In Defence of The ALT V

Book Five – Larry Cotter and The Mercifully Truncated Dénouement

Right, what do we have left to cover? Unconvincing teenage angst? No, don’t need that. Vital plot elements that have somehow remained unmentioned for the previous five years? Nope. Idiotic controversy sparked by throwaway extratextual comment regarding secondary character’s sexual orientation? No way, hose.

The Harry Potter connection was always pretty tenuous anyway. Probably better to drop it now before I mention the physical impossibility of a seventeen-year-old boy spending weeks traipsing around the woods with only a similarly aged girl for company without sneaking off for at least one covert hand-shandy behind a bush. I can suspend my disbelief for the broomsticks and wizards and talking snakes, but a heterosexual teenage boy who’s never tugged himself off to the thought of his closet female acquaintance? You can push the unbelievability thing only so far.

There’s a fairly well accepted theory that describes culture shock as a U-curve (or W-curve if you want to throw in reverse culture shock as well), with four distinct stages. That’s how I was originally going to start this post. Then I remembered the ‘5 Stages of Grief’ and that’s perhaps an even better – if somewhat tasteless – fit for the stages of accommodation you go through as an ALT.

On your first mid-year conference you’re convinced that the whole system is fucked up (it is), that you have great ideas to fix it (you do), that you are the first person to have reached these conclusions (you’re not), and that if people would only see sense and listen to you then everything would be fixed lickety-split (they won’t and it wouldn’t). You express this with a degree of vehemence that hovers somewhere between enthusiasm and anger, which is good because it means that you still actually care.

The second year rolls around and you still have the same ideas, but you also notice that while the first year ALTs are saying the exact same things you did, in the manner you did so, the third years are remaining resolutely silent. You start to wonder why this should be so.

And by the time you reach your third year yourself you realize that some of your cohort are remaining silent because they’re jaded beyond hope and just don’t care anymore, and the others simply realize the futility of pissing into the wind and would rather not spend the rest of their time here with unpleasantly wet and smelly feet.

Because splashback's annoying even at the best of times.

As has been said before, the English language Japanese media is shit, and is generally best avoided. But sometimes, like picking a scab, you just can’t help yourself and end up taking a look. Recently (sorta) there’s been a flare up of the old argument regarding the value and utility of ALTs. It’s the gonorrhea of expat controversies; if you’re lucky it will remain asymptomatic for long periods, but once you’ve contracted it, it never really goes away.

And because I’d rather avoid having a swab shoved up my conceptual urethra, I try to avoid these arguments. Once, of course, I’ve taken the small but tolerable risk (it doesn’t count if you do it standing up, remember) necessary to ascertain that the arguments and counter-arguments are exactly – exactly – the same as the ones we were having when I was on JET a decade ago. Be gentle with me please, nurse.

You're going to put that where now?

I used to think that if Japan was serious about raising its standard of English* then it would scrap the JET programme and instead spend the money on training Japanese English teachers to actually speak the language properly. It’s possible, in fact it’s usual, to major in English at a Japanese university without ever leaving the country, which is like learning to swim without ever getting wet. Even in the UK, with our rightly mocked inaptitude for foreign languages, in order to get a degree in French you actually have to spend a year in France.

I’ve had people explain this away to me as study abroad being too expensive, a line of argument that falls down on two counts -

1.    It’s not expensive. Japan has one of the highest costs of living in the world, and unless you go to London, pretty much anywhere in the English speaking world is going to be cheaper, even once you’ve factored in the flights.

2.    So fucking what? That’s what you need to do to learn a language properly. You don’t let surgeons practice solely on inflatable sex dolls because cadavers are a touch icky. That’s just the cost of doing business.

But of course it’s not the teacher training that’s the main problem, really. Many Japanese English teachers are far from fluent, but subject knowledge and teaching ability are two different skill sets. You only need to know slightly more than your students in order to teach them, and some of the most ineffective and uninspiring lecturers I had at uni were world renowned experts in their field (I’m also coming round to the idea the native level tuition in any foreign language is basically unnecessary below the tertiary level, but that’s another discussion).

Better training is always, well, better. But even if JTEs had access to the most state-of-the-art ELT training, we’d still come to a wet, pulpy crash upon the real reason things here are fucked:

The Japanese Educational System attaches no actual value to spoken English.

Not ‘a little.’ Not ‘barely any’. None. That kind of undermines things, wouldn’t you say?

I know it’s possible to point to many Ministry and Board of Education directives extolling the values of English conversation and various related targets for classroom hours and achievements. And to the billions of yen spunked on ALTs annually. However, if an aptitude is considered important by an institution, it will assess its members on it. Economists have to demonstrate their maths ability. Firefighters have to demonstrate their physical fitness. If spoken English was valued, it would be tested and assessed.

It’s not. It’s theoretically possible to ace all your exams, to be the perfect student, without ever speaking a single word of English.

It’s like the football manager who claims to want to play a beautiful, flowing, tiki taka short-passing game, and then goes out and buys a team full of cloggers and scrappers capable only of hoofing both the ball and the opposition out of the park. The methods do not match the stated goals. Often said manager will bow to boardroom or fan pressure and buy a single creative ballplayer. A player who’ll quickly become resented by his teammates for the indulgence shown to him while they do all the hard work, and who himself will rapidly become disillusioned with being underappreciated and underutilized and end up demanding a move in the January transfer window.

Look at all these shits I don't give any more.

So why, then, do I think that all these thousands of words amount to a defence of the ALT, if I also think that ALTs occupy such an impossible position?

Damage limitation, bluntly. As I said, the flaws in The System have been apparent for decades, and nothing’s changed. This is a country so mired in stasis, so sorely wanting of any kind of national inertia, that any thing or person or programme which holds out the prospect of shaking up the status quo and provoking more than reactionary navel-gazing is a good thing, or person (or programme).

ALTs are the least worst option. If the JET Programme and assorted dispatch companies were scrapped there’s not a chance in hell that money would get ploughed back into improving Japanese English education or global awareness. Are there more effective ways of spending the money to achieve those goals? Of course there are. Is there a more effective way of spending that money that actually stands a chance of being implemented? Like fuck there is.

Change will not happen at the institutional level, but it can and does happen at the individual level, and it is at that level ALTs have their biggest and most lasting impact. If it goes wrong, as it so often does, then all it does is confirm everyone’s existing prejudices so in practical terms you’re no worse off than before. But when it goes right it can be truly transformative. A life-affirming, life-enhancing, life-changing experience for everyone involved, and if it’s a choice between that or more of the same I know which I would take.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off down the gym.

*Yeah, I know.

Credit where it’s due.