DISCLAIMER: I have never actually taught GrapeSEED. Recently some of my schools have brought up the idea of GrapeSEED. Being the sneed I am, I asked a friend who is quitting a GrapeSEED school if I could watch their online training videos with his account.
**Below are my thoughts, but I want to hear yours as well (even if you disagree with me!)**
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# Theory:
It became clear to me that they are **seriously misrepresenting Krashen’s theories.** Their idea of input is to throw an incomprehensible material (stories, chants, poems, songs) at the student enough times that the student can repeat it, and they use that as proof of comprehension. Given enough time, **I could memorize a short Spanish picture book well enough to read it aloud when prompted by a teacher — I know zero Spanish.**
What is “enough time”? Well, each unit of GrapeSEED has several materials and about three months to remember it all. The bulk of the class (about 99% of it) is either repeating the material to children or making the children read it aloud themselves. After the “main” class, students are put into this “REP” thing where they have 20 or so minutes to listen to the same material on a CD (where they are again asked to repeat or sing along). **It’s just brute-forcing, nothing more.**
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# Why this is bad:
GrapeSEED was created [around 1967](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GrapeSEED) and, given the following, I would not be surprised if they have never adapted or changed it since its inception.
1. **GrapeSEED offers no way to check if students actually understand the material.** The closest they get is with “transition activities”, which are poorly put together TPR. They are poorly made because there is no re-assembly of the commands given to produce novelty. They teach a very specific list of commands and the most they do is switch the order. A more proper TPR would take “touch your ear”, “pat your head”, and perhaps re-assemble those into the novel “pat your ear” later. GrapeSEED does not do this, which in turn **does not force students to really** ***listen*** **to the words** “pat” or “touch” since they can recognize the commands by “ear” and “head” alone.
2. The materials are garbage. GrapeSEED has songs, stories, chants, poems, big books, basic readers… **there’s way too many different types of materials that all blend together, making it a nightmare for new teachers** to parse them all in their head. In a program where most teachers only stay a year before jumping ship, you don’t want to make something that takes several months to feel comfortable using.
3. GrapeSEED wants teachers to echo the answers of the students. There is a place for recasting and modeling, but **echoing alone is incredibly patronizing** and does two things: One) **It raises the affective filter**; Two) If the teacher is just going to repeat everything everyone says anyway, **will students really listen to each other** or simply wait for the teacher to repeat it?
4. The affective filter is tossed around a lot during the training. They say that student motivation is important, but **they do next to nothing to nurture motivation**. Reading the same material for three months is not, in any sense of the word, interesting, and I imagine most students’ minds go numb. Their answer to this is to ask the teacher’s to gaslight the students by saying it *is*, in fact, fun. They also ask that teachers single out students to answer questions or to read aloud (hopefully) memorized material, which obviously raises the affective filter.
5. Going off of motivation, I asked my friend why he was leaving GrapeSEED. He told me a lot of things like how boring it was and the lack of freedom. One thing he eventually said that hurt me was that learning is not fun and it has to be work. He used to be very bright-eyed about education so I have to assume **that GrapeSEED changed him into a husk of what he was, into a man that thinks learning English has to be a boring thing for the students or else it’s not working.**
6. **GrapeSEED lies about their activities being student-centered activities and having student communication.** To GrapeSEED, students saying a word on the flash card and then the teacher repeating the same word is somehow “student-centered” and “communicative”. This leads to the next point:
7. **GrapeSEED believes in the input hypothesis** ***too much*****.** Being a huge input nerd, I never thought I’d ever say this. But GrapeSEED doesn’t want students to produce anything truly novel and communicative until about halfway through their 40 unit program. Remember, each unit is 3 months. That means that **students don’t get the chance to actually use the language in real situations until roughly 5 years into the program.** Nobody in their right mind will stay that long.
8. The complete disregard for any of their teachers’ qualifications and a disrespect for professional autonomy. **GrapeSEED does NOT want you to change their lesson plans at all.** It’s a \[garbage\] product that is to be served as-is. They actually made it a point in several videos to tell teachers not to try to make anything up because it will ruin the lesson plan and their “Spiral Learning”.
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# Why it’s good:
It would be unfair not to mention the good things about the program.
1. It teaches English. This isn’t saying much though since essentially **any interaction with a language will produce results eventually.**
2. The stories are good. I think the grammar in the stories need to be taught, implicitly for children (perhaps through *GAMES*, which GrapeSEED appears not to have). However, if this is done then **the stories will go from incomprehensible noise to a fantastic learning tool**. The pictures are beautiful and the plots are… passable.
