Learning, sharing and joining the EFL conversation

The same old lesson, over and over again: the more you put in, the more you get out of learning. The deeper you go, the better it gets as a teacher. I have recently become aware of a whole new circle of committed educators, here in Japan as well as around the world. They have organized themselves on Twitter and through a series of educational blogs. I was invited to guest author a small piece on my friend, Barbara Sakamoto’s blog at: http://www.teachingvillage.org/ If you look around Barb’s blog, you’ll see many cool people doing many cool things. The nicest thing about it is their openness to welcoming other teachers into their circle, or personal learning network (PLN) as they call it.

I’m looking forward to writing another piece describing my teaching at Seibo Jogakuin, a private, Catholic girls junior and senior high school in Osaka, Japan.

If the conference is as cool as the organizers, we’re in for a treat

Spontaneous Learning Opportunity Windows (SLOW)

Has this ever happened to you?

You discover some new thing, something you weren’t really familiar with previously, and suddenly you notice it everywhere. This happened with the first car I bought: a 1964, baby blue VW beetle; 400 dollars and sporting a homemade wooden floor. It got me through my university summer job, and that’s all that counted. The funny this was, though, that having bought a VW beetle, I suddenly noticed how many others were also out on the road. They were, in fact, everywhere. The same goes for pregnant women. It is not until you, or your partner, is pregnant that you suddenly imagine that half the world is pregnant along with you. It is hyperbolic, for sure, but it sure feels like there are expectant mothers everywhere. This very same phenomenon is happening in my classroom, with what I have coined as, “SLOW moments”.

SLOW down

These “spontaneous learning opportunity windows (SLOW)” are moments that I have grown to love and cherish. I define them as those serendipitous moments when everyone is suddenly focused on exactly the same thing. It may be triggered by a student’s comment, a joke, a mistaken answer, something from the textbook, or something the teacher has just said. At that moment, everyone’s brain has stopped and a small window has opened. If the teacher is ready, it is very easy at that moment to slide something through the window and into the student’s brain. It actually gets easier and easier the more you keep an eye or an ear open for these SLOW moments. After 2 years, I now get at least five or six chances per lesson. The bonus is that when they happen, the students think that I’m off-script and therefore something “fun” might happen – and it does! They all learn something – and that is about the most fun there is.

Classroom interaction

This classroom interaction opportunity and strategy is a part of learning to improve your teaching techniques during a class. Richards and Lockhart point out that ‘teaching is essentially a thinking process [which] involves making a great number of individual decisions’ (1996: 78). These decisions are planning decisions, interactive decisions or evaluative decisions. Certainly, decisions both before and after a lesson have a great advantage in terms of time. However busy one may be, there is still the luxury of time to think before having to take action. Since interactive decisions must be made immediately on the spot, it is in our interest to learn what we can here and spend time honing these interactive planning skills as quickly as we can in the “live” classroom. Among other researchers who have focused on classroom interaction, some of my favorite educators include: Allright, D. (1988); Bailey, K.; Wajnyrb, R. (1992); Tsui, A.; and Nunan, D., because they consistently deliver a clear and useful message.

So, how is a teacher to exploit a SLOW moment? I’ll describe 5 types or scenarios that have all happened this year in one of my classes, and roughly how I’ve exploited them. First, though, there are three things necessary to become adept at exploiting a slow moment: confidence, awareness of the syllabus and the ability to “riff” like a jazz musician. If you don’t believe in yourself when you go off-script, you risk the students also not believing you in the SLOW moment. That’s when things can go wrong: the most common problem is that the group loses their cohesiveness and chattering ensues. Then you’ve lost them – not forever – but certainly for this SLOW opportunity. Secondly, you need to know the syllabus so you can make sure that everyone succeeds in being able to do what you ask them to do, using meaningful language that isn’t too far away from what you’re doing or have done in the past. Finally, riffing simply means improvising, but being able to stay on one track or one theme. So, here are some examples of a few catalysts of SLOW moments:

Whining

Rumi complains that she’s hungry (“Onaka heta”). Rumi is always hungry, every week, like clockwork. I call out, “Rumi is hungry again. Rumi, this morning I had a big breakfast. I had 2 pieces of toast – one with peanut butter and one with honey. I also had a cup of coffee and a glass of water. What did you have? Nothing? Really? Everyone – Why do you think Rumi didn’t have any breakfast? (Elicit, elicit, feedback, etc) OK, let’s give Rumi some good ideas to help her fix her life. Rumi, I think you should _____. Anyone else? What should Rumi do? Does anyone remember what I had for breakfast? Did anyone eat more than me today?”

