The Japan Times has just come out with an article “Ex-students don’t want JET grounded“. JET has been around since 1987, and its stable of ALTs has been on the decline since an peak in the early 2000’s. The article briefly lists some pros and cons of JET, and pretty much says the Government Revitalization unit has added the JET program to its list of possible budget cuts.

I don’t know. The article states that since JET began “over 50,000 young foreigners with few, if any, teaching credentials have come to Japan and partied for a year at taxpayer expense. They have usually enjoyed their stay, but their effectiveness in improving the English language ability of their students was never quantitatively measured and, given Japanese students’ performances on international English tests, is questionable at best”. Gee, if the original and long-standing goal has been internationalization, not English improvement, what’s the major beef? Yeah, one look at the Big Daikon web site forum shows a lot of immaturity from JET ALTs, and JET itself does not mandate an ALT must have teaching credentials, but let’s be fair here. Unless JET requires them, they will get more people without such qualifications. A source I know at JET says that there has been an increase in the professional credentials as of late, but it’s a small and slowly growing figure.

Also, if there has been no quantitative measurement of English from Japanese students as a result of any JET ALT participation, how can anyone say either way whether any language venture has been accomplished?  You can’t! ALTs and JTEs (Japanese teachers of English) have a mixed bag of relationships. Sometimes they get along famously, sometimes not, and there is a lot of gray area in between. Perhaps what JET needs to succeed is to train the ALTs further in how to deal with JTEs, and get the JTEs in on this training. Wouldn’t hurt to require more Japanese language ability from the ALTs, either.

There is a movement afoot to save JET, too. Save the JET Program has a petition going. From that link you can access another on jetwit.com which has a more comprehensive story and even more links.

Basic 1-page chronology of JET can be access at this history section of the main JET web site.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 27th, 2010 at 1:54 pm and is filed under Jr./Sr. High School. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.