The Heart of the Matter : Teacher Profile No. 3 Anne Hayashi

Lou Spaventa

Lou Spaventa teaches and trains in the USA.

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This is my third and last profile of a practicing teacher. It was done via email, unlike the first two, which were done face to face. Anne Hayashi lives in Japan. She answered essentially the same questions that I posed to the two other instructors I interviewed. The first, Nora Foster, taught at a community college and the second, Santiago Jacksson, taught and administrated in an adult education program. They were both ESL teachers.

Anne Hayashi is an EFL teacher and teaches at the university level in Japan. She is married to a Japanese teacher of French. She herself is Quebecoise and grew up in a bilingual environment where she was French-dominant, but very at home in English. As she says, "My father and mother both have French-Canadian fathers and English/Irish mothers. They were raised bilingually and both felt more French than English. I was therefore raised as a French-Canadian with English ability and strong ties to English-speaking relatives. I consider myself a bilingual French-Canadian." Growing up in Quebec, Anne had the not uncommon experience of speaking the principle language of the province, French, while aware that her country, Canada, was English-dominant. This is a phenomenon of bilingualism in a political context, also true of Catalan speakers in Spain and of German speakers in Italy, for example, and on a smaller scale, of bilingual people in the many ethnic enclaves the world over. Chinese in New York City come to mind, as do Mexicans in Los Angeles. One wonders if this very primal feeling of being one of many while, at the same time, realizing that the many are few in the larger scope of things might not create a very special sensitivity to difference.

Anne says, "When I was twelve, my uncle married a Spanish woman. Meeting her opened up a new world of languages and I taught myself Spanish. From junior high school to university, I studied Spanish and did courses and homestays in Spain before graduating from university." She went on to study Italian and German. She says, "In high school, I already knew that I wanted to be a translator." After she graduated from the University of Ottawa, one of Canada's officially bilingual universities, she worked for five years as a translator for the governments of Canada and Ontario.

I will let Anne tell her story here.

"My first experience teaching ESL was with Frontier College in Toronto, as a volunteer. I accompanied a woman of Italian descent - her parents had immigrated to Canada - who was illiterate in English and had a mental challenge. I taught her how to read and write, how to take the subway and function in the city. Seeing this person learn and grow independent and happier was a very powerful experience for me. I felt that she taught me and I still remember the day she said, "I want to pick the book from now on!" I could see our roles changing for the better!

I left Canada in 1988 to travel and ended up teaching English and French in Taiwan and then Japan, where I have been living since 1991. I had no special sort of training, but I enrolled at the School for International Training (SIT) Vermont to try to make sense of my experiences and get my MA in teaching EFL. I had a much more fruitful learning experience there than at the University of Ottawa, where the focus was sharply on competition between the students. At SIT, we collaborated on projects and exchanged ideas about theory and practice instead of feeling pressure from one another."

A large component of the MATESOL Program at SIT is the emphasis on reflection as a tool for learning and change. Here is what Anne says. "I did find my own answers and confirmation of what I was doing in my classes. Self-reflection has given me the confidence that I can sort out what is happening and modify it to make the experience of learning and teaching more enjoyable and relevant. I have been using film as a "code" for language and culture learning with all the levels I teach from beginner to high intermediate. As I did at SIT, students cooperate on projects and exchange ideas with each other and with me. In reading class, we are using the first Harry Potter book with the movie. Students seem proud to tackle a "real" book in English! I love that the challenges are readily taken up by my students. Group work supports and takes them forward. My attitude of trusting that they can do it often fuels their efforts. The best compliment a student ever paid me was, 'You make me want to learn'!"

Anne is living the life of an expatriate EFL teacher in Japan. She has a bilingual-bicultural family life as well, and this makes her different from many EFL teachers who find and cultivate groups of expatriates. Here is what she has to say about her future.

"All through my teaching career I have been a student, too. I just completed a certificate in written Japanese and I'm taking "very serious" flamenco classes with a Japanese teacher. I constantly make parallels with my learning and my students' learning, my emotions about myself, my classmates and my teachers, what I am learning and how and why this works for me or not. I should also mention that I am raising a bilingual French-Canadian/Japanese child and growing as a mother and educator along with my little boy. I am working on a project where I am comparing his elementary school to a French-Canadian elementary school.

In 1997, I took part in a school building and teaching workshop in Thailand. I enjoyed the teacher development seminars we ran for Thai teachers of English, and I hope to do more teacher development in the future. One of my dreams is to teach during the summers in different countries outside Asia to expand and compare my experiences as a language teacher. My little boy would benefit from the culture contacts, too. He already knows we will board the Peace Boat leaving Japan every three months for a voyage around the world in the near future. I also hope one day to work in my own country. Teaching languages has been a rich and rewarding journey for me. I think it's because I love being a student!"

I must confess to being one of Anne's instructors during her MAT program at the School for International Training. I was immediately attracted to her openness and gentleness, and as I reread what she wrote to me, I see that, apart from her basic good nature, her exposure to and love for language and culture have made her a lifelong learner and a world citizen, though one rooted in a specific language and culture, which she stills holds dear. To my way of thinking, there is something of optimal experience in Anne's personal story, being clearly of a place and people while opening up oneself to other places and people. Perhaps the more we learn about others, the more we learn about ourselves.