Hi Andrea. I was a TESL teacher in Tokyo for a few years. Actually, that was a second occupation on certain evenings (the first being advertising executive during the day). That's a complicated story. I wasn't certified in TESL as that wasn't necessary 20 years ago. But I can share with you my experience as a TESL teacher.
I taught two kinds of students. One was members of the Diet (the Japanese Parliament) as individual students on an hourly basis weekly, paid for by some part of their government to prep them for the tourist portion of junkets abroad.
The members of the Diet were men well past middle age encountering conversational English for the first time in their lives, accustomed to being obeyed and deferred to effusively, accustomed to making the rules including ignoring what they didn't want to do, not accustomed to taking any direction from a woman, entranced by the idea of being in the same room with a short, strawberry-blonde American woman for an hour every week, terrified of looking like a fool. Each of the Diet officials whom I taught were quite willing to let me lead (as long as I treated them with warmth, consideration and respect), and they turned out to be smarter and quicker of mind than I had expected (the Japanese bureaucracy is slow, but not, it turned out, the men who
are the bureauracy). They were cooperative and fairly brave about trying English during the class hour, and useless about homework which I quickly abandoned. Immediate accomplishment, such as nailing "How do you do?" or "How much is that?" with appropriate gestures, won them over. They turned out to be hooked on achievement and that became my path to working with them. They loved the notion of having lived 50 or 60 or more years and suddenly being able to speak another language at least minimally, enough to shuffle through tourist situations. They relaxed, had fun, and generally were both slow and enjoyable to work with. Each of them gave me a small gift at the end of their classes; it's a Japanese custom to be especially appreciative of teachers.
The other type of student was the general adult public of varying ages, put together like a community college into very small classes at a major department store (department stores in Japan are not simply commercial companies; they take one from the cradle to the grave in multitudes of ways). I taught many evening classes of no more than 12 adults for two hours once a week in a classroom situation with blackboards, desks, and so forth. The classes were arranged by levels of English conversation ability, so theoretically the students had a similar starting point. They were great! They were highly motivated, spoke in Engligh in class in an orderly but eager way after they decided I was on their side and this was going to be fun, helped each other, and did the homework. We worked on lots of stuff per class, or just one thing like solving the mystery of how to pronounce Ls and Rs which don't exist in Japanese but are crutical to spoken English. A couple of times per month all or most of us would go out to dinner and a beer together after class, where, despite my pretty-good fluency in Japanese which they knew about, I would insist that we continue speaking in English which they loved because it was "real life" and free of charge and they could pursue questions about the finer points of English. When the courses came to an end, they, too, would give me gifts, either individually or in a grand communal expression.
I tended to get teary-eyed at the gifts and cards because I knew they really meant the emotiion behind the objects. Both groups of very different people were extremely thankful that a native speaker had made a 6-month or full-year commitment to them, and the more emotionally committed I was to the specific work of any given session, the more they pressed themselves to achieve.
Does this answer any questions for you?
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