Labor Law for Public School Teachers in Japan

Today I went to a junior high school with 19 sophomore students at my university who were about to start a week long "School Experience Practicum" where two - three university students are matched with a teacher and observe their classes for a week as well as mingle with the children. When we got to the school we had to listen to a lectures by the principal, vice-principal, and head English teacher. The lectures were actually all interesting. The vice-principal talked about the labor law for public school teachers who have the same status as civil servants, and I learned some new things. Here is my translation of the handout he gave us:

I Occupational Duties of Civil Servants　（職務上の義務）

Article 31: Employees must take an oath of service (服務の宣誓）
Article 32: It is the duty of employees to follow work-related orders.（職務上の命令に従う義務）
Article 35: Employees have a duty to devote themselves to their work （職務に専念する義務）

II Duty to Protect the Integrity of Civil Servants (身分上の義務）

Article 33: Employees are prohibited from doing anything that violates the trust of the public (i.e. getting arrested for driving under the influence, fighting, etc.) (信用失墜行為の禁止）
Article 34: It is the duty of employees to guard their clients' secrets (a teacher cannot share the problem of a particular student with people outside the school) （秘密を守る義務）
Article 36: There is a limit on political activities (Teachers cannot tell students that they support a particular political party) (政治の制限）
Article 37: Labor disputes are prohibited. (争議行為の禁止）
Article 38: Employees are prohibited from working for private industry (A teacher cannot work at a cram school every night as a second job) (営利企業等の従事制限）

III Working Hours

• According to article 32 of the Labor Standards Act, workers are not allowed to work more than 40 hours a week or 8 hours a day. 
• If a worker works more than 7 hours and 45 minutes in a day, they are required to take an hour of rest and this hour will be included in their working time.
• Teachers do not have official working days on Saturday and Sunday （However, most teachers go to school on these days to supervise club activities. They do not get paid for this work, though.)
• Teachers will get paid if they work on a holiday.

What was interesting to me was that while rules I and II seem to be followed very strictly, rules concerning the working hours were not adhered to. Most teachers work much more than 40 hours a week. For example, at the school I visited, the official working time is 8:10 to 16:40 but most teachers come to school about an hour early and leave much later than 16:40. This school is the norm, not the exception. From the way the teachers spoke, they seemed to take pride in the amount of time they spent at school and they came across as extremely dedicated to their students. Nevertheless, as a father, I would want to get home every day at an early enough time to play with my kids and would want to have the weekend to spend with my family. I wonder how teachers feel about this.

Adapting a Task to a Junior High School (An Update)

In a previous post, I wrote about the how my graduate students and I were struggling to adapt a task to use at a junior high school. After a lot of negotiation, we were able to agree on a framework for conducting the task. The framework was based on the one in Jane Willis's A Framework for Task Based Learning . The task type was a Jumble. In a jumble, students have to arrange strips of text into its correct order. For the jumble, we used the story "Sylvester and the Magic Pebble" by William Steig. We made cards of the story (see below). Each card had a picture from the story and we rewrote the text using mainly words that the junior high school students had studied up to that point.




The graduate students taught a total of 4 second grade classes at the JHS, each class had close to 40 students. There were three graduate students and each class was taught by 2 graduate students; one would be the main teacher and the other would serve as the assistant teacher. The goals of the lesson were the following:

1. JHS students see the words that they have studied in a different context from the textbook and reinforce their understanding of these words.
2. JHS students use the language that they know to organize the cards with their partners. This will give them practice in using communicative strategies and it is hoped that this activity will make it easier for students to use English with each other the next time they do a similar activity.
3. Organizing the cards helps students understand how pieces of text fits together to make a whole.
   

Perhaps the main goal of the class was number 2. Although the JHS students had many opportunities to write English, read English, and use English in speeches, they had little experience using English in free, spontaneous speech.

Below is how the class was organized.

Pre Task

1. The teachers introduce the topic:
Teachers, "Today we are going to read a story about a donkey named Taro. Taro likes stones. In the story, Taro finds a magic stone but something terrible happens to him. What happens?

2. Teachers tell students the goal.
The teachers wrote the goal of the class was "To put the story together in English". This goal was a little difficult for the students to understand.

