Japan 2001: A Sabbatical Leave Report
By Norman Johnson, ESL Program
INTRODUCTION
As
a member of the faculty of English as a second language at Lane Community
College I serve a wide range of students with a complex array of learning needs
and challenges. Some are international students, often from Japan, who may need
to adjust to different instructional styles on top of coping with learning in a
second language. Others are immigrants to the U.S. who must cope with taking
care of their family and daily life responsibilities in a foreign language in
addition to their classroom work. I hoped to take advantage of the sabbatical
leave opportunity to deepen my understanding of these student experiences as
well as to reflect on the current thinking in my field. I therefore set the
following four goals for my sabbatical leave experience.
1. Research the current state of English language methodology in high schools in Japan; - I wanted to look at how our Japanese students are being prepared in English prior to their arrival at LCC.
2) Refresh my experiential understanding of language learning by studying the Japanese language;
3) Read several books related to the theory and methods of Teaching English to Speakers of other Languages (TESL); and
4) Experience personally arrival in a foreign country and taking care of daily life responsibilities in a foreign language.
ACTIVITIES
I arranged with an acquaintance in Japan to rent a house
in Tokyo for the period from July to January. My family and I arrived in Japan
on July 4th and the next day began the process of enrolling our
children in Japanese schools. It took one full day of meetings with school
officials and reporting to various offices to get papers stamped and a school
uniform picked up but the next day our middle school-aged daughter began her
experience in Japanese schools. (Both of my children had studied Japanese as a
foreign language as part of the curriculum in Eugene schools so they had a
foundation for participation in Japanese schools.) Enrolling our son in high
school was more difficult but we eventually were able to get him into a high
school about one and a half hours away from our home. Since we decided to take
advantage of the summer to extend my Fall term sabbatical leave from LCC, we
not only had time to set up housekeeping in Japan before I began my formal
program of study, but I also had time to make contacts for additional school
visits after arrival in Japan. After a break in August when everyone in Japan
goes on vacation, my daily routine settled into studying Japanese and doing
readings in my field of TESL every morning, and doing formal Japanese study
most afternoons. I mixed in site visits to different high schools and colleges
once or twice a week. I kept a daily journal of my observations about English
education in Japan, second language learning as I experienced it and
cross-cultural adjustment. From these notebooks I’ve distilled a few notes to
share with others in this report.
OBSERVATIONS ABOUT JAPANESE SCHOOLS
1) Admission to a university in Japan is based on performance on the entrance exam administered by that university. (There are no tests similar to the SAT or ACT with scores recognized by many different universities.) High school grades are unimportant in the admission decision, so there is tremendous pressure to prepare for the entrance exams.
2) Instruction in high schools tends to be by lecture except in the sciences where there is some use of experiments. It is boring to most Japanese students and in all but the best schools sleeping in class is not uncommon and goes largely unpunished. Other students in classrooms I observed spent the period in self-grooming or discreetly checking their email via their cell phones. Because high school grades are unimportant to the students’ future there is little incentive to do assignments or perform well in class.
3) There are striking differences between high schools, but the differences are mostly in the quality of the student-body. (High school attendance is not compulsory in Japan, although over 95% of Japanese do attend high school. High school attendance is therefore not primarily local but is based on high school admission test scores.) At a high level high school that I visited, students took careful notes on lectures, color-coding grammatical relationships, etc. Many of these students hope to enter a respected four-year university. At a middle range high school in a suburban area I was told only one in four students was likely to enter a university after high school, yet the curriculum was the same, emphasizing only preparation for university entrance exams. This, of course, means that the instruction there is not relevant to the majority of students, which explains some of the time-off-task behaviors observed.
