department, I got accepted and went through a couple days of training before I officially became a TA.

I worked as an English TA for about a year before transferring to University of Hawaii at Manoa. Throughout the one year which I have worked, my job was primarily to collaborate with other fellow TAs and teachers to teach Japanese middle school and high school students how to speak and write English. The overall experience I had from this job was very interesting and rewarding, as it forced me to work on my social skills and overcome a language barrier. Despite the fact that I knew a little Japanese at the time and could speak with the students in Japanese, the program strictly enforced a rule among all the TAs to only speak in English, as speaking Japanese with the students defeats the purpose of them learning English in the first place.

Therefore, me and the other TAs had to think of creative and efficient ways to teach these students the language in a manner at which they could actually understand. Some of the techniques that we utilized included using lots of visuals and illustrations, along with body language to convey an action, and then associate that action with the respective English word. Additionally, I had to brainstorm some social group activities that would get these students speak to each other while using the English phrases and words that we taught them.