3. Teachers teach new words.
The teachers taught students new words that appeared in the story.

4. Teachers demonstrate how to do the jumble
The teachers demonstrates to students how to do the jumble and pasted phrases they thought would be useful for students to learn on the blackboard (See the picture below).
The teachers explained that there were two rules for jumble: 1) The students should read and understand the text first. 2) The students should use only English and they can use the phrases on the board.



5. The teachers confirm that learners understand the instructions
Actually, the teachers only did this in one of four classes. This class was the most successful class.

During the pre task stage, the learners were supposed to listen for useful expressions to use for the task. Learners were not given any time to plan for the task.

Task Cycle

Task
1. Students do the tasks in pairs
2. The teachers let the students do the task but offer support to those who need it. They also encourage pairs to use English.
3. At the ending of the task the teachers show students the order of the story.

Planning
1. Students write a transcript of the dialogue they had in the task.
The point of this is for students to be able to analyze the English that they used in the task.

2. The pairs make groups of 4 and each pair reenacts their dialogue. The pair that is listening is supposed to write down useful words and phrases.
The point of this was for students to hear the phrases their classmates had used for the task and learn about the variety of language that could be used.

Reporting
1. The teachers call on various students to perform their dialogue in front of the class.

Post Task (Language Focus)

1. The teachers give students metalinguistic feedback on the reports.
2. Students write a self evaluation

Positive and Negative Aspects of the Classes

I will start with the positives:

JHS students made a strong effort to use English.
One JHS student wrote the following:(Jimbo translation)
"I was able to confirm the meaning in English with my partner when I did not understand something. It was really difficult to use only English but I was surprised that I could do so by using such simple phrases as 'Yes' and 'This is'."

JHS students realized the importance of using English.
One JHS student wrote:
"Up until now I could not really use the English that I had studied, I was not so skilled at English. From now on I was to study 'English that I can use". (Jimbo translation)

The JHS students were able to learn from friends.
"Listening to other people's conversations, I learned a lot of new expressions and could use them. I want to use these expressions in the next class." (Jimbo translation)

The JHS teacher reported that students’ comments made her realize that her students wanted to try speaking more.

Here are the negative aspects:
After each class, students were asked to comment on how much English they used in the jumble. Here are the results:

How much English did you use during the jumble?
	Class C	Class D	Class A	Class B	Total
Almost all English	6	21	7	9	43
Half English and half Japanese	18	13	26	28	85
Almost all Japanese	14	5	4	0	23

Class D was the only class where the teachers confirmed that students understood the demonstration of the jumble task. The students said no and the teachers gave a quick explanation in Japanese. The students then said "Oh, I see" and most succeeded in doing the task mainly in English. In the other classes the students were not sure what they had to do for the jumble task and struggled to use English. Through this experience, we learned the importance of introducing the task well in the pre-task phase. One of my students wrote:

"Even if you have a good task, it will not work unless the teachers present it well.

In all the classes the students struggled with the "planning" stage of the task cycle. The reason for this was that the teachers told them to write down their conversation but did not say why they should do so. So, the students did not know that they were supposed to transcribe their conversation so that they could present it to their classmates and, so, in turn, their classmates could learn new words and phrases by listening to their presentation.

Students thought that they could only use the expression on the blackboard for the jumble when there were other expressions that they wanted to use.

There was not sufficient time to go through the task cycle and the class was rushed.

The teachers had a difficult time giving the students spontaneous feedback in the post task (language focus) phase. For example, the teachers heard the students say the expression "How about you" in the following way in the report stage:
Student: "This card is here, how about you?"
The teachers said this was a good expression to use for the jumble when in fact the usage of this expression was incorrect.

The teachers did not discuss how the sentences fit together after the task.

Implication for Using Tasks in Teacher Education

The teacher-educator should consider making the lesson plan:
I had the student-teachers make the lesson plan and they must have given me 5 or 6 versions before it had my final approval. I think that making the lesson plan was a good experience for the student-teachers but they spent so much time working on the lesson plan that they did not have much time to practice presenting the task, explaining the planning stage etc. In the future, I will consider making the lesson plan myself so that the student-teachers have more time to practice doing the lesson. If we do a similar practice a second time, the students can design the lesson as they will have a better idea what doing a task in a JHS entails.

If the JHS students and the teacher educators are doing a task for the first time consider an alternative framework to Willis's task cycle
Personally, the cycle has worked for me well. However, if teachers and students are doing the task for the first time it will take them longer to complete the task. Fifty minutes if probable too short. Thus, we should consider thess options:

1. They do the jumble task, reflect on it, and then move onto another activity. There is no planning or reporting.
2. Students do the jumble task, relfect on it and get feedback from the teacher, do a different jumble task, and see if their performance was any better.
   

