16: Getting to the bottom of the question: "What are your goals?"

A day or two ago I chatted with a friend and 先輩 of mine who is working towards revolution in his own corner of the EFL world. He asked me before and he asked me again, What are your goals?

I know my goals, I thought. I write pages of notes about what I want to do a couple of times per week just to keep my thoughts from evaporating into forgetfulness. My goals are to provide a fun, relaxed, English-learning environment for kids and adults. I have a handful of ideas that I want to implement that I reckon will have better outcomes than the typical 英会話 fare. My biggest goal, I thought, is to imagine what a proper 21st century 英会話 school would look like, and to work my way there over the next couple of years.

But the more I thought about his question, the more I realized that these goals, while useful, weren't fundamental goals. They were resting on gravel. I know why I wanted to build an 英会話 school, and I knew what I wanted to do to make it better--or at least fresher--than a lot of other schools I've seen, but I never answered the question of what exactly I wanted my students to be able to do.

This is especially important with elementary school kids. With JHS students and above--including adults and businesspeople--they have access to grammar explanations in their own language, and enough discipline on average to apply the knowledge and improve their abilities over time. Younger kids seem to be wired to absorb linguistic information faster, but they do it less consciously and so it ends up being a harder thing to pull out of them.

(Well, that is, if you conduct English classes all in English. That's the trend at the moment so I shall have to abide, I suppose, but I would be interested how students of English who are taught the technical aspects of it in their native tongue do after a year or more of instruction compared to the all-English, game-based learning practiced everywhere in Japan at the moment.)

What do I want my elementary kids to be able to do? Why am I teaching them English?

This is a frustrating question if you work in a public elementary or junior high school in Japan. Rules are either changing, but some rules are changing too quickly and others not at all. For the last couple of years Japanese 5th and 6th graders have been learning English, but despite that the curriculum at junior high schools nationwide doesn't seemed to have changed to accommodate them. What's resulted is essentially a system designed to jerk the students around: they go through two years of "fun" English class where they learn the basics, maybe even a bit of reading and writing, but then they're effectively reset in junior high school, going over the same introductory material but in a much less active, immersive environment.

(By the way, none of this is researched; I'm just taking vague bits of knowledge that I have and extrapolating. Nobody quote this in the potential future where this blog has more than a small handful of readers.)

I keep thinking about piano and dance schools. Kids come once or twice a week to these private schools, take their lessons, and after a while they come away with some skill. Little kids can play songs, maybe even perform at a recital; dance students learn how to dance. At this age only prodigies are good enough to raise anyone's eyebrows, but nearly every child walks away with a skill that they can perform in front of family or friends and be applauded for. Does this happen with students at 英会話 schools? I don't think so, usually.

There are complicated reasons that we can throw around to prove that piano and dance are fundamentally different from learning and using a foreign language, but I don't think leaning on that wall will help us create a better type of school. The problem is, piano schools train kids to enjoy smashing keys on a piano, and dance schools train kids to enjoy throwing themselves in the air, but English schools don't necessarily (or even usually?) train kids to enjoy using English. If we can change this, we will have solved a major problem in the field.

What English schools do, though, is teach little kids how to introduce themselves to an English speaker. They learn how to talk about their likes, and sometimes the things they don't like. They can point at and name a whole bunch of nouns. But I don't see the point, really, since none of these things really allow the students to express themselves in realistic, constructive ways. That's arguable, but that's how I feel.

One promising memory that I have floating around comes from my first job in Japan teaching kids. I had a preschool student named Nozomi who, her mom told me, shouted "It's cold!" one day at the hair salon when the hair dresser started to wash her hair in the sink. It was spontaneous--the little girl felt cold and she said so, and she had the energy to say so in English without anxiety or any of the stuff that sometimes stops kids from speaking. She thought it would be fun to express herself in English, and she did. She blurted out her feelings right there in the salon.

That's the kind of atmosphere I want to create. That's my goal. To get kids to blurt.

