Of course we all know Genki English works great because we see it every time on the kids’ faces. But especially on the hard days or when it seems like somethings will never sink in, or when head teachers or boards of education are grilling us, it would be great to have some solid numbers to show them. Luckily we now have some and they are looking astoundingly good!
Background
Because the numbers of students for the India and China projects are potentially so huge they are testing in local schools first to make sure the risks taken in putting in something so different as Genki English are worthwhile. If by some strange set of circumstances Genki English didn’t work in considerably improving the kids’ speaking ability then it’s better to find out about it earlier rather than later!
So a team led by researchers from the University of Newcastle in the UK (a member of the Russell Group, I guess the UK version of the Ivy League) tested hundreds of kids before starting Genki English and then again roughly 6 months later to see how the children’s scores in a speaking/listening test had changed.
Preliminary Results
I hope the results will be published in the future, because I just got to see some of the preliminary results and they are hugely positive. The introduction of Genki English looks to have really, really improved the children’s abilities considerably. It’s so nice to see all the graphs moving upwards and to the right! Needless to say I’m very, very happy about it. It takes away so much stress and me feeling I have to prove things all the time. I feel so much more secure and can now get on with the job of improving things even more.
Confidence & Enjoyment & You!
The next step is to try and look at the effect Genki English is having on “confidence, enjoyment and satisfaction of teaching” which I’m hoping we can ace as well.
Thanks to everyone for your support throughout these projects and if any of you from other countries and schools have any anecdotes or comments about the effect Genki English is having on your students please, please write them below.
Now I want to get even more teachers to know about and enjoy teaching using Genki English!
Congratulations! It would be great to have the proofs out soon, not for us who are teaching but for the few people at the top who are ignoring or doubting.
The effect of Genki English?
First the kids “report ” on the lesson: f.ex: “I’ve been studying English for 4 years, but it’s only writing and reading. The lessons Margit is teaching I feel that English is for “communicating . For the first time English is fun”or “I never studied English and don’t know anything, but the explanations in the lesson were so simple, that I really had fun and even won the “Samurai Game”
I could go on and on. These are 5th graders. Within 200 kids of this grade there are hardly any faces who aren’t smiling.
The other day, there was one kid bringing a plastic bag to the lesson. Why? He was sick, and had been vomiting before the lesson, but by all means he wanted to take part. Another kid was having temperature, trying to hide this from the teacher,just to take part.
And as far as I’m concerned: I’m doing these lessons at our school for free, this year. It’s been more than 50 lessons, and usually I think work needs to be paid. But in this case my big goal was to make them start teaching English, and please in the right way. I wanted to convince teachers and kids that learning a foreign language is fun and easy.
And their smiles and “Thank you” and encouragement + the experience of working together with many teachers and kids was more than enough payment.
This satisfaction in what I’m doing appears even physically. Last week each member in our family (3 kids and my husband) was down with the stomach flue and though usually I’m the first to catch flues, I’m GENKI!
Hi Richard
Just yesterday I had a comment from a parent. Her son will be starting primary school this September. She attended the new school parent meeting last week.(In Austria you need to sign up quite early to secure a place) The Head teacher told the parents about the way I teach English in her school, using GE. She explained to prospective parents that the level of English in the school had made a massive gain during my three years there. She also told the parents that a Director from an Upper school had called her to remark about some of her former students. He had told her their level of confidence, vocabulary, phrases, pronunciations etc etc was so much higher than students from other schools this year. Needless to say they do not have GE in the other schools!!!
I am sure the results of the projects will be very positive. I find using these materials a very enjoyable and an extremely effective way to teach. Happy Teachers = Happy Students and Happy Students = Happy Teachers!!!
Flossy
This is great news Richard. The results are not a surprise for those already using GE, but I hope this will help the undecided people to go for it and use GE.
Even in my junior high school, where I use GE songs/videos and games whenever possible as a huge supplement to a required text, my students will start singing a GE song whenever they pass me on campus! A few students have even sung their homework at correction time!
The melodies stick so the language does too and GE increases their motivation. Once motivated, the students can do great things….
Carol
That’s great, Richard! I hope the results will be published soon.
I also have heard all the good comments from kids, parents, and teachers since I started to teach Genki English. Teachers at our school highly appreciate the spirits of Genki English and they apply them to other subujects too. In other words they take Genki English as a tool to give real education to kids.
But it is also true most of the Japanese teachers think they can’t teach English. For them Happy Teachers are those who don’t have to teach English.
I hope more and more teachers notice the value of Genki English. If we could show the results of academic research, it would help them teach English on the right track.
Right on! The primary school I teach at is used to having very good innovative native speakers teaching there, so I had some very good and hard acts to follow. Genki English has made it possible. Let’s hope we get some official figures soon to be able to show to the to the education board. It’s also one of the best ways to achieve rule nr. 5 from Power Teaching – “keep your teacher happy”
Note to Flossy: Hi, I’m in Austria too, in the Vienna Woods. Where are you located?
Iβd love to hear more about the testing. Did the researchers from the University of Newcastle develop assessments specifically for this project or did they use commercially available material like the Cambridge ESOL Young Learners English (YLE) Tests? What types of tasks were the children asked to do during the listening/speaking tests? Were the children tested individually or in groups?
Hi CJ,
For Genki English the commercial tests didn’t really cover the content we were doing i.e. mainly speaking and vocab, giving the children either an aural or visual stimulus to generate a spoken response, so a new assessment was made. They were all tested individually which took a long time! Hopefully there’ll be more on the procedure when the results are made public, I’m not entirely sure of all the details myself and the actual data analysis is completely over my head!