A Task Based Lesson at a Junior High School

On October 1, I gave a task based lesson at a junior high school in an Iwate city. The following definition of "task" guided my lesson planning:

" A task is an activity in which a person engages in order to attain an objective, and which necessitates the use of language."
(Van den Branden, K. (Ed.) (2006). Task Based Language Education: From theory to practice. CUP.)

The goals of the class were the following. You can see the lesson plan here (in Japanese).

1. Listen to an easy speech (actually, it was more like an interview) and understand the general meaning without worrying about words that you do not understand.
2. Give a simple speech without memorizing every word but by using key words to recall the content.

Description of Students and Class
This was a kenkyuujugyou or open class. I taught 20 first grade students (12- 13 years-old) who I had never met before. There were also 30 English teachers watching. I was asked to do this by the municipal board of education. They asked me to teach page 55 of the New Horizon text book. It was a listening exercise where students had to listen for the nationality, age, residence and other information of 2 fictitious foreigners living in Japan. Another teacher did a demonstration class after me using the same page of the textbook with different students. The objective of the 2 open classes was to compare and learn about different teaching styles.
Before I had met the students, their homeroom teacher had told me that they were hard working and motivated to study English. They had all been studying English for about 6 months, or since entering junior high school.

The Class
I decided to make my own content for the class rather than use the textbook page, because I did not think that anybody cares about fictitious foreigners living in Japan. I decided to introduce to the students a real non-Japanese person (other than me) living in Morioka.

Task 1
The objective of the first task was to watch an interview of a researcher at Iwate University and learn 1) where he is from, 2) his occupation, 3) the languages he speaks 4) and his likes. I tried to chose someone with an interesting background: he came from a country that students did not know well, spoke 5 languages etc. After watching the interview, students were then asked to confirm the answers in English. The real world language use necessary to attain the objectives was 1) listening for specific information 2) using language that you hear in your speech and 3)confirming the answers to a problem with a partner. The interview that students watched is below. I had videotaped the interview the day before and burned it onto a DVD.



The handout that students used is here. In the handout (see exercise A) students attempted to circle the correct answer for each question. Because the students were not familiar with the a lot of the vocabulary, (Slovakian, chemistry, etc... ) the multiple-choice questions were in English and Japanese.

After introducing the video to the students, I played it for them twice. I then asked them to make pairs and confirm their answers in English. I knew that students had the ability to confirm the answers in English but they did not know how. So, before they confirmed the answers, I played them a video of a colleague and myself doing a similar task and using English that was at about the level of the students. I told students that they should watch the video carefully and write down any English they think would be useful for confirming the answers with their partner. In the video, I used subtitles so students would know exactly what was being said.
The video is below:


Overall, most of the students got all the multiple choice questions correct and 11 the 16 students who completed a simple questionnaire after the class reported that they were able to use English to confirm the answers after watching the above video. I had originally budgeted 20 minutes for task 1 but ended up using about 26 minutes. This meant that I had about 20 minutes to do task 2. This would mean that I would have to make some modifications so that class would finish on time.

Task 2
I asked the students to write a simple speech using part B of their handout. To write the speech they simply had to fill in the blanks of a prewritten speech. The objective of this task was to say a simple speech in English using keywords to recall the content rather than memorizing every single word. The real world language use was giving a monologue in front of people using key words to give. After students wrote their speech, I put the following key words on the blackboard (in Japanese):

1. Name (名前）
2. Residence　(住まい）
3. Age　(年齢）
4. likes　（好きなこと）
5. day (you do what you like)　(何曜日に好きなことをするか）

I asked students to prepare to give a speech in front of the whole class. I told them that when they give the speech, they should not read their speech from the handout. Rather they should look at the keywords on the board and use it to give their speech. I added that quite often when we are asked to do public speaking we do not have time to memorize a speech. So, one thing we can do is use keywords to organize the speech in our heads and then we can give a speech. I told students to take 5 minutes and practice their speech by themselves. After the 5 minutes, I had originally planned for students to give the speeches in pairs and then have individual students perform their speech in front of the class. Unfortunately, because time was limited students did not give the speeches in pairs. Rather, I called on students to give their speech in front of the whole class. A total of 8 students gave their speech in front of the class and they were all able to do it without looking at their prints.

