Mt Unzen Disaster Memorial Hall - Shimabara TPRS workshop venue, Sep 2010

A TPRS workshop for language teachers was held in Shimabara, Kyushu, Sep. 18-20. The workshop leader was Susan Gross, a retired teacher of French and Spanish in Colorado high schools, and an experienced workshop leader. There was an interpreter, Yuki Watanabe, who translated everything into Japanese, and did an excellent job.

How did I hear about it? Ben Slavic’s blog.

Update: What got me interested in TPRS? I like to hear other teachers’ answer to this question, so here’s mine.

Just over a year ago, I had been teaching my students using a new method that involved testing students almost every class. The test was a conversation with them. The instructor models the new structures, explains new vocab, etc., then has students practice in pairs and goes around to monitor, then sits in a corner of the room and calls students up for conversations and gives points to students for fluency, using target structures, askingquestions, and using strategies such as “Pardon?” “Did I what?” “What does xxxxx mean?” etc.  I thought it was interesting: the “test” gave students a clear goal and an incentive to practice. The textbook was clear, with diagrams and exercises, plus the key parts had a Japanese translation. What could go wrong?

Just one thing: my students did not improve.

Much as I tried to avoid this embarrassing discovery, it was staring me in the face. At about that time, I read the experience of an American teaching English at university in Thailand. On his blog, he told of the same discovery:

1. his students could not speak English in spite of years of English in high school
2. his students could not speak English in spite of taking his class for xxx months/years.
3. his students really wanted to gain fluency in the language, regardless of the university classes’ official goals
4. the university administrators (his bosses) had their own specified goals and targets and approaches, which while traditional (increasing vocab, improving reading comprehension, raising proficience test scores, etc.) were not always compatible with improving fluency

He came to this conclusion: his students were really only interested in gaining fluency in English, and he was letting them down. Short story: he got fired, studied Language Acquisition as part of his M.A. , discovered Krashen and Blaine Ray and TPRS, and is now developing and selling his own materials.

That made me think: I had been confused about my goals. I knew in my heart that many students secretly wanted to be able to speak and understand English (i.e. fluency), at least to a basic level. When they said they wanted to improvie their TOEIC scores, they were to some extent parroting what they had been told or had heard. Also, that’s what I really wanted, too – for them to achieve a basic degree of fluency. Susan Gross told a similar story about how she came to TPRS.

I spent last summer vacation researching and reading as much as I could about TPRS. In the autumn (2nd) semester, I picked one of my general English classes to experiment on, and away I went (read entries in this blog for October 2009).

That’s my story. Now back to the Shimabara workshop.

55 people had signed up for the workshop. There were 30-40 on most days. This was my first TPRS workshop. I had read Blaine Ray‘s book and the 2 books by Ben Slavic. I had also seen Ben Slavic’s videos of him teaching French. I had tried TPRS in all my classes since April 2010.

First, a common misperception: TPRS = Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytellling. The TPR in TPRS does not refer to Total Physical Response, a form of direct language teaching developed by Dr. James Asher. (Blaine Ray, the inventor of TPRS, began with TPR, then developed the storytelling component as a way to extend this. However, as many people had become familiar with the name TPRS, the acronym was kept.)

“Proficiency” means fluency: a facility with the language; it does not necessarily mean a native-speaker’s level of proficiency.

What I got out of the workshop (in no particular order):

