Special

The Use of Computer-assisted Language Learning

2006-07-01T00:00:00Z

Ask not what computers can do for language teaching; instead, ask what you can do for language teaching using computers

Takako Kawabata
Aichi Gakuin University

With the development of user-friendly computers and software and the rapid reduction in their prices in the last decade, the use of computers has become widespread and has expanded in homes, offices, and schools. In the 21st century, everyone is required to use computers to some extent to function in our society.

In Japan, in an educational context, audio language labs are gradually being replaced by computer centers with internet connections and university local area networks (LANs). With the introduction of computer-assisted learning (CAL) and the financial aids provided by the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture (Monbukagakusho), which aims to internationalize the education offered and researches conducted in Japanese universities, the implementation of computers at universities would be extended further in the future.

With regard to the use of computers in language teaching and learning, teachers and researchers have been testing and developing ways to implement computers in their teaching context since the 1960s when computers were first introduced as part of language teaching. However, many language teachers continue to be uncertain about the manner in which they can effectively use computers in the educational context. Since we are at the transition stage where we are moving from simply “using computers” to “using computers effectively” in our classroom, let us discuss what language teachers can do to assist the development of learners’ language acquisition using computer-assisted language learning (CALL) in our current teaching context.

Warshauer (1996) categorized the development of CALL into three main phases—behavioristic CALL, communicative CALL, and integrative CALL—which were the result of advancements in computer technology and changes in outlook toward language teaching.

CALL in the past
“Behavioristic CALL” was implemented in the 1960s and ’70s and was based on the behaviorist theories of learning, which included drill and practice. At this juncture, the use of computers and software in language teaching was, as Taylor (1980) describes, the “computer as a tutor.” One of the best known systems of its type was the PLATO system that included central computers and terminals and performed tasks such as vocabulary drills, grammar explanations and drills, and translation tests (Ahmad, Corbett, Rogers, & Sussex, 1985).

The next phase, i.e., the “communicative CALL,” introduced in the 1970s and ’80s was the result of a communicative approach, which was one of the mainstream methods in second/foreign language teaching at that time. Since this approach emphasized the process of communication and highlighted the use of the target language in real settings, the programs that appeared in this period featured practice in a non-drill format. Software that had not been specifically designed for CALL was also employed for writing practice. This type of application in CALL is the so-called “computer as a tool” (Brieley & Kemble, 1991).

CALL at present
Currently, we are at the “integrative CALL” stage, which is a result of the expansion of technological advancements such as multimedia technology and the Internet. These two innovations allow the learners to access a more authentic learning environment. As we know, multimedia enables one to integrate four skills, and the Internet provides opportunities to interact in an English language environment 24 hours a day. Although the scope of CALL has widened in the last 40 years, it is not yet a perfect solution for teaching/learning all aspects of a language. The quality of programs has not yet reached the level of assessing the users’ natural spoken language or the appropriateness of use in the context of the situation.

Implementation of CALL in literacy development
Since computers and software have not yet met the requirements in our educational context, it may appear plausible to await the advancement of technology; however, we should think about what the teachers can do to assist language learning using the equipment currently available? The use of computers in the context of foreign language teaching continues to offer a great deal of potential to support students’ literacy needs inside and outside the classroom. If we use computers in more interactive ways, they could be of great assistance in developing the learners’ language acquisition.

One potential use of computers in the classroom might be their use as a tool for monitoring. Since there are approximately 40 students in each classroom in Japanese schools and universities, it is difficult to monitor each student in a large classroom. First, the teacher could display a text using a projector and use it for the purpose of modeling or demonstrating. The students could then be asked to answer some comprehension questions and send their answers to the teacher’s computer. In this manner, computers could be introduced as a tool to confirm the learners’ understanding of a text. If a software capable of assessing learners’ literacy skills were developed, it would significantly assist teachers in conducting their classes.

The other potential use of computers might be in teaching students of different proficiency levels in the same classroom. Software such as that used for the test of English as a foreign language (TOEFL) computer-based test modifies questions according to the test-taker’s responses. By implementing this type of software, students of a more advanced level could study further, while learners who require more support could stay and practice at the same level or study easier materials.

Computers can also be used as an exercise tool in the classroom or as a self-study tool before and after the class or at home. Each student can use a computer for drilling activities anytime and anywhere, at his/her own pace, without the teacher’s supervision. Students who have difficulty attending school due to geographical reasons or adult learners who do not have sufficient time to attend lessons might benefit from the use of computers and software. With regard to further literacy development, students could use computers for studying unfamiliar words, highlighting important words in a passage, and drawing arrows to show lexical chains in the text to recognize how the latter achieves its coherence. Still and moving pictures might also be used to assist the learners’ reading comprehension. Further, Japanese students living in non-English speaking environments would benefit greatly from the Internet, which provides opportunities to access materials written in English, since these students might have difficulty accessing authentic English texts.

Although computers have considerable potential in language teaching, the teacher’s role in the classroom continues to be very important since technology has not yet reached a level where it can be relied upon solely. Therefore, it would be better to implement software as a supplementary teaching tool along with the teacher’s input.

CALL in the future
The role of computers in language teaching has significantly changed in the past 40 years from merely “drill and exercises” to a somewhat “authentic communication” tool. This leads to the question of what the next generation of CALL will be? Underwood (1989) termed it as “intelligent CALL,” which involves the use of computers and programs with a certain level of intelligence. However, it might take a long time for “intelligent CALL” to be put into practice.

As pointed out by Warschauer (1996), “The effectiveness of CALL cannot reside in the medium itself but only in how it is put to use” (p. 6). Thus, my fellow teachers, ask not what computers can do for language teaching; instead, ask what you can do for language teaching using computers.

Ahmad, K., Corbett, G., Rogers, M., & Sussex, R. (1985). Computers, language learning and language teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Brieley, B., & Kemble, I. (1991). Computers as a tool in language teaching. New York: Ellis Horwood.

Taylor, R. (1980). The computer in the school: Tutor, tool, tutee. New York: Teachers College Press.

Underwood, J. (1989). Linguistics, computers, and the language teacher: A communicative approach. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.

Warschauer, M. (1996). Computer Assisted Language Learning: An Introduction. In Fotos, S. (ed.), Multimedia Language Teaching (pp. 3-20). Tokyo: Logos International.

Marking Students' Writing - A Considered Approach

2006-01-01T00:00:00Z

Antony C. Spear
Aichi Gakuin University

1. Micro Considerations
The question of how to mark a student’s written work, or, more precisely, what to mark and how to mark it, has provoked some debate. The overriding importance of the question of what to mark was recognised by Fathman and Whalley (1990), quoting Griffin (1982: 299):

“the major question confronting any theory of responding to student writing is where we should focus our attention.”

Thus the essential question appears to be whether written feedback should concentrate on form, with reference to grammar and mechanics, or content, addressing aspects like organization of text and amount of detail.

Studies conducted by Fathman and Whalley (1990) concluded that feedback on both grammar and content, given separately or together, had a positive effect on students’ re-writing. While grammar feedback had more effect on correcting grammatical errors than feedback on content did on improving content, the latter was still shown to have some positive effect, with general comments of encouragement and praise helping to improve re-writes. Moreover, re-writing as an activity in itself, with or without feedback, was shown to produce consistently positive results.

Cohen and Cavalcanti(1990) discovered a bias for teacher comments on the work of lower proficiency students to concentrate, in an exclusive way, on grammar, with a consequent lack of constructive feedback on areas such as vocabulary and organization. The benefits of praise were also stressed, with special reference to weaker students being reported as anxious to receive praise on what they had done correctly.

Drawing on the findings of both these studies, the natural conclusion is that marking of students’ writing should relate both to form and content, and feedback should be devised to facilitate revision.

Having decided that comment be directed to form and content, and that comment on the latter be encouraging in its import, consideration next has to be given to how mistakes of form are to be marked.

Mistakes can be identified and corrected by the teacher, but a form of guided correction, whereby the number and location of mistakes are indicated - without hint or explanation of correct form - is preferred as a method that will require self-correction.

Fathman and Whalley (1990: 187) concluded:

“Students whose errors were underlined and who were given general comments on content improved significantly in both grammar and content when they rewrote their compositions.”

Important grammatical errors are, therefore, underlined, with a simple comment directing the learner to look again at the words and structures identified.

This ‘formative’ feedback can be complemented with the type of ‘Formative Feedback Profile’ recommended by Hamp-Lyons and Heasley (1987:146), in which the students’ relative strengths and weaknesses in the areas of ‘communicative quality’, ‘ideas and organization’, ‘grammar and vocabulary’ and ‘surface features’, are rated on a scale of ‘Excellent’ to ‘Weak’.

‘Summative’ feedback, also known as ‘grading’ or ‘marking’ can be given if requested by the learner as an indicator of her progress, or else if required by the curriculum. Hamp-Lyons and Heasley (1987: 147) advocate an emphasis on the first category, ‘communicative quality’, when considering summative feedback (with the added qualification that this kind of feedback should be based on more than one piece of work and should be given by more than one teacher)

In conclusion, feedback should be given considerately, expressed clearly, and used as part of a process of continuing development and improvement. The importance of feedback is not underestimated by Hamp-Lyons and Heasley (1987: 143):

“The feedback which the learner gets on her or his piece of writing plays a very important role, both in motivating further learning, and in ensuring that the learner’s texts gradually come nearer and nearer to written fluency.”

2. Macro Considerations
A fundamental re-definition of the learner’s writing from finished product to ‘work-in-progress’ in the context of a ‘process approach’ is favoured as a start to remedial action.

Essentially, the ‘process approach’, in recognizing that writing is not a directly linear activity, promotes guidance and intervention by the teacher at various stages, as opposed to ultimate control over the finished product. Silva (1990: 15) explains:

“From a process perspective, then, writing is a complex, recursive and creative process or set of behaviours that is very similar in its broad outlines for first and second language writers.”

By adopting the process approach, the teacher can become involved in the process of re-writing. One immediate advantage is that, by being accessible, the teacher will be able to clarify or elaborate on feedback when required.

To properly follow the process approach, it will be necessary to create a collaborative workshop environment which allows students sufficient time to work through the composing process again. Given the inevitable constraints on time for individual student attention, it is suggested that a full lesson is devoted to students’ consideration of feedback and teacher-student discussion on how to effect improvement.

Re-writing of the original written work can be assigned as homework, or else, if class scheme of work permits, done in the next lesson; the second alternative is preferable and would ideally fit the process approach, again allowing the teacher to participate in the writing process.

Adoption of the process approach, though placing some demands on time, is favoured for fostering a democratic, motivating classroom atmosphere, and, more specifically, for underlining the recursive nature of writing and extolling the benefits of revision.

As a preliminary to re-writing, direct reference can be made to the mistakes made in the original through a controlled composition exercise - practising relevant discrete areas of grammar. These exercises can be presented separately or combined, from a text, or, ideally (again time permitting), ‘tailor made’ by the teacher to address the learner’s individual areas through devised transformation or substitution exercises. A degree of discretion ought to be exercised when setting controlled composition work, since too much can de-motivate the learner and compromise the intended freer approach to composition.

Through an overall strategy that combines elements of the controlled composition and process approaches, the student can be best served in receiving a necessary degree of corrective input and guidance, while not being denied the opportunity or encouragement to write creatively.

Reference Sources:
Barbara Kroll (1990) Second Language Writing, Research insights for the classroom, Cambridge University Press: inc. essays by- Ann K. Fathman, Elizabeth Whalley; Andrew D. Cohen, Marilda C. Cavalcanti; Tony Silva

Liz Hamp-Lyons, Ben Heasley, (1987), Study Writing, Cambridge University Press

The Extensive Reading Foundation 2005 Language Learner Literature Award Winners

2005-08-01T00:00:00Z

The Extensive Reading Foundation (ERF), an unaffiliated, not-for-profit organization whose mission is to support and promote extensive reading in language education, takes pleasure in announcing the four winners of the Second Annual Language Learner Literature Awards.

The Awards were for books published in 2004. The winning books were selected for their outstanding overall quality and likely enduring appeal. An international jury made the final choices, taking into account the Internet votes of students, teachers and others from around the world. The awards will be presented following the ELT News Think Tank Live event at the JALT National Conference in Shizuoka on Saturday, October 8. For more details on this event, see the ELT News Think Tank Live 2005 page.

Young Learners
Is It a Butterfly? by Claire Llewellyn and Ant Parker. Retold by Carol Read. Illustrated by Ant Parker (Macmillan Children's Readers, Primary, Level 1).

Adolescents and Adults
Beginners
Love among the Haystacks by D. H. Lawrence. Retold by Jennifer Bassett. Illustrated by Bob Harvey (Oxford Bookworms Library Stage 2).

Intermediate
Dead Cold by Sue Leather (World Wide Readers Intermediate [eBook])

Advanced
Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier. Retold by Mary Tomalin. (Penguin Readers Level 5).

The Award Jury made the following comments about the winning books:

Is It a Butterfly? allows learners to gain information about interesting scientific facts as they learn to read. Even though it is a pop-up book, it will be enjoyed by learners of all ages, from children to adults. It is written from the viewpoints of a bee and a snail, which makes the story more interesting than just being simply narrated.
Love among the Haystacks is a simple but powerful tale about the loves of two brothers. The language is graded to make it easy to comprehend and enjoy. It is an exciting, well-rounded story.
Dead Cold is expertly done: clear writing, a sense of place, and the right number of well-drawn characters and amount of well-crafted plot for the length of the book. The fast-moving story line and the easy-to-understand English are the two winning features of this book.
Cold Mountain is storytelling at its best. This version intelligently pares down the characters and incidents of the original, yet vividly conveys its pastoral and anti-war themes, and depiction of humans at their cruelest and most generous. It is notable that, in spite of compression, the adaptation retains the leisurely, sometimes dreamlike mood of the original. Reteller Mary Tomalin inhabits this material as Charles Frazier did in the source book. Here is a masterwork of language learner literature. "I have watched the movie, but I prefer this book," commented one student. "You can't stop reading it." Used as a class reader, it is also sure to stimulate discussion and spark writing.

The judges in the advanced category would like to append a note on a problem with almost all the books nominated this year and last. We regret the lack of support given to learners in understanding the background and purpose of a book. Do editors suppose learners of all cultures are equally familiar with varieties of background, place and time, and literary techniques found in fiction of their culture, let alone of all other cultures? Do they think that all students are equally accustomed to reading fiction? We urge series editors to see their task as that of ensuring that learners understand as much as possible and enjoy all aspects of a story as they read it.

In addition to the winners, the following books were selected as the shortlisted "finalists" in each category:

Young Learners
Who's Stealing the Fish? by Gerald Rose. Illustrated by Gerald Rose. (Cambridge Storybooks Level 3, Elementary). The story is very interesting, with an element of a detective story that keeps us reading to the final page to find out who did the stealing. The art is humorous and attractive, and there is good repetition of words and phrases.

The Little Red Hen retold by Sue Arengo. Illustrated by Laurence Cleyet-Merle. (Oxford Classic Tales Beginner 1). The layout of pictures and text in the pages is excellent. The illustrations are self explanatory and very attractive. This classic story is made appropriate for young learners with minimal loss of meaning.

Adolescents and Adults
Beginners
Moonfleet by J. Meade Falkner. Retold by Joanna Strange. Illustrated by George Sharp. (Penguin Readers Level 2). This gripping 18th century story is about a boy who has to deal with some smugglers in his village. The story is well written and has good dialogue.

The Withered Arm by Thomas Hardy. Retold by Jennifer Bassett. Illustrated by Bob Harvey. (Oxford Bookworms Library Stage 1). This fascinating tale concerns a woman who one day finds her arm withering away for unexplained reasons. It is a good read for those who love the mysterious.

Intermediate
Tales of the Supernatural by Frank Brennan. (Cambridge English Readers Level 3). The six short stories take us to an entirely different world - a world that may well exist but is difficult to explain or comprehend. Adult intermediate learners of English will find the tales captivating.

Bamboo Girl by Anthony Kwamlah Johnson. (Macmillan Writer's Prize for Africa). Set in a bustling city in Africa, this simple yet powerful story will touch the hearts of readers. Though the language is not carefully graded, the story line is simple enough to allow informed guessing of some of the low frequency words used in the story.

Advanced
The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler. Retold by Jennifer Bassett. (Oxford Bookworms Level 5). Adults will find this a delightful, compelling and well-written story with good dialogue. It is told at a pace that allows understanding and appreciation of the main characters.

A Tangled Web by Alan Maley (Cambridge English Readers Level 5). With a plot from today's headlines, this thriller is a real page-turner. The writing is crisp, and the subplots of love and fatherhood add welcome depth to the action. "Very exciting and thrilling," said one student. "I couldn't stop reading. Moreover, the story happens in France, Spain and England, so I could travel in the book."

The ERF thanks the publishers who nominated books, the members of the ERF's Award Jury, and all those who voted in this year's Award. The nomination and voting procedures for the 2006 Language Learner Literature Award will be posted on the ERF website in December 2005. For more information, please visit the ERF homepage.

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Extensive Reading; Why do it, how to do it, how not to do it

2005-06-01T00:00:00Z

Beniko Mason

Even a brief look at the research shows that extensive reading (henceforth ER) is the most successful approach we have in second and foreign language education for students at the advanced beginning and intermediate levels. When those who do in-class self-selected reading are compared with those in traditional classes, readers do at least as well, and generally do better, with the greatest success seen in longer programs in which students have a chance to get thoroughly involved with books. The evidence we have so far shows that readers show better gains in reading comprehension, vocabulary, grammar and writing. Studies done using other approaches (case histories, correlational studies) arrive at identical conclusions (See e.g. Krashen, The Power of Reading, 2004).

“While I would never ban output activities from class, including an excessive amount of speaking and writing actually detracts from students' ability to speak and write.”

In addition to the test scores, studies also show that students prefer extensive reading to traditional instruction.

A current trend in ER is to bring in extra output-oriented activities, because it is felt that "Reading is not enough." This is an odd concern, considering that ER has been shown to be so successful in study after study. In addition, adding output in the form of writing has not been shown to increase language or literacy development. (For a recent study, see B. Mason, 2004, in the International Journal of Language Teaching.)

The problem with adding excessive output activities is that it takes time away from reading this results in insufficient reading and little progress. When this happens, reading usually gets the blame, and teachers feel they need even more output activities.

It has been argued that students need to "practice" writing and speaking in class in order to learn to communicate in their second language. While I would never ban output activities from class, including an excessive amount of speaking and writing actually detracts from students' ability to speak and write. According to the Comprehension Hypothesis, language and literacy development occur in only one way, when we understand messages. Comprehensible input builds the competence that underlies our ability to speak and write a language fluently. The ability to produce output, in other words, is the result of language acquisition, not the cause. There is massive evidence for the Comprehension Hypothesis, and Krashen (Explorations in Language Acquisition and Use, 2003) has argued that there is no compelling evidence supporting various output hypotheses.

Our students are beginners and intermediates in English. Class-time should be devoted to helping them build basic competence through comprehensible input. In addition, we also want them to become autonomous: Extensive reading is a wonderful way of accomplishing this if students continue to read, they will continue to improve long after their EFL program is over.

Classroom Activities
Does ER mean that teachers do nothing? Not at all. The teacher has several roles, all aimed at helping students obtain more comprehensible input. One role is to help students find texts that are interesting and comprehensible. This requires knowledge of the student as well as the available literature. Some class time might be devoted to acquainting students with books of interest, and may include read-alouds. Direct instruction in some reading strategies may also be useful, especially when they replace what are clearly inefficient strategies (eg look up every word). The ER teacher is also willing to explain difficult words and complex grammar constructions, but if this happens too often, it means that the text is inappropriate.

In my view, research, theory and my own experience lead to the conclusion that the best way to do ER is the simplest: Students read a great deal of interesting and comprehensible books, eg 100-150 pages per week, that they select themselves from a large collection with plenty of choice, and with the guidance of a teacher who understands language acquisition and literacy development, knows what is available, and is a dedicated reader.

Support of extensive reading, which often includes "light" reading, does not mean a rejection of aural input. It also does not mean a rejection of literature, academic reading, or linguistics. Rather, ER is a bridge, just a stage in language development that makes more advanced stages possible. A student who has done a great deal of easy reading, from graded readers and easier authentic texts, will find academic texts far more comprehensible than one who has not done this reading. Unfortunately, this bridge has been missing in foreign language study until now.

Beniko Mason teaches at the International Buddhist University in Habikino city, Osaka. She has written extensively on extensive reading in EFL, including several articles with Stephen Krashen. She has her own web site at: benikomason.net.

(Editor's note: This article is in response to the question raised by the May 2005 Think Tank, "How does one set up a reading class, especially in situations where extensive reading is not an option?")

Books That Have Influenced Me

2005-02-01T00:00:00Z

What are you doing?! What are you saying?!

Chris Hunt

There's one story in Zen Flesh Zen Bones (compiled by Paul Reps, Charles E. Tuttle, 1957) that I keep coming back to. I have yet to fully grasp the meaning, or perhaps I should say, to be content with the meaning that I have grasped.

The story is about the Zen master Mu-nan and his only successor Shoju. According to my interpretation of the story, in ancient times Zen did not suffer from problems of professionalism. No teacher would advertise their teaching or claim to be the heir of a former great. To do so would be to prove that one had no true mastery at all. The true master remained discrete and would only impart knowledge should an opportunity present itself. As death approached Mu-nan so Mu-nan approached Shoju and offered him a book. The book had been passed down from master to master for seven generations.

Shoju was not pleased…

“In my experience books are a feeble excuse for experience. Words on the page are but words unless they enter the imagination.”

This month's Think Tank theme (What ELT books influenced you most as a teacher?) is one that both fascinates me and troubles me. I feel to limit my selection to ELT books is meaningless. The influence of ELT books on me are but grains of sand in a vast ocean. It's true that a grain of sand can cause an oyster to produce a pearl. I am no oyster. However, I can mention the four books that I brought with me when I first came to Japan something over a decade ago.

Before coming to Japan I spent an afternoon in a bookshop in Leeds. I knew very little about teaching English (and how much more I know now is a matter of speculation). What I did know was that I didn't want any books about theory but instead something practical. I was looking for tools. In part I was after a bag of tricks but it was more than this. In my experience books are a feeble excuse for experience. Words on the page are but words unless they enter the imagination. I figured theoretical books would be of little value in helping me make sense of the experience I thought I was letting myself in for. I intended to be in Japan for no more than a year. I wanted to travel light.

The four books I chose were, Games For Language Learning (Andrew Wright, David Betteridge and Michael Buckby, Cambride University Press, 1983), Five-Minute Activities (Penny Ur and Andrew Wright, Cambridge University Press, 1992), Drama Techniques in Language Learning (Alan Maley and Alan Duff, Cambridge University Press, 1982) and Music and Song (Tim Murphey, Oxford University Press, 1992).

I still think that all four are excellent. They've been gathering dust on my shelves for years. I can't remember the last time I referred to any of them.

Did these books influence me? Do they influence me now? Since I can count the number of times I've used a textbook on the fingers of one thumb I guess they surely must have influenced me more than any textbook, but then, I chose the books out of the ones the bookshop had. If I had thought them bad I wouldn't have bought them. So did they influence me or reinforce viewpoints I already had? How does one define what influence really means? Does an individual current in the sea shape the sea or is the current created by the shape of the sea itself?

Perhaps if one reads a book that one would not have read unless it was recommended, lent or given, and acts on it then that book can be called influential. Two books that fulfil these conditions, but broader in scope than ELT, are No Contest, The Case Against Competition (Alfie Kohn, Houghton Mifflin, 1992) and Cooperative Learning (Spencer Kagan, Kagan 1994). The first was given and the second recommended. It was after reading the Alfie Kohn book that I really began to question and remove competition from my practise. The Spencer Kagan book gave me some of the tools to do so, but it also brought me intense frustration.

The friend who first introduced me to the book referred to it as the bible of co-operative learning. I took him at his word. Part of the book includes the following formula:

Structure + Content = Activity

I came besotted with this. I still think the idea is sound in moderation. Spencer Kagan claims that by learning structures teachers become able to create their own activities. A structure is a process without content that can be universally applied. These can be useful but accepting this framework can also be very stifling. For several years I threw away game ideas I had because they were too specific the content was integral to the structure. The ideas are gone now. What a waste.

It's certainly true that if the content can be changed, this gives more flexibility, but it is not essential. I've grown to think that activities that are content specific in general offer richer and deeper experiences and can be more rewarding than the shell-like approach that Spencer Kagan suggests. I now think a mixed approach is best. Influence is not always positive. I think Cooperative Learning is pretty much essential reading for anyone who would like to call themselves a teacher in the modern sense of the word. But don't do as I did and take it as gospel.

Mu-nan told Shoju how valuable the book was a collection of wisdom without price. Shoju replied that he had learnt his craft from Mu-nan without any book and had no need of it. Mu-nan extolled Shoju to take the book, it even contained Mu-nan's own scribbled notes written in the margins. Shoju remained unmoved, save his anger grew.

Can and should the books that have influenced me really be of interest to you? Is not the meaning found in a truly influential book intensely personal? Who has walked a mile in my shoes while wearing my glasses?

The book that has undoubtedly influenced me the most is one by my father. Hopes For Great Happenings: Alternatives In Education and Theatre (Methuen, 1976). As a teenager I attended the launch party in London and read it sitting alone on the train home. I guess it was the first non-fiction book I ever read straight through without stopping. The book resonated with me and still does. My quests to integrate choice and democracy into learning spring from this book. The book is out of print but not impossible to find. But could it influence you if you did? Would you want it to?

I found the recommendations of my fellow panelists inspiring. I think I will add the Eisner book Curtis mentioned to a wish-list right behind the Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto (the whole book is online: here is a link). I may well add Teaching As A Subversive Experience and On Becoming A Person to the front. But to read these books, I guess I will be opening myself up to little that is unfamiliar or uncomfortable. I'll be clearing silt and driftwood from existing channels and making the existing current stronger rather than digging out new channels and creating uncharted waters.

I feel that influence is an ongoing process. Ideas that influence do so only to the extent that we keep recreating them. With this in mind, to know which books are influencing a person, sit at their desk and find out which are within arm's reach. Hopes For Great Happenings is there (or would be if I hadn't lent it to a Christmas visitor). Zen Flesh Zen Bones is never far away (especially after I lent my first copy to someone and never got it back). Adrian Mitchell's Greatest Hits (Bloodaxe 1991) and Bertolt Brecht Poems 1913-1956 (Methuen, 1976) are close by. How Children Fail (John Holt, Penguin 1990) and Summerhill (A.S. Neill, Pelican 1985) are not a stretch. The only ELT book I have that close is Language Hungry by Tim Murphey (Macmillan, 1998). Here's a quote from the preface:

"When you really want to understand, after you read, DO IT. Actions speak louder than words…and are far better teachers."

