The Danger of Groupwork without Feedback

I was reading John Hattie's Visible Learning for Teachers, which is a readable summary of a meta-analysis on thousands of studies investigating effective teaching practices. I was struck by on thing in particular:

“Most of the feedback that students receive about their classroom work is from other students – and much of that feedback is wrong.”

 One of the reasons I do groupwork in my classes is so that students will support eachother. Usually, students work in pairs or groups of four. In my teacher education classes, the class sizes range from 24 to 30 students. It is difficult to monitor 12 to 15 pairs or 6 to 8 groups but I always assumed that students would be able to support each other. After reading Hattie, though, I thought that I needed to do a better job of monitoring groups.

In my "English Teaching Methodology 3" (ETM 3) class, we were reading about "Practice Activities and Tasks" in the TKT Course Module 1,2,3. I gave three questions to the class about the main ideas of the chapter and had them answer these questions in pairs. This time, though, in our Wordpress class blog, using WPDiscuz, I posted each question as a comment on the lesson page for that day. The groups then had to post their answers as replies to the comments (See below).

To my surprise, most of the pairs answered the below question incorrectly.

2.What is the difference between skill-based and language based activities? Can you provide and example from the New Crown or Sunshine textbook?

 

I actually thought the concept of skill and language focused lessons would be easy for students to grasp. Because I could see students' comments, we could discuss the issue deeper: I could understand what many of the students were thinking and they could understand what I wanted the to learn. I saw one way that technology could be used as a means for the teacher to understand the extent to which students are grasping comments and make the appropriate intervention.

 

Who am I to criticize my students' English when my Japanese stinks?

  Yesterday, I had to write a letter to a junior high school principal requesting that he permit a teacher at his school to present at a conference with me. I wrote the letter in what I thought was fluent and persuasive Japanese. I asked my wife to take a look at it just to make sure there were no typos. Immediately she took out a red pen and started to correct. When she got to what I thought was the most compelling part of the letter, she asked if I has used a translating program. I, the teacher who curses the invention of translating programs often when he reads his students' written work, was being accused of using what I despise the most. Although she did not mean to insult me, my wife's appraisal of my Japanese felt, for a moment, absolutely devastating. It was like working your whole life to become a Picasso and being told that you can't even finger paint. 

  The past few years, in my teaching methodology courses, I have been very strict in correcting students' English. In my evaluation of their writing, I have designed rubrics that frankly tell them if their English has shortcomings. I thought that even if the criticism was a little tough, it would be good for them. To be hired as English teachers, to be superior English teachers, they must possess a superior level of English. However, being on the receiving end of the tough love has made me reexamine this notion. The semester has just ended but next semester I would like to talk to my students about this.   

Practice Lessons for Pre-service English Teachers

Today was our last day of classes at the university. In my English teaching methodology class I have been experimenting with different ways for students to do practice teaching in the class. It is extremely important for students to experience teaching because that is the only way they can link such theories as learning strategies, communicative competence, etc. to English teaching. However, practice teaching is not easy because I have 43 students in the class. This means that it is not feasible to have one or two students do their practice teaching in class and have the others pretend to be students. If we did this, then maybe each student would teach no more than one 10-minute lesson a semester. Therefore, I have decided to have students do their demonstration lessons in small groups. Here is what I did for our practice teaching day:

First, I chose four activities from the Internet TESL Journal:
Lesson 1: The Bragging Game

Lesson 2:  Verb Review Game
Lesson 3: (a) The Family (Worksheet)  (b) The Family (Text)  (c)  The Family (Teacher's Notes)

Lesson 4:  The Syllable Game

Then I divided the class into 5 groups of 8 students. Each group had 4 teaching pairs.

	Lesson 1	Lesson 2	Lesson 3	Lesson 4
Group A	Kota and Airi	May and Yui	Haruka and Emi	Miki and Saki
Group B	Mai and Chika	Kotaro and Shohei	Hiroki and Makoto	Hamaya and Matsun
Group C	Shunsuke and Hikaru	Masato and Tatsuki	Shunta and Satoru	Takumi and Eiki
Group D	Takahiro and Ai	Flowers and Machiko	Marin and Yurika	Yoshi and Ryouhei
Group E	Satoshi and Wataru	Ayu and Moe	Shiho and Kanako	Yui U and Takayuki

Then, each student was given the following blogging assignment (taken from our class blog):

I would like you to write the lesson plan in your blog specifying the following. Next week, you and your partner will conduct a 10 minute lesson based on your plan.

Activity:  What kind of activity is it?　Adjust the activity so that it encourages acquisition, interaction, or focus on form. Your activity can cover more than one of these.

Strategies: What kind of learning strategies does it encourage?

Learning styles: What kind of learning style is most appropriate for your activity?

Communicative competence: What kind of communicative ability does it encourage and why?

Procedures: Write the steps you will take to carry out the activity. At the ending of your activity, there should be some kind of reflection to help students realize the skill/strategy you wanted them to practice. 

See my sample lesson for an example 

Although you will be team-teaching, you should write the lesson plan in your own blog. It is ok to write the same thing as your partner.