1. Circling does not include asking “wh-” questions to which the answer is not already in the story. Such questions can be interesting and help liven up a story or a class, but they are not circling.
2. Asking “wh-” questions to elicit weird, creative or funny details to add to the story is not a compulsory part of TPRS. I had been doing this with every story, but guess what? Students did not find it as entertaining as I did!
3. There is a natural progression towards having students write stories. This is common sense, but I had not thought about this carefully. In my writing class, I had had students writing their own versions to stories right from day 1. The result? I discovered that a few could write quite well, and a few could not write even 1 sentence and were now feeling intimidated. I then had to try and rescue these students in the latter half of the semester. However, 3 stopped attending. Two kept going, which says more about their courage and determination than about my teaching.
4. Pizzazz is NOT an optional extra, but vital to successful TPRS. Susie introduced this topic on the last day. It has more to do with manner, attitude, posture, and so on. I understood pizzazz is a device to do 2 things:
   1. make and keep the linguistic material interesting and the students attentive and motivated, and
   2. trick students into forgetting that they are learning.
5. I’m not a big fan of the “rah-rah-rah” approach to language-teaching, but I could see how it would be a useful tool in a teacher’s “toolbox” as it were, particularly for elementary teachers. And Susie had such obvious fun doing it.
6. Information processing, or how humans remember stuff. “Survival” and “emotion” were the top two: in a life-or-death situation, memory and attention work at top capacity. Also, strong emotions help anchor experience and information in our brains. Given that we could not easily bring our students to near-death experiences or make them cry every day, what are some other things that help memory and retrieval? Meaning and sense.

   This relates to pizzazz above. Pizzazz can help raise the emotional level. Pizzazz can also help relate material to students’ own lives, thereby enhancing meaning and sense. Some factors in pizzazz are

   • gestures
   • intonation (pitch, tone, speed and volume)
   • body posture
   • incongruous detail (this was not on Susie’s list).

   For example, by exaggerating gestures or voice intonation, you can make an ordinary and not particularly interesting story funny. Younger children enjoy exaggeration at any time. Older learners understand the incongruity of taking a mundane story and exaggerating the telling of it.

   In both cases, students forget that they are “learning” (I don’t mean “learning” as opposed to “acquisition” but in the sense that they are in a classroom and supposed to be academically studying something.) Younger children can forget this easily, especially when told a story. It is more difficult to seduce older learners away from academic study and into an imaginary world, but what better way than stories, and if the stories are so-so (and we cannot always find enchanting stories), then exaggeration and pizzazz in the telling and in the questioning can go a long way towards tricking students into acquiring the language (i.e. subconsciously) by distracting them with big gestures and exaggerated tones and facial expressions and incongruous details.

7. “Nothing motivates like success” was a kind of mantra of the workshop. I began to understand how to implement it: try to ensure that at every step, students are not only not intimidated but are given tasks that they are pretty sure they can do and do well.
   In my writing class, I have the weakest group of students in the year. I did not spend much time reviewing language acoustically, but instead dove straight in to having them write their own versions of stories (I used “Look, I Can Talk”). The result? Three students stopped attending. I learned that several students are very capable of writing well and perhaps should not be in that level. Just two students were obviously unable to cope, but they stuck with it. I will try a different approach in the second semester.
8. Last but by no means least, I met a few likeminded people. Until now, I only knew one other person using TPRS in Japan, and he is not teaching at university. I am also very interested to see how the Japanese teachers will fare. How many will try TPRS in the classroom? With what success? What difficulties will they face? If TPRS / teaching for fluency is going to make any kind of mark in Japan, it will have to be implemented successfully by Japanese teachers of language. As they start out trying this new approach, they are going to need support – practical and moral. The natural place to look for this support will be people they meet at workshops like this one.
9. Thank you, Susan! And thank you, Martha, for organizing this. Great energy, lots of information. In a year, I’ll be ready for another workshop. Meanwhile, I hope to keep learning by means of the TPRS Japan forum.

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A while back, I posted about using dictation in EFL classes. I recently gave dictations in my final exams, and reading the results taught me some further uses for dictation.

