Interview

Michael Rost

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From the point of view of listening, what factors would you say are unique to the English language learner in Japan as opposed to say in Latin America or Europe?
Social factors are the first thing that comes to mind. I was recently in Latin America, visiting English classes, and one of the most noticeable and most entertaining things is how overtly social or sociable the students are compared to Japanese students. I mean, the first five minutes of class, when students are drifting in is spent socializing – students greet each other as they walk in, women kiss each other on the cheek, guys have their secret handshakes and little shoulder hugs, everyone greets everyone individually, everyone seems to have a cheerful word for each other. When the class starts, students are seemingly more connected with each other, and more willing to participate, even when they're not sure what to say, even when they know they're making language errors. And perhaps their fellow students are more sympathetic, more supportive as well.

Of course, students from all language backgrounds have major problems with listening, the decoding, vocabulary recognition, short-term memory limitations. But one area where I know Japanese learners have a special issue is with what Goffman called "footing". Most Japanese learners, it seems, want to have a very firm footing in the discourse before they're willing to participate. I've worked with a lot of Japanese students who have an expectation that they need to understand everything in order to feel they have understood anything. If they're not on the right footing, they just give up.

I heard a crystal-clear example of this phenomenon a few years ago. I was at a psycholinguistics conference in Europe and I met Anne Cutler. As I mentioned earlier, she does experimental research with metrical segmentation, using subjects from different language backgrounds. Her research model involves inducing mishearings and misunderstandings in a lab setting, by degrading the input. She does this to map out the phonological cues listeners use to make sense of L2 speech. I asked her why she had research data from so many major languages, but none from Japanese. She said, frankly, that she was unable to get data from Japanese subjects because they just wouldn't cooperate in the experiment. She said most of her Japanese subjects simply wouldn't report what they heard or understood from the audio input in the mishearing experiments. They knew they hadn't heard a "correct" utterance so they wouldn't report what they did understand. Everyone just answered, you know, "Wakarimasen."

A lot of Japanese students I've worked with in the States find it truly enlightening to realize that it's okay to acknowledge comprehension problems, okay to ask questions, okay to work with partial understanding, okay to guess. Not only is it socially more appropriate in most settings, but it actually helps build listening skills.

You spoke at a JALT event some years back of using the notion of "intervening" when the learner is at the point of noticing something new or making a decision about what to do as a metaphor for the teaching of communication. Can you elaborate on that?
"Intervening" sounds to many people like a very harsh word – I really mean finding the "teachable moments" and setting up a very specific awareness exercise for the learners at those times. The exercise might be a strategic "insertion", like demonstrating how to ask for a clarification, or a linguistic "reminder" of an appropriate expression or vocabulary item.

I was able to validate this construct of intervention points in a study I did with Steve Ross several years ago, here in Japan. We had our subjects in a one-on-one story telling session. They were given an opportunity – every 15 seconds or so – to interrupt the story to ask for a clarification or an elaboration. We had three kinds of experimental treatments and found that students who took advantage of these intervention points to ask a clarification or elaboration question ended up with better comprehension of the story. Of course, they also exhibited more symmetrical communication, which is another goal of this kind of training.

You also mentioned a situation familiar to most teachers: the gap between many students' ability to express their ideas "off-line" - in writing and given enough time - and in "real time" or face-to-face conversation. Do you think this gap is any more noticeable in Japanese students?
Yes, it's very noticeable in Japan, but certainly this gap in language performance with different kinds of tasks is universal. Any person's language performance without rehearsal – spontaneous, "real time" communication " – will generally be less complex then a language performance with rehearsal, or off-line preparation. I think the phenomenon you're referring to is more related to cultural norms or styles of self-monitoring and self-assessment. You know, if you're very assured about your abilities, you tend to identify the high end of your performance as your "real ability". If you're more modest, you tend to identify the low end of your performance as your "real ability". As teachers in Japan know, Japanese learners tend to be self-effacing, which is a very endearing trait, but not always conducive to language learning.

Because of this cultural trait, if you will, adding short rehearsal steps to a speaking activity – like visualizing and mind-mapping – or planning steps – like explicit language priming – you'll see an increase students' fluency and confidence. This is a fairly consistent finding in the task-based language learning research. And it's something I know Marc Helgesen talks about very lucidly in relation to Japanese students (at the English Firsthand Teacher Discussion center).

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