The text books we use are the TKT Course and 新しい時代の英語科教育法と実践 . The items that I asked students to specify(Activities, strategies, learning styles and  communicative competence) were concepts that we studied in the textbooks. When we did the actual practice lessons, all groups did Lessons 1, 2, 3, 4 in that order. We were able to finish on time easily. What impressed me was that each pair of students taught their lessons differently depending on their goal. This meant that they were thinking very deeply about their teaching which I think is great. The problem areas were first, with five groups teaching at once it is hard to understand what each group is doing. I had two other teachers come to class that day to help me but I will not always have these kinds of resources. Second, I was not able to look at all the blogs before the class and give feedback on the lesson plans. I was just too busy. I was fortunate in that one of the other teachers volunteered to read the students' blogs. Third, sometimes when you are so busy orchestrating students' group work, keeping time, etc. it is hard to give students good comments on their lessons. Despite the problems, I am going to continue to use this format next semester. Although I need to think of ways that I can follow the students' lessons better, the most important thing is that the students, themselves, learn from this experience and determine themselves how they should improve.  

What I Learned About Teacher Education in Thailand

For 13 days I rotated around three unique schools and saw three unique groups of student-teachers teach at each school. In my post before I left for Thailand, I wrote:

in Thailand I want to see how students will fix their own lessons and how this experience will change their view of what effective teaching and their image of themselves as teachers.

In the blog, I try hard not to write about people or schools in such a way that would reveal information they would not want shared. I am a little worried that what I would write might reveal certain details that schools and or the student teachers would prefer not to be shared. However, I do think that I can share what fascinated me the most about this whole experience.

At the Thai schools we had three groups of people working together on planning the ideal English class. These groups had different life experiences and views on teaching, they were Japanese college professors (who were American!),  Thai and non-Thai English teachers working in Bangkok or Ayutthaya, and Japanese pre-service teachers. We had different ways in how we perceived good topics, appropriate activities, our ideal image of teachers, how to interact with students, and how to use materials.

I think that for the classes that were most successful, the pre-service teachers, the Thai teachers, and the American teachers were able to exchange dialogue about the classes, understand each other, and negotiate changes that everyone could be happy with. For the classes that were not as successful (all the classes were actually good, I think), the pre-service teachers, Thai teachers, and American teachers were not quite able to reach a common ground. Nevertheless, the opportunity to collaborate on planning these classes was an incredible experience which taught me about myself, my students, and the Thai teachers; it also brought us all closer together. This trip taught me about how difficult and exhausting communication can it made me a more open and honest communicator and made me feel more alive.

Using the Japanese Portfolio for Student Teachers of Languages in a Class Discussion

I am in Thailand right now but need to get my mind off it. So, I am going to write about using the J-Postl. The J-POSTL or  the Japanese Porfolio for Student Teachers of Languages is adapted from E-POSTL or the European Portfolio for Student Teachers of other Languages. The J-POSTL consists of 100 descriptors that students can use to assess their teaching ability. The descriptors help students assess their knowledge or ability related to their context, teaching methodologies, using resources, planning lessons, conducting lessons, etc. The descriptors are useful in that they can raise students' awareness of the techniques, skills, and knowledge that very good teachers have. For example, look at the following descriptors for conducting lessons:

73. 73  I can start a lesson in an engaging way.
    
74. 74  I can be flexible when working from a lesson plan and respond to student interests as the lesson progresses.
    75  I can adjust my time schedule when unforeseen situations occur.
    76  I can time and change classroom activities to reflect individual students’ attention spans. 

The problem with J-POSTL is the sheer number of descriptors can make it a little overwhelming. However, the developers of the portfolio recommend that students only do a few descriptors at a time. I tried to do just this last month. My students in my teaching methodologies class did a one day teaching practice at an elementary school where they conducted a foreign language activity (English activity) using the standard elementary school English textbook, "Hi, Friends"After their practice lesson, we had a class discussion using part of the J-POSTL. For the discussion our goal was to Determine the essential skills necessary for conducting foreign language activities in elementary school, this is what I did:

1. I gave students a list of descriptors from J-POSTL about using resources, lesson planning, and conducting a lesson (using a lesson plan, content, interaction with students, classroom management, classroom language). I have written the list of descriptors I used at the bottom of this page.
2. I asked students to write a circle next to they thought they were able to do in the lesson, a cross next to what you were not able to do, and write a triangle next to what they thought was not relevant. (5 minutes)
3. Each teaching group of students (7 groups of students each conducted a class) watched a video of their class. If their thinking changed, they could change their answers they wrote in 2. (15 minutes)
4. Each teaching group comes to a consensus about the 5 items they thought they were most successful in accomplishing in their classes and the 5 items they were least successful in accomplishing. (20 minutes)
5. Next, students made seven new groups so that each new group consisted of a member from each of the original groups (like a jigsaw task). They shared the results of 4. with their new group members. After that, as a group, they chose what they thought were the four most important items for conducting foreign language activities in elementary school and gave reasons why. (20 minutes)
6. Lastly, each group presented their top four items. I wrote them on the computer (using a projector of course) and as a class we chose the top 5 items. 

In steps 4 and 5, I told students that they could add their own items if they so wished. The final list of the most important items consisted of the students' original items rather than those of J-POSTL.