Mu-nun pushed the book into Shuju's unwanting hands. Shuju accepted the book and immediately cast it into the fire. "What are you doing?!" screamed Mu-nun. "What are you saying?!" screamed Shuju back.

The book was so much ash.

A Tale of Two Books: Looking back on twenty years of communicative language teaching

2005-02-01T00:00:00Z

Youngstown State University, Youngstown OH USA February 2005

Steven Brown

Like many of my generation of English Language Teachers, I came to ELT through a back door. In the 1970s, I found myself teaching "Introduction to American Studies" to a very diverse group of students at City College of San Francisco, people who were working on a new language as well as on new academic concepts. By early 1981, I was in Japan teaching EFL full-time. The Communicative Revolution, Notional-Functional syllabuses and the ideas of Stephen Krashen were on everyone's tongue. It was an exciting time, and in retrospect a charmingly naïve time.

“Dialogues provide a strange sort of confidence to beginners (until they realize that real people seldom memorize "their" half of the dialogue).”

At least in Japan, lots of people were learning how to teach as they went along, and in most cases it was textbooks that taught us how to teach in a new way. In my case, even as I worked with the slim audio-lingual volumes the school had ordered for my class, Building Strategies (Abbs and Freebairn 1979) showed me the way. Several years later, a friend, Marc Helgesen, invited me on a continuation of his project (Helgesen, Mandeville & Jordan 1986, Helgesen, Brown & Mandeville 1988). We've recently revised the English Firsthand books again and I've been thinking where we've been over the past twenty years. I'd like to analyze selected pages of Building Strategies and English Firsthand to see what (if anything) we've learned.

Conversations
I'm sure I'm not the only one who can remember snippets of dialogue from high school Spanish textbooks. Dialogues have been with us from the beginning. They provide a strange sort of confidence to beginners (until they realize that real people seldom memorize "their" half of the dialogue). Here's the first half of a Building Strategies dialogue (Abbs & Freebairn 1979, p. 85-86):

Rod: Hello, Barbara! Welcome back! You look marvelous.
Barbara: Rod! What a surprise! It's lovely to see you again.
Rod: Sorry I didn't telephone you before I left, but I didn't have time, in fact…
Barbara: Oh, that's all right. Forget it!
Rod: Well, how was Italy?
Barbara: Fun, but tiring. Milan was interesting. It's bigger than I expected. Noisier and dirtier, too.

The dialogue presents two functions the unit will focus on: apologizing and comparing. It's relatively natural ("Fun, but tiring" and the attempt to represent overlapping conversation) and later attempts some humor (of a suitcase: "What's in it? Stones?") The dialogue is followed by comprehension questions like "Why didn't Rod telephone Barbara before she left?" The text also provides suggested starters for the answers to the questions that attempt (by what we might call now a focus on forms) to draw attention to the language within the dialogue:

What did he say when he apologized?
Sorry I …but…

What did Barbara think of Italy?
She thought it was …but…

Would we do this today? Yes, I think so. Though I'm not so sure we would have comprehension questions, we might well want to draw attention to the language of the dialogue, and directed questioning can accomplish that. Here's what English Firsthand (Helgesen at al. 2004a, p.92) does with this part of a dialogue about shopping (the theme of its unit on comparisons):

May I help you?
Yeah, I'm looking for a sweater.
What ______1______?
I'm not sure. ____2_____, I think.

The choices for #1 are size and color. The choices for #2 are medium and blue. The use of slots attempts to build flexibility in language use. The dialogue is much more minimalistic; there is no story line, there are no characters. The students are the characters and they choose what they want to say (and their partners have to listen a little more carefully). The dialogue is accompanied by a "3 Minute Conversation Task" that asks the students to personalize the activity (Close your book. Have a conversation. Talk about something you bought.) and a homework activity the students can do on their own to work with the dialogue.

The newer dialogue is at once simpler and more complex. There is less "content" but students are making more decisions. They're filling in slots and practicing in a way that is not an oral reading of the page. They are using their own lives, not Rod's and Barbara's. That said, there are students and teachers who like story lines and characters and there is certainly no denying that in the hands of a good teacher such stories can serve a useful purpose. I myself used to play up the soap opera possibilities of the plot of Strategies. Dialogues are interesting in that they have the potential to serve as exemplars of language, and it has been hypothesized that there may be structures that are better presented through exemplars than rules (DeKeyser 1998).

Listening
I am struck by the difference in the amount of listening given in the two books. In Building Strategies, this is the listening task:

John is British, but has worked in Japan. Etsuko is Japanese from Osaka, but she is studying in Britain. Listen to them comparing life as they see it in the two countries. Make notes about the features of each country they mention and the comparisons they make.

The follow-up task is Write paragraphs using your notes, like this: "John says that, in his experience, the …Etsuko says that, in her experience, the …" (Abbs & Freebairn 1979, p. 92). In English Firsthand 1, there is one entire page devoted to pre-listening or "Getting Ready." The first exercise asks learners to match sentences with responses ("May I help you?" " I'm looking for some jeans."). The learners listen and check their answers. The second exercise is a guessing activity. Students first guess the price of the items they will hear about in the listening task, and then note if they have ever bought that item. The purpose of guessing the price is to make students aware of the possible range of answers, so that they don't answer $250 instead of $25 (Helgesen et al. 2004, p. 90).

This focus on task-based listening with extensive pre-listening tasks is clearly an area of difference between the two books. Over the last twenty years, ELT has forged a consensus on the importance of developing listening skills. We have in the process of forging that consensus learned a great deal about listening.

The model of listening that we've adopted is one from cognitive psychology. We see the brain as limited in its processing abilities, and we try to ease the processing burdens, for instance, by activating prior knowledge. I like to use as an example of prior knowledge's amazing power my experience buying postcards at an Austrian museum. I speak no German, but walked up to the counter after having calculated that the postcards would cost sixteen schillings. I gave the clerk a twenty-schilling note, she opened the till, looked in it, and said something in German. As a reflex, I dug in my pocket and produced a one-schilling coin and gave it to her. She smiled and handed me "a five." I managed the transaction based on my prior knowledge of how one deals with change at a store. In some sense, I didn't need German. I just needed my life experience.

Later, on that same trip, however, I did need to manage a conversation "bottom up" when I asked at the Madrid train station for tickets west and was answered by a torrent of Spanish including the word "huelga." There had been a wildcat strike that morning. Here the "getting tickets" routine failed and I needed words, just one in this case, to understand what was going on. We now try to develop both kinds of listening in our students and we try to use pre-listening activities to remind them of what they know about the situations they will hear.

Another key idea in listening is to provide a task. Strategies encouraged note-taking. That's still an important skill, but most books these days provide for a quick check/circle/write one word sort of task. Tasks provide feedback for both learners and teachers and they are (at least somewhat) more like the real world, where we are most likely not to take extensive notes but to write down the starting time of a movie or a phone number as a result of listening.

A third key idea about listening is speech rate. Students often tell us "The tape's too fast" or "People speak too quickly." Some tapes have always been natural while others have treated learners to a molasses-like flow of sound. Speech rate may not be the main issue, however. Studies in reading (Beck, McKeown, Omanson & Pople 1984) have shown that presenting a text with clearly linked ideas is more beneficial (leads to more comprehension) than simplifying the text's language (see also Long & Ross 1993). One way materials developers do this is by building in redundancy to their scripts.

The final important notion in listening is individual differences. The assumption of many in the field has been that one of the key areas where individual differences come into play is through strategy use. One of the best studies I know that shows clearly that strategy use improves listening is Thompson and Rubin (1996). They showed that teaching small groups of American students cognitive strategies like predicting content and listening for redundancies, as well as metacognitive strategies like planning and defining goals, led to improvement by the experimental group on listening comprehension tests.

One aspect of strategy use that well may need further study in light of Just and Carpenter's (1992) work on language processing while reading is the development of strategies to improve memory. Just and Carpenter claim that individual differences in processing are a function of working memory. People who have good working memories have more processing space and are more efficient readers. At present, there seems to be no work in this are of listening and it is unclear whether strategy use could have any effect on short-term memory (as opposed to long-term storage) but it's something worth considering.

Speaking Tasks
Next, let's consider two tasks that practice giving excuses.

Building Strategies approaches its task by presenting learners with a chart with stems such as these:

Explanations
Apologise for
a.) not doing your homework

you
-- forgot
-- didn't have time
-- lost your book

Students work in pairs and make apologies, choosing different explanations. The partner is instructed to accept the apology, using phrases like, "Oh, that's all right." The next step is a Roleplay, in pairs, with situations like "Apologise and explain to your teacher you didn't come to class last week." (Abbs & Freebairn 1979, p. 86).

