The story of how I came to promote bilingual parenting

Hello.
I am Hide,
a person who promotes bilingual parenting.

In this note, I would like to share through my own life story
how I came to be involved in activities that promote bilingual parenting.

I was born and raised in a city called Asahikawa in Hokkaido, with a population of 360,000.

It was an ordinary family, like any other, with nothing special to note. My parents were not only not enthusiastic about education, but almost indifferent. My parents divorced when I was in the lower grades of elementary school, and I was left with no choice but to go with my father, after which I grew up in what would now be called a state close to neglect.

Despite growing up in such an environment, I am now married and have succeeded in raising my two biological children to be bilingual. I am truly enjoying parenting.

Also, I became a foster parent in 2019, and I am practicing bilingual parenting with a child I have been caring for since they were 7 days old.

I would like to introduce my brief background here. I think that will help you understand a little bit about how I got involved with English, taught it, and came to promote bilingual parenting.

<Background>
Born in Hokkaido
2000: Dropped out of technical college in my 3rd year ← Department of Control and Information Systems Engineering, setback
2001: Studied abroad at a university in the Philippines (4 years)
2005: International school teacher
Organized a street listening volunteer group called "Kikiya" (The Listener)
→ Appeared on Close-up Gendai
2008: Moved to Osaka immediately after marriage, worked as a pastor and ran an English conversation school
2012: Started bilingual parenting with the birth of my eldest daughter
2015: Opened an international school
2016: Worked as a freelancer doing Google ad evaluation, interpreting, and as an English tutor
Scored 970 on my first TOEIC exam.
2017: Through a connection, became a company employee in the nursing care industry (in charge of general affairs, IT, and creative work)
July 2021: Started activities to promote bilingual parenting (Twitter, note, Youtube, stand.fm)

■Twitter https://twitter.com/Zenryoku_Daddy?s=09
■Youtube https://t.co/k7D8k4sZCj
■stand.fm https://t.co/kKULsAKDhx

*I have also summarized a more detailed self-introduction about my upbringing in this note, so please take a look if you like.

Actually, I was never good at English.
Even now, I cannot speak it like a native speaker.

In fact, it was one of my weaker subjects in junior high and high school, and there were many times when I barely passed.

It was an era without YouTube or the internet like today, so
my first encounter with English was in a junior high school English class.
At that time, I finally started studying from the alphabet in my first year of junior high.

I still remember Mr. Mori's pronunciation.
He clearly said in katakana, "Good morning everyone. How do you do?" (laughs).

However, that was English to me.
I had this English drilled into me through repeat-after-me exercises.

Time passed a little, and during high school, I made friends from New Zealand and South Korea, was blessed with two opportunities to go abroad, and was able to experience various cultures.

Through these encounters and connections, although I was by no means good at English,I ended up studying abroad at a university in the Philippines.

In the Philippines, classes are basically conducted in English from elementary school, and Tagalog is studied during what is called national language class. Therefore, most Filipinos can have daily conversations in English, regardless of the level. Of course, university classes were learned in English, reports were written in English, and discussions were in English.

The Philippines is recommended for language study abroad. I think there may be concerns about safety, but it is fine as long as you don't go to dangerous places. You will definitely broaden your world by experiencing not only English but also new cultures and values. (I will talk about studying in the Philippines in another article someday.)

In my second year of study abroad, a friend told me,"I really couldn't understand what you were saying in your first year (laughs)"and although I laughed it off at the time, I felt incredibly frustrated. Even though I was bad at it, I thought I was speaking well myself! What an embarrassing misunderstanding.

So, from that day on, I watched American TV shows every day to get my ears more accustomed to English, and I studied English properly for the first time. I stopped having an attitude of just wanting to "keep up" in class and started preparing for classes before attending. As a result, I was able to graduate from university as Cum Laude.

That one word from my friend ignited my English studies.

I hope this note will similarly
ignite your bilingual parenting.