• Students failed to notice how a falling intonation indicated the end of a sentence. I did not announce the punctuation, as I had not consistently done so in earlier dictations, and did not want to start now (or then, i.e. in the middle of an exam). It had not occurred to me that the significance of falling intonation was not obvious and needs to be taught. They put full-stops where there should have been commas, and failed to put full-stops (or subsequent capital letters) where they were indicated by meaning and by my falling intonation.
• Dictation can be used to not only test (or review) known or previously taught vocabulary, but also to test if students have acquired enough patterns of English spelling to make a reasonable guess at spelling unfamiliar words. (All my students failed miserably at “champagne”.)
• The dictation revealed grammatical weaknesses I had not covered (I assumed students had acquired enough English, but I was wrong), e.g.:  I gave New Year’s presents two my children.

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Having [students] do time writings without editing is an excellent way to assess fluency.

I’ve been having my students write for 5 minutes almost every class, usually at the beginning, sometimes at the end. Sometimes I set the topic, but most times I left them free to write whatever they wanted. I had them count the words and keep a record. These writing samples were great sources of information, both personal (about students) and linguistic (they revealed areas of grammar, syntax or vocabulary that needed more practice).

I did timed writings in almost all my classes, including “Speaking” and “Listening” classes.

This is a follow-up to my previous entry on this subject.

If you are looking for a website to help you teach academic writing to university students (whether EFL students or native-English-speaking students), I recommend those by Gavin Budge (Writing for the Reader), and by Andy Gillett: Academic Writing.

As many of my students don’t seem to be clear on what academic writing is, or what it is for, I found the following sections of Writing for the Reader particularly helpful: I paraphrased some sections or translated them into Japanese for my students. I don’t actually teach Academic Writing, but two of my courses require students to write several essays which must include references and citations in the MLA style. Judging from my experience this year (academic year 2009-2010), most students don’t really have much of a clue. Students who wrote an essay comparing a British children’s story with a Japanese children’s story, for example, often wrote more just describing the plot than actually comparing the two stories.

I found the pages below particularly useful when helping me explain the why’s and wherefore’s of academic writing to my students. If this year’s experience is any guide, I shall need to spend more time on these basics.

I discovered several problems with my students’ academic writing.

1. Problem #1: many of my students wrote lots describing the plots of the stories they were using for their comparison essay. See “writer-oriented prose” from Gavin Budge’s website.
2. Problem #2:  students were making all kinds of assumptions about who their readers would be and what they would know. Essentially, they assumed their “readers” would be Japanese college students like themselves; in other words, they had not thought about who the readers would be at all, they were still writer-oriented. In the case of my writing and blogging students, they assumed the readers would be their classmates; in the case of the more academic classes, they assumed their readers would be their classmates and/or me, their instructor, a gaijin familiar with Japan and things Japanese. (See “rhetorical situation” below.)
3. They seemed unaware of the purpose of proper referencing,  paragraphing and formatting. Gavin Budge wrote the following in an explanatory article, and it was this that first caught my attention and made me want to explore his site more:

The other fundamental problem with most existing guides to academic writing, whether in book or electronic form, seemed to me to be that they don’t explain the purpose behind the advice they presented, a purpose often clear to those who have already mastered the craft of academic prose, but whose obviousness can’t be assumed for the students the guides are supposed to be addressing. Referencing conventions, for example, are often set out in considerable detail, but the purpose of providing references is rarely discussed. And yet all studies of the learning process show that material which is assimilated superficially, without an understanding of its purpose, is quickly forgotten, so that it is little wonder that even those students who have consulted a writing guide often fail to reference effectively, by which I mean not just with mechanical correctness but with an understanding of the rhetorical purposes served by referencing in academic writing.

4. They wrote their essays as “reaction papers”, or what the Japanese call “kansou-bun” 感想文: they started off with explanations about why they had chosen the topic and added all sorts of irrelevant, personal details. They also threw in their personal opinions helter-skelter, anywhere, and failed to adhere to my rule that they at least leave out all personal opinions until the concluding paragraph: they simply could not understand why. (See “rules” below.)
5. They also did not really understand the reasons for splitting their writing up into paragraphs, or the importance of the order of the paragraphs. When they remembered to do so, they only did it (I felt) because I insisted on it. They did not understand the need for a clear, introductory paragraph, and indeed found it very difficult to write one. (See  “cues” below.)