Reporting

Chikako reports, “I went *to shopping and *studying English last night.” I call out, “Double chance! Can anyone find any small mistakes with [I went *to shopping and *studying English last night.]? Can anyone else give me a two-verb sentence about last night? Can anyone ask Chikako if she bought anything cool?”

Worrying

Miki asks, “What’s on the test?” I call out, “Miki chan loves tests! Miki, what do you think is on the test? If you were Steve, what would you put on the test? Everyone, ask your partner, “What do you think TERRIBLE Steve will put on the test?” Ready… Go. (time passes…) OK, let’s review what could be on the test.”

Killing time

Hiroko suggests, “Let’s play a game today.” I call out, “Hiroko is the queen of “killing time” What does it mean in Japanese? Yes, exactly, jikan wo tsubusu. In this class, who else is good at killing time? Oh, yeah. Which teachers are weak against these killing time queens? Everyone, ask your partner, “How do you sometimes kill time?”

Writing

Yuri writes, “I take *on the train to school every day.” I’m walking around the room, watching students during a writing assignment. When I see this mistake, I call out, “Wow, Yuri, you are a very macho girl. Everyone, do you know how macho Yuri is? Every morning, she takes on* the train (I gesture putting on a train like a backpack). There are two or three good ways to say this. Anyone? Yes, “take the train”, “catch the train”, “get the train”… great. Everyone, be careful, though. Don’t make Yuri angry.

Hidden bonuses

This technique is actually full of hidden bonuses: it builds extra rapport with students, it teaches students to learn from other students, it promotes consciousness-raising of grammatical patterns, it feels like it isn’t studying because unscripted lessons are so rare, and it encourages active participation by both instigators and students who respond to my questions.

The more you invest time into observing, recording and reflecting on what is ACTUALLY happening in your classroom, the more you will learn to handle classroom interaction better, and the closer you will come to becoming a master of classroom interaction. And those 45 or 90 minutes with the students have a disproportionally high influence in determining what they do with English or how they think about English for the other 10,000 minutes of the week.

Steven Herder (September 2009)
http://stevenherder.org

References

Allright, D. (1988). Observation in the language classroom. Longman: New York.

Richards, J. & Lockhart, C. (1996). Reflective teaching in second language classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wajnryb, R. (1992). Classroom observation tasks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Special thanks to Barbara Sakamoto for her inspiration to use NOTES as a writing venue.

Olympic swimming’s individual medley as a metaphor for studying English: Can you see Japan’s handicap?

Ironic?

“The 400m individual swimming medley has been an Olympic
competition since the 1964 Summer Olympics, Tokyo, Japan.”
(Wikipedia online)

Metaphors describing the difficulties of studying English in Japan have come and gone over the years: studying English is like learning to ride a bicycle; like learning to play a musical instrument like the flute; or like learning how to cook. In various ways, these metaphors all highlighted the need for practice, perseverance and patience (PPP?). The old adage went, “Imagine being taught, in explicit details, how to play the flute but never actually touching it” or “Imagine being allowed to touch the flute and practice the fingering, but never actually blowing into it.” This picture was painted to argue that learners must use English in to improve at English. Now, a new swimming “medley” metaphor may actually come closer than any of its predecessors to capturing the true essence of what it is like for Japanese to try to learn English in the Japanese context: a context where the educational system handicaps learners way beyond anything that would be advocated or even tolerated in sports, but is completely accepted as the norm in our junior and senior high school English classes.

Can you imagine an individual medley swimmer having to swim the four different strokes in a competition, but never having practiced one or two of those strokes prior to the event? Imagine they worked very hard on the breaststroke and the backstroke but never practiced the butterfly stroke, the crawl, or even making turns at the end of each length. It defies common sense and almost totally handicaps the swimmer’s chance of success when the time comes for them to perform. It goes without saying that if one wishes to compete in the individual swimming medley, and not feel like a complete failure, then you must practice all four strokes, as well as the start, turns and some overall mental “image” training of confidence and success.