Well, how to do this? Actually, starting a private 英会話 puts me at a bit of an advantage: I know for the time being that JHS and HS curriculum are going to promote reading and writing over speaking, which will largely be left to elementary schools (which will soon start offering classes to 3rd graders and up). Elementary schools cover all the basics of speaking: introductions, likes and dislikes, and a whole bunch of basic vocabulary, phrases, and sentences. Those are the bases already covered: it is the job of private EFL teachers to reinforce those lessons and to expand the students' knowledge base. In this case: teach them how to blurt.

Beyond the basics, they can learn to blurt catchphrases from cartoons, from Internet memes, from English translations of their favorite anime characters' catchphrases; they can learn to blurt STOP in an authoritative, English accent (or, for that matter, Stop right there!); they can learn how to ask for a high five properly (Gimme five!!). Teach them how to play chess and how to say “check and MATE” when they know they've won. Teach them that the words they use can be used anywhere, because the words are a part of them--teach them not through explanation, but by the presenting of and playing through a myriad of situations where they can blurt and have a ball doing so.

Okay--back to work. If anyone knows of any places already doing stuff like this, I'd love to hear about it. Link me through in the comments, if you please.

15: Hark! My Navel! a review of the execution of J. Peder Zane's Top Ten book

A friend of mine posted a review of a book edited by J. Peder Zane, entitled The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books. It seemed like a really fun idea—I like hearing what writers read, and I respect their opinions because they’re a class of people who actively takes what they read in order to better their own craft. They are into reading on a level that most of us aren’t, and so when a writer goes out of his or her way to recommend a book, I reckon it’s a good idea to listen.

Anyways, I clicked through the review to the main website and my morning was quickly ruined. A more accurate title for this book would be The Top Ten: Mostly White Writers Who Grew Up in Places Like the Places I Grew Up in Pick Their Favorite Books. I didn’t do an exhaustive inquiry into each of the 125 writers’ genetic lineages, but at a glance it seems like four or five of them are from non-European ancestry. Even fewer than that seem to have grown up in foreign book markets, or predominantly around foreign literary influences.

I realize this is picking a big fight, so let me take a breath and step back. The idea behind the book is great, and the content in the book is probably also quite interesting—but it is not, in fact, a very diverse list. I’d go as far to coin an adverb and call it navel-gazingly narrow. Books of this sort that purport to be knowledge-expanding surveys are rather, by surveying a more or less sociologically and culturally similar group of people are building walls between America and the rest of the world, culturally speaking.

I have met very few Japanese people who have ever read Shakespeare. They know who he is, but they don’t spend an awful lot of time studying him in school. Isn’t that crazy? Isn’t that nearly unbelievable? How can you say you know good literature—that you’re a book-lover, even—without knowing about the gorgeous turns of phrase and the artful tension between the various characters in any of the scenes of Murasaki Shikibu? I mean Shakespeare.

See what I did there? Yeah.

The problem with The Top Ten isn’t the authors’ various lists. Those lists are their own, honestly considered, top ten most beloved books. The problem is the collection of authors. Imagine a similar book concerning food: the editor asked 125 chefs from around the country what their top 10 favorite dishes were. These chefs would have been from multiple socio-economic backgrounds—some grew up poor, some rich, some black, some white, some from culinary families, some not. Some of them like sushi and some of them like escargot; some of them like beer and some of them like wine: but I can almost guarantee you that the ultimate Top Top Ten list will contain, somewhere, chicken wings, and somewhere else hamburgers. Because Americans, regardless of your own personal upbringing or background, get around to eating a lot of hamburgers and chicken wings in their lifetime. If, however, you only surveyed 25 American chefs and left the remaining 100 spots to chefs from Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Northern Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, South America, Central America, and all the different bits and pieces of Asia, I bet hamburgers and chicken wings would be weeded out of the list, because you will have introduced a much more representative amount of people to your list, and thus will have ended up with a wider variety of foods from which to concoct a final, comprehensive average of the Top Top Ten foods.