3. **The songs are very catchy.** I listened to that one songs that goes “Who am I? Try to guess if you can”. I listened to it a single time and **it’s been stuck in my head for a week.**
4. From what my friend told me, **the GrapeSEED office is very fast on replying to emails** asking for assistance with anything ranging from delivery of materials to how to manage a classroom.
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# A moral dilemma:
I first found out in [this thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/teachinginjapan/comments/mhyexq/my_experience_teaching_at_meysen_academy_in/), but apparently MySen Academy, who created GrapeSEED, was **founded by the same man who founded a dangerous cult** in Japan called Marumori. If this is true, *which I hope it isn’t*, then that means **using the GrapeSEED method is essentially giving this cult money to continue their operations.** How far are the teachers removed from this? If you work at a dispatch that sends you to a kindergarten that uses GrapeSEED, are you morally responsible for any of this? I would feel incredibly uncomfortable if I had to teach with this method knowing its history.
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**Anyway, what do you all think? Does anyone out there have experience with GrapeSEED that wants to chime in, good or bad?**
11 comments
Never used it, heard a lot of worrying things about the people that make it/profit from it.
Pretty much exactly what you have written is my experience. I don’t want to go into too much detail just in case I can be identified but particularly the moral dilemma you mentioned is problematic to me. There are posts on this subs history that you kind read more about that. I’m in a privileged position at the school I work at that I am able to slowly remove it from our curriculum. The sooner the better IMHO.
I’ll give a bit of demographic info to qualify my comment with while attempting to not doxx myself. I’m an Ma TESOL and have taught kindergarten and middle school with Grapeseed, the school had a somewhat close connection to MeySen, and the senior teachers (who were not licensed/had little to no actual education in English acquisition/education) fully bought into the program.
My total assessment of the program mirrors a lot of what I see as the failures of the Japanese educational system as a whole. The short assessment is there’s a lot of surface flare, branding, and misinformation as to why this program is special and effective. The reality is that it’s mostly effective because of how much time on task there is. Generally in Japan modern research and actual best practices are not considered or ignored in favor of what impresses parents and doesn’t necessitate actual change in the system.
To be specific, you hit on one of the biggest flaws in the Grapeseed system, in that there is no objective assessment anywhere in the program. There are no metrics to follow, no specific learning goals to achieve, no flags or markers for teachers to follow to create treatments or to pivot in response to student needs. There is also the spectre of rote memorization. Again, especially with young learners, Japan seems content with systems where a teacher can press a button in the back of your kid’s head and a rote response reflexively pops out of their mouth without any understanding of what they’re actually saying. Say the trigger words “How are you today Sophie” and watch the kid blankly and without emotion spit back “I’m fine Mr./Ms. X, how are you?”. That’s the basic method of nearly every approach to every bit of content in Grapeseed.
The only hope the program has of being used well for good results is in the hands of actual educators that know enough to make their own assessment apparatus, to adapt the materials for practical use, and to abandon the bits that are obsolete. The kids who otherwise make it out of Grapeseed after 7+ years learned their English by brute force and attrition, and it shows. The teacher’s that are handed the program often have no education themselves and just follow what the institution or Grapeseed consultants tell them, and do not/are not allowed to deviate. So it’s not just the program itself that needs fixing, it’s also the teacher’s that are expected to teach it and the institutions that misunderstand it.
It’s fantastic at making money.
Taught it for 2 years, and I saw through the pretty materials almost instantly. At around ES g3 level the kids started to resent it to the point that they would openly ask me to reach off curriculum. As a teacher, it was mind numbing to sit and repeat the same stuff over and over again. So glad I quit that job when I did.
It works for kindergarten with some nice results but after that naw.
I’m sorry to tell you this, but pretty much every language school in Japan has a bullshit methodology that is based on outdated methodologies that have gone the way of the dodo:
Nova? Audiolingulism – dead since 1960.
Berlitz? The Berlitz method is based on the direct method, which was usurped by audiolingualism in the 60’s.
Aeon? Again, audiolingualism.
Japanese schools are worse, having based their methdology on grammar-translation, which was used waaaaay back to translate dead languages like Latin, that no one actually spoke.
They are all the same: listen, repeat, regurgitate, memorize.
The only places you’ll find people using updated versions of CLT and TBLT and other mixed-method methodologies that are considered current best practice are in universities, and even some university instructors are dinosaurs who got their MA twenty years ago and haven’t bothered to crack a book since.