Is the goal actually to learn English?

If the goal is to learn English, and this may be a dubious assumption, then learners must consider the metaphor above when it comes to studying English. If the goal is not ultimately to learn English, then we have all collectively been hijacked by the university entrance system, in which students spend six years of their live studying “grammar for grammar’s sake,” culminating in a test that contains some of the most obsolete English that one will ever encounter. This is not stated to disrespect the efforts of many educators who put a great deal of time into creating these tests, it simply becomes necessary to have more and more unreasonable testing expectations and rarely used forms of English included in order to create a normal distribution of scores. Have junior and senior high school teachers thrown in the towel, held up the white flag and given up even pretending to want their students to learn English?

The honne and tatemae of English textbooks produced by Japanese publishers

MEXT (equivalent to the ministry of education here in Japan) recently released its new approach to English education for the next 10 years. It is the government’s attempt to steer English language education in a progressive direction. They have analyzed the approach up until now, evaluated the successes and failures, and have decided to take a more holistic interwoven approach to English language education.

Speaking with a seasoned textbook writer who is also a high school JTE, I asked, “How does the publisher balances the obvious tension between the new MEXT policy and preparation for university entrance exams?” Without missing a beat, she replied, “Do you know honne (what we really think) and tatemae (what we say to appease)?” She elaborated that writers must pay “lip service” to the MEXT guidelines in describing a new textbook, but that the real intention is that 99% of the text design must be geared towards university entrance exam preparation.

Back to the metaphor

I wonder if I even need to spell this out at this point? To be successful in just about any agreed upon way of measuring success with English includes: communicative competence, be able to exchange meaning, or having the capability of using language. One must take a balanced, multi-pronged approach to getting to any of those described levels. If there were four swimming strokes and three other big considerations for the individual medley swimmer, the same can be said of the English learner: grammar, vocabulary, input (reading and listening), output (writing and speaking) are all integral parts of the whole that is necessary to learn English. Sidestepping of any of these parts will result in students who are at a distinct disadvantage compared to those who take a balanced approach to learning English. This is now the case when comparing Japanese learners with other EFL learners.

Back to the basics

If students simply took a balanced approach to English, they would be much further ahead than they are today. The only people who have survived the grammar-translation approach to learning English are now teaching today’s junior and senior high school classes. Currently, everything taught in the classroom is just a slightly different shade of grammar or translation instruction: reading is intensive (one page per class), writing is limited to one-sentence constructions, and listening and speaking opportunities are either negligible or contrived. Fluency practice does not exist, unless the never-ending barrage of test taking could be construed as some form of “fluency”.

Yet another audacity of hope

If only more teachers could have the courage to admit the farcical nature of the current approach, and the audacity to consider taking a new approach, an entire generation of young learners would quickly jump onboard: we see this over and over where in classes where a minority of enlightened Japanese and native speaking teachers have decided to treat English as a live, unscripted entity; a communication tool that brings people together and can make the human experience a more meaningful process.

A call to discuss

So, am I missing something? Is there some reason that Japan should voluntarily handicap itself against the rest of the world in learning English? If you were the coach of the swim team, could you imagine ignoring the butterfly stroke, or not practicing turns or starts? Do you think you would be forgiven for your approach? Now, imagine if you were an English teacher in Japan, what would you do?

Very Cool Event in Kyoto on June 14th, 2009

The simplest messages are always the most powerful. Can’t wait to show this to my students on Monday. Thanks to Curtis Kelly for passing the video on to friends at facebook.

A new idea – English lessons as Action Research

Here’s a thought – I wonder if I were to  present each class from chu 1 – Ko II with an option to research something quick and easy for the 10 weeks that we have left in this school year. Then the idea would be for them to consider doing a half year or full year study starting in April, if they are interested.

My approach would be to challenge them to consider whether they are learning, or changing attitudes, or developing in any way, shape or form in our English classes. Of course we would need to set up pre-tests based on whatever they chose to research. We would then have to set up control groups, and determine the hypotheses, measurement tools, duration, etc. If I can get them excited about it, it could really set the tone for the lessons.

But, how can I get a list of ideas to get them started?

I’ll start brainstorming and see what I come up with. If anyone has any ideas, please share.

Steve

Photo found through Google images at