Giving a Workshop about Thailand at a High School in Akita

This was a while ago but in late August I visited a high school in Akita. I was asked to give them a university style lecture so that they could get a taste for higher education and develop interest in applying for university. On the day that I went, there were actually 14 or so different professors representing different institutions. I gave two 90 minute workshop style lectures and was fortunate enough to be one of the more unpopular "lectures" only having 14 students sign up for each one. I call myself "fortunate" not because I like being unpopular but that 14 is an easy number to work with and I can get a chance to talk to all the students. 

Since my area is English teacher education and the students attending the workshop probably had some kind of interest in English, I decided to conduct about half the workshop in English and half in Japanese. To make the workshop stress free, free discussion between me at the students was done in Japanese and the English parts of the workshop were mainly the kind where students listened to English and reacted. 

The topic of the workshop was school life in Thailand because my department has a teaching internship in Bangkok and I had some material I could readily adapt. Here is what I did in the workshop.

Part 1: Ice Breaking: Four corners

This was surprising successful. I gave the following statements one by one on Microsoft Powerpoint. In each corner of the room, I posted one of the following signs: I agree, I disagree, I don't understand, I don't know. When the students saw a statement, they went to the corner of the room that best expressed their feeling. When the students went to their respective corners, I then called on a few students to explain their reasoning. Of course, this activity was done in Japanese. This activity and the statements came from a social studies teacher I know, and the students were eager to tell their opinions. What was interesting was that in the first workshop, most students agreed with the first statement but in the second workshop most students disagreed. Those students who agreed said that they felt it was important to pretend you agree with people even if you might not so as to not make others feel uncomfortable (I think the Japanese translation is slightly different from the English). Those that disagreed said that you had to be true to yourself.

Anyway, I have tried four corners using different statements in a variety of workshops and usually this has been very successful.

Part 2: Introducing My Department

When introducing my department, I gave an overview of a students' four years and tried to emphasize that students' involvement with English shifts from studying English itself to learning about the world, their area of specialty or undergoing new experiences using English as a means of communication. Here is the slide (I apologize if there are mistakes with my Japanese):

After this, I said that we would learn about Thailand and English would be the language we would use to study it. 

Part 3: Basic Information about Thailand

When I gave the basic information about Thailand, the right hand column of the table below was blank. I included the information about Japan so students would have an idea what the heading of each column meant. I read the information fairly quickly and told students that the goal was not for them to get all the information correct but rather to see how much of the information they could successfully record. At the ending, I showed students the information about Thailand so they could confirm their answers. There were, of course, some words I taught before hand such as "constitutional monarchy, Buddhism, etc..." Because this information appeared in the Japan column, I could teach these words without revealing the answers about Thailand.

Part 4: A Thai and Japanese English Class

I showed a short video of an English class in Thailand and an English class in Japan, both of which I had filmed. I asked students to write the similarities and differences between the classes. This was done in Japanese. Similarities included students' greetings at the beginning and ending of class, uniforms, and the high status of the teachers. Differences included textbooks, the noise level of the classes, and the activities.

Part 5: A Profile of a Bangkok Family

I showed the students a DVD about a family living in Bangkok from the Families of the World series. I have found that if I turn on the English subtitles and pause the DVD frequently asking questions that students can follow the story. I gave students the questions in the left column and every minute or so, I would stop the video and ask the students to answer the questions.

Unfortunately, we did not get to finish the video but the point of the workshop was basically for students to experience university English and maybe leave the class with rekindled curiosity about the world outside their high school and increased interest in pursuing university study. Students supposedly did write their responses to my workshop but I have yet to receive them. I had been waiting for the responses to write this post but I realized that if I do not write soon, I will completely forget what I did. 

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. 

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.

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.

