Chiaki

Certified Tutor

Due my father's career, I lived in several foreign countries for the first 16 years of my life before permanently moving to Japan. Those countries included Paraguay, Argentina, Canada and Australia. I attended different school systems where English or Japanese was not the first language. There I learned how to communicate with students from different backgrounds by exploring how I could adapt myself in the multi-cultural environment and this experience, in addition to the varying cultural exposure, has set me a goal to become a language teacher. Since then, I have been teaching ESL and Japanese at various countries and so far my teaching experiences have been extremely rewarding and wonderful and I am hoping to continue on in the United States. The past 10 years, I have been teaching overseas in Asian regions at different international school settings. My husband and I moved back to United States last year and I am looking forward to reach out to the students all over the states and hoping to share my experiences through language teaching.

After my graduation from the Kanagawa University, Japan, with a Bachelors Degree in Liberal Arts and English as a Foreign Language, I was employed for a number of years for various international corporations in Japan. It was not until my employment in 2002 as a full time English teacher that I discovered my passion for teaching.
My passion of pursuing the goal continued after I moved to USA, Minnesota, due to my marriage in 2009. I worked as an assistant teacher at IB international school in Minneapolis where half of the students were African-Americans and South Americans. There I learned how to deal with immigrant students as well as gaining additional perspectives of ESL teaching. I also instructed Japanese language to adults at the Minneapolis public school's continuing education program, while started to obtain a Masters degree of ESL teaching. I completed my MA degree in 2015.

I was teaching Japanese to adults and local college students while residing in Malaysia and Singapore for 4 years. When we moved to Shanghai, I was working at one of the American international schools and taught Japanese to secondary students. I moved back to Japan due to my family situation in 2019 and there I was teaching at one of the IB schools in Osaka city, Osaka YMCA International school for 3 and a half years. I learned a lot of innovative approaches that were practiced within the IB curriculum at that time, and I must say it helped me to improve my teaching skills greatly. I also learned many things about online educational resources during this time as it was the pandemic period.

As described, my past experience shows that I have an extensive career of working in the filed of language teaching for different age groups in the international learning environment. I am looking forward to seeing you soon and hoping to assist you to strive for the next step!