It seems most people I have met who reached a high-ish level in a second language don’t give credit to the classroom, but rather to self-study. I myself reached N1 level in Japanese through self-study, and my girlfriend started studying Chinese on Duolingo recently and surprised me with how much she was able to learn in just a month.
I don’t really have a problem with how English is taught in elementary school. I think songs and games are the best way for them, given the attention span and cognitive skills at that age. However, I feel junior high school and high school students are leaving a lot on the table.
I get the feeling that if junior high and high school students learned English either in the computer room or on tablets for an hour a day, instead of having a traditional English class, they would learn waaaay more. Perhaps split the classroom into three 15 to 20-minute activities, such as doing Duolingo, Rosetta Stone, and FluentU, and the teachers simply facilitate. Even with the flaws of Duolingo and Rosetta Stone (and I am aware of them), I still think they would reach a much higher level by the time they graduate than anything being done in public schools so far.
My reasoning is that in a classroom, even if you do a lot of pair work and group activities, you can’t have every student actively participating the whole time. The amount of engagement for each individual student in a ratio of the total class time is quite low. On the other hand, if each student is working at their own pace for an hour on one of these “digital activities” that include a lot of listening, writing, and speaking, we can get an increase in individual engagement. My opinion is that this is the way to make Japanese students more comfortable with actually using the second language. They think they are spending an hour a day studying English, but in reality, each individual student is doing very little within that hour.
In my proposition, the facilitator simply needs to help them in the process, occasionally explaining grammar but mostly letting the digital learning systems do the work.
I can see the ALT fitting into this puzzle, so I’m not saying ALTs like myself are totally meaningless. Perhaps once a week of the ALT doing role play or task-oriented activities with a cultural element would provide a nice supplement to the system.
And I can foresee high school students eventually transitioning off of these guided systems and onto true self-study.
Thoughts?
by Consistent_Cicada65
26 comments
I came from teaching ESOL and Social Studies in the States, to teaching in high schools here. Every year I feel that the native English teachers or the directives to native English departments get worse and worse, even though the MEXT hopes and suggestions get better and better.
When I first came, I was very gung-ho on working in high school and a bit anti-Eikaiwa and Juku. Now years along the line, I think those 2 do far better. Many a juku has communicative English for teens; helping them prep for overseas homestays or study, having international teen vacation seminars with both JP and visiting overseas teens. Eikaiwa works on conversation, chatting, business greetings, etc. I’ve done classes for both juku and Eikaiwa that were book club style, reading authentic English materials and then talking about it. Not in a “grammar must be perfect” but a “let’s make sure you have the words you need.” We’ve also done mock debates, mock UN, mock business presentations, and cross-cultural communication classes.
It isn’t self-study as you mention, but I do see value in that too. Be it actual text and notebook self-study – or podcast & video self-study – or just following X and IG from people who post in English. Add that the juku and Eikaiwa are picking up the “let’s make sure the people can actually do life in an English speaking environment,” established courses, and what is going on in junior & senior high schools seems like just not so useful lessons with easy to grade tests.
There is no one right way to learn a language. You need to have a combination of things. However, if the kids don’t want to learn/ think they can’t then they won’t. Doesn’t matter how much you throw at them. (See banduras self efficacy theory).
Have you tried this approach in any of the schools you have worked with or with students you might be teaching privately? Why not try this experiment of yours on some students of English and see how well it works?
My oversimplified solution is to test speaking. That’s it.
The most important factor in success in language learning is motivation. If you are studying by yourself, you are obviously more motivated to learn the language than someone who is just taking it at school because it’s mandatory.
I think you’re spot on with the idea about it increasing individual engagement. Aside from times when students might be broken up into different eiken level groups when studying for the test in class, a lot of times students are often all practicing/learning the same material, which is going to naturally make more advanced students bored and less advanced students feel lost or inadequate, both leading to a lack of engagement. On the other hand, if students are working on material directly catered to them through technology, engagement will go way up, because it’s simply more interesting when you’re actually learning something, and more students will improve faster as a result. Even students who “hate” English might be surprised once they finally start learning at the right level.
But, I see two problems with trying to use technology like this. One would be that some school districts would see it as a reason that they don’t need ALTs anymore, despite the fact that they provide a chance for students to get used to interacting with a foreign person. The second is not exactly a problem, but a hurdle, in that the person in charge of deciding on curriculum changes in a given district must have the faith that doing it this way is better, instead of sticking with the old books and education styles which are aimed toward students passing the tests (despite the fact that since the tests are changing, the old methods aren’t working so well anymore anyway).
Many ELL classrooms overseas are using technology to great effect like this, so I see no reason not to adpot some of those methods for English language education in Japan.
[deleted]
There’s an entire scientific field called applied linguistics. Have you read any of the literature? After that, you could put your ideas into a research project. At the moment, it’s just another meaningless anecdote.