After graduating from university, I worked for 3 years as a teacher at the elementary and junior high school division of aninternational school that my local mentor had started. It is the school where ski jumper Sara Takanashi was enrolled. (Unfortunately, she enrolled a little after the time I was teaching, so I cannot say she was my student...)

Immediately after getting married in 2008, through another mysterious connection, I moved from Hokkaido to Osaka.
While working as a pastor, I ended uprunning an English conversation school.

I didn't start the English conversation school from scratch, but rather took it over from my predecessor; it had about 30 students and was operating at a loss. Prepared to close it if I couldn't turn it around in a year, I created a website myself and started advertising, eventually growing the student body to 120, from children to adults.

A major part of that success was due to my wife, who is more of an English specialist than I am. The kids' classes she was in charge of were so popular that they grew solely through word of mouth.

This leads into the next topic, so a brief introduction of my wife.

My wife is from the same hometown, majored in education at an American university, and graduated Summa Cum Laude. After teaching at an American high school for about two years, she returned to Japan, where she worked at a major English conversation school and as an instructor teaching English to teachers at junior high schools and other institutions. At the English conversation school I took over, she was in charge of the kids' classes and private TOEIC lessons. The students she taught achieved their target TOEIC scores one after another. I believe my wife is one of the best English teachers in Japan.

Now, to get back to the story, although the school was doing well financially as the number of students increased, my wife and I began to feel a growing sense of conflict.
That was,

that with the conventional English conversation school format,
even if you can get a little used to English,
you won't be able to speak it.

That was the issue.

The children were participating happily. However, I witnessed time and again that students who had been attending since kindergarten didn't grow enough to be able to converse by the time they reached the fifth grade of elementary school, and they would quit to prepare for junior high school entrance exams.

Conventional lessons using commercially available materials were somewhat fun and could be prepared efficiently, but I began to struggle with whether I was doing work that was truly valuable.

Our first child was born in 2012, and my wife began to focus on parenting. After discussing it as a couple, we decided to raise our first child, our eldest daughter, bilingually even before she was born.

When a few friends found out about this, they asked me to "run a parent-child English circle," so when our child was six months old, we started a small baby English circle.

This was the beginning of a major reform in our English education.

You can't learn to speak English in a 50-minute lesson once a week.
If that's the case, why not just raise them to be bilingual from the start?

In the Philippines, where I studied abroad, children are bilingual in Tagalog and English by the time they reach elementary school. Of course, most people are more fluent in Tagalog. However, they can communicate sufficiently in English, so they are included in the global English-speaking population.

If it can be done in the Philippines, which is not an English-speaking country, I believed that "it must be possible for Japanese people to raise their children to be bilingual while living in Japan!" and started moving forward.

And, separate from the start of this circle, after about a year of planning, in 2015, when my eldest daughter was three, I opened an international school.

At the start, we gathered about 10 students for the nursery and baby classes combined. However, unfortunately, due to financial difficulties of the parent company, the international school had to close after one year.

I also experienced great disappointment during this time as I lost my job, but I was also blessed with the opportunity to work as a freelancer, doing interpretation and reviewing Google ads in English under contract with a British company.

Although the school closed, some of the students asked me to "please continue the bilingual education, even if it's just private lessons," so we started a parent-child English circle at our home. We are still continuing the lessons today.

There are families where the parents don't speak English at all, and families who are working on bilingual parenting while learning together.

Although there are differences in family environments and individual personalities, everyone can do Show & Tell (a type of presentation for children) in English, and there is even a child who passed the Eiken Grade 2 exam at age seven.

The bilingual parenting method has proven effective not only for my own children, but also for various children with different parental English abilities and environments.

As I have introduced up to this point,
my spouse and I have been involved in various forms of English education.

And I have come to be convinced that
bilingual parenting is the most effective method of English education.

I believe
that through bilingual parenting,
we can fundamentally change English education in Japan.

Thank you
for reading until the end.