Questioning Education for International Understanding

I just read the book Imperial Subjects As Global Citizens by Mark Lincicome. It describes the international education movement in Japan from 1910 to the 1990s. I read it after judging a speech contest in which junior high school students spoke in Japanese about their ideal kind of international exchange. The top 6 students in this contest would get to visit a junior high school in Canada as representatives of the city I live in. All the JHS students I heard speak were remarkably mature for their age and were able to articulate their thoughts enthusiastically and well. When I was a JHS student, I was not even close to their level of maturity nor would I have been capable of making such appealing speeches. Nevertheless, there was something about the speech contest bothered me but I was not sure what. The book had been sitting unread on my bookshelf for about a year and I finally decided to open it up and see if I could figure out what was bothering me.

In  a nutshell, the book argues that throughout modern Japanese history, there has been conflicting purposes in international education. One purpose of international education has been to bring up creative, compassionate and independent thinking students who can contribute to world peace. On the other hand, another purpose has been to bring up patriotic students who will respect their country and share Japan's wonderful culture with the rest of the world.

Of course, I think that there is a lot to like about Japan. If I did not think so, I would not be here. Every year, I help run a program that brings students in the English Education Department at my university to high schools in Thailand for for a two week teaching internship. At these schools, the intern teach Thai students about various aspects of Japan. In the past, we have done such topics as seasonal events, high school life, ghost stories, origami, toys, and Iwate's history of tsunami. Usually after the teacher trainees have finished their classes, the Thai students have a very positive image of Japan. Now, before I go any further, please don't get me wrong, I am happy that the Thai students have a positive image of Japan, they should.

Nevertheless, every country has history which they regret. Japan's colonization of Manchuria as well as the Korean peninsula and the human rights violations accompanying this would most likely fall in this category. This history is a big contributor to the resentment that many Chinese and Koreans have towards Japan and definitely affects relations between these countries. I think that this resentment makes disputes over the Senkaku Islands with China and Takeshima Island with Korea that much more difficult to resolve.

In the speech contest I judged, most of the students talked about aspects of regional culture or Japanese culture that they wanted to show the Canadian students. Few talked about what they wanted to learn in Canada or what they knew about the place they would be visiting.  It seems to me that a lot of what is emphasized in "international understanding" is showing positive aspects about Japanese culture to non-Japanese. Furthermore, it seems that the image of "non-Japanese" that many students have are anglo westerners. Nevertheless, the largest foreign populations in Japan are China and Korea, respectively.

An important part of understanding other people is to try to look at things from their perspective and learn from it. In my daily life here (I cannot speak about Japan as a whole), this seems to be missing. In Thailand, in addition to having the Japanese teachers teach about Japanese culture, we need to ensure that there is a component where the Thai students teach us about their daily lives and customs.  Of course, giving students these kinds of experiences won't immediately solve tensions between Japan and its neighbors. Nevertheless I think that it could be a start.

Cycling from Morioka City to the Aomori City Ferry Terminal

My route from Morioka to Aomori City
大きな地図で見る

On August 11, the day after a one week business trip I set off on bicycle from my home in Morioka, Iwate to Aomori City. My plan was to do the trip in one day and take the ferry from Aomori City to Hakodate. After that, I planned on cycling to my wife's hometown which was about 300 kilometers from Hakodate. To make a long story short, although I did make it to Aomori city on the first day, cycling 185 kilometers, I got a heatstroke and had to finish the remainder of the trip to my wife's hometown by train. This was my fourth time doing this trip and I have cycled longer distances on hotter days so it was kind of a shock for me to be knocked out on the first day. Anyway, this post is for anyone who is interested in cycling in Japan or the cost of emergency room treatment!

Details of the route

My planned route was to take route 282 from Morioka which would merge into route 7 in Aomori. Route 282 is a very up and down road and there are three parts which feature substantial climbing. However, I think it is the best route to Aomori City. The other way, going on route 4, is about 30 kilometers longer. Although there are less mountains, you feel as if you are going uphill the whole time. I prefer the long ascents followed by the quick descents where you can actually go faster than the automobile speed limit (50Km and hour)!

