Resumen de Supporting part-time ELT faculty in a Japanese university
Most English language teaching at our university, as in institutions around the world, is carried out by part-time faculty. Part-time teachers often feel underappreciated, marginalized, and poorly informed about institutional policies. The OECD (2019) reports that an average of 40% of the academic positions among its 38 countries were part-time with 50% in the US and 60% in Japan. Many ELT instructors belong to this economic precariat and work part-time, teach more classes, commute to multiple institutions, receive fewer benefits, and possess far less job security than full-time teachers (Walsh 2019).
Our institution is a large private Japanese university with 19,143 students, 597 full-time academic staff, and 1,055 part-time instructors, most of them language teachers. The English department operates an integrated skills English language program, now in its twenty-eighth year, which provides 600 freshmen and sophomores with 105 classes, and employs 49 part-time ELT instructors. The 32 full-time faculty in the department usually teach students in their third and fourth years and in graduate school. Three tenured professors, including myself and a colleague (who also serve as program coordinators), teach only seven classes in the program, so our part-time ELT faculty are essential. Given their central role in our program and the problems outlined above, our department has tried to improve their professional lives and our efforts may suggest ideas to others facing similar challenges.