Unfortunately, I came across this excellent website too late to make much use of it in my classes for this (Japanese) academic year, which is now drawing to a close (end of January). I plan to translate some of the key points below and make them available to my academic writing classes next year (starting in April, with the cherry blossom).

• writer-oriented prose:

Writer-orientated writing may be appropriate in a note-taking context, but should be avoided in the context of a university essay, which is expected to be reader-orientated. The requirement in university work to take account of the reader’s perspective is one of the main differences from the kind of writing you may have done at school. Typically, when revising, you can improve the effectiveness of your writing by making it more orientated towards your imagined reader.

The tell-tale symptoms of writer-orientated writing may be summed up as a lack of synthesis. Although it may sometimes be necessary briefly to remind your reader of the content of a text you are discussing, if you find yourself taking more than a half a page to describe the plot of a novel, for example, it indicates that you haven’t really arrived at any overall view of what the novel is about. In the same way, if you are aware that you are presenting information in a particular order simply because that is the order you came across it yourself, it shows that you haven’t really worked out what the significance of the information might be for someone else.

• rhetorical situation

It’s very easy to assume that simply by producing a piece of writing you have succeeded in communicating. Everything seems perfectly clear when you read it over, so why wouldn’t somebody else understand it? The short answer is that, if you haven’t put considerable effort into providing cues, you are expecting your reader to be a mind-reader. You have spent hours preparing and writing your essay, and as a result have formed a very detailed mental picture of the topic, which you automatically relate to the words you have put down on paper. But the reader can’t see this picture inside your head; they can only form their picture of the topic through a process of creative reading. Your job as a writer is to make it possible for your readers to reconstruct an adequate version of your mental picture, or approach.

• expectations

Unlike the essays you may have written at school, writing at university level is expected to be reader-orientated and aware of its rhetorical situation, rather than an essentially writer-orientated display of knowledge. This means that nobody can give you a simple checklist of the differing expectations that apply at university level, because what is being marked by your tutors is often the structure and the cues you provide for the reader, rather than anything which can be reduced to discrete items. You can only understand these aspects of essay-writing by actively exploring writing strategies.

One of the fundamental differences between writing and speaking is the lack of interaction with the audience when you’re writing, which makes it easy to forget to put design for a reader into your essay. The lack of audience interaction is also responsible for the feeling of not knowing what is expected which you may have. This is why it is often useful to give an oral presentation when working on an essay, since it helps you develop your sense of audience.

• rules

Impersonal forms of expression are preferred in academic writing. This does not mean that you should never use the word “I” in a university essay. The word “I” is quite acceptable in contexts where you are talking about what you are doing as a writer (e.g. in expressions such as “I am now going to discuss…”). The reason you may have been told not to use the word “I” (perhaps at school) is that you were being discouraged from taking a writer-orientated perspective in which the meaningfulness of assertions in the first person (e.g. “I think that fox-hunting is wrong.”) is assumed is to be obvious. Making this kind of claim using the word “I”, and without providing any evidence or supporting argument, is very like citing from unpublished sources, because it gives your reader no way to examine the basis of what you’re saying. Using the word “I” in this way, in order to substitute for evidence rather than to clarify your approach as a writer is fundamentally in conflict with the reader-orientated perspective that is one of the expectations attached to essay-writing at university level.

• cues

When we’re in conversation with somebody, or listening to an oral presentation, we’re provided with a running commentary on how to understand what is being said by the speaker’s tone of voice or their body language. A reader is cut off from all such signals, and unless you take care to provide plenty of explicit indications in your writing about how one part of your argument relates to another, will quickly become disorientated. One source of these cues is the structure of your writing, particularly the introduction and, to a lesser extent, the conclusion, which perform a framing function for your argument, allowing your reader to place what you’re saying in a context, and thus understand its bearing by answering the so what? question. But it’s a waste of time doing the work to provide this context and then allowing your reader to forget about it – readers have fairly short memories and will simply be puzzled if your argument refers back to something you said more than about three pages previously, so you need to keep this context in your reader’s mind by regular signposting.