Wrap-up of my experience: Considering how to facilitate task based language learning more smoothly and the use of the L1 in a communicative class

This was my 5th time doing this kind of "open class" in the past 2 years. My first open class was a miserable failure, my second open-class was a failure, my third open-class was mediocre, my fourth open-class went fairly well but students did not speak, and this class went well and students DID speak! The reason why my classes have improved is because I have slowly learned to put myself in the shoes of the junior high school students and imagine how difficult they might find certain activities or the anxiety they might feel. I think the key to planning good language learning tasks is to give students a task that is challenging so that they have to overcome a little anxiety to succeed but not too easy. I also think that when conducting task based language teaching, a key to having a successful class is to be able to change the lesson plan as the lesson proceeds depending on how the students' are working. In other words, to attain the learning objective of a task, teachers might have to add an activity, take away an activity or modify an activity as the class progresses. I have become more comfortable with this.

After the class, the teachers who observed me commented on how much I used Japanese. I explained the rationale of each activity in Japanese, gave tips in Japanese about how to do activities, introduced the rationale of the class in Japanese, and helped individual students who were stuck in Japanese. If I had done the class only in English we would not have been able to finish the lesson. Using Japanese saves time because you only have to explain something once or twice while in English in can take a lot of effort on the part of the students and teacher to understand one particular point. If I had not been under so much pressure to finish the demonstration task in the 50 minutes of class time, I would have used more English.

Using Jeopardy to Teach Relative Pronouns

Last week I went to the same junior high school I went to last month for a demonstration lesson in front of 30 English teachers and officials of the city I was visiting. I was asked to teach page 60(?) of the New Horizon Textbook. My students were 35 third graders (9th grade). I was supposed to teach the nominative use of that relative clauses (The word being modified is the subject of the that clause, in Japanese this is　主格のthat). For example,

• This is the dog that ate the cat.
• The country that hosted the world cup was Germany.

I was not supposed to teach the objective use of that relative clauses (The word being modified is the object of the that relative clause, 目的格のthat).

The above explanation makes the class sound more difficult than it actually was. This class went better than the last one because I decided to flood students with input and encourage them to learn the new grammatical pattern that way rather than force them to speak a grammatical pattern that they did not need to use so much. I also had a graduate student, John Wang, and an undergraduate student, Monchichi, come and help me by joining the various students groups during the activity and providing support. Here is what we did:

---------------------------------------------------

Goal:

• Use jeopardy to help students learn how to use "nominative that relative pronoun clauses" through input flooding
• Do 95% of the class in English
• The students experience group work and speak English within the group
  

Class:
Warm up (Materials: computer, projector)

Plan: Students make pairs. Using MS powerpoint, I display 10 questions. One member of a pair is looking at the screen and asking questions to the other member who is turned away from the screen and cannot see the questions. Then, the members switch.
What happened: Students were nervous at first but did this activity.

Introduce the Key Sentence: (Materials: sentence cards (made by some nice graduate students) to put on the blackboard)

What I did and how the students reacted:
I put the following two sentences in the blackboard:
1. Mr Hall is an Iwate University teacher.
2. He is nice.
I asked students to make the two sentences into one sentence. Most of the students knew how to do this but no one volunteered an answer as I had anticipated so I simply reminded students that the sentence would be:
Mr Hall is an Iwate University teacher who is nice.

I asked students, "Why do we use 'who'?" Of course I had no answer so I asked a student, "Is Mr. Hall an animal?" The student, after an initial period of uncomfortable silence said "no." I then asked is "Mr. Hall a thing?" and asked a student for an answer. Unfortunately the student answer, "yes". I then said that I was not a "thing" but a "human" and that we use "who" to add information about humans. (The students had studied "who".)

Next, I then put the following two sentence cards on the board:
1. Kobe is a city.
2. It has great beef.

I then combined these two sentences to make
Kobe is a city that has great beef.

I asked students if Kobe was a human to which they replied "no." I then told them that we used "that" to add information about "things" or "non-humans" and asked them to make a sentence out of the following two sentences:

1. The Nile is a river.
2. It is in Africa.

As a class, students made the sentence
The Nile is a river that is in Africa.

I did not call on a student because I knew that no students would answer in such an atmosphere where they were being taight by someone they did not know and were being watched by 30 or so other strangers. Nevertheless, students seemed to understand so we went to the next activity.

