Today I was asked to help out at a teacher’s “eikaiwa” or private English class. I usually don’t do these types of classes ( please don’t write in asking me to visit one – I just don’t have the time!), but the teacher today has been really helpful and as I was in town I popped along.

I thought it would just be a small class that I could just sit on in and maybe just chat with the kids. As it happens there were 40 kids, 20 primary school and 20 junior high – not what I was expecting!

The primary school kids were all mixed ages and mixed abilities, so I was a bit worried as you can’t actually teach anything new to that sort of group. For example what interests the 1st graders doesn’t interest the 6th graders and vice versa. So I just did the general Genki English style show with Rock, Paper, Scissors and rules of Genki English and they were really good. I just hope the teachers who were watching didn’t think that was how a real lesson should be as it was far too “tekitou” or made up as I went along!

Lots of the kids were shouting out questions, often cheeky stuff at first but as soon as you flip their questions round and get those kids on board it makes the lesson run really smoothly. They actually want to learn, and enjoy themselves doing it.

Then it was the junior high kids, again 20 kids of mixed ability. Now that was tough! They were nice kids, but once you get to 12 or 13 you don’t really want to communicate with anyone really, never mind in front of everyone else in a foreign language. Instantly we also had the boys all way over on one side of the room, and the girls all way over on the opposite side with no intention of either side even looking at the other, never mind talking. There’s no point fighting that, so I simply made them into boys and girls teams!

We did the hammer game, the lines quiz ( to test their genkiness and English level) and the Where is Baby Monkey? game. Although the teacher and parents were quite happy that the kids enjoyed themselves, and they did get sort of genki-ish and the end, the huge, huge gap between learning English in junior high and elementary school is just so obvious.

Whatever the experts may argue about whether you can learn a language just as well later in life, and the fact that learning grammar translation style of languages is probably easier in high school, when it comes to communicating in English it’s so, so, so, so much easier to teach when the kids are younger. I almost felt sorry for the junior high kids, it’s almost criminal that their parents wait till they get to this age to let them learn English. They really should do languages from kindergarten, get it out of the way ( i.e. speak really well) then spend the junior high years learning business or science or other things that are more suited to what the kids want to do.

As I’ve said before the people who say that English education should start at 5th or 6th grade instead of earlier have obviously never ever set foot in a primary school classroom. Well, except for when they were kids of course!