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Update: This workshop has been cancelled.

There will be a 3-day TPRS workshop in Shimbara, Nagasaki, Jan. 15-17. The workshop will be in English with interpretation in Japanese. The workshop will be led by Susan Gross, a TPRS veteran (Ben Slavic mentions her constantly on his blog as his inspiration and teacher), and Melinda Kawahara who has been teaching in Japan for 21 years and whose lessons are all based on TPRS. She runs her own language school called Lindy Lizard English House.

To find out more, visit the elt calendar.

Susan Gross is so well known that, once the word starts to get out, places are likely to fill up very quickly.

Susan Gross’ website, like Ben Slavic’s, is a treasure island of information and resources on, about and for TPRS. Check it out.

Here’s what I emailed some friends to let them know about this workshop:

I want to tell you about this workshop next month.

Do you know about TPRS?

You can read more on the ELT calendar and download a bilingual pdf flier from there.

The workshop will be led by Susan Gross, a veteran of TPRS and nationally known in the US as a TPRS teacher and teacher-trainer.

I think TPRS has much potential for teachers of English in Japan, particularly in the elementary and high schools, i.e. for near beginners up to intermediate (and that includes most of the uni students I teach!).

Since finding out about TPRS a few months ago, it has had a big impact on my teaching. Briefly, I’ve completely changed the way I teach. It’s too early to point to definite results in terms of test results, but I’m enjoying teaching more now than I have for a long time.

AND,

* there’s a lot more eye-contact in class between me and students
* I’m talking in English with students for much more of the time (over an hour each class)- before, I had students do pair-work a lot of the time, and I spoke to students individually, but not so much to the whole class
* my classes are more focused on fluency
* I know much more accurately how much my students understand, and work hard to ensure that ALL of them understand EVERYTHING I say
* many students who were tuning out because they did not understand and I hadn’t noticed, are now paying attention
* students are learning tons of vocabulary each week and RETAINING much of it (I do spot quizzes each week)
* a lot of the ideas for input comes from the students, from things they say or write or suggestions they make (e.g. in a recent session on health, I was asking students “Have you ever broken a bone?” then “When?” and “How?” Then I told them I’d broken my foot over 10 years ago and I asked them to guess how. One student suggested an elephant stepped on it. I accepted his suggestion (much more interesting than the truth!)
* students are the focus of the language input: I’m talking about them as much of the time as I can
* classes are more fun (we laugh more) and less stressful for me and students.

All new vocab goes on the board. I don’t care if everyone in the class understands and recognizes the item except one person; for that one person, it goes on the board (and I’m sure at least one other person is grateful).

I very quickly ran out of room on the board, but I squeezed things on until the bell rang. While the students are filing out, I carefully noted down everything on the board on an index card, and used it for review, spot quizzes, etc., the next time. This also reminded me of what we had done in class.

I had been recording my classes with a lapel mic and a voice recorder, but I did not always remember to switch it on. Plus, the recordings have been piling up unedited on my hard-drive, waiting for me to get around to posting them on this blog. (I want to see if students will access the recordings and/or find them useful: it could be a way to “revise” before the final exam.)

Then there were a couple of classes when I had to leave in a hurry because the next teacher was waiting to use the room. I had no record.

Today, I spent the last 10 minutes or so of class giving a dictation of sentences that included most of the key structures and vocabulary that we had covered (I wiped the board clean before giving the dictation).

I did not do it as a “dictee” a la Ben Slavic, i.e. I just dictated the sentences and collected their papers.

So I made up my own rubric for the Speaking classes I teach, then went to the teachers who “teach” listening and asked them how they evaluate their students. Two of them said they have students do dictation, but they were unable to tell me exactly what dictation assesses. Accuracy in spelling, perhaps, but what’s that got to do with listening?

