Shoganai Journal

It’s quite interesting how my job as an ALT here in Japan coincided so much with the recent developments of AI.

As many people will know, being an ALT is less about teaching the youth of Japan English and more about… well, teaching them how interact with foreign people, I suppose. Having access to AI has made it a lot easier for me to communicate with the students. Therefore, my answer to the question, “How has technology changed your job?” is that it has significantly enhanced my ability to express my ideas to people who do not share a native language with me.

It is especially useful when it comes to translations and I mostly use it when it comes to preparing instructions for activities I would like to do in class. Although things like Google translate have been around for awhile now, anyone that has ever tried to blunt force it as a communication tool will know that it would not always provide the desired results. This is especially prevalent when translating between languages that are as incompatible as English and Japanese.

With AI, however, I have been able to much more accurately create worksheets and activities that convey exactly what I am trying to get across. In that sense, I will say that I am extremely grateful to have access to this new technology.

Reversely, I do think there are arguments to be made that this is “too convenient”. If the purpose of my role here is to facilitate communication between cultures, then should I not be learning to communicate these ideas on my own? Even if my Japanese is full of mistakes and grammatical errors, is that not a more accurate simulacrum of what actual cross-cultural/language exchanges are really like?

As always, the best solution is a bit of option A and a bit of option B. Whether we like it or not, AI is here to stay and to ignore it would be to your own detriment. The danger lies in becoming over reliant on it. For these reasons, I like to balance my classes with the incredibly accurate written instructions (so that everyone can be on the same page) and then making sure to get lots of personal interactions with the students where we communicate in my broken Japanese and their broken English. Overall, I think this has been the most successful version of my time here as an ALT – especially since the majority of students I deal with have incredibly low levels of English and would not be able to follow along without the translations of what we are trying to accomplish.

Although an ALT is a far cry from being a real teacher, I do still overall consider my job to be an education-adjacent field. As such, I think I am able to speculate that AI will never be a replacement for teaching. Yes, it is useful for translating my ideas and enhances the overall quality of my lessons, but the value of the one-on-one interactions with my students eclipses that small detail. No technology will ever be able to replicate the feeling of someone taking an interest in you as a person and being invested in your potential.

If only there was a way to get the students themselves to stop shoving their homework into ChatGPT… but I suppose I was no better when I would copy a friend’s answers before class to avoid getting into trouble. Kids will be kids.