Anyway, if you take Route 282, the difficult climbs are
1. Before the Appi Highlands (安比高原）

大きな地図で見る
2. Before and after the Tayama Area(田山）

大きな地図で見る
3. And by far the worst climb is in Kosaka（小坂), Akita. I think this is Akita prefecture's way of telling you not to leave. Kosaka is after Kazuno(鹿角） and features a particularly vicious mountain road called the 坂梨峠. After riding uphill gradually for 20 or so kilometers, you arrive at a steep winding mountain road. When you reach the top of the mountain, a sign welcomes you into Aomori prefecture. I averaged about 6 to 8 kilometers an hour going up the mountain and since I was riding so slow, the bugs could also keep up with me and my sweaty body seemed to be quite an enticing feast for them.

大きな地図で見る

After merging with route 7, I decided to not go through Hirosaki but rather take route 13 through Hirakawa City (平川市) and Kuroishi City (黒石市）because it would decrease the trip by about 7 kilometers. This was about the last 40 kilometers of the trip. However, there were a lot of traffic lights and I got frustrated with all the stop and go.

Details about what happened to me
Basically, I left my house at 5:30 AM and my goal was to make it to Aomori City by about 4PM for a 5PM ferry to Hakodate City. I felt great all the way to Kazuno which was about 80 kilometers or so into the trip. I stopped at the "road station" （道の駅）,  had some well-deserved ice cream and snack and stocked up on water and sports drinks. I was confident that I would make it to the ferry on time. After that, I knew I would have my biggest challenge which was Kosaka and the dreaded mountain. Since I had already conquered two mountain roads though, I felt fairly confident.

大きな地図で見る

Soon after leaving Kazuno, I started feeling tired. My pace slowed down. My plan was to keep on cycling until I got to the top of the mountain and into Aomori prefecture but I actually had to stop three times to rest. All of a sudden, my energy seemed to have been lost. Despite not feeling 100% I conquered the mountain road. Although I planned to rest on the top of the mountain, the bugs would not leave me so I had to continue until I had descended the mountain. The video below shows me about to accomplish my conquest of the mountain.

After my descent, I finally found a place to rest at the Ikari ga seki Road Station (see below). At this time, I did not feel hungry but I ate anyway. I also realized that it was 1:50 PM and I only had 2 hours to travel 50 kilometers. All of a sudden, I realized that I was behind schedule and would have to hurry to make my ferry.


大きな地図で見る

If I had been 100% I could have made the ferry. Although there was some stop and go, the road between Ikari ga seki and Aomori City was mostly flat with some modest hills and sometimes me going against the wind. Nevertheless, by this time, I was definitely weaker than usual. I also started to experience pretty strong muscle cramps in my legs.  I had to stop about 6 times to stretch and massage my legs. The good news was, each time I was able to recover. The bad news was, each time I lost A LOT of time.

Another problem I experienced was getting my foot out of my petals. A week before, I had bought the kind of pedals which your shoes hook into. Every time you get off your bicycle, you have to detach your shoes from the petal by twisting your feet. If you do not do this before stopping, then you will fall with the bicycle. For some reason, in the last 50 kilometers, I forgot to detach my shoes from the petals 4 times. Two times, as I was falling my shoes some how dislodged from the pedals and I landed on my feet. Two times, though, I fell together with the bicycle.

Going to the Hospital

I made it to the ferry terminal and 5PM and I missed my ferry. Fortunately, there were later ferries I could catch. The problem was, I noticed that I really did not feel well. I felt thirsty, nauseous, dizzy, and had bad muscle cramps. Usually, after a long ride I feel good to rest no matter how strenuous the day was. This time, though, I did not have the energy even to stand in line to get a seat for the next ferry. Some people behind me in line were nice enough to let me sit down and call me when it was my turn to go to the front. After getting my ticket, I lied down on the floor of the ferry terminal but after an hour I felt about the same. At that time, my wife called me and when I explained to her how I felt she told me that I was probably having a heat stroke. After I got off the phone, by chance some motorcyclists approached me and asked me if I was ok. To my surprise, they recommended that I go to the hospital by ambulance rather than take a taxi because if I go by ambulance I can get treated immediately and the ambulance will choose the hospital for me. I told them that I knew I should see a doctor quickly but I did not think I was in a life or death situation. They were emphatic in insisting that it was fine to call an ambulance even if you were not near death and persuaded me to do so.

