How to Start Your First ALT (Assistant Language Teacher) Job

How to Start Your First ALT (Assistant Language Teacher) Job

This blog post is the second in a series I’m doing about starting my new ALT position. Exciting! The first part talks about how out of my depth I felt two weeks before the job started. How I didn’t feel I had much information about what the job was actually about. Here’s the link if you want to check it out. How to ALT – Assistant Language Teacher.

Tomorrow is the first day of my ALT (Assistant Language Teacher) job. In some ways I don’t feel much more prepared than I was a few weeks ago. I haven’t done much actual preparation. But the information that I received has made me feel quite a lot better about the job in general.

Help from the other ALTs in my city

The ALT in my city who has been in the job the longest asked if he could be any help and said to let him know if I had any questions. He sent me a document called “Let’s ALT” published in association with the Ministry of Education. He also told me that generally an ALTs first lesson of the year is a self-introduction, and that I could start planning that.

The document “Let’s ALT”, which was a compilation of notes from last year’s ALT meeting, was quite a general outline about what an ALT does. The general responsibilities and best practices of being an ALT. It was more about the mindset of how you should approach the job in terms of getting involved, building relationships with fellow teachers, and building a rapport and trust with the students. While this information was helpful and interesting, I was looking for more “nuts and bolts” information about how to start in this job. Like for example, what would happen on my first day? Was I expected to have anything prepared?

Self Introduction

For this reason, it was great to know about the self-introduction lesson. It was something I could make some immediate progress with. He gave me a few web pages as resources which I’ve already found very helpful. Here are the resources he mentioned.

Tofugu.com – Mastering the ALT Self-Intro Class

Tofugu.com – Tips For Becoming a Better Team Teacher

I’d come across the Tofugu site before, but finally took the time to see what they were all about.

Friends who have been ALTs

More valuable help came from an old flatmate from when I was a student at university in Wellington, New Zealand. She’d been an ALT a few years ago and she sent me some really good pointers about how to start at your ALT job.

The following tips are from my friend Ros. Her advice has made me feel so much more prepared. And she kindly said that I could share them here.

Survival Tips for First Week ALTs

The Introduction Lesson

Turn up to your first day with an introduction plan ready, and any materials you need to run it.

I know you said in the blog post that you’ll have a week before classes start, but schools tend to spring extra curricular things on you without much notice, plus it always looks good to be prepared. An introduction lesson (as in, introducing yourself and your country) is something you’ll probably be asked to do for the first lesson with every class, every year, so its worth putting the work into coming up with one you can comfortably pull off. And because you’ll have to repeat it so often, the ideal lesson plan should be one that’s very flexible in time, numbers, and ability level, so it can be pretty quickly adjusted to be run with anything from 10 to 40 students, aged 6 to 18, and can be extended to 50 minutes or shrunk down to 15. Also, never rely on question time. You can plan for it in a lesson, but be prepared to quickly change tack if the class isn’t biting. Some classes will want to ask questions, others will sit in complete silence and stare you down until you break.

Time Filler Activities

Have a collection of time filler activities ready to go at no notice

These are framework activities that can last from 5 to 20 min, and handle any kind of language content. E.g. bingo, hangman, and similar word games. Games you can plug the English of the week into. And 100 yen store stickers to give out as prizes. Every Japanese student loves stickers. I’m not even joking here.

Keep a Suit in your Car / Bag

If you’re hopping from school to school during the week, the schools will always, always forget, at some point, to tell you about an event. If you aren’t required to turn up in a suit everyday, keep an emergency ‘graduation day’ suit in your car so you can change if needed. This isn’t such a big deal if you’re at one school every day and can track down and interrogate English teachers regularly, and read the staff room schedule board yourself, but if you’re moving around a bunch of schools this information always seems to slip through the cracks.

Standard of Dress

You will need to wear a suit for the entrance ceremonies in April, and you should always turn up on a first day of work in one. You can then scope out what all the other teachers are wearing for next time. If they normally dress down for work, they will tell you you didn’t need to wear a suit. This is a lie. What they mean is, you don’t need to keep wearing a suit. Always start in a suit in Japan, and then gradually relax your standards of dress to blend in with everyone else.