I agree. Not so much for English but my son (half Japanese) has a study tablet and it’s very engaging with games etc. It made him enjoy studying and he gets 100s on most of his tests. He’s still in shogakko but I think they should do more of this thing with chugakko and koko. I’m a high school teacher here and I have to stick to a text book, it’s very boring. I can’t really do very interesting lessons because by the time I get through it, it’s already test time. All the students have chrome books so it could be possible to do it.
What are the goals of this approach? Like, you say they’ll be able to reach a higher level, but by what metrics?
Will they know that how to write a three-sentence “essay”? Because as stupid as those are, they’re what get kids into schools. Good handwriting gets kids into schools. And following Japan’s curriculum gets kids into schools. And that’s the goal for a lot of Japanese kids.
Your idea is great for self-study kids. But they’ll do it regardless. I know kindergarten kids doing Duolingo. But fill a room with kids playing video games, and all you’ll get is kids who know how to play games. Some might learn, others might just figure out how to select the right answers without learning. And a good portion will just roll their eyes and fall asleep because they know none of it matters.
You’re not the first to realize that Japan’s English education methodology is flawed, and certainly won’t be the last. You won’t be able to change it. No ALT ever will. The only thing you can do is try to create the best environment you can, win over your JETs to work with you and encourage the students, and that’s it.
Didn’t somebody just post this exact same thread pretty much?
Zzzzz. IMO some ALTs need to stay in their lane and remember that most students don’t give a fuck about mastering foreign languages at school (much like everything else they’re fed goes in one ear and out the other).
In the other thread we noted that large percentages of Canadians in Quebec don’t speak English. Go figure! Japan’s system isn’t THAT bad.
You are under the false impression that English is being studied in schools as a means to become proficient in speaking.
English is being studied as a means to pass tests.
The board of education can talk all they want about how they want Japanese people to get better at speaking English, but the problem is, the entrance exams for universities and high schools almost univerally have no speaking section……..and the one’s that do have speaking interviews, have interviews that are so laughably easy they are irrelevant anyway.
I teach as a regular teacher at a public junior high school, and as soon our students get into test study time (basically now until February) the ALT stops coming to the lessons, because nothing matters except passing that written test.
So until something changes in the design of the test, or the test itself is removed altogether (ha!) the English education system will remain similar at any school that is serious about academic achievement.
This leads to the other big problem which is, most Japanese people hate studying English. The reason for that is, English is a subject that prevents a lot of them from realizing their dreams. Why, let me give you an example of a question on an entrance exam in my prefecture from a few years ago
Please translate the following sentence into English
私はアメリカに行ったことがありません。
I had a student who wrote
I have never been to America
As you can see, there is no period…..this is a 1 point question on the entrance exams here, so she got it wrong.
So she knows what the sentence means, she can say it, and use it in conversation, but because she made the simple mistake of forgetting to write a period, she gets no points.
Now I am not saying she should have gotten points, because she forgot a key element of writing a sentence. I am saying, from her point of view, she clearly knows the material, and lost a point she could have gotten. So English pisses her off.
​
So yeah, as far as ‘how students should learn’ well there are million teaching methods, and they all work well for different people. But if you want to see actual changes in motivation to learn English, as well as the education system itself, you need to start with changing the way entrance exams work, because passing that test is the end goal of your 12 years of education in Japan.
Man, I wish there was something I could say in this forum that would sway the strong beliefs of those that believe the system must change, and those that believe the system cannot change.
The fact is, who am I that you would believe me and trust me when I share my professional opinion based on education, experience, and time. And who are all of you that others could believe any of the entrenched echo chamber ideas you read here.
The way I like to think of education is that it is an experiment, and the classroom can be the laboratory. The OPs idea is fine and worth testing out in the classroom. And can be used as a method to teach English within the national government’s established curriculum. If done well, and the results of the experiment are presented and published and accepted and advanced by more and more peers, it can be incorporated into the existing system along many of the other methods and approaches teachers in the public and private sectors use. Make a very small scale proposal a research plan, then give it a whirl!
In education, academia, and government you can’t expect there will be huge changes overnight, but you can create small incremental changes that make a difference and still respect the cultural context.
But also try to keep in mind, this is Reddit, not an educational special interest group in a professional language teacher association. So it is ok to take the opinions you get here with a grain of salt sometimes. Of course, I’m just stating the obvious, I guess.
Good luck!
[deleted]
I appreciate your enthusiasm, but you’re proposing a one-size-fits-all solution in a school system you don’t appear to even know what sizes every school needs, without doing any research and without testing your ideas in practice.
Look, saying this with as much respect as I can muster: anyone can have an idea. Ideas are not special. Doing all the boring planning and organization work to implement your idea and then going the extra mile to test it in a way that it can be compared against alternatives is special.
