Today I was asked to help out at the ETJ conference in Fukuoka. But this time as a member on the panel discussion for school owners. As I don’t actually own a school, that sounded a little strange at first, but it was good to put on my businessman hat and help out with some points about internet marketing etc.

Very often school owners, and I guess all business owners, can be kind of blinded by the trees because you only see your own business everyday. But actually setting up your own English school is a very attractive proposition. If you can find your own unique selling point and really push as hard as you can to be the best school out there (because what customer wants to settle for second best?) you can not only build up a successful business but also make a big difference in your town or city.

Also on the panel was David Paul, David Lisgo and Torachan Travis, who were giving advice on the more specific sides of expanding a school. And I was surprised at how many people were there, all the chairs were gone. I guess I should write a book about Internet Marketing for School Owners in Japan, it’s one of those sure fire products where you know whatever you charged for it, school owners would make the money back almost straight away!

I also checked out a couple of the other workshops. Gordon Olsen did a good presentation and probably the first one I’ve seen with just the presenter talking all the way through but where everyone is still wide awake and alive at the end! The best workshop for me was Melinda Kawahara’s TPRS demonstration. . You can read all the theory etc. on the websites, but as always participating yourself is a big difference. The presentation was flawless and really showcased the power of the method. It does very much remind me of the Pimsleur system with all the repetition and I would imagine it could involve some of the same problems later on ( e.g. motivation and sitting down without moving for 40 minutes is hard!) and although you learn the language very well, it is quite narrow so you’d really have to think about your curriculum. But very good none the less. If I was in high school and had a good class I’d probably try it out.

I also went to another workshop about a four skills course ( i.e. speaking, listening, reading, writing) and to me it was just the reason that I started Genki English in the first place. In that it doesn’t matter if you can read or write a million things, if you can’t speak them then it’s not going to do you any good in the real world. For most people language isn’t letters on a piece of paper, first and foremost language is people talking to each other. And the confidence to do that has to be the main focus of any course, especially when time is limited!