2006 May | Genki English

May

The American Idol Classroom

by richard

I just watched the American Idol final on Fox tonight ( Japan is a week late). There were special guests everywhere and brilliant songs, what a fantastic piece of TV. Great entertainment is all about moving people, changing emotions to inspire, to relax, to take people on a trip where you acquire knowledge without you even knowing it, at the end you feel on top of the World and want to try it all again. There is so much the education world can learn from entertainment. Even in the one show, American Idol, you have…

The story. It starts off with thousands of hopefuls and you know where it’s going to end. You have a pathway to walk on and a goal to reach. There’s no dawdling or looking out the window. You know where you are, where you are going, so you start the walk. In the classroom the content of the lesson is the Idol stars, the students are the viewers, let’s follow the story.

The Baddie. Simon Cowell doesn’t mind playing the bad guy, the one everyone loves to hate, the one who people tune in to see, he’s in charge of everyone’s recording rights. You need something like that in your class. What do you make the bad guy everyone can battle against? Unnecessary Japanese? Katakana pronunciation? Talking too quietly? Just remember that mistakes aren’t bad guys, they’re good guys. As long as you don’t make them thrice.

It’s mine!. The reason Idol is so popular is that along the way it’s not the producer or teacher that chooses how you walk that path, the viewers, the students choose. It then becomes their own, they own it. Let the kids choose.

The emotion. The ups and downs, the “Oh nos!”, the “What’s going to happen next?”, the “I can’t believe it!” all keep you on the edge of your seat right to the very end. You need the lows and tears to appreciate the highs and joys.

The sounds & sights. Sights are what we see straight away, it’s got to draw the eye. But music is the most powerful tool to move people emotionally. Imagine American Idol without music. Imagine a classroom without songs.

The event. You were there, you were part of it! You saw them at the lowly beginning, you saw them at the end. If you were part of it, you knew how special it was. Your students aren’t just in any English class, they’re in your English class. That is special.

The happy ending. No one could watch Idol and not be happy at the end. Yes there was a winner, but everyone was a winner. And we all know the end is just the beginning of the next chapter, and we want to know what happens next. Every lesson should be the same, we know who won, but we all won, and we all have a chance to try again next time.

Over the years entertainment has learned what people want, what they need and what they crave. That’s what we need to use in our lessons, to use all the tools & techniques available to make as many students as involved and engaged as possible in the lessons, in the learning. We don’t just have to move their minds, we have to move their hearts, to take them on a story as they learn, and arrive at the happy ending, the learning of the new skills, that everyone deserves.

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May

TPRS from the British Council

by richard

One of the other workshops I attended last week in Kobe was on storytelling in the classroom. Funnily enough when I looked at the name of the presenter, it was Hamish Buchan from the British Council. The British Council, in various countries, have been really great over the last year or so ( have a look at this link for a lesson plan they have incorporating the GE “Under the Sea” song), but my schedule has never matched up with Hamish’s in Tokyo so we’d not actually met until today.

The workshop itself was very good, it was great to see a professional workshop at the conference. He started out with basic Total Physical Response ( TPR) similar to the TPR Warm Up game. He then did a demo in Hungarian and had people split into twos, one giving instructions to the other. That was a really good idea.

Then he moved onto storytelling using actions and gestures. This is a style of teaching called TPRS which I’ve been looking into more and more after Gumby and CJ were talking about the benefits of it on the GE forum. Here’s a good overview from the main TPRS website. We started out with a story that went something like:

Mr Bean woke up
Mr Bean switched off the alarm clock
Mr Bean made the bed
Mr Bean got dressed
Mr Bean brushed his teeth
Mr Bean left the house
etc. etc.

The key with TPRS is that kids hear the words many ( several dozen ) times, all the while doing the directions, then eventually they begin to speak them. At this point we were split into twos to practise on each other.

The key is to keep it interesting enough so the kids are always paying attention. Here Mr Bean was the hook, other teachers use strange stories to get the kids paying avid attention.

