The reality is that raw English ability alone is unlikely to produce any significant change, even assuming that Japanese students go on to have basic conversational skills in English which is often not the case anyway. The problem for many Japanese doesnt necessarily stem from the English lessons themselves, nor the lack of opportunities to use English in Japan though this does exacerbate the situation. The big problem is often the significant cultural barriers.

I’m going to comment on a few points of this article, as it’s well worth reading and makes an important point, but needs amplifying. Ogawa’s point is that Japanese don’t learn to discuss or argue in English class, and that this severely cramps their English communicative ability, and that (inevitably these days) the government should do something about it!

I think he’s right. Partly. But the situation is more difficult than he implies, and I don’t think the solutioncan be implemented by governmental regulation or initiatives.

OK with you so far: the big problem is cultural barriers rather than English classes themselves (there are plenty of them, both in school and in zillions of private language schools) or even in the lack of opportunity to use English, although I’d add that the “lack of opportunities to use English in Japan” comes close to meaning “no need!” If there aren’t many opportunities to use English here, then what’s the point in learning it? Surely a lot of Japanese high-schoolers and university students ask themselves this question (though they’re mostly too polite to ask it aloud, to their teachers). They “know” it’s important (because they’ve been told so and because an increasing number of company’s are setting English-requirement entrance conditions or promotion conditions) … but they don’t “feel” it.

Setting that aside, so, what cultural barriers are we talking about here?

Japan’s collectivist ideals necessarily arose to allow the nation’s large population to live comfortably together in a comparatively small archipelago. This has given rise to some commendable traits, such as an appearance of agreeableness among Japanese. But it has also led the Japanese to eschew disagreement and argumentation, even though these can be extremely beneficial forms of social interaction. Simply put, Japanese culture and etiquette doesn’t groom people to become confident communicators in English.

OK: collectivist ideals – check. Large population: check. Small archipelago: check. Japanese “eschew” disagreement and argumentation: check. [That word "eschew" gives me the willies: why does the writer have to show off his erudition? What kind of writer eschews the simpler word "avoid" and pick the rarer and more pompous "eschew"? But I digress.] They avoid it like the plague. But the writer’s cultural bias is showing. He assumes that being good at “disagreement and argumentation” makes people “confident communicators”. Japanese would probably disagree. After all, if indeed “an appearance of agreeableness among Japanese” is important for living “comfortably together in a comparitively small archipelago” (i.e. cheek by jowl with your neighbours) – something I don’t dispute – then that would make “agreeableness” or its appearance, a key communicative ability, rather than argumentativeness. Which is exactly what we find. A retired company executive once told me companies in Japan like to hire graduates who played sport in college. Why? Because they’ve learned to work hard and do as they’re told. (The Japanese don’t “play” sport in college: it’s a very serious business, more like becoming a monk – practice every day for several hours, and that includes vacations of course.)

Another problem: if the Japanese “eschew disagreement and argumentation” (they are, after all, famous for not being able to say “no”), then how can they eschew that eschewing, so to speak, just in English classes? Can they be argumentative in English class but not elsewhere? Perhaps. If they’re brought up bilingually or biculturally, like that lady with the American father and Japanese mother I wrote about a while back.

And another thing. Let’s agree for the moment that being good at arguing helps make you a better communicator (although as I said, the Japanese tend to value diplomacy and tact far higher than argumentativeness). If that’s true, then being poor at arguing will leave you worse off as a communicator, period. It doesn’t matter in what language. And in fact, this is a common complaint of Japanese company HR managers: that young people hoping to enter the workforce are poor communicators, generally speaking. Hiring employers are looking for people with strong communication skills. They have difficulty finding them. That may be true in any country, I don’t know, but it certainly seems true in Japan.

In my “problem” class this year, I have one student who is particularly argumentative. In fact there are several who are in that class, but he’s the best (or the worst, whichever way you want to look at it). At first, I was irritated. I actually had to speak sternly to him (privately), something I rarely have had to do in Japanese colleges. But then I recalled an article about the relation between argumentativeness and communication – written by an American, of course! In What We Can Learn from Chinese Mothers… and what They Should Learn from Us (But Won’t) (members only), Gary North wrote,

The [Chinese] mothers expect their children to get straight-A’s in everything except gym and drama.

The kids learn to work hard. I’m for that. They learn mastery. I’m for that, too. But there is a flaw in the training. The child is not encouraged to discover what he is really good at and spend extra time on that. He is also taught to shut up. Not good.

