Hi everyone!
I’ve been teaching really young kids (6 and under) in Japan for 8 years now, I’ve been at four schools, all of which have the same problem; they want the students to speak more English. Personally, I don’t think it’s a problem with a solution, but then again, I’ve never seen it successfully done. Some people I work with swear that there are school where the kids naturally speak English all the time, which is their ideal, but… I don’t know how realistic that is.
In all of the schools I’ve worked in, teachers speak in only English, and my current class’s level of English is relatively high. We also have one student who’s mixed and totally fluent in English, but the still students always speak to each other in Japanese. They know that I “Don’t speak Japanese” but still, 9 times out of 10, they’ll speak to me in Japanese first and once I remind them to use English, or oftentimes, get confused, then they’ll make the effort to use English.
We’ve been trying all kinds of things to find a way to get them to use English first, and Japanese if they get stuck. We want to allow them to use whichever language they want at playtime and lunch, but we’d also like them to remember that they need to use English with English teachers and Japanese only when needed with the Japanese teachers .Nothing seems to do the trick, so i thought I’d ask here and see what others have tried.
One thing I’ve thought of but haven’t tried is just not vocally replying to Japanese. When children speak to me in Japanese, and other teachers too, we’ll always respond. Has anyone tried just not replying to Japanese? It feels so cold and would be really difficult for me to do, but I also wonder if that would change things quite quickly.
Bonus question: I’ll be changing jobs to be working with even younger students from March, students from the age of 2. Personally, I don’t think that they need to be speaking in only English all the time at that age, but that aside, are there any tricks for helping encourage it when bosses inevitably say that the kids need to speak in English more?
Any tips would be gratefully received!
Thanks!
15 comments
Sounds stupid, but make speaking English fun. That could mean absolutely anything which is why its impossible to give any one suggestion.
Reward works SO well with kids – especially younger kids – get a stack of stickers (the shinier, sparklier, more holographic, the better) and award them to the kids doing what they should be doing. Ask the class, “why do you think X got the sticker?” if they come up with no answers or silly answers, prompt them with a specific reason “she was using good vocab, or she answered my question in English”.
Another thing is explicit instruction – if you let them use Japanese in their free time they can very well forget to take it into class time. Reminding them class has started its time to use English only, or setting up distinct times of the day, say 1pm right after lunch till 2pm is English only between teachers and peers.
There are many ways of addressing it though, and yeah I’d never just ignore a child question, I would set my expectation, get on with the lesson if they don’t quite meet my expectation I would prompt them towards it.
(Mostly for behaviour management in my class if a kid has a great answer but shouts it out or doesn’t have their hand up I would praise the answer but remind them because of the behaviour I can’t take their answer and I would let a pupil who meets that behaviour expectation answer. You can do the same in yours, if a student answers in Japanese, in English say good answer BUT I’m looking for English answers only, let someone else answer. )
Depending on how much time you have with them its impossible. There is a hard cap on how much even the best of kids can remember if all the practice they get is once a week for one hour.
If its 1 hour a day 5 days a week I’d say there is potential.
One big key is maintaining engaging atmosphere/lessons. If they don’t get bored and are constantly participating its easy to convince them to not speak any Japanese with each other. This is pretty difficult with this younger tablet-since-5-years-old generation though.
I don’t think refusing to respond to Japanese is good. Whenever they don’t understand you can let them speak Japanese to you but make them repeat their questions in English. If they’re constantly forced to repeat all their basic questions in English most students will learn.
Stickers
“The award for using (or trying to) the most amount of English this lesson goes to …..”.
Don’t remind them at the beginning. A round of applause from the class will suffice as the award. If you do need an award then the winner can choose what English game / activity to do next.
You can always have the kids decide at the end of the class who they think tried their hardest that lesson. If you focus on Tryjng rather than Best then it will be a different person each week.
Well coming from a bi-lingual upbringing. If you ask me to only speak in one language that I’m not familiar with, I will most definitely not do it 😂
I never understood what’s so bad about them speaking their own language. They are kids. Being raised in japan. Of course they are goin to speak in a language they are more comfortable with.🤷
Besides stickers, I play dumb a lot. (Kind of like the “not replying to Japanese” option, but it pulls their empathy strings a little more.) Oh, I don’t speak Japanese, you’re going to have to tell me that again in English! Assuming you have Japanese-speaking staff helping, get them in on the ruse so that they’re also telling them that “(name)-sensei can’t speak Japanese, you have to use English”.