4) The most powerful learning for most kids during high school happens “after-school.” Every student is expected to belong to a school club and these clubs, which are largely student run although with the help of a faculty advisor, meet regularly and sometimes intensively. Clubs ranged from the usual sports teams to music, art, cartoon illustrating, calligraphy, science and the school newspaper. Both of my kids joined the band club while they were attending school in Japan. For my daughter, especially, this was a shock. It wasn’t a class like she was accustomed to at her middle school in the U.S. Although the band appeared to be a club open to all, it became clear over time that only accomplished musicians who were committed to extensive practice together were welcome to belong to this club. The club met everyday after school for 2-3 hours of rehearsal, and during “summer vacation” they met for between 6 and 8 hours a day, five days a week. At the high school level the commitment was similar although the enforcement was more relaxed. It was apparent that some students developed leadership skills, discipline and a work ethic in pursuit of goals through participation in these school-sponsored clubs.
The other after-school learning that was important to many students was in their personal study and private lessons in preparation for specific university entrance exams. The good students took this task very seriously and would study between 6-8 hours on school nights and 10-12 hours on “vacation” days and weekends. Most high school seniors gave up participation in club activities to either study for college entrance exams, or to get a part-time job if college entrance didn’t seem like a realistic goal.
5) Formal group rituals continue to play a very important place in school life (and in Japanese society as a whole). At the middle school my daughter attended I believe there were at least 6 assemblies plus two all day school festivals (one for sports and one for music) during the six months she was in attendance. At the school assemblies each class sat in straight rows on the floor of the gym for individual student awards, a speech by the principal and exhortation from other school figures about such topics as bicycle safety and earthquake preparedness. These assemblies were characterized by formality with group bowing to the authority figure who stood to speak from the stage above them. In the middle school ceremonies I observed, there was a significant degree of conformity to these behaviors enforced by teachers and given by students. The high school had similar assemblies, yet there were clear distinctions between middle schools and high schools in the degree of conformity in acting out rituals. High school students would line up for the opening and closing ceremonies but only a small percentage would actually bow at the appropriate times. When I mentioned this observation to a high school teacher in Japan, he acknowledged the change from middle school to high school behavior, but said there was nothing high school teachers could do about it. I wonder what the future holds for changes in Japanese society. I also wonder how Japanese students who come to the U.S. to study feel about the level of informality in class and the absence of school rituals here.
1) English language teaching in high schools is still driven by the demands to prepare students for the college entrance examination. It emphasizes memorization of vocabulary and grammar rules and trains students to translate a paragraph of English into Japanese. High schools throughout the country follow the same curriculum day by day. Even in private high schools the need to prepare students for university entrance exams controls much of the required English coursework.
2) In particular, the English language curriculum in Japanese schools contains very little work on extensive reading skills and almost no work on writing English beyond the sentence level. Most Japanese students coming to study in the U.S. are woefully under-prepared for the kinds and amounts of reading and writing assignments typical of college work here.
3) There is a recognition among English teachers in Japan, and also in the Ministry of Education, that the current state of English education in Japan is inadequate. However, recommended changes so far have focused on introducing more spoken English and communicative activities into the curriculum with little attention to changes in the way that reading and writing skills are taught. The Ministry of Education has established model programs at several elementary schools to begin communicatively oriented English education. (Normally English does not become a part of the curriculum until middle school.) There also are considerable efforts to reform the middle school curriculum to make it more communicative, however, most educators in Japan feel that there is little that can be done about the high school English curriculum as long as the English section on most university entrance exams remains the same.
1) Meaningful assessment of second language ability can be deceptive and may depend on the language use goals of the individual more than a generalized score. I completed the second year level of Japanese language at the University of Oregon as a student and lived and worked in Japan from 1974-1977 and again from 1982-1984. Since 1984 I have had little occasion to use my Japanese language skills. While we were in Japan during my sabbatical, many people praised my Japanese language ability. I seemed to function well in most social situations as I filled in any vocabulary and grammar gaps with educated guesses. However, I found that in settings where the interlocutor took an unexpected tack, I lost my ability to fill in the gaps and sometimes lost my confidence in resolving the communication situation. I more than once felt frustrated and helpless to make myself understood in Japanese. I’ll never forget the day I stood in a store trying to resolve a problem with my printer and listened to the clerk tell another clerk over the phone that he was sending me to his store and that I didn’t speak Japanese. Clearly I’m not a beginner in Japanese as this one clerk perceived me, and yet there are significant holes in my language competence. But what is my ability in Japanese?
