How to Run a Community English Circle (Eikaiwa)

Before coming to Japan to teach English, I was TEFL Certified at Hamline University in Minnesota, one of the leading programs out there. TEFL stands for Teaching English as a Foreign Language, and the certification is generally used to instruct abroad, much like the Spanish, French, and German classes are conducted in American middle and high schools.

My TEFL Certification has immensely benefited me. Having a foundation in second-language acquisition theory, experience with adult learners, lesson planning, and team-teaching have been indispensable. My experience with adult learners has transferred well to my community English conversation circle, or eikaiwa, and my community English class for beginners. It makes me think that since I was most experienced with adults and junior high level students, and that I ended up teaching primarily these, that placements on the JET Program are much less random than they may seem (and Hokkaido was my second choice!). 

I have encountered many first year JETs who are at a loss as to what to teach in their eikaiwas.  With little guidance or experience, it might be difficult to decide what exactly to teach. But let me begin by saying that  the Internet is a virtual hot spring (onsen!) of teaching ideas. You can find curriculum, lesson ideas, or activity ideas, handouts or conversation questions. This post does not focus on specific lesson ideas, rather, creating a strong foundational backbone for your eikaiwa. The rest will fall into place.

I have a bit of a background in biology, and I find that the process of teaching a new class loosely follows the scientific method. The scientific method is a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting or integrating previous knowledge. By researching, observing, making hypothesis, testing, retesting, and modifying your hypotheses, you can run a good eikaiwa! Okay, maybe that overly complicates it...but anyway...

The first step in running an eikaiwa is researching your group and observing during the first lesson. How many members are there? What did your predecessor do? What levels are they - beginners, intermediate, or advanced? Discover demographics perhaps using a survey: ages, occupations, and experience with English. What is their motivation for learning English: travel, business, making friends, or watching English TV shows? What are their expectations: do they want activities, games, open conversation, grammar, new phrases, and on about which topics?

Now, once you have acquired all that information, what do you teach? By assessing the needs and abilities of your learners, you can begin to develop a curriculum and goals. While it is okay to use some of the work done by your predecessor as there is no reason to reinvent the wheel, you also want to introduce some new ideas and make the class your own. Usual topics include: shopping, culture, asking for directions, travel, ordering at a restaurant, talking on the phone, etc. Hypothesize what your class wants to learn, and revise as you go. For my adult beginner class who is quite well traveled, I extrapolated that they would want experience with travel conversations (airport, asking for directions, restaurants, etc.) in English. And at the next class, a member requested all three. Luckily, I had already planned that night's topic as "at the airport" and I had began planning next week's lesson: ordering at a restaurant!

Chances are you will be teaching to a multi-level classroom, with a variety of interests and ages. One lesson I learned in my TEFL classes was the saying, "Every classroom is multi-level." You will (most probably) never have a class of clones, so your students will always have varied backgrounds and abilities. As a teacher, this is a wonderful opportunity for you to utilize your creativity and intuition. To accommodate varying levels, it is important to use individual, pair, and group work, a variety of difficulty level tasks, teach functional language including how to ask clarifying questions when they do not understand. "Could you please repeat that?" "Please speak slowly." "What does ___________ mean?" Sometimes splitting the class into two groups to work on two separate activities will be appreciated, to challenge all adults at their level.

And perhaps the most important part of your lesson comes after all the hard work is done: reflect. How did the lesson go? What did the learners get out of it? What would you do differently next time? If you reflect and adapt, you will undoubtedly improve as a teacher, make class more enjoyable, manageable, and useful for your students.

Most of all, members of your eikaiwa probably just want to use English, learn a few things, and have fun. So if you can manage to pull those off on any given night, you will be successful!