When do you think it’s better to speak Japanese vs English?

19 comments

1. I never use full sentences. Only single words or the grammar point equivalent. For example, ~because = から・ので. ~in order to = ために、ように、には for example.

2. Ideally, before the class starts or at the beginning.

   Explaining what is gonna be taught, as in the grammar point or vocabulary explained in the students native language.

   And then proceed into the lesson practicing it.

   Finally, after the check, any questions and feedback in their native tongue.

3. As rarely as possible. You should try to explain in simpler terms and/or encourage your student to look it up in the dictionary. If they are traveling, at work conference, etc. no one can lean over and tell them a sentence in Japanese. Encourage them to guess, figure it by context. If they don’t want to bring an electronic dictionary to a lesson, have one with you for student use.

4. It depends on their level. Beginners will need more instruction in their native language while intermediate and advanced will try to do everything in the target language as much as humanly possible. If your students are having trouble understanding the instructions, try modeling the activity and shortening the instructions.

5. Depends how good your Japanese really is as in how well you know the differences in grammar, idiomatic expressions,etc and the terminology that come with those. Also depends on what level the students are and why they are studying English.

   I teach high school seniors preparing for exams to get into university. They’ve been taught by Japanese teachers for at least five years, mostly on a way that resembles formulas used in physics and mathematics. If you’ve ever seen one of the grammar reference books they use in high school here you’ll know what I mean.

   Reading comprehension and ability to translate sentences between the languages trump actual communicative skills like speaking and writing.
   If you’re teaching English conversation, post secondary, or are an ALT there is much more freedom to do what you want.

6. I teach middle and high school students at a juku, probably 90% or more in Japanese. The students generally know grammar structures and formulas by their Japanese names as well as what they correspond to, and since when they’re preparing for university exams or Eiken etc. it’s much less about creating texts themselves than it is applying the English to concepts given in the questions in Japanese (or at least if it is in English, something they would translate into Japanese before attempting to answer) I find it gives better understanding when they have a good grasp in their native language of the concepts being applied.

   Only if I’m sure they know what we’re doing do I throw in some English conversation, just for listening practice and getting comfortable with having them speak on the fly.

7. No problem whatsoever with using the native language especially at lower levels where the explanations would require more advanced English than what’s actually being explained. I teach elementary in a small town and very rarely explain things in English, but I do try to elicit ideas from the students instead of spoonfeeding the information to them. For example, when teaching when to use play and when to use do for different sports, I show a few examples and then ask them in Japanese to come up with an explanation. Then I show them more examples and we check if their explanation is still adequate. I usually get at least one student blurting out “球技や!” Giving it to them in English might be good for listening comprehension, but this way gets them to think more analytically and form the distinction themselves.

8. There is no simple answer for this. My understanding is that the EFL community is moving away from the idea that L1 must be banned from the classroom, so you’re in good company. But I think the best answer to this is not “when” but “why”.

   I think of a teacher’s use of L1 in my classroom as a cost/benefit decision: getting the message across immediately and unambiguously at the cost of losing a chance for students to practice decoding information in the L2 on their own. I’ll see the benefits of using L1 immediately, but I won’t see the consequences of the cost until the future. Of course, there are other costs and benefits to using L1 in the classroom, but we’re already getting to a decision that has too many variables to work out easily as a teacher with lots of education, research, and is probably impossible to solve if you’re new to the industry.

   So I go with my gut, acknowledging that sometimes I’m going to make the wrong choice and the students in my classroom won’t be learning language at peak efficiency. And that’s okay, because there are a lot of other factors in students’ language learning efficiency, and I’ll have to make the wrong *L1or L2* decision **a lot** before it starts to seriously impact learning efficiency compared to other factors. Instead of following a rule, I try to be mindful of students’ experience with the classroom. In this teacher’s opinion, having one single rule to follow is a lot less effective than building the practice of constantly asking yourself “What is the experience this classroom like for my students right now?” and “Will they get more out of figuring this out themselves or out of me giving them a bit of support?”

   **HOWEVER**, I know some teachers, especially new or overworked teachers, want a rule to follow just to get through the day. So here are times when I tend to use L1:

   * I can see students are mentally exhausted, and I have something I need to communicate to them that is more complex than I think they can deal with, and we’re close enough to the end of the lesson that I don’t expect to be forcing them to be code-switching back-and-forth between L1 and L2 for the rest of the lesson.

   * I try to avoid using L1 for homework activity instructions, but I may switch to L1 for when I need to say something about the mindset I want them to approach their homework or studies with. So I guess we’d call that meta-task language instead of task-language.

   * When I need to scold students who behave badly, and they aren’t fluent enough in English to learn from a scolding in English.

   * I really, really avoid using L1 for teaching L2 vocabulary. I want students to build a neural network of concepts linking to each new word, so teaching the L1 meaning is IMHO one of the most counter-productive things I could do. “A dog is a furry animal, dogs are usually pets, dogs are sometimes cute and sometimes messy, dogs can be very small or big (gestures with hands), dogs like meat and chasing balls and going for walks, here’s a photo of me with my dog…” builds multiple routes in the brain for understanding and hopefully recalling ‘dog’, but if I say “It means 「犬」,” my students will get one very solid neural pathway for comprehension but they have only that single route to use when they want to recall it, and that can be pretty shaky.

   So I tend to use L1 for vocabulary teaching only when I want to highlight a contrasted nuance of meaning between Japanese and English. For example, I would absolutely never use L1 to teach my students that “play soccer” means 「サッカーをする」, but I might use L1 to teach that while in Japanese many sports and activities can be made into verb phrases with 「する」, in English certain sports and activities need ‘play’, some need ‘do’, and some can be a verb on their own or use “go ~ing”.