The staff at the ferry terminal called the ambulance, took care of my bicycle and bags, and let me rest in one of their back rooms. The paramedics came and put me on a stretcher and whisked me to the nearest hospital. They were very nice, they seemed to understand my situation, and hearing them explain everything to the hospital on the phone while we were riding there gave me a sense of security. In the back of my head, though, I was worried about how much this would cost, especially since I did not have my health insurance booklet with me.

I got to the hospital at about 7:30 PM. They gave me a blood test and then started giving me an IV to get me hydrated. They confirmed my wife's diagnosis. After about 45 minutes, I started to feel much better. However, the doctor said that my blood test results were bad and I had put a big strain on my kidneys. She said that I should not continue my bicycle trip because I could do more damage to myself with super-strenuous exercise.

By about 1:30 AM, I had had two bags of fluids put into me and I asked to be discharged from the hospital rather than spend the night because I really wanted to go to Hokkaido and see my family whom I had not seen in almost two weeks. When leaving the hospital, I had to give the hospital a 5000 yen deposit for my hospital bill and they said I should call them on Monday (it was Saturday night) so that I could settle the bill. In Japan, health insurance is nationalized and patients have to cover 30% of the costs of their treatment unless the treatment is above a certain amount, then the government pays everything. Also, it turns out the ambulances are free! My bill turned out to be 6500 yen or about $80 US.

I checked out of the hospital and was back at the ferry terminal by 2AM, August 12. I took the 5AM ferry to Hakodate and arrived there at 8:45AM. After arriving in Hakodate, I rode my bicycle very slowly to a friend's house where I spent the whole day sleeping. After resting on August 13, I took the train from Hakodate to my wife's hometown along the route which I should have rode on my bicycle. I felt like a defeated man and very embarrassed but I will do this trip again.

What I Learned from this ordeal:

• Bicycle trips should never be rushed. If I had not been in such a hurry, this would not have happened. Next time, I will only go about 100 - 140 kilometers a day and try to enjoy the sites and scenery more. I have actually learned this lesson before but forgot. 
• I need to take better care of myself before going on a bicycle trip. Up until the day before the trip, I have been on a one week business trip where I was dining out almost every night and probably not living a very health life style. I believe that attempting a 185 kilometer journey less than 12 hours after I arrived home from my business trip contributed to me getting a heat stroke when I should not have. 
• Before the trip, I spent a lot of money buying a bicycle carrier for my car so we could transport the bicycle from my wife's hometown to Morioka using our car. However, when I was in Hakodate, I learned that I could actually ship my bicycle by takyuubin to Morioka for 3450 yen which is much cheaper than the cost of a bicycle carrier. Unless, you're going to use the bicycle carrier frequently, I realized it can be more economical just to occasionally ship it home.
• Bicycle bags are expensive but they are good to have. Putting my bicycle in its bag, I was able to ship it home to Morioka. I also could have carried the bicycle in the train with me by putting it in its back but this time I just sent it home.
• Next time, it would be better not to cycle alone. Anyone want to join me?   

Using Vocabulary Notebooks Part 5

Well, I just finished presenting about using vocabulary notebooks (VNs) at the annual Japan Society of English Education Conference in Aichi. I will summarize how I used vocabulary notebooks and what I learned from using them. Again, as I have written before, I introduced vocabulary notebooks as a tool for students to learn how to use the words they were exposed to in class.