The chicken wings and burger selections here strike me particularly hard with The Great Gatsby. It's a great book, unarguably. But its particular fame is due in large part to it being chosen somewhat randomly to hand out to American GIs during World War 2. By the 1950s, the book was chosen by school boards staffed with many of these former soldiers to be included in the national curriculum. So it comes as no surprise that Fitzgerald's book is on so many American-raised authors' top ten lists--but I reckon that a survey with more authors from places like Iceland, Egypt, or China would have had less exposure to the American high school literary canon and would have chosen a different variety of books for their top ten lists.

(Or maybe not. Japan's Haruki Murakami considers The Great Gatsby his favorite book and credits it with launching his literary career.)

Anyways, I’m just annoyed that lots of people won't see the need to branch out from this type of survey. This is meant to be the age of (economic yes, but also cultural) globalism and, while I’m busy enough as an English teacher in Japan trying to teach my students how and why to be more rational against certain seemingly innocent notions of cultural superiority or inferiority, it seems that even from a circle that I expected to be more global-minded, the dire meme of navel-gazing is still holding on tight.

I shall tell you now, literary America, what I often have cause to tell my students:

Think better. You have the tools and you have the power.

14: thinking out loud: Cultivating for What?

I'm speaking just from my limited experience in the field, but it seems to me that a lot of 英会話 have no definite focus for their kids classes. This is in contrast to, say, a dance school or a piano school or a karate dojo where, in addition to studying and practicing regularly, students also occasionally prepare for performances or recitals or tournaments. I remember this lingering problem from time to time and it usually results in me throwing out a lot of lesson plans or schedules because I start to feel they're too vague.

The question is what are you preparing the students for? Ballet schools are preparing their students to do well in ballet competitions and, perhaps eventually, to become professional ballerinas. Music schools have the same goal--but what about 英会話? For adults the training is obvious: they are there to learn how to communicate in English or improve an aspect of their communicative abilities (as in a business English course). But what are children being prepared for in 英会話?

Not much, it seems like. There are a few project-based schools or -themed lessons that I know of that I'll detail below, but the majority of what I've seen or taught to kids in 英会話 or even in public schools has been generalized to the point where something like this can happen:

"Okay, we've got two volumes of Hyper Listening to get through, so let's spend the first 15 or 20 minutes of each class on this book, then we can do the conversation textbook for the rest of class."
"Fifteen minutes of listening quizzes every class? Won't that be a bit demotivating?"
"Well, 60% of their grade is based off a listening test at the end of the term, so we've got to study it."
"60% of their English Conversation grade is based off of a CD listening test? Sorry, I know I'm new here, but what is the goal of this class?"
"... Goal. ..."
(A conversation between me and one of the senior English teachers at school, early April 2013. The teacher responded to my last question with a bit of wide-eyed exasperation. I dropped the subject.)

I'm not a total anarchist, though. I think for very young kids--pre-schoolers and Kindergarteners--spending most of the time learning simple words and spending time around English is probably the best use of the students' time. Certainly elementary school students and above also need time to just be around English, but at that point you really ought to throw something else into the mix. JHS and HS classes are communicative because the students are studying English grammar in Japanese during the day, so they have some basis on which they can build sentences and conversations. With elementary kids it's a different ballgame, though.

Elementary kids don't study English grammar explicitly--and in Japan at least, elementary-level English education in the public school sector is game-based. It's a great idea for building confidence, and the classes are a lot of fun, besides, but I'm not sure of the long-term benefit to their communication skills. The current situation is that, gifted in English or not--fluent in english or not--all kids in the Japanese school system are put through the grammar grinder in junior high and high school. If they don't sit through the lectures, do the homework, and pass the tests, their records indicate that they're not proficient in English--which can affect their chances of getting into a good high school or university when the time comes.

Back to the main point, though--what are we preparing elementary-aged 英会話 students for? Shall we just play games forever with no overarching goal? Shall we never push kids this age to work towards something with their English?

I think there's room to. There's this school based in Tokyo called MLS. Apparently it's the 英会話 that Ken Watanabe goes to, but its main focus is kids lessons that culminate yearly in a play recital. All the kids from all the classes get up on stage and perform a play in English that they've been practicing since about the middle of the school year. I've only ever interviewed for the company so I can't say for certain how focusing on drama affects the kids' English abilities in the long run, but theoretically it sounds like a good idea.

