Howard

I have taught English as a foreign language at universities in Japan and Australia, and at secondary schools in Japan, China (as a Head of English at a bilingual middle and high school) and the UK. In total, I have about 25 years of teaching experience. I can help students with the following: general English, English for academic purposes, IELTS, and Cambridge IGCSE English as a Second Language. As a fluent Japanese speaker (JLPT N1), I am able to give extra support to Japanese-speaking students.

Tutoring Experience

After gaining the Royal Society of Arts Certificate in Teaching English as a Foreign Language soon after graduating from university, my first job was at a small language school in Rouen, France, teaching mainly business English to company employees in and around Rouen. I then joined the JET Programme in Japan, which led to a strong interest in Japanese language and society. After taking an M.A. in the Study of Contemporary Japan at the University of Essex in the early 1990s, I returned to Japan and lived there for another 15 years, teaching for most of that time at a national university in Kyushu. I then moved to Australia for a further two years of postgraduate study, during which time I taught privately part-time, mainly helping Japanese school students in Brisbane with their English homework, and then at a university. On my return to the UK, I taught English for a number of years at an international high school for overseas students planning to enrol on degree courses at UK universities, with a particular focus on IELTS and English for Academic Purposes. My most recent post was as Head of English at a bilingual middle and high school in Shanghai, where I was in charge of the English programme and taught general English, IELTS and Cambridge IGCSE English as a Second language to students between the ages of 11 and 19. I am now back in the UK.

Tutoring Approach

My approach is to do my best to find out what the needs of each student are and to base classes on these needs. For example, a student may wish to focus on presentation skills in preparation for an upcoming conference, in which case we could work on areas such as pronunciation, the language used in the slides for the presentation, how to deal with Q & A sessions, and so on. Or a student may wish to focus on IELTS writing tasks, in which case they could write an essay for homework and we could correct it together and work on ways to improve it in class. Teaching general English, an approach I favour is to find a topic of interest to the student, to talk about that topic in class, and then ask the student to write something related to it for homework. In the next class, we would then go over the written work, finding and correcting errors and doing exercises targeting certain points of grammar, vocabulary, and so on.