Number of Votes	Item
40	Enjoy the class
23	Use English as much as you can.
20	Don’t use Japanese too much
16	Try to speak easy English
12	Prepare for the class perfectly
12	Prepare for many activities

I thought that this was VERY interesting. I think it means that it is difficult to tell students to look at their classes from a perspective that is different from their own. The J-POSTL makes A LOT of sense to me because I am an experienced teacher. Student-teachers, however, are new to teaching and they might perhaps focus more on the very basics such as "enjoy the class" rather than the detailed techniques, knowledge, and skills written in J-POSTL. Also, it could have been the nature of the task itself that influenced students' answers. Nevertheless, I was surprised that every item that students voted as most important were their own original ones.

I should be writing about my students' teaching in Thailand right now, but actually being able to think about my orderly and predictable life in Japan has been a little therapeutic for me.

Appendix: Items from J-POSTL used in the class discussion

RESOURCES
47 I can identify and evaluate a range of coursebooks/materials appropriate for the age, interests and the language level of the students.
48 I can select texts and language activities from coursebooks appropriate for my students.
49 I can locate and select listening and reading materials appropriate for the needs of my students from a variety of sources, such as literature, mass media and the Internet.
50 I can make use of ideas, lesson plans and materials included in teachers’ handbooks and resource books.
51  I can design learning materials and activities appropriate for my students.
52  I can recommend dictionaries and other reference books useful for my students.
53  I can guide students to use the Internet for information retrieval.

LESSON PLANNING
A. Identification of Learning Objectives
54 I can identify the Course of Study requirements and set learning aims and objectives suited to my students’ needs and interests.
55 I can plan specific learning objectives for individual lessons and/or for a period of teaching.
56 I can set objectives which challenge students to reach their full potential.
57 I can set objectives which take into account the differing levels of ability and
special educational needs of the students.
58 I can set objectives for four main skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing
respectively, according to the focus of individual lessons and/or period of teaching. 59 I can set objectives which encourage students to reflect on their learning.
59. I can set objectives which encourage students to reflect on their learning.

CONDUCTING A LESSON
A. Using Lesson Plans
73  I can start a lesson in an engaging way.
74  I can be flexible when working from a lesson plan and respond to student interests as the lesson progresses.
75  I can adjust my time schedule when unforeseen situations occur.
76  I can time and change classroom activities to reflect individual students’ attention
spans.

B. Content
77 I can relate what I teach to students’ knowledge, current events in local context, and the culture of those who speak it.

C. Interaction with Students
78  I can keep and maximize the attention of students during a lesson.
79  I can encourage student participation and student interaction whenever possible.
80  I can cater for a range of learning styles.
81  I can help students to develop appropriate learning strategies.

D. Classroom Management
82 I can create opportunities for and manage individual, partner, group and whole class work.
83 I can manage and use instructional media (flashcards, charts, pictures, audio-visual aids, etc.) effectively

E. Classroom Language
84 I can conduct a lesson in the target language, and if necessary use Japanese effectively.
85 I can encourage students to use the target language in their activities. 

Off to Thailand

I am writing from a hotel in Narita and am off to Thailand for almost two weeks. Another colleague and myself will be accompanying 10 students to Bangkok and Ayutthaya where they will be teaching English at high schools. I think that the students have been preparing hard for their teaching but I still don't think that they are quite ready. Last year, students went to Thailand with an almost perfect lesson plan. However, I took great pride in watching their lesson but then wondered whether students were actually teaching their own lesson or actually teaching my lesson. This year, students have chosen their own topics, activities, etc. Students are divided into 3 groups. Each group has made lesson plans and conducted demonstration lessons. Here are the topics of each group.

Group 1 (Three female students teaching at an All-Girl's High School in Bangkok): Valentine's Day in Japan, Traveling in Japan
Group 2 (Three female students teaching at a coed school in Ayutthaya): Origami, New Years in Japan
Group 3 (Three female students and one male student teaching at a coed school in Bangkok): Seasonal events in Japan, Japanese food stalls

One regret I have is that during the demonstration lessons I tend to talk A LOT and the students do not have much of a chance to give each other feedback after the lesson. If I see something during the lesson that I know would not work well in Thailand I become filled with an uncontrollable urge to point it out and give students my own ideas about how to remedy the problem. I do not have the patience to let students resolve the problem themselves. However, I also think that because the students have not gone to Thailand, they CANNOT understand why some thing might not work. I have been accompanying students to Thailand for a couple of years and feel the overwhelming urge to impart what I have learned before students have had a chance to try to work out the problem themselves. I need to learn to speak less.

No matter what I tell them though, they won't really be able to understand why or why not their lesson will work until they actually teach in the Thai schools. Therefore, in Thailand I want to see how students will fix their own lessons and how this experience will change their view of what effective teaching and their image of themselves as teachers. Well, I have to get ready to go.