Japan is amatureland and always will be.
Never heard of it, but I studied under Krashen in grad school and have had tons of conversations with him personally about language teaching. Some of the things you mention are clearly not what Krashen was about, and he in the end comes down to motivation, which you hit in 4, and in the foreign language teaching context, keeping up the student’s motivation is most important, to allow them to seek out input.
Well I for starters, when I got them to read I did it in an unconventional way that made sure that they were able to read and not parrot.
Like having a two students read every other sentence and pointing to random words before actually continuing. There’s a set of questions per lesson and you can use that to gage your students.
There’s a book that they put a sticker in to show if they are actually practicing and it actually does show because my worst students were those that never practiced.
I taught three times a week so that was 4 units a year. With 3 classes. So for example unit 1,5,9 all at once.
After a certain point the songs are easy to memorize because it’s the same song just different words. I went to see my (brother, sister, mother, father, friend, teacher).
I would do random things not written down. Like pat your tummy, rub your head, and jump on one foot. After doing it for a while they would know what rub/pat was, and some body parts.
Left and Right was the hardest so I again would be random. Stand up, look left look right. Left side stand up, (correct if necessary) back row can leave.
I would play a fun game once they knew vocab. Ok what’s next? Ball, ahh no it’s monkey. (Students usually say monkey one time), what’s next? Chimpanzee (yes it is) no need to repeat.
I get students to ask questions to each other. Rio how are you you today? I’m excited, Hina how are you today?
I had tons of fun doing GrapeSEED. I considered the lesson plan as a guide because it’s designed for 40 minutes while my classes were 55 minutes and just did my own thing around it. I decided that phonics were important so I’d go around the room ask what’s this Ken? M. Good Miku what sound does M make? Mmm. Good
And for those with many sounds I would do all the sounds at different parts of making the letter in the air. They especially loved O and i when I did it.
I would also have them stand up and give them a sound to find. Gou where’s mmm? They would place a sticker on the m. I would high five them or pat their heads and then they would sit down.
If you really want to get them to use the unit language make up your own questions. In a class of 20 most of my 6 year olds could spell simple words using phonics alone and could read some random words that we hadn’t even covered yet.
You make it sound like someone sits on you making sure you can’t be innovative. If you don’t want to make your lesson your own and just follow a script then yea it’s gonna very boring. Every 20 minutes we were standing up and doing some random stuff just to get them to follow commands. Even commands that they shouldn’t know yet.
I can see how it can be boring if you don’t don’t spice it up. After a year you should have a few songs memorized. We did Stand Up, Sit Down even after Unit 1 just to get them active (not the whole song and usually I messed up the lyrics. For example go to sleep, pat your head, go to sleep, pat your head, go to sleep pat your head, and jump up high.)
Wow! Very interesting to see this brought up, I’d love to chime in with some opinions as a GrapeSEED teacher. I haven’t seen the training videos you mentioned, but it is not true that the teacher isn’t responsible for teaching more than the pieces. We use the pieces as a jumping off point to language usage. Comprehension of what they are reading/singing/chanting IS very important. After every piece we are asking them questions about it, and then practice using that same language in a new context they are familiar with. We also have assessments on fluency and pronunciation. I argue that this allows the teacher to have a lot of creative freedom in each class. Over the course of a unit, the teacher talks less and the children talk more… I argue that the success of this curriculum is dependent on the teacher and how well they can do this. How well they can build report with the kids, and how fresh they can make things every class. This takes a very skilled teacher, in my opinion. The vocabulary is also controlled, so that they are learning the most helpful language instead of too much, moving on, and not retaining anything..Certainly, there are pros and cons. Most of all, it builds CONFIDENCE. Maybe Katie didn’t know how to say something on day one, but asked the same question by the end, she is happy to raise her hand and try the language. And thats what the goal is, for me anyway, that they gain confidence trying the language, expressing themselves.
As for the morality of using the curriculum, I can say… it certainly is muddy. Thanks for posting this, it is a valuable discussion.
I saw your post yesterday and really wanted to chime in, but I was at work and then busy with chores so I’m late.
Disclaimers: 1. This is not in Japan. 2. I’m not an English native speaker, not bilingual, I’m a local teacher that passed the GS interview and was trained to be a TSI teacher (I have a BA in English and a teaching certificate but these are not required for a GS teacher). 3. I taught GrapeSEED in person for 1 year (Unit 1-6) before the pandemic, and I’ve just started teaching GS Online recently.