A lot of schools already have internet connected devices available, and there are a plethora of online self-study tools out there. At my private school for example, repeatedly dedicating actual class time when a flesh-and-blood teacher is present for nothing but unguided online self-study would be a tacit admission that either the teacher is unqualified to do their job or that the students are so badly disciplined that they can’t even be counted on to do basic online study in their own time. Now I realize there are a lot of ways that my private school and your public school are different, but that’s the problem with your idea – it doesn’t account for the fact that not every Japanese school works like the one you’re in.
Personally, I’m not impressed with digital language learning activities. They can have their place, but typically because computers still cannot process actual language, they are structured in ways to make one and only one answer correct and negotiation of meaning isn’t possible, meaning their use of language is quite artificial. They might be good for reinforcement between instruction and extension/production/project activities, but they don’t tend to achieve much in and of themselves except for in the rare case of an extremely self-motivated individual. And extremely self-motivated individuals don’t tend to need whole classes set up for their benefit.
This sort of approach can be downright dangerous for our field IMHO, because the moment a budget-crunched administrator starts looking down this road, the first thought they come to is always, “well, why should I pay for a fully-qualified teacher in the first place?!” Next thing you know English class is students sitting at their tablets, not interacting with other human beings in the room, not really understanding the language being taught but not really being able to ask their teacher because their teacher has been replaced by some random web-tech who has no qualifications beyond being able to retrieve students’ passwords from the online system or who can reboot the tablet if something doesn’t work.
>It seems most people I have met who reached a high-ish level in a second language don’t give credit to the classroom, but rather to self-study.
Can you give us any compelling reason to believe that the people you met represent the norm among language learners? Because I know people who achieved high fluency without anything resembling study, just by voraciously consuming language content during the critical period.
>my girlfriend started studying Chinese on Duolingo recently and surprised me with how much she was able to learn in just a month.
*Every* learner who makes an effort makes fast progress in the first month. Going from zero to any number more than zero is infinite times more growth than going from 1 to 2. I’m not saying this to mock your girlfriend’s effort – I have no doubt she’s working really hard. But MEXT’s goal is for Japanese learners to spend an hour a day learning English and in the best of cases be able to actively participate in university-level lectures in English. If your girlfriend can take a university class in Chinese after a month, publish that damn paper right away because she’s a miracle. Otherwise, maybe accept that long, sustained growth in language ability and language complexity requires a variety of tools used with skill and careful planning.
Don’t stop dreaming. Just recognize while you dream that you aren’t the first person to have ever thought of any of this.
“I get the feeling that if junior high and high school students learned English either in the computer room or on tablets for an hour a day, instead of having a traditional English class, they would learn waaaay more.”
I’m in a school that does this in addition to regular classes.
It depends entirely on the student. Some students do it because it’s expected, some do it without caring about the content as long as they get a good score(they can’t actually use the English they “learn”, even though the app says they “learned it”), and some actually benefit from it.
I’m not sure comparing your girlfriend who has an interest in learning Chinese to a Japanese student base that doesn’t really care that much about English except for entrance exams is the best way to go here, but… you did.
There is no way to force learning and engagement. The main issue with learning English in Japan is motivation, just like foreign language learning in the US with any language in mandatory education. Most kids don’t take it seriously until they reach the non mandatory years, usually the 3rd or 4th years, or the 3rd or 4th years studying in University.
The issue with mandatory education is just that. It’s mandatory, and if someone doesn’t want to, at least math is simple enough to brute force it, and most of the other subjects are more relevant to every day life.
Which middle school students do the best? The ones that have interest in long term careers, or whose parents are multilingual or travel a lot, or that have a huge interest in foreign culture. They have a reason or a goal in mind already, and someone to role model where they want to be. 90% of the students in Japan do not have that. The goal of ALT’s and other types of similar programs are not to teach English, it is to provide students with some motivation, to put a person that speaks this language they want to learn within the same room as them, in the hopes they find motivation. There is a lot a teacher or ALT can do to help, and there is a lot of harm they can do. Ultimately, the issue of motivation is entirely within the student.
The best way to learn a language is to want to learn a language. Taking classes is a method that motivates through group participation. Usually you’re not practicing on your own. You’re waiting for the engagement.
Self-study is more motivated. Someone actively seeking to learn in their free-time and not as a social event.
But everyone is different. Some people just don’t have the motivation to self-study, in which case classes are the best option.
They can do that for homework though.
I used to live and teach in Japan in the late 90’s through the early 2000’s. And I taught in junior and senior high school (university, private, etc). Back then kids were taught using the grammar translation method by their Japanese teachers. This is why by the time they get to 9th grade they become zombies. They’ve had it with the “This is a pen” nonsense and just hate English. So naturally when I showed up with a communicative method lesson plan that actually required participation no one wanted to do it, not even in small groups where it would be safer. Ultimately it turned into “a light, fun, genki games hour” in English.