Taking Japanese Student Teachers to Thailand to Teach English

Building a lesson from scratch includes choosing the content, thinking about how to present the content to the students in a way that is comprehensible and interesting, conceiving of communicative activities related to the content for students, and determining which language points and vocabulary to highlight to the students. I believe that this is what the best English language teachers in Japan can do.  I have written about this many times, but at my university, we have a teaching internship in a few secondary schools in Thailand where our students try to do exactly this. We tell the student-teachers that they are not teaching English but rather teaching about the Japanese culture in English. This year, a colleague and I will accompany the student-teachers to Thailand for two weeks in January. We have been helping the students prepare since October and we have done up to meeting 5 so far:

Meeting 1: Write profiles to send to host families and schools. Overview of the participating schools.
Meeting 2: History of Thailand
Meeting 3: Culture and customs of Thailand
Meeting 4: Classroom English practice and students receive a description of the kind of lesson plan we want them to conduct.
Meeting 5: Student-teachers present proposals for lessons and receive feedback
Meeting 6: Student-teachers give demonstration classes. More meetings: Student-teachers make appointments to consult with the internship supervisors about their classes.

I wish that we could meet more, but considering all the other work both the student-teachers and my university teachers have, even the above schedule is very hard. In meeting 4, I introduce many different ideas for ways to present material and tasks that encourage the use of all four skills. However, student-teachers probably did not learn anything from this. I have found that student teachers grow when they try demonstration lessons, receive feedback, and fix their lesson. It is only by actually teaching that student-teachers develop the know-how to teach. As I said before, this program enables the student-teachers to do some thing that would be more difficult for them to do as teachers in  a school of Japan: design and develop their own teaching materials and activities to accomplish the English learning goals they have for the children. It is my hope that this experience will  inspire the program participants to develop their own materials when they become teachers.

In a few weeks, I will blog about the themes and lessons of the student teachers.

Issues with textbooks and reading/writing assignments for pre-service teachers

I am in charge of a teaching methodology class for second year students university students. Most of them are English majors and about half of them aspire to be English teachers. This year I have 43 students in the class; this means giving them any kind of assignment also gives me a lot of work. Checking 40 + long writing assignments adequately can take over 7 hours easily, and really make it hard for me to prepare the week's lesson. Because the class is conducted mainly in English and the content, theories and practices in TESOL/TEFL, is new to students, it is essential that they read the textbook and do the writing assignments every week.

The textbook that we use is titled 英語科教育の基礎と実践 (An approximate translation is "Basic theory and practice of English Education"), the book is a good introduction to basic theories in TESOL/TEFL, teaching techniques, and teaching English in junior and senior high schools in Japan. Of course, the book cannot go into very much depth, but I think it points students into the right direction for learning more about their field.

Anyway, back to the reading and writing assignments. As you can tell, the book is written in Japanese, but I have the students answer questions about the reading in English.  I think that it is important for the students to be able to explain concepts about English education in English. I hope that they will be able to build off this experience to one day be able to explain their pedagogical choices to ALTs or be able to discuss English teaching with other educators throughout the world.

We have a class blog and students make their own blogs which link to the class blogs. Students put their assignments and reflections of their practice teaching on their personal blogs. These blogs are supposed to serve as portfolios of students' work. I am actually not sure if I have chosen the appropriate technological tool for students' portfolios, but that is a story for another post. Students evaluation is based on whether or not students can explain the concepts written in the textbook in English. I grade them by giving them one of the following marks:

✓- means that a student was not able to explain the concepts in English.

✓ means that students were mostly able to express the concepts but there were some mistakes which made the writing difficult to understand.

✓1/2 means that they were able to express the concepts well with perhaps a few minor areas where the meaning was not completely clear

 ✓+ means that they were able to express the concepts very well 

A couple of weeks ago, I encountered an unexpected problem with these writing assignments. In the first assignment there were many sloppy mistakes. Sloppy mistakes are spelling mistakes, mistakes in plural/singular, mistakes in with subject-verb agreement, etc. Basically, sloppy mistakes are mistakes that students should be able to catch by themselves. To my surprise, well over 50% of the assignments were littered with these sloppy mistakes. For example, some students spelled the word learn as "lean" throughout their whole assignment. This gave me a sense of deja vu as something similar happened to me last year in the same class. On top of that, many of the assignments were full of global errors or awkward English, I was not sure what the students were trying to say. Becoming an English teacher at a public school is very competitive and these days one needs strong English skills to pass the teacher's examination and interview test. For the sake of the students, I cannot accept mediocrity. They have to all work hard to improve their English if are serious about becoming English teachers.

I underlined all the mistakes they made (this took well over 10 hours), and told students that they had to fix their mistakes as an assignment. I also transformed myself to the stern Jimbo and told students that they made too many careless mistakes and this was intolerable (Of course making mistakes because you are experimenting with new and difficult language is a good thing. Also, I should not that I make spelling mistakes all the time and a few mistakes in an assignment will not bother me. In fact, for me to get mad at a few mistakes would be very hypocritical).

As I said before, in addition to the careless mistakes, there was a high amount of unintelligible prose written by the students. Therefore, after the stern Jimbo had said his peace, I decided to give the students about 40 minutes to start the next assignment in pairs and I walked around to observe how there were doing the assignment. One of the most typical strategies was this: they would find the answer to the question of the textbook in Japanese and try to understand it. After grasping the meaning, they would write the answer in Japanese. Lastly, they would translate the answer into English. I realized that the textbook in Japanese was not necessarily clear-cut for them. When I read and summarize parts of the textbook, I understand the concepts already and can use my background knowledge when the language of the book is unambiguous or clear to me. The students, however, do not have the background knowledge that I have. It seems like that when students are unsure what the Japanese is actually saying, they tend to just directly translate it into English. The result of their effort is unintelligible English.