2) I wasn’t satisfied with the options available to evaluate my Japanese language ability. The standard tests look almost solely at knowledge of kanji (Chinese characters used in writing Japanese) and ability to manipulate grammatical forms. How can language ability be assessed in a wholistic way that looks at pragmatic competence as well as accuracy of grammar? It would seem that the answer lies in individualized assessment but to complete such an assessment would be very expensive if the assessors must rely on gathering information on the individual only during an assessment session. Something similar to the individualized end of term advising that our LCC ESL students receive may be the alternative I was looking for as a means of coming to a wholistic appraisal of my current competence in Japanese. The LCC ESL teachers can give this assessment because they have at their disposal information on the student’s performance in a range of activities completed throughout the term. By connecting assessment with instruction spread over time students can get more meaningful feedback than is possible in standardized tests that yield more or less meaningless scores and supposed levels.
3) Another area of language learning that intrigued me during my time in Japan was the relationship between levels of language competence and memory. I experienced first hand the experience of how mastery leads to chunking information as new wholes, whereas a lower level of understanding requires processing of each bit of information by itself. This distinction (and limit to my current Japanese language ability) was revealed in a couple of different situations. On one occasion I had the address to a bookstore but not any directions. I asked a worker at the nearest train station for help and after looking at a map, he gave me a long series of directions. I found I could understand each direction as he was saying them but couldn’t remember anything exactly other than the first direction after walking away. Another time I attended a lecture in Japanese on a topic I was familiar with. During the lecture I felt like I was understanding, and enjoyed following the development of the proposition. However, afterward I was frustrated by the fact that I couldn’t summarize anything of what I’d heard.
One way of looking at this phenomenon may be that the constant demands on short-term memory for processing doesn’t allow time to adequately move things to long-term memory. What makes this intriguing to me is that there is very little work done in the ESL field on the affect of the length of chained utterances or the length of aural texts as a whole in relationship to aural comprehension. The significance of this in preparing students for lecture comprehension in a second language seems especially important.
4) Language interference is a topic that has sometimes been in, and sometimes out, of favor among second language researchers. In my role as second language user I had an experience of misunderstanding that seems a classic example of cross-cultural/cross-linguistic interference. One day we received free tickets to attend the new Disney Sea theme park in Tokyo. While there, we had dinner at one of the restaurants in the “Mediterranean Seaport.” Since this was a Disney park, the menu was in English with Japanese writing underneath. Each person in our family ordered a dinner and I ordered the veal, all speaking in English. The waitress read our order back to us to confirm (speaking in Japanese), and then left. After awhile she showed up with a glass of beer. I explained that I hadn’t ordered a beer. Later, she showed up again with meals for the other three but not mine. When I asked about mine it became apparent that she had misunderstood me to say “beer” instead of “veal” during the ordering process. This may seem like a strange misunderstanding, but when we consider the fact that the Japanese language does not distinguish between v/b or l/r, it becomes apparent that this was an easy mistake to make. It was surprising to me that she didn’t clarify such an unusual order, however, maybe in Japan it’s not so strange for a man to only order a beer while the rest of the family orders a dinner. I believe that each of us heard what we expected to hear, which in cross-cultural situations gets to the heart of interference.
5) One final observation on language learning relates to the issues of what it means to know something and how we learn things in comparison to how they are presented for learning in textbooks. In my review of Japanese using the newly released text Japanese for Busy People, I was struck by how even though I had some capacity to use many of the forms in focus for the lessons, in fact the grammar explanation didn’t feel very helpful. It wasn’t that the grammar explanation was poorly written, but rather that I needed something different from technical verbage to focus on the differences, similarities and range of use of language forms. Maybe more use of visual representations would have been helpful. Certainly, the example sentences seemed most helpful of all the information that was included. Although this is the best Japanese language text I’ve seen yet, I still found the grammar substitution and transformation drills so boring that I regularly skipped over them. At the same time I know that I need more practice in using the forms in focus so that they could become more integrated into my evolving competence.
