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EigoNoto.com

He said the hardest part for him, and for the students, has been knowing what the classes are all about. The list of questions included:

• Are the Eigo Noto classes preparation for Junior High School English classes? 
• Are the Eigo Noto classes English Conversation classes? 
• Are they about communication?
• Why is there so much focus on speaking English in the workbook? 
• How are Eigo Noto classes different from other subjects/classes?
• Eigo Noto classes don't have any tests...

These kinds of questions have been in my head for a year, and I have often heard other teachers voicing the same questions.

Whenever I go to a new school, I always ask the Koucho-sensei (school Principal), "What are your hopes or goals for my classes at your school?" And I always get the same answer, "Improving students' communication skills." There are other answers I get as well, but every Principal has put a priority on Communication.

So to address the HRT and his students' confusion about the goals of the Eigo Noto classes,
This would label an obvious goal for the classes for everyone to think about. There might be different class labels, such as 'World Culture', too. Just giving each class a clear name, and content or goal, would do a lot to help both students and teachers more successfully approach the learning task at hand. Throughout this year, I have heard a wide variety of class names/titles used by the toban (class leader) at the opening aisatsu of the Eigo Noto classes. How many have you heard?

Regarding confusion about teaching communication, in my 15 years of teaching in Japan, what I've seen some English teachers call Communication has really left me scratching my head sometimes. Clearly making Communication the name (or one of the names) of the classes would be an effective way of forcing everyone involved - students, teachers, administrators and textbook publishers - to have a serious discussion about what real communication is. Having an in-class, regional or national dialog about this could be very fruitful.

I have often had reason to ask why almost everyone in Japan studies English for years, but most adults are unable to have even the simplest English conversation. A common answer is "We're an island country!" Well, I lived in Indonesia for 2 years before I came to Japan, and it's an island country, too. And LOTS of people, with A LOT LESS education, speak a functional English. So I have a hard time accepting this reasoning. Perhaps an island nation that refused contact with the outside world for centuries would be a better explanation.
There are other reasons that are commonly put forth, and no doubt you have your own. But personally I have often wondered if, among other things, the socially-hierarchical nature of the Japanese language and society lend themselves to a handicap to true communication. It is often more important just say, 'Hai!', especially when talking (or rather, listening to) superiors, but does this really demonstrate comprehension?

And in the classrooms, a Japanese junior high school home stay student once observed,

'In America students raise hands to ask questions; but in Japan, students usually raise hands to answer questions.'

And my foreign friends agree on another point- 90%+ of Japanese people, when asked (in Japanese) 'Pardon?', go mute or stutter at best; seldom does a Japanese person repeat what they have just said to us. And asking a Japanese person to speak slowly, something I had to do as a learner of Spanish, Indonesian and Japanese, usually gets a positive response for only 1 or 2 sentences. And then speaking returns to 'normal' speed. These two points have been foremost in my learning 3 foreign languages; in Japan, these points have, and continue, to handicap communication with native speakers.

These are personal experiences I've had in Japan regarding why English is so difficult to learn for students here. No doubt you have other experiences or ideas. But regardless of why communication skills are lacking in young (or older) students, here or anywhere, let us next address Communication Skills.

There are 2 basic skills to Communication, Listening and Speaking.

To any adult, whether involved in education, business or personal relationships, the importance of listening skills should come as no surprise. And for the purposes of Communication (as well as Language Learning), we need to go one step further- Listening AND REPEATING.
Repeating what has been heard is often used as way to confirm what has been said. 'I have a dog.' 'A dog?' Or when someone tells us their telephone number on the phone, we usually repeat the number back to them again.
And for language learning, I think this is one of the most important skills, as well- Listening and Repeating. And I have been wondering if just the ability to do this repeatedly is one of the features of the language classroom that makes it different from learning language naturally.

Speaking well is something that takes practice. Again, the classroom setting allows students to say the same thing again and again. For students, or natural language learners, just saying something once seldom leads to speaking competence, let alone long-term memory.
As teachers, and especially those of young learners, we need to be creative in doing repetitive speaking activities just to avert boredom for the students. In Japan, this is often easily accomplished just by having students play Janken/Rock-Paper-Scissors first (it also conveniently serves to determine the order of speakers). See Janken Conversation Rounds and Janken 4's for a variety of ways to use this strategy.

Another aspect of speaking is simply having something to say. At a deeper level, this also requires self-knowledge. And the ability to give it a voice. Degrees of Introversion and Extroversion are different in all of us. There are probably also cultural tendencies that might make one stronger than the other in a given culture.

There are not-too-difficult classroom activities that prepare students for speaking, such as Brainstorming or Previewing, that I deal with on the ConverstionalFluency website. Another activity that I think would work well for elementary and junior high school students are the SOCC (Student's Own Conversation Cards) by Duane Kindt at this website. I will be working in the future to adapt his approach for elementary school.

We also need to be sensitive to what are known as Affective Factors, or simply said, students' feelings. Creating a speaking environment that reduces stress, and risk, for the speaker is very important. Compare

1. Standing and speaking once in front of the class, and 
2. Taking turns giving a speech with the other members of your small group. 
3. Students making pairs, each saying a speech, and then forming new pairs and speaking again. 

Given these three activities, in what order would you put them for maximum student success with the least amount of stress?

Clear training in Communication and Conversation Skills is not that hard, in my opinion, but is something that anyone, in any culture, would greatly benefit from. Heck, it might even reduce violence and war.
The ConFluency Card game, and many of the other activities on this website, are activities that teach and practice these basic communication skills.
My own opinion is that many of these communication activities, and others, could be used in the lower elementary school grades, and used as a basis for building competence for later higher-speed and higher-level communicative interaction. At the lower grades these would be done in the native langauge, not only making it easier to teach (and for students to comprhend), but also building a foundation of communicative competence in the native language that will later be transferred to use with a foreign langauge.

