I’ve been wanting to interview an English language teacher for this series since I started it. I spent some time teaching English before I started my undergraduate degree, and I know that I would have benefited from many of the skills I learnt in my linguistics major. I met Ash when he was doing his Honours year. I knew that he had gone to Japan to teach English, and he very kindly agreed to be interviewed. Turns out he’s been busy since then!

What did you study at university?

I did a Bachelor of Arts/Bachelor of Science double degree, with majors in Geology, Japanese and Linguistics. As it happens, linguistics was the major I enjoyed most and pursued for the longest.

In linguistics, I did a wide range of subjects, but those I found most interesting were about grammar (syntax and morphology). In my Honours year I wrote a thesis on the grammar of an Australian language called Marri Ngarr.

I have since also completed a Masters in TESOL, in which my linguistics background not only helped me get lots of credit for prior learning, but also simplified much of the learning for me

What is your job?

After graduating I worked as an English teacher in a Japanese junior high school, primary school, kindergarten and local town adult evening class. Day-to-day I assisted a main Japanese teacher at the junior high school to make her classes more communicative and overall more interesting for the students. At the primary school and kinder I ran the classes myself, combining insights from both my linguistics major and masters degree (that I was doing simultaneously) to try to make truly effective and innovative lessons. Although phonetics had never been my main interest during my uni days, it was especially useful in teaching Japanese children how to pronounce English sounds.

These days I am not working full time, but have become a language student myself in Korea. Learning Korean has definitely been made easier by my knowledge of Japanese and by my knowledge of linguistics, in particular how people learn languages best, and just in grasping grammatical and semantic nuances faster than some of my classmates.

At the same time, I still do some English teaching in the form of private tutoring. Again, my linguistic knowledge helps in every single lesson, whether I’m explaining how someone should position their mouth to pronounce a tricky sound, explaining an English grammar point, advising on how best to improve/study, or just generally in my selection of activities for the tutoring session.

Do you gave any advice do you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?

Study linguistics! If you have even a small amount of interest in language, linguistics will enable you to understand it in deeper ways than you can even imagine before linguistics training. And if you are considering a career as a language teacher, linguistics will make you a far better teacher.

Also, don’t do a language major in university: A year in a language school (or even self-study) in the country where it is spoken is worth more than any amount of study of that language in an Australian university. This is particularly true if you have some linguistics training to help you along.

Previously:

• Interview with a Speech Pathologist
  
• Interview with a computational linguist
  
• Interview with a language revitalisation program director
• Interview with a media language researcher
  
• Interview with an editor and copywriter
  
• Interview with a humanitarian aid worker
  
• Interview with a high school teacher
  
• Interview with an interpreter
  
• Interview with a journalist
  
• Interview with a data analyst