In my case, my Japanese skills miraculously return if there’s an actual emergency or if someone needs to know what a Japanese word is in English, but then, I’ll start playing dumb immediately after.
You’re fighting an uphill battle that you’re actually not suppose to win.
As u/sports_dude_ said, in any real-life context where multiple languages/language communities exist, you’ll never see forced L1/L2 usage. It’s just not a concept that exists in real life/real contexts and can even be detrimental to development.
Any contemporary research you’ll find on the subject will only support “L2 only” classrooms if and only if immersion can be achieved, and again only if learners are already functional/fluent in the language. On top of this, most research shows that supporting students with some L1 usage yourself, and allowing students to navigate tasks and collaborate in their L1 is more productive and efficient. This basically means, unless it’s an international school, attempting to enforce L2 only is really inefficient, confusing, and doesn’t really lead to more gains. Trying to switch between 4-5 modes of communication between two languages (Institutional, instructional, social, target for lesson, disciplinary, etc) is inconsistent and too much to expect students to keep track of.
The “I don’t speak Japanese” policy is also harmful and causes missed opportunities. Students in Japan desperately need real life examples of adults that speak more than one language as functional members of society. Foreigner staff refusing to speak Japanese can perpetuate impeding stereotypes (Foreigners can’t speak Japanese, what language you speak is genetic, etc) and removes a lot of teaching moments that could take place between the two languages when they come up in the classroom.
This topic in general is mostly an issue in Japan because of really outdated teaching methodology and beliefs about language learning that have been abandoned for 30+ years. Of course, if you don’t have control over your classroom or curriculum then the decision to employ updated practices is not up to you. But, how you moderate is, and if all you need to do is for kids to spit out English while the bosses are looking then teach some performative tasks to satisfy them. Flashcards, call and response, set interactions with set phrases that you drill, etc. Keep some of those up your sleeve to demo when the people that don’t know what they’re doing come around, then get back to actual teaching when they leave.
Doesn’t matter what you do, if the child doesn’t WANT to learn/use English, they won’t do it.
Just like everything in life, people are different.
Don’t take it personally and just focus more on the kids who want to learn.
I taught 4 year olds, and after about 4 months they were talking exclusively English at school. However, they were at school 5 hours a day, had private tutors, were from quite well off families where the parents were also quite good at English.
Just constant reminding to speak English. When they said something in their native language (and I understood) I would tell them how to say it English. Eventually, bit by bit their native language was mixed with English, and Eventually they were speaking only English.
Some other things that helped was letting them talk first in their native langauge, then yourself repeating in English. Like, “Oh, your friend hit you! You are angry?” Then they would say it English themselves too.
The only way I ever consistently get my kids to speak English is 1.) when they are really little (3-6 years old) and when we are playing. The #1 best way I got them to do it was play where THEY were the teacher and they had toys that were the student(s). Then they would teach (in English as the teacher) and answer (in English, as the students). If other students joined in then sometimes they’d play games with the English-speaking-dolls.
If your students are young enough, I’d try this method. As a bonus, we “made” the dolls, too. (Paper dolls we colored and cut out, etc. sometimes they were made of clay or whatever.)
If you’re talking kids 6 and under, I think impulse control is the biggest issue. This is an age where thought->mouth can be a nearly uninterrupted pipeline. It’s not they don’t understand they should speak English to English speakers. It’s that they literally don’t think about who you are before they think about what they want to say to you, especially outside the classroom. Parents with different L1s who raise bilingual children spend years of daily sustained contact to build the habit of associating different languages with different people. You are going to have to put in at least as much time. I think it’s worth your school thinking about moderating your expectations.
Especially because output is not nearly as important for language learning as input. I wonder why it is that your school wants students to speak English more? Are they by chance hoping the kids will speak English outside of class in front of parents and visitors and in order to show off how good your EFL curriculum is?
The Homo Sapien is an incentive-based species.
Have to reward the students for speaking English to you instead of using Japanese. If they speak English then they can get a little prize or some perk.
Anytime they say something to me in Japanese, I give them a head tilt and say “hmm?”. I’ve done it enough that they either laugh or say “ah!” and immediatly start using English again.