English Firsthand 2 first has the students work in groups of six. They divide themselves into three teams. Each team has two members. With partners, the learners think of a "wild" excuse for items such as

I'm sorry. I don't have the homework…
I was late for class because …

After thinking up excuses, they join the other two teams. The group of six decides which of the excuses for each item is the most interesting. A note at the side of the page specifically encourages the students "Use your imagination. Crazy, unusual or funny excuses are best for this activity" (Helgesen et al. 2004b, p. 50).

Both books are rooted in the Notional Functional syllabus. Both exercises are drill-like work in pairs, in which the students are given several opportunities to practice short exchanges. The difference is in English Firsthand's conscious focus on students' own ideas and on the encouragement of fun. There is also an attendant increase in task complexity.

Over the last twenty years, we have seen another consensus join the one developed around listening comprehension, a consensus that says that pair and group work are important and that task-based learning should be at the core of speaking activities. Books like Strategies clearly led the way on the use of small group work.

The advantages for work in groups over whole class activities have become clear. The most obvious is time on task; learners simply get more speaking opportunities when the teacher leaves center stage. An early and influential study by Long and Porter (1985) assured us that group work led to more negotiation of meaning and was thus good for students' interlanguage development. Porter later (1986) noted, however, that members of groups sometimes do not treat each other in pragmatically appropriate ways; they are likely to be less polite than target-level norms would dictate, for example. Still, the value of group work has been stressed again and again, in different ways, including in Swain's (1995) notion of pushed output: pairs force each other to notice their learning, to notice what they don't know, and thus to strive to be more accurate.

It seems that how well the partners know each other may be important. Plough and Gass (1993) found, for example, that unfamiliar partners tended to echo each other as a device to keep the conversation going, while partners familiar with each other were more likely to use clarification checks and more negotiation (an argument, incidentally, for fostering classroom community). It makes sense that negotiating or questioning someone's language would be a face-threatening act toward a non-intimate.

We have also accumulated a great deal of information about task-based learning in groups. In general, closed tasks are more facilitative of language learning, stretch learners more, than open tasks. Closed tasks are those for which only one outcome is possible. Assuming we want students to push each other by thrashing out an understanding of each other, a jigsaw task in which partners cooperate to find the answer is better than a discussion, for which there is no closure. Two-way tasks are better, in the same way, than one-way tasks. Two-way tasks are those in which partners have equal information they must share in order to reach the task outcome. One-way tasks are tasks like listen-and-draw, when only one person has some information the other must obtain (Long 1990, Ellis 1999).

There also seems to be (Plough & Gass 1993) potentially more negotiation in tasks that are familiar to students (arguing for repetition of task types). However, there may be a sort of law of diminishing returns if students are familiar enough to be bored by the task.

The role of planning has recently been shown to be important. Teachers tend to get impatient and throw their students into activities. As little as a minute or two of planning might, however, lead to gains in fluency, accuracy and complexity of language (Foster 1998, Skehan & Foster 1999).

In the best of all possible worlds, then, the ideal task would be a two-way information gap activity that calls for a definite resolution, and furthermore one that is somewhat (but not too) familiar to the students. This task would be done by partners who know each other. The teacher would allow some planning to take place before the task. As my students say, "Yeah, right."

Conclusion
I hope the effect of this piece is not to suggest that we today are geniuses and Abbs and Freebairn weren't, because I think their series remains one of the great ones, better than much of what is published today. If we had to learn on the fly, I'm glad we learned from them. There was much in Strategies that anticipated today's best practices. The main difference I see today is a greater sophistication in listening tasks and perhaps more complexity of tasks overall. But, again overall, I think the differences are relatively small. I suppose this proves that the teaching art, as well as the teaching science, progresses gradually rather than in leaps and bounds.

References
Abbs, B. and Freebairn, I. (1979). Building Strategies. London: Longman.

Beck, I.L., McKeown, M.G., Omanson, R.C. and Pople, M.T. (1984). Improving the comprehensibility of stories: The effects of revisions that improve coherence. Reading Research Quarterly 19, 263-277.

DeKeyser, R.M. (1998). Beyond focus on form: Cognitive perspectives on learning and practicing second language grammar. In C. Doughty and J. Williams (Eds.), Focus on Form in Classroom Second Language Acquisition (pp. 42-63). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Ellis, R. (1999). Learning a Second Language through Interaction. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Foster, P. (1998). A classroom perspective on the negotiation of meaning. Applied Linguistics, 19, 1-23.

Foster, P. and Skehan, P. (1999). The influence of source of planning and focus of planning on task-based performance. Language Teaching Research, 3, 215-247.

Helgesen, M., Brown, S. and Mandeville, T. (2004a). English Firsthand 1: New Gold Edition. Hong Kong: Longman.

Helgesen, M., Brown, S. and Mandeville, T. (2004b). English Firsthand 2: New Gold Edition. Hong Kong: Longman.

Helgesen, M., Mandeville, T. and Jordan, R. (1986). English Firsthand. Tokyo: Lingual House.

Helgesen, M., Brown, S. and Mandeville, T. (1988). English Firsthand Plus. Tokyo: Lingual House.

Just, M.A. and Carpenter, P.A. (1992). A capacity theory of comprehension: Individual differences in working memory. Psychological Review 99 (1), 122-149.

Long, M. and Porter, P. (1985). Group work, iterlanguage talk, and second language acquisition. TESOL Quarterly 19, 207-228.

Long, M. (1990). Task, group, and task-group interactions. In S. Anivan (Ed.), Language Teaching Methodology for the Nineties (pp. 31-50). Singapore: SEAMCO Regional Language Centre.

Long, M. and Ross, S. (1993). Modifications that preserve language and content. In M. L. Tickoo (Ed.), Simplification: Theory and Application (pp. 29-52). Singapore: SEAMCO Regional Language Centre.

Plough, I. and Gass, S.M. (1993). Interlocutor and task familiarity: Effects on interactional structure. In G. Crookes and S.M. Gass (Eds.), Tasks and Language Learning (pp. 35-56). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Porter, P.A. (1986). How learners talk to each other: Input and interaction in task-centered discussions. In R.R. Day (Ed.), Talking to Learn: Conversation in Second Language Acquisition. (pp. 200-222). Rowley MA: Newbury House.

Swain, M. (1995). Three functions of output in second language learning. In G. Cook and B. Seidlhofer (Eds.), Principles and Practice in Applied Linguistics (pp. 125-144). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Thompson, I. and Rubin, J. (1996). Can strategy instruction improve listening comprehension? Foreign Language Annals, 29, 331-342.

The Teacher as Facilitator: Reducing anxiety in the EFL university classroom

2005-02-01T00:00:00Z

(This article was originally published in JALT Hokkaido Journal,
2004, Vol.8 pp. 3-18. JALT Hokkaido Web Site)
For references and tables, please download the full PDF file.

Peter Burden

Introduction

Anxious students are often concerned about the impressions that others form of them. When such students are confronted in a classroom with a learning situation that makes them uncomfortable, they may choose to withdraw from the activity. Some learners believe they cannot perform in English and consequently form negative expectations, which in turn lead to decreased effort and the avoidance of opportunities to enhance their communication skills. This study replicates Horwitz, Horwitz, and Cope's (1991) Foreign language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) and results show that around half of the students in conversation classes at the focus university suffer from some level of language anxiety. This paper suggests that learners' level of motivation and effort can be raised when teachers use communicative strategies and adopt a language facilitating role by encouraging students to assess their performance in a positive light.

“Around half of the students in conversation classes at the focus university suffer from some level of language anxiety."”

Many of us have been in situations as language learners when we are asked a question and our minds mysteriously go blank. Or perhaps our heads follow a teacher around the class as we nervously await our turn to speak, barely listening to other students' output, our eyes trained on the teacher to see which "unfortunate victim" will be chosen to speak next. At other times we shun communicative opportunities altogether. While some students avoid talking because they are unprepared, uninterested, or unwilling to express themselves, most anxiety stems from feelings of alienation in class, from a lack of confidence, or because the students fear communication itself (Daly, 1991). Reflecting on my own, anxiety-ridden experiences of learning Japanese, I pondered that if my English conversation classes somehow induce anxiety and lead to a miserable experience, then I need to consider how to encourage my own students in their English study.

Task-based language teaching often utilizes incongruity and unpredictable learning activities to encourage communication (Ellis, 2003). Arguably, tasks that are not focused in a sequence of activities that ends with controlled practice may unwittingly encourage anxiety. As Aida (1994) notes, many language teachers are concerned about the possibility that anxiety may function as an affective filter preventing learners from achieving a high level of proficiency in the language. Learners need to have attitudes and use strategies that encourage lowered anxiety, higher motivation, and confidence in their ability to convey what they want to say. One of the challenges for teachers is to provide the kind of classroom atmosphere that promotes low-anxiety.

Classroom Anxiety

Nespor (1987) writes that beliefs are "composed of episodically stored material derived from personal experience" (p. 320) which derive legitimacy from past episodes. These critical episodes then "color or frame the comprehension of events later in time" (ibid.). Thus, learners' experiences determine the value of similar, but new, tasks. In the classroom, students perform a "cognitive appraisal" (Dayhoff, 2000, p.15) which helps affect judgments. Students who experience anxiety in the classroom often base their fear on an inaccurate assessment of its causes. They imagine danger where it does not necessarily exist and do not have an effective plan of action to cope with their anxiety. Over time and in different learning situations people develop expectations concerning the likely outcomes of various behaviors within and across situations, but when they engage in communicative behaviors that seem to work, they develop positive expectations for those behaviors, and these can become a regular part of learners' communicative repertoire.

However, if experiences are negative, language anxiety begins to develop and if these negatively perceived experiences continue, foreign language anxiety may become a regular occurrence and the learner begins to routinely expect to be nervous and perform poorly. Anxiety can be associated with a variety of physiological and emotional states, embodied in feelings of tension even in situations where the immediate cause of such tension is not readily apparent. MacIntyre (1995) concludes that:

Language learning is a cognitive activity that relies on encoding, storage, and retrieval processes, and anxiety can interfere with each of these by creating a divided attention scenario for anxious students. Anxious students are focused on both the task and their reactions to it (p. 96).

Anxiety is related to self-focused, negative and anxious cognition during interaction. Highly anxious students often have relatively negative self-concepts, underestimating the quality of their speaking ability when compared with others.

Anxiety and the Threat to Self-esteem

While some may argue that a dose of anxiety is necessary to create a language learning "charge", for many students nervousness distracts from attending to and remembering new language, and will thus affect the practice required for language to be assimilated. In describing language anxiety, MacIntyre and Gardner (1991) write:

"The anxious student may be characterized as an individual who perceives the L2 as an uncomfortable experience, who withdraws from voluntary participation, who feels social pressures not to make mistakes and who is less willing to try uncertain or novel linguistic forms" (p. 112)

An unwillingness to make an effort can be seen as debilitating in communicative language classrooms, where making an attempt to use new language forms is a central tenet of second language acquisition. This unwillingness may spark what Dayhof (2000) calls the "anxiety feedback loop" (p.27), in which anxiety is triggered by concern over being scrutinized and evaluated by others in a performance situation. This can lead to an excessive fear of being humiliated or judged negatively in learning situations. Yet, I contend that students can make their learning more profitable and less painful by reflecting on their learning experiences and receiving necessary guidance.

The Present Study

The instruments
As a form of action research, I decided to replicate Horwitz, Horwitz, and Cope's (1991) 33-item Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) to examine the degree of anxiety in my own university English classes. The three constructs (speaking anxiety, foreign language classroom anxiety, and classroom non-anxiety) have eleven items each. In addition, I sought an example of an anxiety-provoking classroom learning experience through an open-ended question at the end of the survey.

The participants
A Japanese version of the questionnaire was given to 289 first-year students during English conversation classes in the second semester at a private university in Western Japan. In their first year, students at this university must enroll in either elementary or intermediate conversation classes, based on a self-appraisal of their English ability. All the Japanese students studied English as a school subject for six years at junior and senior high schools. The participants formed a convenience sample and responded on a 5-item Likert scale ranging from 1 ("strongly disagree") to 5 ("strongly agree"). In an attempt to gain a wider picture of student reactions, they were informed that there were no correct answers and were asked not to think too deeply before they responded. Of the 289 respondents, 190 (66%) were aged 18, and 73 (25%) were 19 years old. Two hundred and thirty-one (80%) were males, and 58 (20%) were females, which is roughly representative of the university's broader student population. One hundred and fourteen (39%) of the students are majoring in Commerce and 175 (61%) majored in Law and Economics. Two hundred and seventy-eight (278) or 96% are Japanese with the remainder made up of Chinese and Korean students.

Data analysis of the FLCAS
The responses to the 33 questions are displayed using frequencies and percentages and the overall findings had an acceptable Cronbach-Alpha reliability of .79. For the purpose of this analysis, the responses to "Strongly agree" (SA) and "Agree" (A) were combined to create an overall score of agreement with the question, and the sum of responses to "Disagree" (D) and "Strongly disagree" (SD) were similarly calculated to gain a measure of disagreement.

The Results of the FLCAS

Speaking anxiety
Table 1, shows that students endorsed questionnaire items that suggest speech anxiety, with 59.1 % of respondents stating that they do not feel sure of themselves when they speak in English (Q. 1), 51.2% claiming that they start to panic if they are called upon to speak without having prepared in advance (Q.9), and 40.9% reporting that they get nervous when the teacher asks questions without allowing for preparation time.
(Table 1: Speaking Anxiety)

Forty-four percent report that they are embarrassed to volunteer to speak (Q.13), while 42.9% feel that other students speak better English than they do (Q.23). Thirty-six point three percent feel self-conscious speaking in front of their classmates (Q.24) and 53% feel overwhelmed by the number of rules that are believed to be necessary to speak English (Q.30). Thirty-two point six percent of students can feel their heart pounding when they sense they will be called upon in class (Q.20), but 60.9% of respondents do not feel so anxious that they tremble (Q.3). Forty-five point seven percent do not feel they get nervous or confused while speaking in English (Q.27), with the same percentage maintaining that other students will not laugh at them when speaking (Q.31). Obviously such findings must call into question teaching strategies that require learners to speak in front of the whole class, or tasks where they feel pressured to compare their performances against others.

Foreign language classroom anxiety
A perceived lack of competence can also lead students to display anxiety in the classroom. Fifty-two point six percent of students feel frightened when they do not understand what the teacher says in English (Q.4), 42.9% get upset when they don't understand what the teacher is correcting (Q.15), and 38.7% get nervous when they can't comprehend everything that the teacher says (Q.29). Sixty point three percent worry about the consequences of failing the English class (Q.10), while 36% say that they get so nervous that they forget things they know (Q.12).
(Table 2: Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety)

As in question 23 (above), 46.4% think that other students perform better than them (Q.7) while 30.5% feel that English classes move so fast that they worry about being left behind. However, 43.6% of students do not feel anxious about English class if they are well prepared (Q.16), while only 27.7% feel more tense and nervous in English class than in other classes. To some degree then, anxiety must be understood in relation not only to English as an academic subject, but also in terms of the activities that take place in language learning environments.

Foreign language classroom non-anxiety
If we reverse the wording in some of the questions, we can see that 39.4% of students worry about making mistakes in English class (Q.2), and 37.7% say that they would be bothered if they had to take more English classes (Q.5). Sixty-eight point eight percent of respondents feel unconfident when speaking in English (Q.18), while 58.9% feel they would be nervous speaking English with native speakers of that language (Q.14), and 31.9% would feel uncomfortable around native speakers (Q.32). Thirty-nine point one percent feel pressure to prepare for English class (Q.22) while 33% often feel like not going to English class (Q.17). Again, findings show a lack of confidence. Fear of making mistakes may indicate that as anxious learners focus attention on perceived inadequacies, they are concerned about the potential for failure and the consequences of failure instead of concentrating on the task itself.
(Table 3: Foreign Language Classroom Non-anxiety)

Findings of the Open-ended Question

The survey also included an open-ended question asking respondents to recount a classroom learning experience that increased their level of anxiety. Many students viewed being asked to respond to teacher questions as threatening, particularly in situations when teachers "suddenly" asked them questions without adequate time to prepare a response. Students often blamed misunderstandings on their perceived limited ability level, which may lead to feelings of helplessness. Failing to remember previously learned vocabulary was also frequently cited, again heightening ability doubts. One respondent suggested that,

"when I thought I knew a word from last lesson and was called upon to answer, I was dumbfounded, soon forgot, and couldn't answer."

Similarly, another student reported he felt anxiety when asked a seemingly simple question about something he managed in the past, but found that he was unable to reply. Such statements appear to be linked with self-esteem and cause students to look inward and to blame themselves for poor language retention. This may lead them to avoid making greater effort in class in order to protect their sense of self-worth. Some also noted that their level of anxiety rose when they thought other students were better or more able them, as evidenced by such comments as; "everyone else seems to understand, except me", "when I don't understand what the other students around me are doing," or "when I don't understand, but other students manage to answer simply." Students use classmates as points of comparison and their perceived failure is attributed to the belief that they have less language proficiency than their peers.

Implications: The Facilitating Role of the Teacher

The position advocated in this paper is that learners' potential is hampered by anxiety and its associated reductions in self-esteem, risk taking and competitiveness. As Horwitz, Horwitz, and Cope (1991) note, educators should help anxious students cope with existing anxiety-provoking situations and endeavor to make the learning context less stressful. Creating a low-anxiety classroom atmosphere is clearly an important prerequisite to language learning success. Language classrooms are "inherently face threatening environments" (Dornyei, 2001, p.91) as learners are expected to communicate using a "severely restricted language code" (p.91). Therefore, teachers need to encourage students to recognize their language learning fears and situations that provoke anxiety for them, especially as constant error correction serves as "a form of mild public humiliation" (Tsui, 1996, p. 146). However, teachers can reduce such embarrassment by using a modelling approach to correction, whereby students are not spotlighted during feedback. The teacher first acknowledges that the learner has conveyed a meaningful message, and then repeats the student's utterance using grammatically correct forms. This encourages the student to recognize discrepancies without a feeling of having been admonished. If teachers reward successful communication, they send the message to their students that there is more to language learning than just grammatical rules and forms.

Fifty three percent of students in the survey say they are overwhelmed by rules. By focusing on content rather than form and encouraging students to talk about familiar topics, students will invest more of themselves in the classroom environment. In the survey 59.1 % of respondents stated that they never feel sure of themselves when they speak, and 50% state that they panic. This may lead to non-cooperative behavior such as avoidance or withdrawal. Such students may also benefit from "cognitive retraining" (Oxford, 1999, p.67) in which the teacher asks learners to verbalize and reflect on subjective anxiety inducing situations so they can see that others often share the same apprehensions. If teachers help learners to recognize their fears and realize that anxiety episodes are transient, students can learn to interpret such situations in realistic ways, and thus may choose to approach, rather than avoid, situations that demand participation. Through reflection, learners can deduce the kinds of activities that seem to help them, and evaluate suitable tasks for their learning, while teachers can uncover their students' individual learning purposes, personal definitions of appropriate content, and beliefs about preferred ways of working. After establishing appropriate activity criteria, teachers can encourage learners to work together to design and develop new activities for themselves and for each other with a view to meeting students' individually identified learning needs.

When we engage in communicative behaviors that work, we develop positive expectations about those behaviors and they become a regular part of our communicative repertoire. Good study strategies have compensatory value; therefore, strategic and communicative competencies need to be encouraged so that students have access to a communication "first aid kit" that can be called into action when conversation breaks down. Teaching both learning and communicative strategies, which will help them to develop realistic expectations and achievable goals, can eventually raise learners' self-efficacy. Forty six percent of students in the present study think that their classmates perform better than them at English. Students who are concerned about others' impressions have a tendency to behave in ways that minimize the chances of unfavorable evaluation. Teachers should avoid saying "that's wrong" instead relying on a flexible questioning style which makes it clear that there is not only one "correct" answer. Another useful technique is to have students discuss answers with their peers before replying, which alleviates competitive stress. Considering that the classroom is a "public arena" (Long and Porter, 1985, p. 211), anxieties often arise when a teacher makes it a practice to call on random individuals in front of their peers. This can be particularly stressful when the students are aware that the lesson will not proceed until the teacher receives a satisfactory response.

In contrast, pair work provides a relatively stable environment in which to nurture skills without the absolute necessity for accuracy. Forty four percent of students report that they are embarrassed to volunteer to speak in class while 36.3% feel self-conscious speaking in front of their classmates. Students become even more nervous when faced with randomness and unpredictability, which can turn a seemingly innocuous question from the teacher into a nightmare experience. Such students benefit from pair work situations, where comparisons of capability are "operating at a more comfortable level" (Gardner and Lalonde (1990, p.219) because learners are compared with peers rather than the "expert" native-speaking teacher.

One way to increase confidence is by using co-operative rather than competitive goal structures. Collaborative tasks in which all parties provide certain information create positive interdependence between students. Through scaffolding, students use collective resources to "jointly manage components of a task to distinguish between what they have produced and what they perceive as an ideal situation" (Ellis, 2003, p.193). Similarly, "dictogloss tasks" (Ellis, 2003, p.193) whereby students note content words in a short text read by the teacher, encourage students to work together to decide what language forms to use to reconstruct texts from joint notes. Learners are more intrinsically motivated towards the task when they have to support each other. Another way the teacher can build confidence is to act more as an advisor, or even a friend and "less like an authority figure making them perform" (Young, 1991, p.432). Instead of viewing herself as the expert whose task it is to transmit knowledge and leaving learners "silenced and powerless" (Auerbach, 2001, p.145), the teacher can adopt the role of facilitator, in order to empower learners to take charge of their learning. By encouraging L1 use, issues important to the students will emerge.

Discouraging the "banishment" (Allwright and Bailey, 1994, p.172) of the students' first language "accepts that the thinking, feeling, and artistic life of a person is very much rooted in their mother tongue" (Allwright and Bailey, 1994, p.172.). Horwitz, Horwitz, and Cope (1991) suggest that as students have mature thoughts and ideas but an immature L2 vocabulary with which to express them, the inability to express themselves or to comprehend another person leads to frustration and apprehension. Nearly 53% of students in the present study feel frightened when they do not understand what the teacher says in English. When their normal means of communication is suddenly eliminated, they feel unable to express their real personality and can demonstrate only a fraction of their intelligence. This inhibits learners from communicating and can deprive them of communicative practice opportunities. Students' mother tongue should be used for integration and setting the scene, and also at times of communicative exigency, which are unpredictable but often involve personal contact. Students may not recognize which aspects of their performance are being assessed in class, so informing the students in their own language that they will not be appraised on discrete language items during speech production will go a long way to alleviating anxiety and increasing confidence and motivation. Moreover, valuing learners' bilingualism has implications for the role of the teacher. An authoritarian attitude will be reduced as the teacher is no longer the traditional power holder and decision-maker. Instead, the students' language can be used as a negotiation tool and the teacher's role as a facilitator or enabler is brought to the fore.

Conclusion

When learners view the classroom as anxiety inducing, they often feel as if they are swimming among sharks and become less socially oriented, less assertive, and more withdrawn or self-conscious than in other situations. Anxiety is often a manifestation of feelings of incompetence. Where the trigger is concern over being scrutinized, judged and compared to others, the teacher can alleviate anxiety and foster a less confrontational atmosphere by encouraging pair work, group activities and scaffolding for mutual support and reassurance. Simply by removing the need for students to compare their performance with others in a competitive environment, teachers can reduce negativity, raise students' self-belief and assist them to alleviate the anxiety caused by expectations of failure.

The Forums About Teaching English in Japan Need to Take a Reality Check

2005-01-01T00:00:00Z

Kevin Burns

"After reading what they had to say in the forums there, I almost decided to go to Korea, it is so negative. When I did ask, well what schools are good to work for?-no one answered."
- A.P., USA, commenting recently on a very popular forum about teaching English in Japan.

“Many forums are too negative and distort the reality of teaching in Japan.”

Many forums are too negative and distort the reality of teaching in Japan. At one popular forum, one of the moderators dispensing advice is a university professor, who presumably has been out of the loop of looking for a teaching position in Japan for many years, yet he is telling people (incorrectly) how to get a job in Japan.

In one forum, he stated that schools here won't hire you unless you are already in Japan. In fact, most schools will hire you while you are outside of Japan. Why? They have to. If you have a school in one of the mid to smaller cities in Japan--which comprises most of Japan--you don't have many teachers banging on your doors to teach at your schools. These schools must accept resumes by Email or post, and interview by telephone, or they can't hire teachers. I am talking of course about the smaller schools like my own.

My point is that some of ths so-called experts are anything but. Yet they are espousing their opinions on the internet and you are reading them, and sometimes taking them at face value.

The people who post at forums rarely post anything positive about any of the schools they work for. There must be some positive stories but you won't read them there. I think it would be a great idea to set up a forum that has a positive story only section. As this would help to redress the balance and restore some reality to the debate about whether working for an eikaiwa school is a good idea or not.

Have a separate forum where people can only post positive stories-- just to give some balance. If your purpose is to educate people, that requires balance. Even if you are "Debunking Eikaiwa," as the Let's Japan quote reads, surely you should alert people to some good schools to work for?

Unfortunately, I just spoke with a teacher from America (quoted above), and she felt the site was so negative that she was debating whether to even come to Japan. If the situation were so bad here in Japan, then the forums would be doing everyone a service. But it just distorts the actual reality of teaching English here. Many of the teachers who post have had a bad experience at one school, yet in many cases still continue to teach there, and rant about it--ad nauseum at one of the forums. Can you say, "Get a life?"

You won't find the people who enjoy their jobs posting much. If they do, they will take a lot of abuse from the complainers already ensconced there, and they are too busy enjoying their lives to log on and post. Happy people don't usually rant.

Two somewhat famous webmasters did not enjoy their time at Geos. Yet I have a friend named Lee who loved Geos. He loved the fact that he had his own classroom, would brag about the fact in his animated way, and enjoyed teaching and his students. Lee doesn't post at the forums though. He is too busy enjoying life.

At times, some of the teachers seem to want to pick a fight over things so inane. In one story, a teacher said "Sayonara," to his students as they were leaving. Being an English school he should have said, "goodbye." His manager told him not to do it again. Had it been me, I would have simply said, "Sorry," and said "goodbye" to my students the next time.

But this teacher argued with his boss over it. A person was called from head office to have a meeting with him. I gather his local manager felt she couldn't get it across to him that what he had done was enough to make some students quit.

I can see both sides, but a simple "sorry it won't happen again" would have defused the situation. I agree with the teacher that it is a pretty silly thing, but students quit over silly things, and a lot of arguments are over them, too.

I enjoyed my time at ECC and the YMCA. I modelled Kevin's English Schools after the 'Y' to some extent. My point is we all have different experiences and we have to be careful about what we read, especially the negative stuff. Don't spend too much time at any one site, even here! Don't take my word! You need to explore many websites and read many books. You shouldn't jump on a plane and not be prepared. It is your life you are thinking about, so read all you can so you can select the right place for you to work. Both you and your employer will be happy for it.