   Anyway, sorry this turned into a book. TL;DR: L2-only teaching is losing support, but how to choose L1 or L2 is really hard. You will probably make the wrong choice sometimes, but it probably won’t matter much as long as you’re constantly trying to trend towards more empathy for your students and generally teaching better day-by-day.

   Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

9. In class? Never. That’s the standard and expectation. I’d go further and say that the better you are at Japanese, the easier it is to explain things in English because you’ll know EXACTLY what they’re gonna understand.

   Japanese is useful for…
   – Talking to Japanese friends while out drinking on the weekend
   – Travelling around Japan
   – Accessing services (e.g. banks, hospitals, phones…etc)
   – Talking to the parents on your last day of work at a school (i.e. to say ‘thanks for your support… I’m going home now… Japan’s been great… my next move’s gonna be [blah]…etc’)
   ~~~
   Okay ONE isolated situation in class… I had an adult student who kept telling me I was fat and making fun of my weight (let’s ignore the fact I’m 183cm, ~75kg and run marathons for a second). In English I politely asked her to stop doing that as it was considered a little bit rude in English. She kept at it and was like ‘no I’m not being rude… I think you misunderstand… how do I say… you have put on weight! You should lose weight by eating less fatty food’. After 20 minutes of this (in her broken English) I cut her off and in Japanese said ‘NO, STOP!!! That is rude… do not talk about my weight’. She was pretty shocked but afterwards an assistant (who hated me and always listened in so she could critique my lessons) said ‘you did the right thing… she was being very rude… I think it was 100% the right thing to do’. That’s the ONLY time I ever used Japanese in class.

   99.99% of the time when I hear an ALT/eikaiwa teacher trying to speak Japanese (and bragging it was essential), their Japanese is incorrect and completely unnecessary. IMO it’s a non-issue.

10. As a general rule I try to avoid using the learner’s native language. However, if all else fails, I will ask for a confirmation check, eg. “How do you say ‘sassy’ in Japanese?” Usually at least one student in the class will know the translation, and they can elucidate the rest of the class. So technically I won’t speak Japanese, but get a student to do so if necessary.

    This technique was recommended in a recent course provided by the British Council and I’ve found it useful for difficult to explain vocabulary.

11. I frequently explain things that are not relevant to the lesson (such as how to do some assignment or piece of homework) privately to individual students in Japanese if they ask me about it, and I often give or write instructions on tests in Japanese when the test is designed to check students’ understanding of a particular text in the target language (rather than to check understanding of test questions, as some research has showed tests are more reliable when students have prompts in a language stronger than the target language).

    I usually send students two email warnings if they seem in danger of failing the class, and these are always written in Japanese.

12. Just flip it. Explain it in English and ask someone to say the japanese word if they’re not sure. If they get it wrong you’ve caught the misconception, before it’s caused any problems. If they are right they’ve improved their own analytical understanding of new English words as well as catching any other possible misconceptions from shyer students in the class, who might not have said anything.

13. Target language only in class for students mainly exists because certain schools only hire fresh off the boat native speakers who can’t use the students’ L1. They then promoted total immersion as a way to flip this weakness into a marketing strength.

    To me it seems fairly clear that a bilingual, well-trained teacher with good judgement as to how to maximise the target language in the classroom would be the best option.

    Personally I aim for ‘as much English as possible, with as much Japanese as is useful’. Depends on age, ability, motivation, goals, etc.

14. https://ealjournal.org/2016/07/26/what-is-translanguaging/

15. I teach university students. I teach in English 99% of the time. The 1% of occasions when I’ve used Japanese is when I pre-taught some vocabulary for a particular topic, and even then I just copy-pasted the definition from weblio or something. I haven’t had any problems with this method. They produce what they should with English instructions so I haven’t seen the need to use more Japanese.

16. For beginner and some intermediate levels I use Japanese when explaining grammar points and some vocabulary.

    Immersion is great and highly effective. Very few English classes and courses in Japan are immersion. You can’t have immersion with a couple hours a week, especially when students do very little study outside of class. It is FAR more effective to just give them the grammar point in Japanese and get them using their English as soon as possible where you can fine tune any issues and reinforce correct usage. Playing the puzzle game of trying to meet in the middle just isn’t as effective.

    Once a student is at mid-high intermediate you should rarely, if ever, need to use Japanese – though it still has its place. “L1 has no place in a language class” is bullshit. Unless you’re actually running a real immersion class, there is no benefit to having your confused students spending time trying to figure out a difficult grammar point when you could explain it to them in 30 seconds and then have them actually using it the rest of the time. Correct usage is far more beneficial for learning than puzzle time.

17. The longer I’ve been teaching the less Japanese I use in the classroom. It’s ok to use, but over time I’ve found other ways to get them to understand.

18. I use Japanese outside of class to chat with students. Lower level textbooks often have some explanation in Japanese, so I often point to that while telling them the English meaning. Or if a student asks me a question in Japanese, I’ll tell them how to say it in English and answer in English.

    …Also if it’s kids I think scolding in Japanese is fine.

19. I set up most of my lessons so I shouldn’t need Japanese, but depending on the topic it might be sensible in small pieces. For example, if you’re teaching JHS kids what the passive voice is, a short Japanese explanation saves a ton of time. Another example is translation. If your students are practicing translating English to Japanese, maybe you’re going to want to speak some.