Today I attended a presentation by Tom Merner, who has done a lot of work with elementary school English activities. Tom is really on the ball, is a great bloke, really knows his stuff and gave a great presentation.

He started off by going through the guidelines. And he was very much focussing on the “it’s not teaching English”, and he put the lessons into the broader context of the “Period of Integrated Study” i.e. it’s not about teaching kids English, but using English activities to improve the kids’ personal development. This is something I totally agree with. And as he says is something that many companies involved with schools simply ignore because they have never read what they are supposed to be teaching! In Tom’s translation the aims are “developing better problem-solving qualities and skills by being able to identify issues, learn, think and making judgments by themselves” and “nurturing attitudes to actively and creatively involve themselves in problem-solving and investigative activities”. Very nice.

It was really good to hear this again from an authoritative source as this is what it’s all about. This is where most of the Genki English activities came about, i.e. doing things like cooking, or hallowe’en games and especially exchange projects. Unfortunately what has happened is that many places have taken this to just mean “have fun with English”, do the simplest type of lesson possible and the students don’t develop at all. Hence recently I’ve been pushing more for the, right here are ideas that work that will get the kids speaking and once we’ve done that let’s start doing these types of international projects. But I think I will start putting more of the more experiential type activities back up, and hopefully the schools can make a judgement as to how to balance their curriculum! ( Optimism eh!)

Tom also showed us his new textbook, and wow that is fantastic!! It’s written by Tom and Koizumi Sensei. Koizumi sensei is pretty famous because he’s an amazing teacher, he’s not one of these guru’s who’s never set foot in a classroom, he’s just a 100% talented teacher. Now I’ve always found his ideas to be tricky to put into practise for the average teacher as the presentation of the things he does is key. But in this new textbook he’s put his ideas down in the most easy to understand way. And rather than starting from the English, he’s started from the topics the kids do in other subjects and introduced English to them. e.g. things like “How old is the Daibutsu in Nara?”, “How do you get to Kyoto from your house?” or “How tall are you?”. The books are very well presented and the teachers packs look pretty cool. I was well impressed.

So that was certainly a presentation that was worth attending. Tom’s on a tour of the country, so if you get the chance then I’d recommend seeing him. It was also good to see a great textbook being produced. Most of the other stuff on the market I just cringe, errrgh. But finding something good is great as it means I can just recommend it rather than having to produce one myself!

So it gave me a lot of things to think about. There are many ways of doing this and it all depends on how you interpret the guidelines. Some people just take the guidelines on face value and simply play with the kids and basically make sure they don’t hate English. I think this has it’s merits, but as most of us have seen it is quite easy to do and not something that takes 6 years! The main reason for having this is to stop JHS teachers or more traditional teachers coming in with strict English lessons that turn the kids off. Hence at the other end are people who ignore everything and sit down with English methods from outside schools and do make the kids hate English. These people are just missing the boat because that’s not what it’s about. English is part of “International Understanding” so that’s the stance I’ve been taking, it’s about giving them confidence, basic English skills and the chance to use them to communicate with people in a totally fun way ( one of the teachers who attended today said one of her neighbours was in my demo class the other day and came home totally excited about it!). My method up to now has been to speak with the kids, find out what they want to say to English speakers and make fun lesson plans based around that English. Then once they have that English they can use it in real life exchanges and learn that foreigners are not all weird aliens! What Tom has done is to look one step up again as International Understanding is part of the “Integrated Studies”.

So first of all I was really impressed with Tom’s book, it is really good, but when I came to think about it more, I doesn’t teach the kids to be able to speak any English. The teacher basically teachers a great lesson and drops in English phrases where possible, the kids will learn to understand and think about the target material, but there isn’t the time taken to get the kids actually speaking. Nor are ALTs involved. Now this is what Tom wants, and it’s done on purpose as the kids development is the main thing, not learning English. And this certainly has its merits. I personally would love schools to adopt it, as it is great for the kids. But pulling back to the big picture it doesn’t solve Japan’s English and lack of International Understanding problem!. So I think my way of looking at things is still maybe the way to go forward, but it will be very interesting to see how things turn out in the future. Certainly having a book as good as Tom’s taking the “it isn’t English teaching” approach will nicely balance the “English cram, cram, cram” people and hopefully keep the debate open as to how to proceed with making English a subject and we can hopefully work out a lot more methodologies and find out what really works for the kids!!