NET-BASED English instruction is becoming popular among language learners in Japan because inviting teachers from low-wage countries, such as the Philippines, reduces the cost of tuition, according to The Daily Yomiuri.
Megumi Kobayashi, for example, practices spoken English four or five times a week with her Filipino teacher on the Internet. “It’s good pronunciation practice because my teacher has a flawless American accent,” she says. Kobayashi has been using the service provided by Gun-Gun Eikaiwa. The company president, Tomohiro Taniguchi, says they only hire Filipino teachers with experience in teaching English online. “We also work to help them improve teaching skills by providing Japanese lessons and teaching them approaches that Japanese students will find easy to follow,” he says.
For students, affordability seems to be one of the most attractive features of the online lessons. In general, they only cost a few hundred yen per hour, much cheaper than the several thousand yen a person could expect to pay for instructors from Britain or the United States.