Please tell me in 2023 it’s not the same.
As a English speaking Japanese high school student myself, I believe that the education system is flawed.
Most of the students are not learning English to be able to talk to foreigners, but to get good grades in class and pass the entrance exams to a prestigious high school or uni.
This comment is not going to be popular, but it is incontrovertibly true. Please do not downvote. Don’t shoot the messenger and read to the end. English tutors or teachers will not be killed.
I’m a retired teacher with 25 years of experience, 15 as a second language teacher. I hold a master’s degree in education and a BA in linguistics.
The truth is that English is not fun to learn (and teach). If we rely on research & extrapolate on Masha Bell’s research on 7000 common words, the English spelling system has perhaps 10s of 1000s of illogical errors that impair learning to read by 2 YEARS (Seymour, 2003) for MOST (including you) English-speaking students (compared to other learners of languages that have a better spelling system like Spanish) (See below for links to the research). It is worse for disadvantaged households, but, surprisingly, it is not necessarily about IQ: https://www.educationnext.org/dont-dismiss-30-million-word-gap-quite-fast/#:~:text=. When children learn to read, they can tap into their own lexicon imparted by their parents. Migrants, the uneducated, unaware, lazy, or narcissist parents won’t or cant impart this which puts children at a huge disadvantage.
Not surprisingly, there are high illiteracy and dyslexia rates & costs TOO in most anglosphere countries (2.2 trillions/y. for the USA alone), unless one spends more hours on English learning at the detriment of other subjects. Surely, not all anglosphere’s teachers and learners are idiots. Maybe it is the system that is stupid! Why do we fix kids when we should fix systems? Do we fix drivers of cars that have faulty parts after crashes?
DYK that Einstein (who struggled to learn English) & Orwell hated the spelling system. It’s so crooked a BOGUS disorder (surface dyslexia) was created to account for it.
But, smart people finds ways to prevent or solve problems. The French fixed theirs a bit smartly recently. No current literate user was forced to learn a new system. Teachers’ unions were for it. One would need to be a real idiot to deny billions of people this opportunity to improve a system that is incontrovertibly defective.
Such a reform will not mean a lost of tutoring or teaching jobs for English 1.0 as the new generation will need to learn and use in a passive way English 1.0 as external signs (shops, road, airports,….) will not be written in the new code.
Here is a petition: https://secure.avaaz.org/community_petitions/en/the_united_nations_the_english_spelling_system_delays_learning_to_read_by_2_years_for_most_native_speakers/?ccSrpab&utm_source=sharetools&utm_medium=copy&utm_campaign=petition-1679415-the_english_spelling_system_delays_learning_to_read_by_2_years_for_most_native_speakers&utm_term=ccSrpab%2Ben
(This url is safe. Check it here: https://webparanoid.com/en/check-website?gclid=CjwKCAjwlJimBhAsEiwA1hrp5nSqfL5ftzBmQnY8rcq71zY-eTHxlfl7mxooyu5jkzh-5Mj8UJQOTRoCvyUQAvD_BwE#/)
*There might be a nutritional component or even a microbiome imbalance side to this (https://youtu.be/rRkqwxovSF0?feature=shared), related to the child eating or lifestyle, but even or also parental choices made prior to birth.
I’m a strong believer that duolingo and similar platforms are awful for learning more than simple phrases especially for Japanese
So my 6th grade elementary school students tried something like this last year. It was called “speaking challenge” and they did it with their tablets that have built in mics. Here is what came out of it
Good stuff
The students who actually did the work probably did practice their English a bit.
It was easy to grade their tests after.
They could practice at home if the tech worked.
Bad stuff
Lots of technical problems. No internet signal means they cant do anything.
Students who dislike English already or are embarrassed about speaking did nothing, refused to speak into the mics and skipped through the tests. The system still congratulated them anyway.
Their real, live conversation partner, who flew half way around the world to teach them (me) was just standing in the corner for most of the classes or helping students fix technical problems.
It’s obviously not a real conversation so my students didn’t take it seriously and was therefore not a meaningful experience.
The software had a built in machine voice that had unnatural pronunciation and intonation.
Despite being gamified and having lots of cool pictures and items to unlock my students seemed as bored of it as a regular English lesson.
Granted that year group had many problems outside of English and my JTE at the time disliked including me in the lessons for some reason.
I agree with you though OP, it could work for some students but implementing it well is a lot of work. I don’t know if the pay off is big enough.
When I came to Japan I wanted to use my computer in every lesson and play fun games with it, but now I really see the value in being able to play simple but effective games with flashcards as well.
Unfortunately Japan is designed for tests so your not going to rehab the system overnight