On this day, we ended up working on writing the answers into English the whole time and after the class had ended, I felt that I had just conducted my first grammar-translation class ever. I would not call it a waste of time, students worked very hard and I think they understood better what I expected from them and I understood better the demands that the assignments placed on them. Nevertheless, I did not think this was an ideal way for us to spend the precious little time we have to learn the basics of English teaching. I am now starting to question whether these kinds of assignments are appropriate (Reading in Japanese and answering questions in English). There are textbooks written in fairly simple English such as the TKT Course Module 1,2,3 which I think does a good job of explaining all the basics about English language teaching and learning that teachers need to know. The TKT is a teaching knowledge test for teachers of adult learners made by Cambridge University Press. I would prefer to use a book that also specifically discusses teaching at schools in Japan. In other words, I want a book that will contextualize the knowledge better.

I will say that most of the students in the class are working hard. I hope that this experience will push the students to become better self-monitors of their writing and also help them realize how hard they have to work to improve their English. I hope that I can choose the right kind of textbook and the right way of using the textbook that will help the students learn the basics of English teaching and improve their teaching. I really want to help them realize their dreams. For the next few weeks, we will be preparing for a teaching practice at a local elementary school. Hopefully during this time, I will be able to think of a better way of using the current textbook.

Giving a Workshop at the ALT mid-year Conference

Well, October was a busy month and really flew buy. The new semester started at my university, I started a PhD program, I went to the JALT conference in Shizuoka, I had to write a laboriously tedious grant application, and I planned and conducted an open "research class" with my university's affiliated elementary school. I would actually like to write about all of these but today, I want to tell you about giving a talk at the Iwate ALT mid-year seminar in early October. At the seminar, there were about 25 ALTs and 15 JTEs (Japanese teachers of English). This was a very workable number. I only had 90 minutes and I wanted to do some thing that hopefully would be of some use for the ALTs. I know that no matter how amazing an educator you are (and I am a pretty mediocre one), after 90 minutes you are not going to reinvent the way someone teaches.

When planning for the seminar, I thought back to the days when I was an ALT in Hokkaido for two years in the late nineties. I came to Japan knowing zero Japanese, having little experience in education, knowing next to nothing about Japanese schools, and no formal knowledge of the English language itself. I was about as unqualified for a job of teaching English as possible. I was stationed at a rural junior high school and usually my job was just to stand in class and do nothing but recite the textbook to the students when asked. Sometimes the JTE would give me 20 minutes of the class to teach. I would be very grateful for this opportunity but usually my activities were either too difficult for the students or not interesting. These days, the JET Program (the name of the scheme that brings people from abroad to assist in the teaching of English at Japanese public schools) seems to be much more selective and most of the ALTs are much more knowledgable about Japan and teaching than I was.

Nevertheless, I thought about something I could have learned that would have made me a little better at my job. Coming to Japan, my understanding was that I was supposed to assist in making English more communicative. However, what exactly does that mean? The national curriculum for English in public schools is called the gakushuu shidou youryou or the Course of Study and all English textbooks in Japan follow these guidelines. To be honest, I sometimes intuitively feel a little bit of resistance towards it because all schools MUST follow it (Whenever someone tells me I HAVE to do something, I tend to automatically NOT want to do it). However, the document itself emphasizes that English be taught as a means of communication and I believe that if more schools actually DID follow it, English education would probably be a little better.   In my two years as an ALT, though, I never heard of the Course of Study. In fact, I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing rather than "making my classes more communicative." I think now that if I had a better idea about the national curriculum (or what I was supposed to be doing) then maybe back then I could have reached an agreement with the JTE about what our goals were and tailor the activities to try to accomplish these goals. With this in mind, here is how I conducted the workshop:

Part 1 - Icebreaking: We played four corners. The signs agree, disagree, I don't know, and I don't understand are each posted in a corner of the room. I give the participants a statement and they go to the corner which best reflects their feelings. Here are the questions I gave them:
1. I think Japanese food is better than the food in my country.
2. The goal of English Education in junior and senior high schools is for students to become high level communicators of English...
... and others......

Part 2: Introducing the course of study for English education. On Powerpoint I showed them the objectives and recommended content for JHS and SHS English classes. This was written in English but I left blanks in the text and read every thing in Japanese. The ALTs, consulting with the JTEs if necessary, had to try to guess what filled in the blanks.

Part 3: Challenges: Next, I discussed obstacles for achieving the objectives in the course of study based on my experience as an ALT and the limited knowledge I have about English education in Japan. The challenges I discussed were:

I System and Environment
1. High school and university entrance exams
2. Teachers' workloads
3. The communicative goals of the course of study are a little ambiguous.
4. Teachers have to follow a curriculum made by their department.
5. The total number of hours spent in the English classroom in JHS and SHS are insufficient (see a previous blog post)

II People Factors
1. Unmotivated students
2. ALTs lack of knowledge of Japanese, Japanese schools, education, and English teaching (I am talking about myself!)
3. ALTs unwilling to cooperate
4. JTEs do not want to work with ALTs (I think this is a big problem)
5. JTEs cannot or do not explain to ALTs their schools situation, the ALT's role, or give the ALT guidance.
6. JTEs can lack understanding of how to make classes more communicative
7. Some JTEs have insufficient command of English (only a few!)