The magic part of this lesson was that Hamish then played an actual episode of Mr Bean - “The Dentist”. In the video Mr Bean does everything the kids just learnt, but in a different order. It’s very funny and afterwards the kids can easily discuss the order of what happened in English! I just had a look on You Tube but they only have part of the episode, you can see it here.

We then moved onto a lot of other great activities. Including going through Eric Carle’s “Brown Bear, what do you see?“, and then using the animals that crop up to tell a version of the Big Turnip story. i.e. instead of the farmer calling for his wife, daughter etc. he calls for the “red birds”, “white dogs” etc. which are the names of the groups the kids are in. Both these books are hugely popular in Japanese schools, and it’s a great way to link them, and the English, together.

If you get the chance, I’d highly recommend the British Council workshops and next year they are planning on introducing a correspondence course for JET programme participants, which should be very worthwhile doing.

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May

Back in Inaka

by richard

I’m back in Ehime this weekend, for the first time since November. When I used to be a JET I could never understand why ALTs from the big cities complained about living in the countryside. What’s not to like about being surrounded by greenery, clean air and lots of fresh food? But after being in the big city myself for the past few months it was strange not being able to catch a Starbucks when I needed one!

I’ve only been here for a couple of days though so it is pretty busy to say the least. It’s been lots of backing up of data, doing stock checks and preparing the action plans for this year. From day to day things do seem to move slowly, but when you look back over 6 months a lot has happened, and the rest of this year should be pretty exciting too. Stay tuned!

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May

Ideas from Nagahama

by richard

Yesterday, after having meetings all morning ( lots of new stuff coming up on the site!), in the afternoon I popped along to some of the ALT workshops to see what was going on. The first one was by an elementary school ALT, Stein Setvik from Nagahama City Elementary English Program in Shiga Prefecture, and it was really good. In past years they have been some terrible ones. One year the presenter told the ALTs they had to never speak Japanese in elementary schools, even at lunchtime or when lesson planning with the teachers! One other time the presenter handed everyone a print out of just about all the games on Genki English ( without asking me), and simply read through them in the workshop! So it was a relief to see a very good one this year.

I’ll put a link up to Stein’s handouts when CLAIR puts them online, but for now some of the very nice ideas from him and the participating JETs were:

Graduation Game: In the Gokiburi Game instead of evolving through animals, you start off at 1st grade and work your way up to 6th grade, before doing the conversation and rock, paper, scissors with the teacher in order to graduate from elementary school! The target language is, of course, “What grade are you in?”

Famous People: Instead of the Name Card Game, give each child a laminated A4 picture of a famous person, and a load of paper money. They meet and ask each other “What’s your name?” and then answer with the card they are carrying. They then rock, paper, scissors. The loser gives the winner some money ( you decide how much depending on whether you want to practise big or small numbers), and they switch pictures. They split up, find someone else and try it again with the name of the new card they have!

For the Monster Drawing Game, instead of the teacher deciding how many limbs to draw, one kid throws a dice and they draw that many.

Class word search. For older kids, or Junior High, try drawing a massive word search on the board. The kids come up and ring the words they find.

Greetings. Get the kids, one at a time, to walk out the front door of the class. Everyone says “Goodbye!”, as they walk back in the door at the back of class everyone says “Hello!”.

Hot, Cold, Warm, Cool. Send one kid out of the room. Hide a cuddly toy in the class somewhere. The kid comes back and has to find out where the toy is. As they move around the class room everyone shouts out “Hot, Cold, Warm or Cool” when they get nearer or farther away!

Anyway, those are a few of the good ideas I learnt, I’ll link up to the rest later. Thanks Stein, I’m sure you’ve helped a lot of ALTs this year.

And if you were in the audience and contributed any of the ideas above, let me know and I’ll give you the credit.

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May

Yomiuri Part Two anti-English

by richard

Today the Yomiuri had the second in its series of articles about elementary school English. This time from one of the opponents, Prof. Yukio Otsu. You can read the article here ( note: the link will expire soon).