Both teachers have students do listening clozes, but again they were vague as to exactly what this evaluates.

It seems the listening teachers are focused on micro listening skills, at the word level, and they’re missing THE big picture – comprehension. (Excuse me while I gnash my teeth.) UNLESS! dictation (and/or listening cloze exercises) actually test comprehension.

What do you think? What does dictation tell you about a student’s language ability? I realize that many TPRS teachers may not, in fact probably don’t, use dictation to evaluate students, but rather as yet another way to provide repeated CI, as indeed I do.

I’d like to think  my colleagues have sat down and thought about exactly how dictation evaluates comprehension: that they are not  just giving dictation because, well, that’s what listening teachers do.

Another colleague, thinking off the top of his head, decided that dictation does not evaluate comprehension because you could write down what you think you are hearing without understanding it. Also, how could you tell from a correct dictation, that the student understood the meaning? You couldn’t.

Instead of giving dictation, fill-in-the-blanks and other tests that just test micro-listening skills (i.e. at the word level), teachers could be giving lots of comprehensible input and repetition.

I am reading everything I can find about TPRS.

I recently got Blaine Ray‘s Fluency Through TPR Storytelling, and have been reading it each night until I fall asleep.

Today, I got hooked on Ben Slavic’s page. Yesterday, I downloaded all the handouts, docs, posters, everything that wasn’t nailed down. I spent the early hours of this morning reading them until I fell asleep. I’m doing the same today.

I want to credit AJ Hoge for turning me onto TPRS. He mentioned it on an old blog he had years ago, when he was teaching English in a university in Thailand, I believe. He wrote a bit more about it after he returned to the States. I didn’t investigate at the time. It was only when I happened across AJ’s most recent site that I felt an urge to find out more about this method.

What prompted me to do so was a few things that AJ said in a video or somewhere on his blog. They were very similar to what Ben Slavic wrote here: Professionally sad.

Humour is an element common to all those I saw at a quick glance, and I think they would be great for teaching English, e.g. as prompts for a writing assignment (write the story you saw, create your own ad), or a speaking task (tell your partner what you saw; what is the ad for? Do you think it’s an effective ad? Why/why not?), or a multimedia project (create your own ad, video it, upload to Internet).

My favourite is the Deutsche Postbank one.

Having spent half the weekend in Tokyo for JALTCALL 2007, and after spending too much time preparing in previous weeks, I decided to cut out the fancy stuff, and just go by the book for once: just follow the instructions in the teacher’s manual. Would you like to know how it went?

I knew you would! Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.

The book I’m using was chosen for me, and is pictured above (see more details on the Longman website): Powerbase Elementary.

Keep books closed. Hold up a newspaper/magazine and point to a job advert. Say what is it? Try to elicit advert or advertisement in L1 or in English. Say It’s a job advert.

Open books. Ask students around the class Are you a accountant? etc, and elicit replies.

Oops. Didn’t read this instruction in time to prepare. I didn’t have a newspaper or magazine (stopped reading them years ago, so I didn’t have one handy in my bag). I skipped this part and just told them “these are adverts. These are job adverts.” Pretty ingenious, eh? I also skipped the part about asking them “are you an accountant?” because all the students in the class are university students, they all know each other, and so they can all answer “no” to any question I ask them; they know it’s pointless and they’ll just look at me like, “what…… are you doing?” Moving on.

Focus attention on the adverts. Ask students to read them quickly and fill the gaps with the jobs in the box.

Walking around the class, I noticed hardly anyone doing this. Did they not understand? Thinking this might be the case, I went around pointing to the jobs highlighted in yellow which are supposed to be used for this exercise, and showed them where on the actual job adverts they were supposed to write their answers. Nobody seemed thrilled, but they (oh! so slooowwwwly) got into gear and started reading and writing. No collaboration, no talking. You could hear a pin drop. I put on some background music. A couple of guys were already asleep (this is the last period in the day). I walk briskly around the room, jollying them along, but asking myself “what’s the point?”