Part 4: Ways to achieve the goals: In Part 3, I was kind of hoping that someone would try to argue against me but no one did. In Part 4, I took a more optimistic view and said that actually most Alts and JTEs care very much about their students' learning and are very innovative. Also, relatively speaking in very general terms, Japanese JHS and SHS students can be easy to work with. My suggestions were that 1. JTEs and ALTs discuss how they want students to get out of their classes; 2. JTEs and ALTs discuss the kind of teachers they want to be; 3. JTEs and ALTs make plans to routinely conduct a small repertoire of activities to push students and themselves towards their goals. Lastly, I discussed my own goals for my students and the kind of teacher I aspire to be (but am not). Then, I conducted a learning activity I had designed to try to meet these goals. The activity was a task-based activity. I read a picture book in Japanese (showing the pictures on the computer). This was perhaps the most well-received part of the workshop.

Overall, the content of my workshop was probably something that the Japanese English teachers had heard many times: The Course of Study and having thinking about a goal for your students before planning your classes or curriculum. However, when I was an ALT, I never heard any thing like that. I hope that they found it useful.

Epilogue: After the workshop, I went to Hanamaki station to go home. To my surprise, who should I meet in the station but the former K-1 kickboxing champ Ernesto Hoost! He was in Iwate to film an NHK television special. He was nice enough to take a picture with me:

Getting New Ideas for My Teaching Methodologies Class

The new semester starts in October and I will teach an English Teaching Methodologies class to about 30 students. I will teach these students from October - February and then from April to August. To try to get some fresh ideas I read the book プロの教師の「初伝」から「奥伝」まで  (EFL Teacher Education for Professional Development）by Takahashi Kazuyuki is seems to be a pretty well know figure in the English education world in Japan. What I liked about the book was this:

1) He gives a fairly frank appraisal of problems with Teacher Education in Japan.

2) He gives a sensible and realistic proposal for teacher professional development in the Japanese context which I think can be a good reference for teachers and teacher educations.

Regarding 1), he writes about the teacher certification system in England which has clear criteria for novice teachers to met and where universities and schools collaborate to develop teachers. He is critical of the Japanese system in that education universities and boards of education or schools have never come to a common understanding of professional criteria novice teachers should meet. I think that he does have a strong point here but I also think that criteria should be flexible and broad enough so that education universities and schools can create professional development programs for their particular contexts.

He bases his process of professional development on what is written in Burns and Richards' (2009) Cambridge guide to Second Language Teacher Education. Below are the stages written in Burns and Richards as well as what Takahahsi called them: 

1. Input of necessary knowledge and skills （初伝）
2. Application to the Classroom Context （中伝）
3. Self-development in Professional Career （奥伝）
4. Social Context （エピローグ）

初伝・中伝・奥伝 refer to the beginning, middle and advanced levels that apprentices of a Japanese traditional art or sport pass through. He calls social skills (Epilogue) . Each chapter of the book is given the title of a specific stage.

In 初伝, he basically gives a list of techniques, skills and knowledge that beginning teachers need to conduct a class. He also gives a lot of practical advice. A lot of this is stuff that most experienced teachers know but may not realize it. I think that this chapter is useful when thinking about what the bare essentials are that a novice teacher needs to know to be able to survive a class.  

In 中伝, he gives a couple of lesson plans, includes tasks asking the reader to evaluate parts of each plan, and then gives his own analysis. The point of this section is for the reader to learn how to visualize a class by looking at the lesson plan, and, through this visualization, determine which parts of the lesson will likely work and which parts will likely be problematic.

In 奥伝, he discusses three views of teacher development: Teaching as a craft (people learn to teach by imitating a mentor),  teaching as an applied science (from SLA theory and teaching methodologies, we learn that there is a right way to teach), and the Reflective Model (The third approach - developing through experience and reflecting on the experience). He then discusses an all Japan English assessment test given to secondary school students which showed that they lacked skills in writing and speaking. He says that teachers must shoulder some of this blame. Then, he gives a couple of case studies of experienced and very accomplished teachers and shows how through a reflective approach, they were able to improve their classes and get students who had little interest in English to enthusiastically speak and write in the language. The point of this is if that if teachers do not take the initiative to improve themselves, they will not make much progress professionally.

In the epilogue, he gives an overview of how social context can affect the English class.

How the book impacted me:

Last semester (April - August), my Teaching Methodology course consisted of the following routine: lecture (for example, teaching vocabulary, teaching reading, etc..) with learning activities → micro teaching → student reflection. I think this is close to a reflective approach. However, students would hand me their reflections and then maybe look at them once again to see my comment. I realized that by not having the students keep a portfolio in which they collect all their work which includes their assignments, lesson plans, teaching artifacts, and feedback from peers and teachers so that they can track their own development. Therefore, this semester, I have decided to have students make blogs on edublogs and record their learning on the blogs as well as display their teaching artifacts. I hope that they can use the blogs to record their growth over the next 10 months that we will be working together. When this project picks up some steam, I might include the link on this blog. 