First, I tried Process A for using vocabulary notebooks:

Process A

• Students record words into their VNs for homework→
• Students share their VN entries with each other at the beginning of class (They exchange sheets and quiz each other) → 
• Speaking, reading or writing activity using the VN words →
• Students update their VNs with new knowledge

Below is the sheet I ended up using. In "Using vocabulary notebooks part 3" I explained each item on the sheet in detail. 

As I explained in the last post, in the first quiz we did after Activity A a total of two times for 15 words in the textbook, students struggled to write important information and example sentences. In the quiz, students were supposed to choose 5 words for which to write "other forms", "important information," and "example sentences." I told students that they did not have to learn to use all the words productively. Rather, they should choose which words to use productively based on their frequency and whether or not the word is related to their fields. Below, is a student's quiz. I have written the overall class averages for each item. The student got the fourth best score in the class but as you can see even she struggled to write "important information". Additionally, she only used the "important information" to make one example sentence. Eleven out of the 21 students who took the test left the "important information" field completely blank.

After giving the quiz, I thought that students must not have written the "important information" into their vocabulary notebooks, but the student above actually wrote word information for 9 of the words. The word sheet from her vocabulary notebook is below.

What happened? Students wrote action logs about their quizzes and I categorized their comments into the following:

Action log comments about the quizzes N=19
Category	Number
Did not study	6
Confident with their performance	4
Could not write example sentences	3
Could not understand the English definitions in the quizzes.	3
Wrote comments, but not about the quiz	2
no comment	2

Obviously, one reason that students did not do so well was because they did not study. However, they also wrote that they could not write example sentences. No one said anything about important information. I decided to introduce a new vocabulary notebook process into the class and hope that students would do better on the next quiz after experiencing the first one.

For the next unit of the textbook, we did Process A and Process B. Process B was:

Process B

• Speaking/ writing/ reading activity → 
• Students record words that they learned in the activity → 
• Students change sheets and quiz each other →
• As a class we choose which words to have on the quiz

We had the following set of words from the two processes:

Process A: Textbook words (Theme = Landmines)	Process B (Words from class activities)
Words A landmine, ban, burn, poverty, explosion, victim, injury, medical care,  treaty, blindness, valuable, conflict, cluster bomb	present, distinguish, laziness, confidence, introduction, demand, aim

To make a long story short, the students did a better job using the Process B words productively in the test. However, one of the reasons for this was I had given the students "important information for words like "distinguish" (e.g, distinguish A from B). However, this got me thinking that maybe students would do better learning the words they chose to learn rather than the words. 

After the quiz, I gave students a questionnaire, where they had to write whether or not they agreed/disagreed with the below statements and why:

• It is easy for me to find a word’s “important information” (Agree/Disagree)
• Result: Agree 7/ Disagree 12
• It is easy for me to learn a word’s “important information”  (Agree/Disagree)
• Result: Agree 2/ Disagree 17

The students who disagreed with these statements wrote that there were so many kinds of "important information" that they did not know which to learn. For example, if students looks up the work "introduction," they will find the following collocations, "introduction of," "introduction to," and "make introductions." There is a lot of information and they do not know whether to learn all the information or which of the information they should learn.  

At this stage of the semester, we had about four weeks left. For the last unit of the textbook, we did "Process A" for using vocabulary notebooks and then I tried "Process C" two times:

Process C

• Students complete an adjective with preposition worksheet (1st time)/ verb with preposition work sheet (second time) → 
• Students write 4 words they want to learn in their VNs (students are instructed to make REAL sentences)
• Students change sheets and quiz each other

At the ending of this cycle I gave students one more quiz. For this quiz, students had six words from the textbook (land mines) and I asked them to write other forms, important information, and example sentences for two of the words. Then, they had to choose any 4 adjectives and 4 verbs they learned from the grammar practice and write all the information into their quiz. Here is one student's quiz:

	Other forms	Important information	Example sentences	Overall average
Quiz 1	54%	24%	59%	59%
Quiz 2	57%	35%	68%	63%
Quiz 3	47%	62%	68%	70%

I think students probably did best on Quiz 3 because:

1. They did not have to discover the collocations for the verbs or adjectives themselves, they learned the collocations from the grammar sheets.
2. The verbs and adjectives that students chose to learn were high-frequency, common words.
3. Students had written meaningful sentences about the verbs and adjectives and perhaps this left a bigger impression on their memories.
4. Students reported that they "studied hard" for this quiz because it was their last one.