- Integrate language form & function; learning task & process. (Carter & Nunan 2001; p.158)
- Involve the whole learner in an experience of the language as a network of relations between people, things, and events. (Savignon; 1983 p.187)
-Five Components of Syllabus Design (Savignon, 1983)
1. Focus on the language system—form and use.
2. Focus on the learner needs/wants to drive communicative learning and practice.
3. Focus on the learner. (show respect, encourage self-expression, individual personality & goals)
4. Focus on performance. (get language practice to a “finished product”)
5. Focus on the community. (classrooms without walls; equip them for independent learning)
Summary of Language Teaching Activities (Richards & Lockhart, 1996; p.162)
- Presentation (visual & tactile as well as aurally)
- Practice, Practice, Practice
- Memorization (especially of useful phrases)
- Comprehension (explicit, inferential, & evaluative)
- Application (integrating & personalizing)
- Strategies training (self-awareness leads to independence)
- Affective Counterbalance (building confidence and positive attitudes)
- Feedback (timely + constructive = meaningful)
- Assessment (formative and summative)
Learning Activities in a Task-based syllabus: (Carter & Nunan, 2001; p.177)
- Listing
- Ordering
- Sorting
- Comparing
- Problem-solving
- Sharing (reporting)
- Creating (use of imagination)
Use multiple processes in learning a new word. Study the word shape, sound associations, synonyms, the semantic field and the sentence patterns it fits in. (Carter & Nunan, 2001; p.45)
Teach reading (especially at the intermediate level) through a process of gradual approximation. Begin with a visual representation of information such as a diagram, graph or chart together with sentences that can be either true or false about the information. Next, give the students a simple account of the text by combining together the true sentences in phase one to make a paragraph. Then present a more elaborate version (longer and with more detail) of the same text. (Widdowson, 1978; p.91)
Teach writing via a process of gradual approximation as well. (Widdowson, 1978. p.119ff)
Phase 1 - Visual presentation of a Topic to write about
Notes (single words and phrases) about the topic
Write simple sentences based on the notes
Rewrite using more complicated sentence forms and vocabulary.
Rewrite using more complex sentence patterns (that & which clauses, etc.).
Phase 2 – Sentence to discourse units. (p. 124)
Practice changing the sentence form. (active to passive, change the tense, etc.)
Combine sentences into a simple account.
Diagram the logical development of the proposition. (guided)
Phase 3 – Illocutionary acts to discourse units.
Present a semantic/vocabulary problem visually. (fill in the chart)
Model sentence forms to use.
Students write sentences in the form of general statements.
Do sentence completion.
Do sentence combining. (This must make sense semantically.)
Change general statements into definitions.
Study sentences as examples of “consequence, qualification & exemplification.
Introduce discourse patterns using illustrations.
Books I read related to my field of teaching:
McLaughlin, Barry, 1987. Theories of Second Language Learning.
Nunan, David, 1992. Research Methods in Language
Learning.
Wenden, Anita and Rubin, Joan, 1987, Learner Strategies
in Language Learning
Richards, Jack and Lockhart, Charles, 1996. Reflective Teaching in Second Language Classrooms
Savignon, Sandra, 1983. Communicative Competence: Theory and Classroom Practice
Ellis, Rod, 1986. Understanding Second Language Acquisition.
Widdowson, H.G., 1978. Teaching Language as Communication.
Nunan, David, 1988. The Learner-Centred Curriculum.
Alderson, J. Charles, 2000. Assessing Reading.
Parrott, Martin, 2000. Grammar for English Language Teachers
Nunan, David, 1989. Designing Tasks for the Communicative Classroom.
Pennington, Martha, 1996. The Power of Computer Assisted
Language Learning
Carter, Ronald and Nunan, David Eds, 2001. Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages.