Interview

Michael Rost

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Another theme you have explored is that of "collaboration" between teacher and students. How would you describe a collaborative approach to teaching? And what are the benefits to the teacher and the students?
Collaboration is the crux of communicative language teaching. I think the starting point is "problem-based" or "task-based" learning. One of my earliest influences in education was Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator, who demonstrated the effectiveness of problem-based education. He said that the teacher's role – I know this translation from the Portuguese sounds weird – is to "regulate the way the world enters into the student." In other words, the teacher's role is to be sure that the student is in contact with the resources needed to confront and solve the problem and in contact with other students who can solve the problem collaboratively. "Problems" or "problem-based tasks" have a kind of inherent power for naturally creating dialogue and for creating abundant language learning opportunities.

An obvious benefit of collaborative learning is that students get more opportunities to do things for themselves, to present their ideas, to talk, to produce more language, to ask for what they're actually ready to learn, to participate at an authentic level, even though this usually means some code mixing of the L1 and the L2. And with collaborative learning, the teacher becomes more of a listener – you spend more energy listening to students, interacting with them more spontaneously, and giving feedback as it's needed.

Coming back to Japan again, is a collaborative style more difficult to implement here?
I wouldn't say it's difficult to implement, but it does requires specific preparation, a willingness to shift learners' expectations. I visited a class at Konan University in Kobe recently, in which the basis of the class was the students working in teams, discussing short readings, preparing short presentations in English on current topics, giving their presentations, answering questions from the audience, making posters, reviewing each other's video tapes, and so on. This is collaborative learning. The instructor said the students really liked the class, that they found it valuable, learned at least as much as they would in regular whole-class instruction. He did say too that it took some time to set up the classroom structure, prepare additional materials, and to remind students of their roles and responsibilities. Once it's in motion though, it's not difficult to maintain.

Have you been keeping abreast of the changes in the English education system here in Japan? And if so, what are your impressions of those changes?
Oh, sure. I've been following the Ministry of Education's strategic plan for English education, to see how these policies are being interpreted and implemented. Some of the recommendations – like promoting contact with "foreigners", encouraging companies to recruit more people with English skills, having more English speech contests – seem like replays of past policy edicts. But other recommendations – like the Super High Schools and the short-term international student exchanges and advocating smaller class size – seem to be new. I think it's important for progressive, internationally-minded educators to receive this kind of "green light."

One of the pivotal ideas in the policy document is the initiative to improve entrance exams, and specifically to add a listening test as part of the "Central Examination" for national universities. That's a step in the right direction, though I expect the initial efforts will be discrete point tests, emulating the familiar ETS models. But you have to start somewhere!

I'm curious about where the "tipping point" is in terms of implementation across the country, across levels of primary, secondary, and university education. I know there is a lot of change going on in Japan in language education, particularly in preschool and primary education, and even in secondary levels – smaller classes, more communicative orientation, task-based learning. But until we see 10 or 20% of classrooms using new methodologies and demonstrating their effectiveness, there isn't enough visibility or believability to ensure an overall success in the education culture.

I believe that Japan is the idea center of Asia, in many fields, including language education, so I feel it's important for these initiatives to succeed, to serve as models for other Asian contexts.

In your book Teaching and Researching Listening, you say that pragmatics should play a larger role in language education. Do you think that's true for EFL education here?
I was talking about Vershueren's definition of pragmatics as involving "perspectives" – language use is driven by personal and cultural perspectives. For listening, what this means is that we never understand language in any situation until we take a perspective, until we establish the basic coordinates: who's talking, why, with what purpose, why am I listening to this or reading this anyway, who else is listening, what does the speaker want me to do. And because people take on cultural perspectives and assume their own idiosyncratic points of view, there is always ambiguity about the "real meaning", there is always some "negotiation" required to achieve any kind of understanding.

I realize that's kind of an airy definition, but for language education, an emphasis on pragmatics would include widening the exposure to authentic input, encouraging interpretations of reading and listening passages rather than focusing on correct answers, encouraging more student production and peer evaluation, encouraging more interaction and more tolerance.

I was in a conversation recently that illustrates to me a way that pragmatics needs to be incorporated in language education here. A high school teacher in Osaka was complaining to me that we included too many "foreign names" in our listening extracts (in Impact Listening) and that she felt we should use only "American" names or Japanese names so that the students wouldn't get confused. Well, that's a valid complaint: you don't want your students to be perpetually confused or overwhelmed. At the same time you do want to teach your students to tolerate some ambiguity, to allow for misunderstandings not to derail them completely, even, dare I say, to ask questions about what they don't understand. This is part of what it means to let pragmatics play a larger role in language education.

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