By now, some have quickly finished the exercise, while others have just started, and yet others are doing nothing at all except possibly waiting to be told the answers. (This is a teacher’s exercise, so sooner or later teacher will check the answers aloud with the class; they can just wait till then and write down the answers. Saves time and brain “wear and tear”.)

Already feeling disheartened, I plough on:

Ask students to read the job adverts again, then ask check questions such as What is Trevor Gibbons’s telephone number? Where do they want a piano teacher?

This is toe-curlingly slow. Nobody answers. I have to stand in front of someone or call their name, then wait up to 30 seconds or even longer while they figure out that I’m asking them a question, that it has something to do with the text in front of them, that they are going to have to actually read the text to get the answers, and is it really worth the effort? Meanwhile, I’m aware that most of the rest of the class have tuned out because I’m asking a particular student. I belatedly realize I should have added another activity: read the friendly text. Again. After a couple of questions, I abandon this activity, and move on. They don’t read the text. They only read the text, when they hear a question regarding it has been directed at them. Then they hold the whole class up while they stare at the text trying to figure out where in it the answer lies.

The next activity requires them to match (write) verbs with nouns, such as “send” + “an email”, or “make” + “arrangements”. I walk around the room, but most students have already finished the exercise, while (again) some haven’t even started. Do I make the quick ones wait and insist that the slow ones complete the exercise (some students don’t even have the textbook; I’ve lent my copy out already)? Or do I abandon the slow ones and move right along? I decide to abandon the slow ones.

Now it’s listening time. There are 2 conversations on the CD which refer to two of the jobs listed in the adverts. Which ones? I make a meal of the explanation, to make sure everyone gets what the activity is, where to write the answers, etc. I play the CD. I just let it run, and, remembering that up to now I’ve kind of been flogging a dead horse, I decide not to replay it, but ask students what they think the answers are right after stopping the CD at the end of the 2nd conversation. The first student I pick looks at me with an expression that tells me she hasn’t got a clue, and may not even understand what it is I’m asking her. This time, perhaps, I should have gone more slowly… I long for the days when I did drama, and barely used a textbook at all…

To be fair, it’s not entirely the textbook’s fault, nor the students’: some are not interested in English at all, but others genuinely want to try speaking it. Some of the fault is mine, for not properly preparing and anticipating some of these problems in advance (I’ve worked here long enough, I should know by now. And I did! I just wanted to try just following the teacher’s manual for once, instead of spending hours creating my own version of the text and the teacher’s book, because that just takes too much of my time).

But they want to talk to the foreigner, me, not their partners. Talking to one’s Japanese partner in English is so weird and unnatural that they do it as little as possible. They are not really interested in learning to use the bricks and mortar or the language, they just want a genuine opportunity to speak it, and they want to say and hear something fun, funny, cool, or all three. What would go down well with this group is a scene from a popular movie, which they read out or maybe act out with appropriate gestures and movements.

There is a major mismatch between the students’ wants on the one hand, and the curriculum that has been prepared for them on the other. The textbook is well put together, based on some sound pedagogical principles, but it fails to grab the students’ attention or imagination: they’re not interested in learning grammar or practising discrete grammatical or lexical items. They just want to talk. I need to come up with something fast. Maybe some role plays with role cards? There are far too few conversations in this textbook, conversations that students could use as models (not just for listening exercises) to base their own creative efforts on.

In an earlier class, I had had students practise three different conversations, then perform them for me in pairs or threes. This went rather better than the last class of the day, the one I described above: altho I was not “teaching” for most of the class, students were practising their conversations in English for much of the time (some downtime while they waited for their turn to perform for me, inevitably), and enjoyed the interaction with me, some hamming it up (including pretending to be completely clueless and unrehearsed, simply in order to spend more time getting my attention and annoying the groups waiting for their turn).