Overall, based on my experience so far, I will end this post by making the following recommendations for using vocabulary notebooks:

• Understanding parts of speech, collocations, and dictionary skills is essential for effective VN use. This can take students a semester or more to understand, and teachers will have to vote significant and valuable time to practicing this. I realized that if I had done an activity like Process C at the beginning of the year, students might have learned how to write "other information" sooner. Nevertheless, on their evaluation of vocabulary notebooks, students wrote that "important information" was helpful to learn a word.
• Students should use the VNs to produce meaningful language (Having students write true example sentences about themselves is better) . Sometimes students copy sentences they don't understand from dictionaries. The drawback for having students write their own, original sentences, however, is that many times they write incorrect sentences into their vocabulary notebooks (approximately 25% of example sentences that students wrote in their VNs was incorrect).
• Students might do better remembering more frequent words or words that they choose. 
• In a questionnaire, some students wrote “The word sheets were too big to use in the train” as a minus for using vocabulary notebooks. This means that students were likely studying for the quizzes on their was to university right before class started. For remembering the breadth of information on the vocabulary sheets, some kind of learning schedule should be introduced so students can plan adequate time to learn the productive information of a word.
• Students should not learn the productive information for all the words in their vocabulary notebooks! They should choose which words they think they should learn to use! I think this is important for autonomous learning.
•  Notebook sheets can become disorganized. Have a place for students to write the topic on each sheet. 
•  If you require that students write certain words in their notebooks, it is best to post the list on-line so that students who miss class can catch up. 
• Quizzes motivate students to update their VNs but they can be time consuming to grade for the teacher and time consuming for the students to take.
• The teachers should periodically collect students vocabulary sheets to see whether or not they are writing them correctly. It is impossible to examine the sheets in detail, but writing a comment or giving the students a check I think will motivate them to continue to write their sheets.
• Students should also write their own words into the sheets and they should be evaluated on the words.

The following issues with using vocabulary notebooks remain:

• It is very time consuming to make and grade quizzes as well as collect vocabulary sheets. Is there anything I can do to speed up this process?
• Students only write words in their sheets because I tell them too. Am I encouraging autonomous learning?
• Students often write wrong information into their notebooks and it is impossible for the teacher to point out every single wrong piece of information.
• Vocabulary notebooks take time away from other activities we could be doing.
• I thought the averages for the quizzes, although improved, were low. Was the level of difficulty to high? Were the students not putting out enough effort? Or, is the VN program I have fundamentally flawed in some way?
• How can I introduce a memory schedule for learning words and would students really follow it?

Overall, I am glad that I tried it this semester and the students were generally positive about the intervention. I think that the students and myself learned how to use dictionaries better, what constitutes productive knowledge of a word, the importance of learning high frequency word, and strategies for learning to use words productively. I will continue this next semester, but from now on I should probably start blogging about what I am supposed to be researching full time: jr. and senior high school English teacher development in Japan.

Lastly, if anyone out there actually dared to read this monstrosity of a long post, I thank you.

Using Vocabulary Notebooks Part 4

Well, I wrote a somewhat positive post last time about students' reactions to the vocabulary notebooks (VNs) in the last post. Well, after the students' first quiz, strictly speaking from the standpoint of the results, the VNs appear to have been almost worthless. 

