This article is the fifth and final installment in a series.

As the number of schoolchildren, mainly foreign nationals, who require Japanese language instruction increases, it is critical to secure and train instructors.

Part-time lecturers hold intensive classes in the Japanese language for students who attend Yokohama municipal junior high schools, including those who have just transferred or been admitted there.

In a classroom at Yokohama Commercial High School on Feb. 1, one of the five locations for such classes in the city, instructor Toshio Shatani, 55, had two male junior high school students — one from the Philippines and another from China — write short sentences using Japanese that they had already learned.

When one of them wrote on a whiteboard the Japanese sentence — “Watashi no chichi ga furo o hairimasu,” intending to say “My father takes a bath,” Shatani told him, “Different particles are used in ‘Shawa o abiru’ [take a shower] and ‘Furo ni hairu’ [take a bath].” The student quickly realized his mistake.

Shatani passed the Japanese Language Teaching Competency Test and is qualified to teach at Japanese language schools. He can speak English and Spanish, so when he cannot make himself understood in Japanese, he can speak to students in those languages.

There are 38 part-time lecturers in Yokohama for the 2018 school year, and they also teach at elementary schools. They have a qualification to teach Japanese language and can have everyday conversations in a foreign language other than English. The Yokohama city government cites these as requirements for the part-time lecturers.

According to the city board of education, there are 2,320 elementary and junior high school students in the city in need of Japanese language instruction in the 2018 school year. A board official in charge said, “Highly professional part-time lecturers teach students effectively by using students’ mother tongues.”

Some local governments employ highly specialized personnel as full-time teachers.

Midway through the 2017 school year, the Fukuoka city government invited applications for full-time teaching staff to begin specializing in Japanese language instruction. A city official in charge of teaching personnel said, “There are more schoolchildren in need of Japanese language instruction than we expected.”

The city employed 11 people in November 2017 and six during this school year, and is planning to hire two in the 2019 school year. These lecturers teach students in need of Japanese language education in separate rooms at elementary and junior high schools.

However, according to a survey in the 2016 school year by the Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry, there is still more to do regarding the lack of lecturers who can teach Japanese. There are 2,202 schools nationwide, about 20 percent of the total, that cannot provide separate Japanese instruction to such students because they do not know how to teach such classes.

New college courses

Universities are also starting to make efforts to train staff who can teach the Japanese language.

In response to calls from organizations such as local boards of education, in the 2017 academic year the Aichi University of Education established a course with 20 students to train elementary schoolteachers for students whose mother tongue is not Japanese, with the aim of nurturing personnel who can give Japanese language classes.

The program covers a wide range of areas, such as the characteristics of the Japanese language, cross-cultural understanding, the process through which people learn foreign languages and effective teaching materials.

In addition to conventional teaching methods, the students taking this program are required to practice Japanese language instruction at elementary schools when they are second-year students. Once in their third and fourth year they are required to teach adults.

The education ministry is preparing a model program for use in training sessions and university programs to train teachers.

Takahito Ueda, a professor of Japanese language education at Aichi University of Education, who is in charge of teacher training, said: “These days, any school could have children in need of Japanese language instruction. All the teaching staff are likely to be required to have a basic knowledge of Japanese language education.”Speech