He seems to be of the familiar, but not widely held outside Japan, view that English shouldn’t be taught as it might interfere with their Japanese. “It’s crucial that children first establish a firm foundation in Japanese as their mother tongue and learn its structure.” The usual one-liner response to that is, “Well try telling that to a child in Luxembourg. They’ll answer you … in 3 languages.” In Africa it’s estimated that half the population is multilingual, and most professional educators would laugh at the suggestion that a few hours of English per week would harm the kids’ Japanese ability.

But the new tactic seems to be to latch on to the failings of the current implementation and use that as further ammunition. For example South Korea where 6th grade kids find English amongst their most disliked classes, or some parts of Japan where a similar thing happens. Of course the reason in both these cases is nearly always teachers pushing grammar based Junior High School type teaching into elementary schools. Some schools really do go overboard on this and it really is a shame to see the kids who do end up really disliking English and anything to do with it. Luckily most schools aren’t like that!

The thing is people who make these types of negative comments completely gloss over the widespread results of many other kids who now enter junior high school with really good pronunciation, a good attitude to English, and the basics of most of the JHS content, all thanks to a good experience in elementary school. But Prof Otsu goes on to say “Introducing English education at the primary school level won’t produce positive results, no matter how many resources we secure for it”.. Obviously someone who’s never actually taught English in elementary schools then! Where do they get these experts?

The problem is, as it always has been, is that the people in charge don’t see the good effects as many Japanese JHS teachers often don’t have the English ability to recognise them themselves. Of course to most ALTs and good English speaking teachers the difference is obvious, and amazing, but how do we quantify that for the skeptics?

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May

Kobe JET Conference

by richard

Today was this year’s Kobe Conference for recontracting members of the Japanese governments’ JET programme.

This was the 4th year I’ve been asked to present here, but quite a few things have changed, so it was almost like doing it for the first time. First of all there was no AJET info fair, so I didn’t have to bother with any “sales” type things. These were the first group of JETs that I’d also presented to at their Tokyo Orientation last year, and I’d basically used up half of my material and all the jokes then, so had to come up with all new stuff! Usually my workshop is on the last day when everyone is severely hung over, but today I was on first on the first day, so everyone was wide awake and ready to go. So that meant we could get going straight away, with only a small warm up, “The bargaining game” for the first group, and Left & Right for the second. I could tell straight away it was going to be a good conference, and it felt like presenting to a group of mates who were very happy to be there.

Content wise I decided to start of with some basic theory stuff ( e.g. “L+1″, “Multiple Intelligences” etc. ) to give them the background to realise why we do the activities we do, and build on how and why we learn, all along illustrating it with lots of practical ideas from 1st grade, working our way up to Junior & Senior High. I’ve written up the main points on the site, which you can find on the link here: “Kobe 2006 Recontracting Conference Notes“.

Then to finish off it was my Genki speech, which I didn’t do in Tokyo last year, and the room was just buzzing at the end! This is what the JET programme is all about! I didn’t have to prompt anyone to do the activities and everyone was listening to the theory bits and really taking them in. Both groups were great JETs. The only thing that surprised me was how many of the basic ideas and games they hadn’t been taught yet. It might be worthwhile doing more prefectural JET workshops like I used to do, as just getting a grip on some basic strategies really takes the stress out of the job.

Then it was a quick rest and out for the evening. Even without the Genki English t-shirt on it took an hour to walk along the road as everyone kept coming up to chat. Everyone was just so friendly, and as I knew a lot of them from last year, it really felt like the old days again, and it certainly keeps my confidence up about how good 95% of the JET programme really, really is.

So thanks everybody, I had a great time and you were a pleasure to present to! Keep up the good work, and be genki!

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The American Idol Classroom

TPRS from the British Council

Back in Inaka

Ideas from Nagahama

Yomiuri Part Two anti-English

Kobe JET Conference

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