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.
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