Jeopardy (Trivia) (Materials: computer, projector, name tags)

Preparation:Before we started jeopardy, students made groups. The groups were pre-determined by the homeroom teacher. Each group had 6 people and each person in the group was assigned a letter from A - F.
(Side note: ALTs who teach the same students only once a month, if you are going to do group work (more than 2 members per team) I recommend that you have the HRT determine the groups in advance and tell the students before the class they will do group work. The homeroom teachers knows best which students work best together and how to make the groups about even in ability.)
Students also wore nametags. Before class, students wrote the name they wanted to be called, their group number, and their letter(A-F). The nametag looked something like this:

Group 4 Letter E Jimbo

The Game

How it was played: I explained that "that" and "who" sentences could be used for trivia and then demonstrated (not explained) how to play jeopardy by practicing a few questions. I told students that jeopardy meant 質問コーナー in Japanese. The rules were that each group would have one leader and that only the leader could answer the question. Of course, the other group members could tell the leader the answer but only the leader could raise his hand. However, the leader would change after every question. For the first question, the leader was student A from each group. After the question, the leader changed. I used powerpoint to display the jeopardy game and questions. The jeopardy template came from EFL Geek and I added the questions. The file that we used to play jeopardy can be downloaded here.

Each question and answer had a nominative "who" or "that" relative clause sentence. When a group answers a question correctly, they were able to rest. The other groups would have to repeat the answer which had the target structure. After they repeated the answer, I would remove the target structure and students would have to repeat the sentence without the target structure.

Ex.
Question: This is a man from Iwate who played on the Japanese Soccer Team.
Answer: The man who played on the Japanese Soccer Team is Mitsuo Ogasawara. (All the groups except the group that answered correctly repeats.)
Answer without target structure: The man is ^^^^ Mitsu Ogasawara. (Students say the sentence adding the omitted target structure).

How the students reacted: On their evaluation forms, most students said that they understood the "that" construction and they enjoyed the class. Many also said that they had made the effort to speak English in their groups. I owe that to John and Monchichi who worked with each group and helped motivate them to speak English.
During the game, students struggled to repeat the sentence without the target structure.

Overall Reflection

I have learned a lot from my last 3 experiences teaching at a junior high school and senior high school. I am finally understanding the students and what they will or will not do in the classroom. This is good because the next time I teach jr high students I can have a class with activities I know that they can do so that the students remain confident and feel secure but also mix these secure activities with more demanding ones that will force students to challenge themselves without overwhelming them.

I also understand what kind of groundwork has to be done in advance for the students to be able to do group work (This is only if you are a visiting teacher and will only teach the students a few times a year.).

Trying a Task-Based Lesson at a Japanese Junior High School

This week I was invited to a junior high school in rural Iwate to give a demonstration lesson (a 50-minute lesson). I taugtht 35 second graders (8th grade US - 14 years old) and there were approximately 30 local teachers and officials wathcing the lesson. I had never met these students before and had not developed any kind of working relationship with them. This was also my first time going to this school. To top it off, the students seemed a little nervous about having 30 onlookers watching them.
I was asked to teach a page of the textbook. Below is the text of that page. I have changed the content slightly. The students had not studied this page before

"A New Parking Area for Bikes " Lincoln Park will become a parking area for bikes. People complained when a bike fell on a little girl (Jasmine Kuroda) near the station. They asked the city for a new parking area. But some people are against the plan. They think we should keep the park. A park or a parking area - that is the question.	New Words become, complain, little, girl, boy, against, for, should, ask...for
Key Sentence People complained when a bike fell on Jasmine.

------------------------------------------------
I am now going to write the Task I decided to try, how I went about doing it, and the successes and failures of the lesson:

Here were my goals for the lesson.
1. Do 95 % of the class in English with the students understanding.
2. For the students to experience and enjoy group work.
3. Reading Strategy: Students make use of their background knowledge (what has happened in the chapter up until " a new parking area for bikes") to understand the text.
4. Reading Strategy: Students use the outline of the text I gave them to understand it and put it together.

The task I picked for the lessons was an "ordering and sorting task". I divided the above text into 6 parts (sentences) and gave each part a letter (A - F).

