Supporting part-time ELT faculty in a Japanese university

Abstract

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...