To answer the question “Is it good or bad?”, in my case, it’s the best we’ve ever had in terms of English curriculums from Kindergarten to Primary ages. The traditional/common way of teaching English for kindergarteners in my country is “ONE WORD A LESSON”. I would be bored out of my mind, let alone the kids. That was why I avoided teaching preschool kids at all costs before GS.
Next, I will follow your points of “Why it is bad?” just to offer a different perspective.
>1. *GrapeSEED offers no way to check if students actually understand the material.*
In my experience, GS provides several ways to check student comprehension. I read your comments and the question in your example: “The gorilla went to the store. Where did the gorilla go? [points to the store] That’s right, the store!” sounded like something in the Lesson Plans of the first few lessons, when the teacher has to ask and modal the answer right after. In later lessons, there will be more creative questions and activities. For example, the teacher may put a toy/ball somewhere in the classroom and ask “Where is the toy/ball?”. In another lesson, the teacher may say “I was at home this morning. Where were you/your father this morning?”. In the last few lessons, the teacher can even let the students come up with questions for the class themselves.
>*2. The materials are garbage. GrapeSEED has songs, stories, chants, poems, big books, basic readers… there’s way too many different types of materials that all blend together, making it a nightmare for new teachers.*
The materials are amazing for me. I love most of the songs, stories, chants, poems, big books, etc. I love to learn all the songs, memorize the stories and chants, etc. before teaching a new Unit. I love to belt out the songs just to charm the kids. I love to tell the stories expressively and do all I can to keep their eyes on me. I love to use puppets and toys and props to assist comprehension. I love to come up with all kinds of flashcards games to play with them in REP time. I don’t know how long it takes for others, but I only need to repeat the materials in my mind for a week to learn them all and after that, I just review them once before the class.
Why did I say most but not all? Because it is true that there are some questionable choices of words here and there. More importantly, some of the illustrations and songs/stories are blatantly sexist. For example, you will find stereotypically “manly” jobs with male characters(doctor, farmer, police officer, firefighter, …) and stereotypically “girly” jobs with female characters(nurse, teacher). You will see mothers make food and fathers build the playground. I also heard that the Turkey song has racist/xenophobic connotation (It’s a song about a fat Turkey that eats all day.)
Regarding REP time, it is true that some places/teachers just treat it as TV time. They force the students to sit for 20-40 minutes just to stare at the screen to watch and listen. But some teachers use this as a chance to make it fun and communicative, to run and dance, to place games and puzzles, to solve riddles using all the languages they learn in the official class time.
>*3. GrapeSEED wants teachers to echo the answers of the students.*
Yes, in the first few lessons, not exactly echoing, but repeating their short/one-word answers with full-sentence answers to encourage them. I think this is what all teachers do, no matter the programs. In my experience, at the end of the unit, most of the students were able to make full-sentence answers with the words and grammar structures they were exposed to, some can even tell stories about their day.
>*4. The affective filter is tossed around a lot during the training. They say that student motivation is important, but they do next to nothing to nurture motivation.*
We do positive re-enforcement, and that was what the trainers stressed all the time. My English language center at the time also bribed the kids with prizes and toys, but I don’t like that method. I used to praise the well-behaved kids, give them high-fives, fist bumps, blow kisses, stickers, etc. You know the drills.
>5. Going off of motivation, I asked my friend why he was leaving GrapeSEED. He told me a lot of things like how boring it was and the lack of freedom.
I think the problem here is the way the program is run in Japan and the particular way that the schools there enforce it, not the program itself. In my case, my assigned trainer and my English center at the time I taught GS in person encouraged teachers to be creative as long as they still followed the LP and made sure to finish all activities and questions in the LP before doing something extra. I’m sad to hear about how your friend lost his motivation to teach but my experience was the opposite. I love teaching more after doing GS.
>*6. GrapeSEED lies about their activities being student-centered activities and having student communication. To GrapeSEED, students saying a word on the flash card and then the teacher repeating the same word is somehow “student-centered” and “communicative”.*
This point is also similar to Point 1. This is what we do when the students have just started with a new Unit. They will soon move from “teacher says – students repeat” to “students say – teacher repeats” to “a leading student says – other students repeat”. The teacher will ask some obvious questions repeating the language in the materials first, before moving to more communicative questions that related to the student’s life. For flashcards, they only need to say each word twice a lesson, so of course, they need to repeat that pattern in many lessons to memorize the word stress-free. Isn’t it better than the traditional way of drilling a word a hundred times a lesson?