North compares this with a typical Jewish upbringing. Jewish parents also expect high standards and hard work from their children (read The Promise for a particularly astonishing, and probably astonishingly common, example) :

Jews are another highly educated minority group. They also excel academically. But Jewish kids talk back . . . early. They argue

…

Chinese culture produces engineers. But where are the Chinese lawyers? …. If I knew nothing of two lawyers, and my life was on the line, I would hire Schwartz rather than Wong. Call me prejudiced, but I cannot imagine Wong leaping to his feet: “Objection!” Where are Chinese politicians?

(So that brilliant female lawyer in Red Corner was fiction? Damn!)

…

Mastery of textbooks — high school skills — is a skill that ceases to be relevant at about age 20: upper division in college. Then the student had better be able to think on his own for himself. He had better be able to defend himself verbally. “I’m right. I’ll show you why.”

Why is this important? It’s important for sales, for marketing, for advertising, for success in business, particularly for entrepreneurs, perhaps less so for corporate drones. Dr. North refers to an essay by Dorothy L. Sayers, The Lost Tools of Learning (1947!) in which she makes a case for bringing back the three pillars of education in the Middle Ages: grammar, logic and rhetoric. The trivium. They are taught in that order, for a reason. Each nurtures skills necessary for the next level. Dr. North says the Chinese never get to the 3rd stage:

Chinese education focures on grammar and logic. It discourages rhetoric. This is a major failure. The first two are necessary skills. But around age 13 or 14, you had better move into the rhetoric stage. This skill takes years to develop. Asian kids do not get this training early enough. ..

What he says about Chinese education is also true to a large extent about Japanese education. Japanese teachers do not encourage questions or a questioning attitude. (I recently attended a presentation in English by an Englishman to a largely Japanese audience. The presenter, as is fairly common among English presenters, said there would be time for Q&A at the end, but please feel free to ask questions at any time. I did. Frequently. Afterwards, I was told that one Japanese gentleman present had been irritated by my many questions: “He shouldn’t have asked so many questions, he should have waited till the end. My students do the same thing. I hate it!”)

Is that attitude likely to encourage enquiring minds?

The Diplomat article and Gary North’s article have caused me to reconsider my “problem” students who argue. If they’re right, then young Japanese need to learn to argue effectively. That doesn’t mean just talking back, but that can be the start. That’s a bud that might, with care, bloom later.

Finally, what does Mr. Ogawa in The Diplomat article suggest as solutions? More government initiative.

For one, the Ministry could address the appalling lack of English discussion in classes in Japan—from elementary to high school, there exists a rigidly structured course that leaves few opportunities for students to apply the English they’ve learned in a practical way.

Could the Minsitry address this? How? Last year, with an advanced class, I tried some simple debates. About half the class were Japanese students, and the other half Chinese. Most of the Chinese students had had some experience of debates back in China. None of the Japanese had. The first step should be discussions and debates in Japanese, not in English.

[T]he English curriculum largely consists of teaching to tests, which is why you’ll see word count guidelines such as ‘1,000 words to be learned during junior high school.’

This is an old chestnut, although it still has a grain of truth, particularly in high schools, and it mostly applies to Japanese teachers of English, there is now a large number of non-Japanese teachers (or assistants) of English in many schools and universities around the country. Some, perhaps many, are not teaching to tests or insisting on vocabulary memorization. Some are teaching discussion and debate.

Modern English, at least in professional settings, is frequently employed in a direct, straightforward manner. This isn’t done to trigger confrontation, but simply out of a desire for efficiency. English isn’t as encumbered with many of the genteel honorifics of Japanese, nor does it rely so heavily on implication.

True, but you can’t separate the language from the speakers! The Japanese speakers live in a hierarchical world. They must constantly be aware of the social levels of themselves and the people they are talking with. As Mike Rogers wrote recently in Modern Marketing Japan,

Sumimasen and a sincere attitude and bowing of ones head shows that you know your place in society and that you respect people.

This is not a “know your place” meaning be a good little Egyptian, but rather be aware of your relationship with the people you are talking to. Japanese use different language to talk to different people depending on whether those people are their superiors or their inferiors. (There are almost no equals in Japan.)

English-speakers do, too, of course, but they are largely unaware of it and are often surprised when it is pointed out. For the Japanese, this is deliberate and conscious; it is a survival skill. Such a hierarchical society does not lend itself easily to the kind of straightforward and efficient communication style that Mr. Ogawa describes. Yes, English is unencumbered by the large number of honorifics that Japanese must know and use, but that doesn’t mean that Japanese can abandon their sensibilities at the drop of a hat, just because they’re in English class.