What to do first

When you arrive at each school, the first thing you should do is introduce yourself to the principal, vice principal and all the teachers you will be working with. Also, find out who your point of contact is at that school. If you’re not comfortable speaking Japanese over the phone, find out which English teacher you can call when you’re sick and can’t come in, for example.

Preparing for actual lessons

What you will be required to do at each school and in each class will depend entirely on what the Japanese teacher you’re working with wants from you. It can range from just pronouncing words correctly and playing with the students, to entire curriculums planned out and run more or less independently.

Start planning with the Japanese Teachers

Once you’ve met the teachers, ask them when can they sit down for fifteen minutes to talk about lessons. This is very important. Teachers who have worked with ALTs before know they need to do this, and probably have a pretty good idea of what they want. They will just give you all the information and everything will go nice and smooth. Other teachers have never team taught before and have no more idea what they want than you do. The best thing to do in this situation is offer them a bunch of ways to organise team teaching and ask them what they are comfortable with:

Give the Japanese Teachers options

Ask them if they want you to a) plan a whole lesson, b) plan some activities lasting x amount of time, or c) just for you to turn up and follow instructions. If they want you plan anything, ask for specifics about the content and teaching style. During your planned lesson time, are you running the class and they assisting? (This is the normal approach). Are lesson plans or activities based on a text book, or made from scratch on an original topic? Are you teaching directly out of a textbook, or designing supplementary materials based on one? If they want you to do anything based on a textbook, ask for a copy of the textbook. If too much fuss is made about this, ask for photocopies of relevant chapters. But they should really get you a copy of the textbook. And even if you aren’t using a text book yourself it’s best to ask to at least flick through one so you can get an idea of the level of each class.

If they expect any kind of planning from you, organise a regular meeting time either weekly or monthly (depending on how often you are at the school) to plan out future lessons. If they’re happy to have you do all the planning and teaching, this might just be them telling you what chapter they want to do each week and you giving/emailing them the lesson plan ahead of time. And if they want more control over the class, you’ll probably need regular face to face meetings where these things get sorted out.

Thank you so much, Ros!

I am so grateful that Ros took the time to make me feel more comfortable. Although there was still a limited amount of planning I could do. The knowledge itself made me feel so much better about my upcoming first day.

Helpful Japanese and Formal Introductions

The final thing that I wanted to do was review some helpful Japanese phrases. My greetings, introductions, and smalltalk in Japanese are coming along, but my formal / polite speaking leaves a lot to be desired. There was also some vocabulary I wanted to learn. I knew the word kyoushitsu (classroom) but I didn’t know shokuin shitsu (staffroom).

Words I wanted to learn:

classroom – Kyoushitsu

staffroom – shokuin shitsu

Principal – koucho sensei 

Vice Principal – kyoutou sensei 

Principal’s Office – koucho shitsu

Suggested Formal Introduction Phrases

Hajimemashite – It’s nice to meet you

Nathan to moushimasu – My name is Nathan (apparently this is more formal than watashi no namae wa Nathan desu) 

New Zealand Shushin desu – I’m from New Zealand (better than New Zealand kara kimashita because I’ve been living in Japan for a while)

Nihongo wa amari hanasemasen – I can’t speak much Japanese

Isshou kenmei ganbarimasu yoroshiku onegaishimasu – I’ll do my best

Other Helpful Phrases

Ohaiyo gozaimasu – Good morning

Shitsureishimasu – Excuse me for entering (used before entering somebody’s office)

Shitsureishimashita – Excuse me for having entered (used before you leave somebody’s office)

Otsukaresama desu – Greeting (when arriving in an office where people are already working)

Otsukaresama deshita – Goodbye (when leaving for the day)

or the even more polite,

Osaki ni shitsureishimasu – Excuse me for leaving earlier than you (when leaving for the day)

Ganbarimasu – I’ll do my best

There’s nothing left to do now but to go to bed and try to get some sleep. Transitioning from English Conversation school hours (around 1pm to 9pm) to regular office hours won’t seem like so good of an idea before 7 am tomorrow. Thank you again to everyone who provided me information and tips about what it is that an ALT actually does. GAMBARIMASU!