Christeph: On the Lam

Every semester, the teachers here are required to hold demonstration lessons. I’m not sure if the classes are being rigorously assessed, or if it’s just a general structured exchange of ideas, but the teachers can get really nervous about these lessons. As a JET, I’m kind of exempt from promotions and the like, so I’m usually pretty immune to the hysteria. At the most I catch second-hand jitters from my co-teacher. Last week, we had a team teaching demonstration for 8th graders, using a shiny projector and everything.

The goal for this lesson was to use the infinitive. We played a game where we gave the students 3 sentences about an object, after which they had to guess what we were talking about. For example: It’s in a house. It’s a room. We use the room to cook. What is it? We put the students in groups and armed them with dictionaries. The activity went smoothly, and the lesson was, as far as I could tell, a success.

But the most amazing development happened two days later, when I visited my other junior high. One of my teachers there had attended the class, and decided to do the same activity. Transferring the lesson between schools was easy, because everyone uses the same government approved textbook, and is on roughly the same schedule. Serendipity struck when my co-teacher forgot to gather together dictionaries for the students.

The 8th graders are only at the beginning of their second year of English study, and some of the words we were using in the lesson, like refrigerator and cell phone, haven’t been officially introduced yet. This means that they were at a loss when asked to come up with English words for these items.

A lot of Japanese schooling, and English teaching in particular, comes down to memorization and repetition, which can be an uninspiring method. Many students, if they don’t know the exact spelling, or the exact word they need just give up because they aren’t encouraged to problem solve in a foreign language. Death seems preferable to hazarding a guess in class and risking a wrong answer. That’s why I was so amazed with what happened next.

When confronted with translating “reizouko” (refrigerator) into English, one student wrote down “cold box”. I was so proud of this student for attempting to communicate even though he didn’t know the exact right thing to say. We made a big point of it in class… I told them how I have to make up words all the time in Japan, like when I use “fish zoo” as a proxy for “aquarium” because I don’t have the most expansive vocabulary. This kind of improvisation is essential if you actually have to communicate in a foreign language.

Preparing to teach the same lesson next period, my co-teacher was about to hurry off to collect dictionaries for the word game. Wait, wait, wait, what if we didn’t bring them again on purpose? How crazy would that be? She looked a little hesitant, but we agreed to forgo the dictionary crutch.

As the next class begain, we explained right off the bat that they may have to do some creative guesswork. The students, to my delight, rose to the challenge. When confronted with translating keitai (cell phone), the class en masse started writing down things like “handy phone”, “pocket phon” and “small telefon”. If I could understand what they were getting at, everyone got points for this kind of guesswork. I left school that day deliriously happy, relieved that there’s some room for creative thinking and problem solving in the English curriculum. My only hope is that this one lesson planted some small seed of innovation that the students continue to take with them for their next 4 years of English study.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 at 11:37 am and is filed under Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.