Observing my Students Teach

Third year students in my Department have a four week teaching practicum at this time of year. In most teacher education programs in Japan, student teachers are only required to undergo a 2 to 4 week practicum to receive their license. This short period for a teaching practicum has been a target of criticism but I will have to save this topic for another blog post.

Right now, in my Department we have 10 students teaching at 3 junior high schools (JHSs) and another 10 students teaching at elementary schools. This week I have been observing some of the students' classes to 1) provide them with encouragement and 2) see if my English teaching methodology class might have helped them for their teaching practicum.

This year, I spent a lot of time remaking my "English Teaching Methodologies" class curriculum. Students take this class before their teaching practice. This year, I cut out a lot of the theoretical content, and we devoted more time to practicing how to teach lessons using the junior high school textbook adopted by most schools in my prefecture. My goal was to help students develop a repertoire of techniques they could use at the junior high school for practice in reading, writing, listening and speaking as well as give them sufficient practice with using English in the classroom so that they could stand in front of 40 children and conduct the class in English with confidence. So, what did I observe?

Well, first, I am happy to report that all my students have received praise for their hard work. Secondly, so far, student teachers who are in charge of teaching first and second year JHS classes have really made an effort to use as much English as possible. I will say that I do not think it is enough but I am appreciate their effort and the more they get used to teaching the more English they will use. Third, the teachers have shown that they can present a goal and sequence activities to try to accomplish the goal. Fourth, the student teachers have shown that they can make visual materials to help supplement students' understanding. Fifth, the student teachers make an effort to conduct pair and group work and walk around the class trying to insure that each student stays on task. These are points I emphasized in my classes, however, these are also common sense in English teaching and it is likely that the student-teachers learned this by observing their supervising teachers at the JHSs or by advice received by their supervisors.

There were also some problems. Here are some of the problems I observed:

A student teacher designs a class to teach a particular grammar point. He over-explains the grammar point, over-practices the grammar point, and then conducts some kind of artificial communicative activity where students use only the grammar point. He speaks English when using the grammar point but uses Japanese for everything else. I think he focused too much on the grammar point and temporarily forgot that students need constant exposure to a variety of English. This is probably one problem with "Presentation, Practice, and Production"

In third year junior high school classes, the textbook content becomes more difficult and the readings much longer. As a result, I have observed that student teachers who teach these classes use much less English and most of the classes tend to focus on confirming the meaning of the texts in Japanese (basically translation). For example, I observed a class where a teacher said that the goal would be to write a title for each paragraph in a reading about Sadako which is a famous story about a girl who died from radiation poisoning caused by the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. When she was in the hospital, she thought that if she made 1000 paper cranes, she would be cured of her sickness. Unfortunately, she was unable to finish before she passed away but her family completed the task for her.

Anyway, there were 5 short paragraphs in the passage. The teacher put the students in groups, for each paragraph, she would call on a student to summarize the paragraph in Japanese. She then asked some students to give a title to the paragraph. She repeated this process 4 times and there was also some reading aloud. After this, she had the students complete a print where the entire passage was written in Japanese with some blanks which the students would have to write. Although this is a sad and moving story, somehow this emotion was lost. It is my belief that when the content becomes difficult, teachers (not just student teachers) become so worried about the students not understanding that they use entirely Japanese (I think I have done this too!). In my English teaching methodology class, I realized that I needed to work with my students a little more on how to handle challenging reading passages. I also need to consult with the local teaching practice schools to make sure that we are on the same page about how to handle difficult texts. 

JACET 2012, TBLT, Focus on Form, and Teacher Education

I attended the JACET (Japan Association of College English Teachers) Conference in Nagoya City. I presented in a symposium titled  "Considering the feasibility of TBLT based on “Focus on Form” approach in the Japanese English classroom" with four friends. I also went there with the purpose of getting some ideas for English teacher education. 

My friends and I may have had slightly different interpretations of TBLT with Focus on Form but this is how I defined it:


In a TBLT with Focus on Form (FonF) class, adequate attention is paid to both meaning and form. Students learn language through exposure to language, producing language, and instruction. Instruction takes place in either a proactive or incidental way. 

I discussed TBLT/FonF from the perspective of student teachers in Japan. I argued that a strong version of TBLT/FONF might not be appropriate for them but there are things that they can learn from it. I tried to illustrate my point by showing a class in a high school in Thailand which was taught by students from the English Education Department at my university (We have an internship program where our students teach at Thai secondary schools in either Ayutthaya or Bangkok for two weeks). I showed that they are capable of doing a TBLT/FONF type of class. This class featured a listening task where the teachers presented about Iwate's history of tsunamis. This was followed by a fill-in the blank task which could be interpreted as focus on form. However, the dominant communication pattern in this class between teachers and students was Initiation response feedback and asking display questions. In other words, the teachers asked the students factual or language questions about their presentation language questions In some CLT textbooks, this is not considered authentic communication. However, Thai students were able to follow this class and understand the main message. Also, this class was conducted in 100% English. This means that we need to do encourage student teachers to do what is possible for them and their students rather than try to adopt a method 100%. Although this class had little free communication, I believe it was appropriate for the context.