To repeat, all of the school Principals I have asked in Japan have said they put a priority on improving Communication Skills for their students. Communication is such an all-encompassing parameter, as I have tried to discuss in limited detail, that making Communication a main theme or name of the Eigo Noto classes would do a lot towards bringing it to the front of teachers' and students' awareness, and towards giving the Eigo Noto classes a broad foundation upon which to build a many-faceted curriculum.

Eigo Noto classes are not to discourage students from further English study, nor are the lessons meant to be Conversation Lessons. But what about students who CAN and WANT TO speak English?

Do you, or the HRTs you work with, ever insist that the Eigo Noto students interact in English? I sometimes hear Home Room Teachers exhorting kids to speak English together.
There are times when we want a student to speak English in the Eigo Noto lessons, to be sure- when listening and repeating words and phrases, or when checking accuracy in pronunciation, for example. And looking at the workbook itself, you could easily get the idea that the kids are supposed to be speaking English.
But as for student-to-student interaction in English,



there are voices from above, as well as implied expectations in the Mombusho Guidelines, that would not have us, as teachers, insisting that students interact in English in the Eigo Noto lessons.

This seemed obvious to me months ago. But an HRT/elementary school head English teacher recently returned from a Mombusho Eigo Noto training event and was telling me that she was told there that we should not be expecting the students to speak English. From the tone of her voice I got the feeling that not expecting the students to speak English in the Eigo Noto lessons was, for her, a striking and extraordinary idea.
Based on that conversation, I thought it worthwhile to discuss it here.

My thoughts on this points are based on these ideas:

1. ‘All students should feel a sense of success in the final activity.’ See the post here.
2. Not all students will be able to produce correct spoken English after 2-3 classes.
3. Eigo Noto classes are not to discourage students from further English study. (From the Ministry of Education’s Guidelines for Elementary English Education. See the post here.) This is also true for students of ability who CAN speak English.
4. Students don’t need to speak English to be able to communicate together.

If we can accept these points, it becomes easy to make a list of the things we can or should do, and those we shouldn’t, in Eigo Noto classes:

Things NOT to do in Eigo Noto classes

• Don’t choose, or require, a student to stand alone in the class and speak English unsupported by a teacher. This includes any lesson that finishes with a Show-and-Tell activity. (The Listen and Repeat CROSSFIRE activity is meant to test students’ pronunciation, for all to learn from, and demonstrates an exception to this rule. A teacher is there as support.)
• Don’t explicitly tell a student that they are saying something in English incorrectly (“That’s not right!”)
• Don’t insist that all, or individual, students perform tasks in English.
• Don’t expect students to speak English without A LOT of modeling and practice. And while they may be able to say the words and/or structures, meaning is something that will take even more time.

Ways to Structure Communication, and Spoken English, in Your Classes

• If you expect students to perform a speaking task in the last activity of the lesson series, model from the very first lesson the language you want them to produce. And then repeat the language, in both listening and speaking activities, again and again and again.
• Keep English langauge patterns very simple and very repetitive.
• Use vocabulary words that are commonly used in Japanese.  See suggested word groups here.
• Ask for volunteers to demonstrate spoken English to the whole class.
• Allow the whole class to respond in English as a single voice first. Then ask for a volunteer to say it again after the correct form has been identified by the whole class and confirmed by a teacher.
• If a student speaks English incorrectly, say the correct form for them to hear. Using a rising intonation at the end, like a question, can mean, ‘Is this what you meant to say?’ Or, give examples of the pattern, changing a word, to model the language by talking about yourself.
• In the whole class, when someone responds in Japanese, ask if anyone knows how to say it in English. If they don’t know the whole meaning, start breaking it down into smaller and smaller chunks- phrases first (blue shoes), and then single words (blue, shoes). Gesture, and point to examples, to help.
• When speaking to individual students, and they respond in Japanese, repeat back to them what they just said, in English. Or, make it an English question. (‘Onaka suita.’ -> ‘I’m hungry.’ or, ‘Oh, are you hungry?’)
• To support low-English ability students, prepare materials with pictures and written Japanese as much as possible.
• Use written English on the blackboard and in materials.
• Narrow the conversation in activities to simple, repetitive patterns. Some of the Eigo Noto lessons use several language structures in one lesson. The EigoNoto.com lessons have simplified the language in these lessons already.
• Use small group and pair speaking activities to advantage- these groupings lower student anxiety, allow for more direct interaction, and many other things.  See this post. And this one.
• Structure activities so that students can repeat the same language experience several times with different partners. Some partners will offer better modeling than others, assisting lower-skilled students to advance their ability. Repeating the experience allows students to learn from their own, and others, successes and mistakes.
• Make activities as communicative as possible. This is the most difficult to describe, but in simple terms, meaningful responses confirm comprehension. Responses can be verbal (Yes or No is the easiest to understand), active (Here is the FISH card.), gestures, or in Japanese.

With visual and written English support, spoken Japanese, spoken English and gestures, and enough repetitive practice, all students will have the best chance of successful communicative interchange, whether it’s in English or not. And those students who WANT to speak English get a chance to.

Communicating isn't just a Question and Answer routine. Students can easily communicate together with any sentence pattern if you'll teach them just a little bit more...

• I like English.
• I like English, too.
• I don't like English.

Students can use sentences to communicate with these activities:

• Hot Potato
  
• Janken 4's
• CROSSFIRE
• Janken Conversation Rounds or Row Practice/Row Races
• Interview Bingo