At the end of a recent 2-day communications workshop that I attended with an American and several Japanese colleagues, during which we did little other than sit and talk and play games like the “NASA Moon Survival” game, all my Japanese colleagues were completely exhausted, whereas my American colleague and I were both fresh as daisies. The reason? The Japanese must constantly remember who they’re talking to, what is the pecking order in the group, when should they speak and who they should let speak first, plus of course the possible repercussions of whatever they say on their future relations with their colleagues. They must be constantly on their guard, careful of what they say, and watching their colleagues faces and body language for clues as to how they are thinking. Displeasure will rarely be expressed verbally.

To sum up, Mr. Ogawa is right to point to cultural barriers or differences as being major hindrances to Japanese people developing good communication skills. But his solution is not going anywhere: how can Japanese learn to discuss and debate in a forthright and direct manner in English class when they can’t do it in Japanese? They can’t be expected to set aside their Japanese persona just in English class.

via Why English Is Tough in Japan | A New Japan.

In TPRS, an initial stage is doing something called PQA – personalized question and answer. I interpreted that to mean obtaining personal info about students and using that info for comprehensible input. I thought I understood what this meant, but I was having some difficulties with students who did not seem interested, were not responding. And the info I was getting from students and using in class was not interesting to me, either!

What am I doing wrong? Am I doing something wrong? I wrote a comment on Ben Slavic’s blog, and he responded in a separate blog post. A discussion started. It continues there and over here on the TPRS.jp forum on a thread called “Personalization question” and another one called “Lesson Report” (catchy titles, eh!).

A key learning point that’s come out of this for me so far is somethigna bout personalization. It started with Ben Slavic’s post “Don’t Be An Asshole”, got laser-focussed in Ben’s own comment to his own blog post in these words, “personalization is really not about the person’s life at all, but about the magic we can spin around it – those are two very different things.”

This observation/lesson was repeated for me again by gumby:

“The point here is that you are NOT circling facts. You take one fact (K got a ticket in front of McDonalds) and get students to add the WHERE (Osaka) WHO with (Fukuyama Masaharu) WHEN (Christmas Eve) at (3AM). What did they order? (10 Okonomiyaki Burgers and 3 large Aojiru). You can go into what kind of car (make, color, year, size) You really have to train them to add the crazy details. The more factual it is, the drier it gets FAST.”

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Krashen is known for the acquisition-learning hypothesis, the input hypothesis, the monitor hypothesis, the affective filter, and the natural order hypothesis (this last is not Krashen’s own hypothesis, and Wikipedia has removed the natural order hypothesis page; for details, see order of acquisition).

Acquisition-learning: “learning”, according to Krashen, is explicit learning about the target language: grammar explanation, for example, and associated exercises and worksheets. Acquisition, he posits, is a mysterious activity that requires a great deal of comprehensible input.

The input hypothesis says that people learn a second or foreign language the same way we learn our first language: by being exposed to (through listening and/or reading) massive amounts of comprehensible input, and not thanks to lots of explanations about how the language works. In other words, Krashen says that language is essentially acquired, not learned.

Even if you accept this, and many don’t, the question for a language teacher is, how to provide the massive amounts of comprehensible input that is required? I accepted the hypothesis, as it seemed to match how I had learned French, English and German and later, Japanese. However, I didn’t see a practicable way to provide the input in class, the same reaction that Susan Gross had, who later became one of the stars of the TPRS firmament. I then got interested in self-access centres and teaching students to be more autonomous because I realized that a) learners do need much more input than can be provided in class, and b) they need to go out and get it on their own.

Well, TPRS seems to go a long way to solve the problem: it provides a great deal of comprehensible input in class, and it also has developed a high standard for comprehension: everyone in the class should understand everything that is said in the foreign/second language. And they’ve developed simple tools to enable a teacher to at least aim for this.

“Comprehension precedes production” says Krashen’s theory. Well, TPRS does not require students to produce much language at least at the beginning (although you can if you want: you just need to tweak the questions). This was a relief, because I had found that students were not producing correct language and they weren’t getting any closer to it. They seemed to have hit a wall.

In fact, Krashen’s theory goes further and explains what happens if you force production too early (before language is properly acquired). Krashen also theorized that grammar is acquired in a natural order, that this order is pretty much the same for children regardless of language or culture, and that it cannot be changed by instruction.

What happens when you force production too soon? The result is garbage. I see this all the time with my writing students. Many of them expect me to correct their writing with a red pen, which I have not done. One simple reason is that their English is so screwed that I do not know where to begin. They need to go back to basics. I had started with an ambitious program of reviewing the rules of written English, starting with basic punctuation and the simple sentence. However, although they understood the explanations, they still weren’t able to write correct, simple sentences.