Overall, from attending various presentations at this conference, my belief that good teaching is about experimenting with different methods and learning to apply the appropriate method based on your students' needs, desires, levels and personalities as well as the school context was reinforced.  It is important that we enjoy ourselves teaching (because we have to do it almost every day) and work hard to continuously improve our linguistic knowledge, cultural knowledge, and world knowledge as well as our teaching expertise. Students should also enjoy the classes but we also have to make sure that they are also actually learning something.  English class does not always have to be fun, but it should be interesting. These are my beliefs about teaching English as a foreign language that I would like to share with the student teachers.

The past couple of years

I really have all but given up posting to this blog but surprisingly it still seems to get some hints and occasionally I will receive a comment that is actually not spam. For about a year, I have honestly wanted to post but these days I am a zombie after 9PM which had been my time for blog writing. Two kids and advancing in age will do that to you I guess. 

I am involved in English teacher education in Japan. Basically, I teach aspiring junior and senior high school teachers in Japan the ropes about teaching English. Sometimes, though, it seems that after 10 years here I myself am still learning the ropes. In addition to the teacher education classes, I also teach general English classes at a nursing school, a night school for nurses, and another university in my city. Japanese universities are fairly liberal about letting their staff work part-time at other places. 

Anyhow, last year I was teaching at the night nursing school I had a bit of a revelation. I had a class of 20 students who had full-time jobs and were absolutely exhausted by the time they came to my class. They had to study to pass their nursing exam and nursing English was not a priority for them. My goal for the class became not to necessarily teach them English but show them how to learn a foreign language so that maybe when they had the time or the need, they would have some tools to help them learn English. I poured an immense amount of time into this class thinking about how I could reach every individual student. One day, I was lamenting a little about my class on English teaching methodology and students' apparent lack of interest. Then, I thought about the nursing school class and asked myself if I was as dedicated to the students at my full-time job. I realized that I was neglecting a lot of students who were actually interested in English and losing students who had still not made up their minds about whether or not they wanted to be English teachers. I did not want to abandon the nursing students who I had grown quite attached to, but I decided to really devote more energy to my teaching methodology class. I doubled the amount of work, gave them long reading and writing assignments - commenting on the content of the writing assignments as well as having them correct their English, and completely overhauled my lectures. By the ending of the semester, I felt that the students were giving me more effort and showing more interest in teaching English. 

I am supposed to be a researcher. However, I think an important job of a teacher is to give students as much one to one help as possible because I think the feedback a teacher can give, if done right, will scaffold the learners growth. Also, if learners know that the teacher is constantly checking their work, monitoring their progress, and actually cares whether or not the learners are making progress, it will be very motivational for the learners. Spending a lot of time on classes though can limit the amount of research I can do. No matter what though, I do not have the heart to go through the motions with my classes; I think that teaching is what I like to do the most.

The late Randy Pausch gave an amazing lecture on time management. He was able to be a successful teacher and researcher as well as watch his Pittsburgh Steelers play every month and spend time with his family. His secret seemed to be that 1) he was incredibly organized and 2) he made a schedule every day of exactly what he would do and when he would do it. So far, I have partially succeeded with 1) but for me to balance my life better, I have to become better at 2).

The difficulty of adapting tasks to Japanese Jr. High Schools without destroying them

I teach a graduate school seminar on Task Based Language Learning. For the seminar we have read the Willis book, a Framework for Task Based Learning, and a chapter from the new Paul Nation book, Teaching ESL/EFL Listening and Speaking which gives a lot of good ideas for tasks. The class consists of 3 Japanese graduate students and a researcher from Pakistan. Next week, they will go to a junior high school (JHS) and teach a lesson that is supposed to feature a language learning task. Our goal (or at least the goal that I imposed) is the following:

"Design a task supported lesson that will encourage communication and interaction among junior high school students to reinforce their understanding of how to use the language they have studied up to that point."

Last week the student-teachers designed a lesson plan which consisted of a jumbling task, where the JHS kids would have to order a story, and then a writing task where the JHS kids would have to write the ending of the story. The problem was that the story was too complex for the JHS kids and the writing task was too long. We went to the JHS last Thursday to present the plan to the teacher and she rightly pointed out that it would take about 3 classes to do such a task. On the way back to the university from the JHS I reiterated to the student-teachers that they needed to drastically reduce the content.

Tonight I got the new lesson plan from the student-teachers and I was shocked. The lesson is only task by name. It changed to a typical JHS lesson. To make a long story short, they plan to read half a story to the JHS kids in English, have them write the ending of the story in Japanese, and then change the story to English. Last the kids will read their English story to each other. What is worse is that the JHS where they will teach did a similar lesson which the student-teachers observed. The lesson was actually pretty good. What bothers me is that the graduate students' lesson is like a bad imitation. If they are going to fail, I want them to at least fail trying something original.

After they made their first lesson I encouraged the student-teachers to "adapt" tasks to the JHS. By "adapt" I meant reduce the content and think about how they could change the task to encourage the JHS students' language use. For some reason, they seemed to perceive my "adapt" to be completely destroy. We have one week until the lesson and I will meet with the graduate students tomorrow. Let's see what happens.