A: They think we should keep the park.
B: Lincoln Park will become a parking area for bikes.
C: But some people are against the plan.
D: People complained when a bike fell on a little girl (Jasmine Kuroda) near the station.
E: A park or parking area - that is the question.
F: They asked the city for a new parking area.

The Task
For the lesson, I printed each sentence onto a small piece of paper and placed them in an empty classroom (Click here). The objective of the task was to go to the empty classroom, find and memorize one of the sentences, go back to your classroom, write down the sentence, and then recreate the whole passage with their group.

Preparing for the task
The class of 35 students was divided into 6 groups. Each group had 6 students (one had 5). Before the class, I asked the teacher who usually teaches them to made sure the students were sitting in groups. Each student in each group was assigned a letter(A~F). I asked the teacher to make sure that each group would have 2 students who were very good at English, two students who were average, and two students who struggled with English. Students who struggled with English were assigned sentences C or B. Students who were average were assigned sentences A or F, and students who were advanced were assigned D or E.
These students had little experience with group work so I brought 4 graduate students from my university to help the different groups because I imagined each group would struggle mightily with the task.
Students also wore nametags which in addition to their names had their sentence letter and group number. By the letter on a student's nametag, I could tell whether or not she struggled with English or was pretty confident in it. I still called on students indiscriminately because I do not believe on only calling on the "good" students. However, it is nice to have an idea beforehand about the likelihood that a student will respond to a question.

Doing the Task and the Class
Here is what we did for class:
Note: When the class began, students were already sitting in groups of 6.

1) Greeting and Review: The guest teachers introduced themselves. I then asked students "How're ya" (intentionally using a strong American accent) and told them they could answer by saying "Great", "Good", "OK", "Not so good". I then had all the A students from each group stand up and ask "How 're ya" and answer around in a circle. I called some other letters too. I did not plan this but the atmosphere was so tense that I wanted to try someting to loosen things up.
For review, I reviewed what had happened up until "A New Parking Area for Bikes" reading. Usually, I would ask the students questions but I knew in such a tense environment students would not want to raise their hands so I summarized what had happened. The purpose was this was to get them thinking about what "A New Parking Area for Bikes" was about

2) Task

Pre-Task
I told students our goal for the day was to write the newspaper article from the text titled "A New Parking Area for Bikes". First, I said that we would have to learn the new words. I introduced the new words using word cards the graduate students made. I first used the new word in a sentence and then asked the students what they thought the word meant. I wrote the sentences on the blackboard before class to save time (Please click here to see what the blackboard looked like). Of course, the students did not answer and I should have known better. Afterwards, a teacher advised me that I give the students a multiple choice answer. That would have been much better rather than directing a question to the whole class.

Task
After introducing the new words, I gave students the instructions for the task. I spent a lot of time thinking exactly how I could give them instructions in such a way that they would understand. Below is what I told them:

We are now going to make the newspaper article. The article is divided into 6 sentences. Sentence A, sentence B, sentence C, sentence D, sentence E, sentence F. Each sentence of the text is in room _________, but it is in a secret place. Each of you has a letter on your name tag. The letter is your sentence. People with sentence A, please raise your hand. Each person with Sentence A will go to room _____ and fins sentence A. When you find Sentence A, please memorize it. Then return to your group and write your sentence on Sheet 1. After your group has written all the sentences, use the sentences and make the article. The sentence order is not A, B, C, D, E, F. （文書の順番はA,B,C,D,E,Fではない）. Use the hints, to help you put the article together.
You have 20 minutes to finish the task. In other words, you have 20 minutes to make the article.

Students quickly found their sentences and were able to write their sentences on their respective sheets (Sheet 1).
I had written an outline of the article on the blackboard to help them put the sentences together:
1)There is a plan.
2)Why?　
3)There are some problems with the plan.　
4)The conclusion.

Time started to run short and 4 of the six groups were unable to put their sentences in order. Students were confused by the outline and they had not learned the phrase "There is" to my chagrin.

I realized that had I written the outline as below maybe the students could have put the article together:
Hints
1) A plan
2) Why? (2 sentences)
3) Problems (2 sentences)
4) The conclusion

Post Task:
We read the actual article in the textbook out loud. I made the mistake of calling on a group who had successfully put together the article to read their version out loud and they were too shy to do so.
I gave students the following evaluation sheet. I wanted to know which of the words we had studied that they understood. I also wanted to know which parts of the task they could do and which they could not do. The purpose of this task was to think of the main ideas of the sentences and how they fit together. One teacher told me that perhaps my evaluation sheet was a little ambiguous. Maybe I should have written something like this:
(1 = Strongly Agree; 5= Strongly Disagree)
1) Today I understood the main point of the sentences 1-2-3-4-5
2) Today I understood how the sentences fit together: 1-2-3-4-5

My Reflection: Doing a research class in front of many onlookers is an incredibly humbling experience. It would have been nice if I had known the students beforehand but oh well.