“Acquisition activities are central, though some Monitoring may be useful for some people sometimes”. Krashen posits that “learning” develops the Monitor, the “editor in the head” as it were, and that that is useful and helpful for more advanced learners, but it is death for the beginners, because it inhibits them production and makes them overly concerned with avoiding mistakes and producing correct forms. The cost is a serious lack of fluency.

Krashen’s hypothesis explains why learners produce garbage, even after “learning” the language for years: these students have not acquired the basics of English. They have been given too much explanations, they have “learned” too much and not acquired enough. In addition, they have been asked to produce before they are ready. In that case, they either rely on parroting or memorization, or they rely on their native language’s grammar and syntax (or, in the case of my writing students in the computer lab, they rely on machine translation, which produces garbage of an even higher order than they would themselves).

In my experiments this past month with TPRS, I’ve been using very basic, very simple grammar: the present tense, the past tense, first, second and third person verb forms. I have noticed that, even after 20 or so repetitions of “third-person ‘s’”, or using the past tense when telling a story, when I ask students for short phrases that require a subject and a verb, they still don’t use the correct form. OK, you’re thinking: 20 repetitions isn’t much. Yeah, but I’m getting the same results even after 4 weeks of 3 hours per week.

After reading Krashen’s theories, and what other TPRS teachers do, I’ve stopped requiring my students to produce correct language; I’ve also stopped correcting them, except by repeating correctly what they try to say. I’m deliberately taking the pressure off them to produce correct language. We’ll get to that later. At the moment, I’m focusing on what I now believe to be the key ingredients: personalization (because many of them have been turned off classroom learning) and lots and lots and lots of comprehensible input.

I tried TPRS with a 2nd-year class for the first time last Friday. Because they were 2nd-years, I figured I should try and make it more challenging: I threw in complex sentences like “Did you have breakfast before you got dressed, or after?” Boy, that threw them (I didn’t ask it right off the bat, of course, I built up to it, but even so, the result was a palpable silence: it was obvious I’d run into a complete wall of incomprehension).  No. Even 2nd-years still need what they obviously have not had enough of: comprehensible input and lots of repetition.

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This blog ground to a halt in October 2007: I’d run out of steam, of ideas. I’d run into a wall.

I resurrected it in October 2009, mainly to learn how to import a Blogger blog into WordPress and to give autonblogger it’s own domain.

I’ll blog about new directions  I’m taking in teaching English, which may take me away from “autonomy” or self-directed learning, but I’m keeping the “Autonoblogger” name ‘cos I like it.

A couple of years ago, I began exploring something called The Immediate Method. Not a quick way to get pregnant, but an EFL approach developed by French teachers in Japan to have their students start using new structures and vocab as soon as possible by “testing” them almost immediately, i.e. by having conversations with students on themes or topics that involve using the structures and vocab that were introduced earlier in that lesson.

Having conversations with students is fun: I get to know them a little more personally. Students also enjoy talking to me personally – it’s one reason why they take an “Oral English” class (the other reason is because the class is compulsory!).

But. My students weren’t improving. They were not becoming more fluent. They were not developing confidence in their speaking. Some of them were not practising the structures and vocab enough (or at all). While I was having conversations with students, I was not “teaching” them or monitoring them. Although I did assign them work to do (“Write your own conversation based on the model in the textbook, and practice it”; “If you’ve finished your conversation test, do the grammar exercises on page….”), some did not do it.

Then I discovered TPRS.

(to be continued)

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Any school in the United States can operate at advanced levels of
effectiveness-if it is willing to implement what is known about
effective schooling. “If we follow the guidance offered from 35 years
of research,” says author Robert J. Marzano, “we can enter an era of
unprecedented effectiveness for the public practice of education.”

That’s all we need to do? Follow the guidance from a staggering 35 years of research? You mean that hasn’t been tried before? What a genius! I foresee an era of unprecedented effectiveness for the public practice of education! He’s right! Waddaya mean, look at the track record? History is dead!

Still, I’m intrigued. I ordered some of his books (not the ones mentioned here, unfortunately, couldn’t find those) via inter-library loan and we shall see what we shall see, boys and girls.