There must be other types of projects to work towards, too. I have a friend teaching in an elementary school north of Tokyo who is probably one of the best in his field in the whole country. He gets his 6th graders to teach an EFL class in English to the first graders once per year. It's a really difficult project--sometimes tear-inducing--but when the kids pull it off their sense of accomplishment goes off the charts. Their teacher has made them prove a point that they can never again honestly deny--they can speak English if they work at it; they can communicate in it and work hard to create something using it (in this case a fun class for their youngest schoolmates).

We're on a textbook break at my high school now while we adapt and perform plays in English. At first most of the kids worked very slowly or not at all on their scripts, and almost no one did their homework. But this week as we're wrapping up our in-class rehearsals I'm noticing that most of the groups are having a good time rehearsing, and they're making creative directorial decisions in order to make their plays better. I've read academic papers supporting independent work and projects over the traditional textbook fare, and even though I already agreed with it in spirit I'm starting to get a feel for the process. Kids, being people, aren't necessarily going to be gung-ho about a project just because it's different from what you normally do in school--but giving them the time and space (and occasionally the gentle shove) to get used to the idea and let their imaginations wander, a lot of them end up enjoying it.

With that in mind I reckon I want to implement some yearly or biannual project for the kids next year...but what to do, what to do. Drama's an option, or some kind of group-communication project... For older kids, from maybe fifth or sixth grade, a penpal project might be a good idea. I tried that last year with mixed results. My friend's teaching project is genius, but it would be difficult to adapt at a private school and, besides, I'm not half the teacher my friend is.

Other ideas:

• musical
• pageant
• speeches (excerpts from famous ones, not self-written)
• Show&Tell
• debate

In an ideal world, I'd like to encourage students from 英会話 around the city where we'll be based to join some kind of annual thing. It needn't even be a competition (the city has one of those already), just a celebration of international...ness? Kids working together to chant tongue-twisters, recite famous speeches, sing songs, and show off things they made. A TED conference for kids, just sharing information and performing and having a good time doing it. But that dream's a bit far away at the moment; for now I just want to create a system where my kids can feel proud of their English accomplishments, and in order to do that I need to make some accomplishments to work towards.

If anyone out there has any other ideas for projects, I'd love to hear them!

13: 英語2.0: English-Attack.com

I stumbled across this yesterday. This was a big find; I didn't think anybody had made this yet; with licensing rights and the wide variety of programming skills needed, I didn't even think a site like this was practically possible.

"Well this is a game changer and no mistake," said Sam.

In a word, it's a homework website that redefines homework. It's an interactive media website that teaches and reinforces English through popular English media (movies, news), not contrived role-plays and games. It's an Amazing Pneumatic One-of-a-Kind Believe-It-or-Not Independent-izing Interest-Making Attention-Honing EFL Machine.

I think it might be a Thneed. And you know who needs thneeds.

I'm going to give it a close inspection after work today to test its user-friendliness and see how well it stays relevant and interesting over the course of it's perscribed 10-30-minute daily session. I'll test it on the iPad, on the iPhone, and on the PC. And then I'll test it on the wife: if she likes it, I might have just struck gold after all.

It'll be years until I'm able to pull something like this off for my students--if I'm able to pull it off ever. Apparently the guys behind this site have lots of experience in media companies, so they know how to go about acquiring licenses and rights and whatnot. But jeez, if I can figure out a doable way to adapt this idea on a small, Japan-centric scale for my own school's needs (including elementary & pre-elementary students, and adults learning business English), I'll...I don't even know. This is some Super Saiyan 2-level stuff right here.

One thing's for sure [eye-glint as I pivot epically toward the camera]: it's definitely the direction that EFL education is going if we're to be serious about the 21st century. And I aim to be quite serious.

If anyone out there knows of similar interactive sites, let me know! I'm scouring the Internet for better alternatives to traditional writing drill homework textbooks.