In the quiz, the students had an English or Japanese definition of a word in our textbook. They then had to write the English word and part of speech of that word. Then, they had to write "another form" and "important information" for 5 of the words and "example sentences" for six of the words. For other information, they were supposed to write information that would help them use a particular word. For example, for a verb such as "protest" the could write what prepositions go it, such as "against." For the example sentence they could write something like, "We protested against the new tax law." To find out this information, I was hoping that they would use a dictionary and had devoted quite a bit of class time to demonstrating such dictionary use strategies and made a rudimentary webpage that linked to various dictionaries.

I do not have the exact statistics with me but of the 21 students who took the quiz, only about 4 wrote five entries for "other information." Also, only four students could demonstrate that they knew how to use a word in the "example sentence section." Sentences such as "My brother is alcoholism" for the word "alcoholism" and "I protest to the law" for protest showed me that many students had no idea how to use the words.

What happened?

I did not collect students' vocabulary sheets but I did ask students to write about the quizzes in their action logs. The majority of the students who did poorly simply wrote that they did not study. Others wrote that is was difficult to understand words that were defined in English. Lastly, others wrote that it was too difficult for them to write example sentences. Obviously, one factor is that students did not study. Even if they did not study, though, I would think that through writing their VNs and experiencing the words in class, they would still be able to make good guesses about how to use the words. This was not the case which means that another undeniable factor is that the students and I are not on the same page about using VNs as a means of developing productive knowledge of the language. 


Tomorrow, we will have class again and I will emphasize the following:


First, students might seemed overwhelmed by having to write so much information for every single word. However, they do not have to learn to use every single word that they encounter. Rather, they should learn to use words that they think are important for them to learn or that are frequent words in English. They will only have to answer word usage information on the words they want to learn to use. So, they do not have to write exhaustive information for every new word in class.


Second, I will go over why I think writing "How to use" information is important and show them how to do it again. Basically, in the end, I cannot teach them how to use English, they have to teach themselves and using dictionaries to confirm how to use a word is one way (of very many).


In a couple of weeks, I will provide an update. I will also collect their vocabulary sheets to determine what kind of information they wrote.  

Using Vocabulary Notebooks Part 3

Well, I have now finished one cycle of my action research into using vocabulary notebooks. I have lots of data: students' word sheets and quizzes, students' comments on in-class work, and students' questionnaire results. I have not really had the time to analyze it but I will give a rough account of what has happened. I do not know how much I will be able to prove whether students' improved in any way, but I think I can at least give some ideas for using vocabulary notebooks (hereafter VNs). Today, I will talk about steps 2 - 5 below:

Step 1) Identifying an issue, problem, or puzzle we wish to investigate in our own context

Step 2) Thinking and planning an appropriate action to address the concern

Step 3) carrying out the action

Step 4) Observing the apparent outcomes of the action

Step 5) reflecting on the outcomes and other possibilities

Step 6) repeating these steps again

(2) Thinking and planning an appropriate action to address the concern  

As I said before, the main problem with the class where I would use the VNs is that they really struggle to express themselves in English. It's not because they are 'shy', rather many of the students do not seem to have the basic knowledge necessary to put a sentence together (See my last post). I thought that I could get students to reduce their global errors and write cleared English is students got into the habit of confirming or looking up word usage in dictionaries when they were confused about how to use a word or phrase. I also thought that the VNs could be a means for them to record this newly learned information. Basically, I was hoping that students would develop the kind of skills necessary to enable them to be their own teachers of English. Students VNs were binders which consisted of vocabulary sheets. Below is a sample entry, it is a little different from the one I posted a couple of weeks ago (Click on the image to enlarge).

Parts of the word sheet:

Pronunciation: I told students that they do not have to memorize how to write phonetic symbols but they should know how to read them. I also gave them an easy to read IPA chart. Sometimes there are words in English that even I can't read and this section was designed to encourage learners to confirm the stress placement and pronunciation of a word they were not sure about.

Part of speech:  This might seem a little too grammatical but part of speech of the word helps students understand its basic usage. 

Word/phrase-frequency: Here, learners write not only the word they learn but also the frequency of the word, because the learning of high frequency words should be prioritized. If a word is low frequency and they might rarely use it, then maybe only passive knowledge of the word is necessary. 