]]> http://www.autonoblogger.com/uncategorized/marzano-a-comment/feed/ 0 http://www.autonoblogger.com/uncategorized/interesting-game-site-for-young-keyboard-users/ http://www.autonoblogger.com/uncategorized/interesting-game-site-for-young-keyboard-users/#comments Wed, 01 Aug 2007 12:50:00 +0000 autonoblogger http://www.autonoblogger.com/?p=661 Just found this plug for online game and web designer, Ferry Halim, on the NextGen Teachers blog, and wanted to promote it here. I haven’t tried all the games yet, but they look like fun. I’ll be introducing my youngest daughter to them soon.

In a sense, there will always be a mismatch, or at least a gap: it’s inevitable that young people will want to do some things that their elders don’t want to spend time on or are unwilling to provide for; and conversely, things that others, from their greater experience and wisdom, can see as important and/or necessary which the young cannot as yet see the point of.

Dan Meyer, an ambitious young math teacher, has been banging on about this on and off since he first saw the light: about the importance of capturing students’ attention and imagination, remaining lively, even dramatic:

The truth, if you’re a speaker addressing an audience, is that the only way to get your audience more engaged is to become, yourself, more engaging. There is no shortcut. The solution is simple but not easy and the difference between those two adjectives lies somewhere on your TiVo.

I’m not advocating abandoning all leadership and letting the students lead the way.

Yet I cannot help feel that the gap or mismatch in many points where students contact the curriculum, is huge and multi-dimensional.

In another class, I abandoned all leadership and let students lead the way (!): I asked the students what they wanted to do. One said, “Go for a walk.” These kids parents are paying serious cash so their offspring can have the privilege of spending time with a fully trained language professional (me); they’ve all said clearly that their objective (this is an optional class – they are all volunteers) is to improve their English-speaking abilities. Yet when asked what they want to do, their answer is “goof off”. Where are they at? I sound chiding, but it’s a serious question. I sometimes feel like someone, person or persons unknown, has been seriously messing with these kids’ heads for the last 10 years or so.

In yet another class, a “higher-level” class, according to test results, and certainly they are all very diligent and quick and do well on vocab quizzes, I set them some reading and writing activities (from Touchstone by Mike McCarthy, CUP). I walked around to see how they were getting on. Some were slouched across their desks, apparently gazing at the textbook, but with no pen in hand or paper to be seen. It takes several attempts at conversation before they volunteer that they don’t understand what they are supposed to do, even tho I just explained it twice, once in English, once in their native Japanese. Maybe my Japanese was crap? Who said that? Highly possible, and yet at least half the class got it.

What got me was not just the incomprehension, but the lack of expression. Incomprehension was ok; just give up. I sensed years of being bamboozled in class, of not understanding a word, and yet having been trained not to make that apparent: just sit tight, maybe it doesn’t matter, maybe we won’t have to hand it in, maybe it won’t count, just let it blow over.

I posted many moons ago, about a student who was sitting not doing anything in class. It took at least 10 minutes of talking to her (more like interrogation in that I mostly questioned her) before it became apparent that the cause was she failed to understand a part of the English dialogue they were supposed to be practising. It took a further full 5 minutes of slowly going thru the dialogue with her to identify exactly where she did not understand. Why didn’t she ask? I figure: she’s just not that motivated (she just wants the credits), or she is motivated but this particular material is so numbingly boring she can’t bring herself to practice it, or she’s learned that raising a hand and asking for help is likely to get her a shame-inducing scolding for daring to suggest that the instructor chose inappropriate materials or failed to adequately explain. It’s apparently common for Japanese to get upset when they are asked a question, as it suggests some kind of inadequacy on the part of the instructor and hence borders on insubordination. (This is what I’ve been told by numerous adult Japanese when I asked them why nobody ever asks questions in a class or public lecture).

So many of the students I come across seem tired, bored, apathetic, and seem to have very low expectations of their university classes and teachers. It’s all boring, it’s all unengaging, and that’s par for the course. You just grin and bear it, or lie down, shut your eyes and think of pachinko (or majhong, or pastries, or Keiko, or whatever your fancy is).

After reading David Allen’s Getting Things Done, I quickly moved to his system. For archiving and for “live” projects, the A4-sized file folders were great. But not for the stuff I wanted to lug around and “read and review”. So I liked the hipster PDA idea (and a variant here).

But it looked tatty, and I was always rooting around in my bag for the stack (or “ring”) of cards I needed.

Then I discovered PoIC. It doesn’t mesh exactly with GTD or hipster PDA, but I like it. One thing I like about it is its analog (versus digital) style. I came across it when I had a bad cold, a cold which affected my eyes and made me physically ill just looking at a computer screen. I felt I had reached a limit of my online, screen-staring activities.

(Photos here. Article on how index cards lead to increased creativity here).