ALTs are a diverse lot, not all coming from majority English-speaking countries and many cultures. When it comes to teaching about culture, you can draw on knowledge of your own, cultures you’ve encountered through travel, or stretch your own understanding of the English-speaking world. Engaging and Informing A simple and time-efficient…
Happy New Year 2023! Have you made new year's resolutions? This is the perfect time to look at Commandment 9 - strategies to increase your learner's goal-orientation. Teachers Setting Goals Every year, teachers pore over guidelines, revise syllabi, and schedule units and tests as part of course goal setting. A syllabus…
Hey ALTTO Community! How's that humidity treating ya?! The first term of the school year may be ending soon, but that doesn't mean we can't take some time to reflect and plan ahead for how we will do things after the summer. This next Commandment is brought to us by Elizabeth…
I hope you're all settling in to the new school year. It is the perfect time to try something new in your classroom! This Commandment comes to us from Alex, an ALT at a high school in Kyoto. He and his co-ALTs and JTEs have been doing some fantastic things to…
Bio: My name is Daniel Pearce, and I am currently working as a teacher-researcher at Kyoto Notre Dame University. I was an ALT in several high schools of the Shonai region of Yamagata Prefecture between 2008 and 2013. During my time in Yamagata, I committed myself to studying Japanese and kanji…
I taught at a low-level school. The students were really eager to use English, but they weren't exactly good at it. One day, I came up with the idea of building a term's worth of lessons around the goal of writing and presenting a basic 5-7 sentence paragraph I like to…
One of the most rewarding parts of being an ALT is being able to build relationships with your students. But more than that, developing relationships with your students can lead to better classroom performance and greater motivation for them. Here are a few tips I have picked up over the years.…
I used to hate planning lessons. It was my least favorite part of my TESL certification program. My instructors wanted so much detail. Every single moment of the lesson had to be accounted for and justified. Why are you doing this? Why at this point in the lesson? What is this…
You may not have a lot of control over the physical structures in your classroom - the desks, the whiteboard, the tech (or lack thereof!). You may not be able to have your students sit in groups and do group projects due to Covid-19 precautions. You may not be able to…
I remember getting the impression that one of my elementary school teachers hated children. I think I was about 11 or 12 years old when it happened. I was paired with a younger student for a reading buddy program, and I saw the difference in how this teacher treated their own…