Good points: I did a class in mostly English and it almost worked. Students understood the task and the new words.

Bad Points: Students were unable to put the sentences together and perhaps thus the lesson did not accomplish its main goal. Furthermore, the evaluation was a little ambiguous.
When I gave a question to the entire class, it was never answered. This is common in Japan; I should know better than to direct a question to an entire class of students that I do not know, but I cannot help it, it is my nature and the way I was educated.

Overall: Unfortunately, I fear that a lot of teachers watched my class and it might have reinforced their belief that English classes in English only do not work and children must be spoon fed everything to learn. My opinion is that doing something new in the classroom never goes smoothly the first time. As time progresses and the students and teacher get used to the new activities and working with each other, the class will go smoother.. For students to become good English learners, they have to learn how to read English by themselves. On November 7, I will have another opportunity to go to the junior high school and teach. To be honest, doing this on top of my university work is incredibly burdensome, but I will give it another try and hopefully do better. Trying new ideas at the junior high school level has given me the opportunity to understand the students better. I must further think about how to adjust the class plans to be more suitable to the needs and abilities of the students. I have a feeling that no matter what I do though, classes in this kind of high-pressure setting will never go smoothly. The reason is that students will be trying something for the first time and they need the opportunity to get stuck on a task or make mistakes. This will help them learn how to do the task in the future, I believe.

How can we succeed in teaching English in jr. and sr. high schools?

On March 26, I gave a workshop titled "How can we succeed in teaching English in jr. and sr. high schools?". The workshop was sponsored by Iwate JALT and the Iwate University Faculty of Education. Althogether there were 20 people including me. The participants consisted of 6 American(to my knowledge) teachers, 2 teachers and research fellows from the Philippines, 2 graduate students from China, 7 Japanese university students (most of them had experience teaching), a translator, a Japanese teacher of English, and a Japanese Univeristy Professor. It was an excellent mix of people from different backgrounds and the number of participants was just right.

The goal of the workshop:
As the title suggests the goal of the workshop was to discuss how we can improve English education in Junior and Senior high schools. We were to do this by sharing our own teaching stories and learning from them.

I tried to make the topics of the discussion concrete. To do this, I gave the participants the following information at the beginning of the workshop:

According to second language acquisition theory the following two conditions are necessary for language learning:
Condition 1) Learners should have plenty of exposure to the target language and the language that they hear should be comprehensible for their level of proficiency
Condition 2) Learners need the opportunity to use the target language to communicate meaning and test their knowledge either by speaking or writing.
These conditions, 1, providing learners with written or spoken input that they can understand, and, 2, encouraging learners to use the target language in speaking and writing so that they can test and develop their understanding of the language, seem easy to provide but in reality can be difficult in the Japanese junior and senior high school classroom.

I hoped that the participants would share some of their strories of successful or non-successful language learning activities they designed so we could come up with conclusions as to how we could provide conditions 1 and 2.

What did we do?
1. Spanish Lesson
After the ice-breaking, I gave a demonstration Spanish lesson to show how condition 1 might be met. I used mostly Spanish during the lesson. I used English toward the ending to confirm the meaning of the new words and talk about the masculine and feminine word rule in Spanish. At the beginning of the lesson, I showed a video to the participants. The video was of my trip to Thailand. It showed the following images accompanied by the following captions: a train station (esta es una estacion), a train (esto es un tren), a street (esta es una calle), a boat (esto es un barco), a man (esto es un hombre), a woman (esta es una mujer), a very female looking man (esto/esta es un/una ?), another very female looking man (???), a school (esta es una escuela) and a market (Esto es un mercado).
(The video can be viewed by clicking here. I was introduced to an amazing site to upload your videos on. You should be able to watch the video soon after clicking on the link. )

I read the captions while we watched the video. We watched the video twice. Next I showed pictures of each image accompanied with their original captions. I confirmed the meaning of the sentences. Then we practiced saying the sentences, but as we did this I gradually took out words from each sentence as we practiced saying them. The purpose of doing this was to make the learners aware of the masculine/ feminine word rule in Spanish. The power point file I used to do this can be seen here.

