All of the faculty are native speakers, fully qualified and highly experienced professional teachers of Japanese as a foreign language.

Yokozawa Sensei Click for Newsletter interview

Yamasa's faculty members work as a team to provide considerable variety, with four (sometimes five) teachers per teaching team. The teaching workload at Yamasa is fairly light compared to other institutes, with a full-time faculty member usually teaching no more than 12-13 classes per week, and depending on their particular area of expertise, no more than 14-16 when the electives are scheduled. This provides each teacher with more preparation time than those elsewhere.

Yamasa's teaching faculty has considerable advantages provided by the support available from non-teaching staff. For example our engineers provide close support through the databases. After each lesson, faculty input all relevant information and feedback into our databases, ensuring that other team members know exactly which problems you may have encountered with new grammar, what your strengths are weaknesses are, and can prepare their lessons with this realtime information.

Hase Sensei Click for Newsletter interview

Although you will be taught by a team of teachers, one faculty member will be designated as academic advisor. Your academic advisor heads the teaching team, and is always a full-time faculty member with considerable experience.

Before assuming positions in a Yamasa teaching team, all of the faculty are required to have considerable experience in teaching Japanese as a second language. Yamasa's faculty is one of the most experienced in Japan. In addition to many years of experience, virtually all of the faculty have overseas teaching experience and a world outlook considered unusual in Japan.

A key advantage results from the fact that all of Yamasa's programs are offered by the Institute all year round. We are able to rotate teachers through both an Academic and Extension stream, providing them with considerable career development opportunities. By contrast, many courses offered by universities and institutes in Japan are offered only in the summer, or at certain times of the year, and much of the actual instruction is provided by teachers on casual contracts.

The major difference between Yamasa's faculty and the Japanese teachers employed by other education providers is that Yamasa's teachers are professionals. As our programs are offered year round, and the Institute has become fairly famous within Japanese language teaching circles in Japan for the stability of its enrolment and quality of working conditions, our program is able to attract and retain full-time career professionals and professional teachers looking for permanent part-time positions. This is something that other Japanese language education providers are usually unable to match.

As a result the qualitative difference between Yamasa's programs and courses offered elsewhere is considerable and increasing.