Other forms: I wanted students to write the word if it had an alternative part of speech or the word with its prefixes or suffixes. An important part of vocabulary knowledge is understanding how other words can be derived from one base word. 

Important information: Here, learners wrote the collocations of a word, for example, if the word is a verb, they would write the prepositions that occur together with it. If the word is a noun, they would write which adjectives appeared with it. They also wrote such information as whether a verb was transitive or intransitive and whether a noun was countable or uncountable. I think this section is most related to the goal of having students look up word usage in their dictionaries.

Example Sentence: Students here are encouraged to write their own original sentences based on what they had written in Important information. In the past, students would copy sentences from dictionaries and memorize them but I was dubious about whether this could really help them learn how to use a work.

Japanese of English Meaning: I have actually found that online English to English learner dictionaries such as Macmillan Dictionary and Thesaurus have very easy to understand definitions. So, I have told students to try to use the English to English definitions when possible to broaden their vocabulary.  Lastly, students could write the Japanese or English meaning of a word. 

(3) Carrying out the action

Students have weekly assignments to fill out their VNs and I also have tried to utilize their VNs in class activities. Here are two frequent patterns of VN use in the class:

First pattern of VN use

Record words into VNs for homework (Before Class)→ Students share their VN entries with each other at the beginning of class →Speaking, reading or writing activity using the VN words →Students update their VNs with new knowledge → Quiz on VN words (After Class)

Second pattern of VN use

Students participate in a discussion or read an authentic text in class → Students write words they learned in their VNs

(4) Observing the apparent outcomes

Ok, now this is going to get messy.; To observe the apparent outcomes, I am using a pre and post dictionary strategy use questionnaire, students' action logs, anlysis of students' VNs and quizzes, and a pre-and post writing task. Right now, I have about 4 classes worth of action logs, two quizzes, students' first VN sheets, and thei pre-test results. I am still thinking about how the hell I am going to analyze this. For the time being, I think the best thing to do is look at: 1) What kind of words they are writing into their vocabulary sheets; 2) Their quiz performances; 3) Reactions to class activities.

(5) Analyzing the outcomes

 (Class work from the teacher's perspective)
I have been pretty successful with the first pattern of VN use. For example, here is one class activity: Students write six words into their notebooks for homework → 
Students quiz each other on the words, important information, etc. at the beginning of class → 
Students have six pictures and have to write a story using the pictures. Students write the story and end up using most of the new words. → 
Students update their VNs.→ 
Eventually students have a quiz.

However, I have not had much success with Pattern 2. Students will not write anything in their notebook that they are not allowed to. It seems like they have a high incentive to write what I tell them to because they will be tested on the words. However, the ultimate goal is for students themselves to choose words/phrases that they need to learn and use VNs as a tool to help them learn. 

(One way to encourage autonomy in my primarily teacher-controlled class)

One way I have tried to encourage students to choose which words they will need to learn is, for example, on a quiz of 15 words, they choose 5 - 6 words for which they will write "other forms," "important information" and "example sentences." In other words, they will choose the words they think they will need the productive knowledge for.

 I gave the above quiz last week and I have only taken a quick look at them, but it seems that most students wrote original sentences for the example sentence section. A lot of students could not write pieces of information for the other forms area and their example sentences were incorrect. This leads me to believe is that all they studied were the meanings of the words. When I analyze the quizzes, students' action logs, and their vocabulary sheets, I will better be able to explain their quiz results and how they used the VNs.

(6) Repeating the steps again

Here are the issues I have to improve on:

1. Students write their own words into the VNs. These words can be words they encountered in their homework, from class activities, or any other English-use experience.
2. To learn to use the words they feel are important, students learn to make use of word usage information in their dictionaries.
3. Time spent on VN notebooks should start to decrease as students know how to use them.
4. Students should not write all the word information at once. Students should write the word information as their understanding of the word evolves.