The purpose of this exerice was to show how pictures, creativity, and a low-key atmosphere can make a foreign language comprehensible to learners who have never studied it before. In other words, it served as a suggestion as to how condition 1 can be supplied.

2. My story of a lesson that did not go well:
Secondly, I shared an experience where I taught a "demonstration class" or 研究授業 to 40 junior high school students. The goal of the lesson was to get them to use English communicatively by conducting a survey to find out the classes favorite television show. In other words, the goal was to provide the students with condition 2. The class did not go well and I learned the following lessons:
1) Never do too many new activities at one. If a teacher wants to try something different and the students are used to a particular learnings style, he should make gradual changes. My lesson was too drastic.

2) The class group should be cohesive meaning that members have to feel accepted by their peers, not necessarily likes. The teacher also should be an accepted member of the group. I was not an accepted member of the group.

3) Quite often a class will have norms that make it difficult to conduct communicative language activies. An example of detrimental norms are:
•"We are not good at English."
•"We will not speak in front of our classmates. "
•"A class is where a teacher speaks and the students listen."
The teacher must negotiate new norms with the students but this is done over the span of weeks or months.

3. Group Discussion:
After my presentation we took a break and then broke into 4 groups of 4 to 5 people. We had about an even number of teachers and students per group. It was a great mix! I gave groups the choice of one of two very specific topics:

1. Please discuss some of your experiences with each other; what listening-focused activities have been easy (or difficult) for your students to understand. Why?
2. Do you have any stories of successful lessons or unsuccessful lessons where the goal was to get students to use new language communicatively? Why was the lesson successful or why was the lesson not successful?

The topics were a little too specific and many of the group members shared their English teaching stories irrespective of the topic to which they were assigned. After the four groups had shared what they had discussed by dispatching a "diplomat" and "official recorder" to the other groups, a few of the participants said they had learned or been reminded of the following through the discussion:

MB, an English teacher from the USA, said:

1. Music can be useful in relaxing the class and changing the atmosphere for the better. It can also help students pick up and understand vocabulary. A combination of music and movement can help children learn English.
2. (quoting what she heard in a previous presentation) “the basic building block of English lessons is building relationships

Mr. C, an English teacher from Japan, said:

1. Music can be effective but we have to remember that some of the songs that children like might be too difficult. We need a balance between what children like and what is possible.
2. Establishing human relationships with students is most important.

RC, a Mathematics teacher and research fellow from the Philippines, listed the following important points:

1. Teachers should give importance to motivation and materials
   - the needs of students
   - the capability of students
2. Teachers should make the lesson lively by showing pictures, songs, and establish rapport (good relationship)
3. Teachers need to unlock difficult words, which means provide a means for students to understand difficult words.

J, a graduate student from China, said:

• There is a saying in China that if we really want to win the war you have to understand your own strengths and weaknesses as well as the enemy's. To be an effective teacher it is not only important for the teacher to understand his students but also his own strengths and weaknesses. The teacher when choosing his teaching style should make his decision based on what style will work particularly for him.
  

My Reflection
Good Points:
The atmosphere was great and almost each group had an American speaker of English, a Japanese speaker of English, either a Philippine or Chinese speaker of English. I thought this combination of different perspectives made the small group discussions work well. As a teacher, it was very rewarding to see my students from the university participate actively in the discussion. Each one of us on that day met someone new and that also made the experience very memorable. One of the main messages from that came from the workshop was that knowing and building a good relationship with your students is one of the most important elements in creating a good language learning environment. Personally, knowing the importance of establishing a good, trusting relationship with the students and maintaining it through the inevitable ups and downs will have an influence on how I teach my university classes. It will also influence how I do my future "demonstration classes" at elementary, junior, and senior high schools. Perhaps the foundation of effective teaching is establishing trust and on top of the foundation comes technique.

Points of Improvement:
The workshop was a little disorganized on my part and I think that I could have done a better job in relaying to the participants what the purpose of the demonstration lesson and my story telling was. I also spent too long talking and should have given the participants more discussion time. Lastly, the discussion topics seemed to be a little difficult to talk about because they were too specific.

To the Participants,
If I have left out something important, made a mistake, or you would just like to say something please write a comment!