By all means read as many articles as you can about teaching in Japan. You may relate to things you wouldn't like, but keep in mind that all Geos managers are not the same. Personality conflicts occur everywhere. I'm not defending Geos, and it definitely is not in my interest to do so, they are my competition for students and teachers. Indeed there are many things about Geos that I don't like.

My point is, I am in favour of being fair and I am worried that some people believe the negative postings at forums. I am concerned that it affects them to such a degree that they choose to teach in another country. That really is a shame when there are many good schools here, and it is a great, safe country to live and work in.

I have a conflict of interest having my own school so could not do this, but someone really should start a website about the good schools in Japan. It wouldn't be easy and small schools like mine would have a tough time, not having as many teachers to vouch for us as some of the bigger schools, but it is a badly needed site. So someone with some internet savvy, here's your notice.

There is a need for an unaffiliated site like this. Many people abroad are going prematurely grey trying to decide for whom to teach. Help them! There are many sites like Gaijin Pot.com but schools pay to advertise. You can find jobs there but don't have any independent reviewers who can tell you about the schools. We need some independent reviewers who can give the unbiased low-down on various schools--ideally a few reviewers would be needed. It wouldn't be easy. Perhaps it is a needed service? Perhaps some teachers would be willing to pay for such a service to avoid getting into a situation they wouldn't like.

Maybe even an independent site like Ohayo Sensei should consider offering this. They are well respected, independent and have been around for a while now. If they or some other site already does offer such a service, please let us know here.

In the meantime, I interview teachers by phone and face to face. If by phone, I try to reassure them that we are not one of the horror stories they have read about at such and such forum on the internet. Prospective teachers sometimes ask to contact one or more of our current teachers to ask questions about what it's like to work at our schools. I feel uncomfortable with this, never having asked any of my prospective employers for the same privilege and because I don't want to infringe upon the privacy or free time of our teachers. Our teachers are kind though, and allow me to give out their Email addresses to prospective teachers. It's a bit sad that this is necessary, but some of the internet forums and the bitter negativity that a minority of teachers express, seem to help make it so.

Kevin Burns is the owner, co-manager and head teacher of Kevin's English Schools - "The Canadian Schools in Japan"
Kevin's English Schools

Forums About Teaching English in Japan - A Rebuttal

2005-01-01T00:00:00Z

(This letter is in response to an article posted on January 5)

I'd like to thank ELT News for giving Chris and myself the opportunity to present our point of view.

Since Mr. Burn's recent article "The Forums about Teaching English in Japan Need to Take a Reality Check" names Let's Japan, Chris and myself (the two GEOS teachers who didn't like their jobs), it's only fitting that we respond.

While the title of the article might lead some to believe that he was criticizing many if not all forums and websites with content based on life and teaching in Japan, it soon becomes obvious that Mr. Burns is singling out only one website in particular: www.letsjapan.org

“Let's Japan has been, admittedly, not everyone's cup of tea. It has been described as a "fraternity house website," a "rough place," and a "nut house of a site."”

What is it that bothers Mr. Burns particularly about Let's Japan? It's supposedly too negative. Mr. Burns then reinforces his opinion with an anonymous quote from an anonymous message board.

From the first day Let's Japan was launched on the Internet, it has been, admittedly, not everyone's cup of tea. It has been described as a "fraternity house website," a "rough place," and a "nut house of a site" among other things. Its features have included polls on drinking habits, surveys on convenience store snacks, and ratings on pornography actresses. The stories, at first written entirely by Chris and myself, are accounts of what we experienced in our first few years of life in Japan.

The sample story Mr. Burns uses in his article seems to illustrate his point perfectly: negative attitudes produce negative results. This is only his opinion. The fact that a person from head office came to the school to talk to the teacher about the incident is viewed in an entirely positive light by the writer, Chris. In Chris's opinion, the resulting meeting was a stimulus to find employment elsewhere.

E-mails received from other employees, both present and past of that company, confirm our opinion of its policies. What it seems to come down to is a matter of taste. Mr. Burns simply does not like Let's Japan. As I've said before, Let's Japan is not for everyone.

Regardless of whether Mr. Burns likes the site or not, what cannot be denied is the fact that many people have written accounts of their experiences in the eikaiwa industry. If Mr. Burns chooses to see all those experiences as negative things without redeeming qualities, that is his prerogative.

Let's Japan was not created to smear an entire industry. On the contrary, right on the front page of our site it says, "English is being taught well by great teachers here in Japan." It has always been hoped that the site would foster a discussion and inform newcomers in an effort to improve the conditions of eikaiwa.

Of the message board forums in general, Mr. Burns writes that people are "espousing their opinions on the internet and you are reading them." It should go without saying that what you read on a message board should be taken with a grain of salt. I sincerely hope no one considering something as serious (not to mention expensive) as moving to Japan to teach English would base their decision solely on what they read on a message board.

If someone was so turned off by what they read or didn't read on the Let's Japan message board that they decided not to come to Japan, then I would humbly suggest that person wasn't ready for life abroad.

To hear Kevin Burns tell it, there is a preponderance of doom and gloom stories about teaching English in Japan. Chris and I don't think so. We think there are many "nice" stories with happy endings. Let's Japan has some of those nice stories, too. Occasionally, and it seems to be the most motivating factor when it comes to story contributions or message board rants, bad things happen to good people. Why should good people be quiet about bad things? Let's Japan has always been open to "happy stories" and the venting of spleens.

Let's Japan also includes interviews with a former (Japanese) manager of a language school and a Japanese student of an eikaiwa school. We're interested in hearing all sides and views.

Is there a lot of ranting and complaining on the forums? You bet. There's also a lot of plain banter and honest discussion. In the interest of fairness should I balance out the bad with the good? No way. Why start dictating the nature of the discussions? If you make an effort to get to know the various characters on the forum, you'll soon see that there are a lot of weirdoes and there are a lot of good people. The weirdoes are acknowledged to be weirdoes and are generally tolerated. The good people can be counted on to give good advice. I have a feeling Mr. Burns hasn't spent much time on the LJ forums and is making sweeping condemnations of my site.

Mr. Burns has complained about our site before. What did he do about it? Nothing. He's complaining again. What will he do about it? Probably nothing. Aside from one story Mr. Burns submitted to Let's Japan, I haven't seen him in the forums fighting the good fight. He wags his finger at LJ and then he excuses himself from doing anything saying that it would be a conflict of interest since he runs his own school.

Strangely, Mr. Burns doesn't have a problem with setting up web pages for Odawara Living, Japan Living, Jobs in Nippon, Chess Odawara, Street & Inline Hockey, Grognards Japan, and Tennis Kanagawa and flogging his own school on a number of them.

Mr. Burns suggests that what we need is an independent website, a watchdog of sorts, to review schools. Let's Japan used to have such a section. It got few responses, not because there are no good schools out there, but because each situation is different. Some people get along great in one school while other people don't. Chris and I have actually heard of some people who like and thrive in big eikaiwa schools. We can't understand it, but that's what they say. Good for them! We're not telling anyone that our opinion is the be-all and end-all of teaching in Japan. In fact, we invite anyone with an opinion, positive or negative or both to post their opinions on our message board for the world to see.

Including Mr. Burns.

I think Mr. Burns needs to actually read the stories Chris and I and our readers have written. Yes, there are some that don't say nice things about GEOS or the other eikaiwas, but that's what happened. They are a record of our experiences.

Why doesn't Mr. Burns end his long-time gripe of Let's Japan and do something to improve the image of the industry? Why doesn't he start a "Testimonial" section on his website which includes interviews with EVERY teacher he has ever employed reviewing his school? Maybe some teachers wouldn't give glowing reviews? Maybe Mr. Burns would learn that everyone has a different take on a situation. Would he still allow a not-so-glowing review of his school on his website? If his employee posted that unflattering review on Let's Japan, would it automatically become something to be downplayed as "just more negative stuff?"

If you're thinking you'd like to teach English in Japan, you need to do your homework. Let's Japan is but a small slice of the Internet. You would be a fool to think that it is or calls itself the world's only eikaiwa review.

Shawn Thir
Webmaster, Let's Japan.org

Selecting ELT Materials

2004-10-01T00:00:00Z

Miriam Lavi

When I first starting teaching ESL in the 60's, the Israeli Board of Education was using short story books (This Wide World, New Horizons) as high school ESL textbooks. Each story was followed by comprehension questions, but no language exercises - teachers were expected to write their own! When I became a partner in an English language institute, the adult classes were using Robert Dixon's grammar books as course books, supplemented by photocopied dialogues (In The Bank, At The Post Office, etc.) and these were considered conversation courses!

“I approach each new ELT catalogue with the delight of a child in a candy store!”

ELT publishing has come a long way in the past four decades: To meet the ever-increasing needs of a burgeoning industry, it has been turning out very professionally-done materials at an extraordinary pace. No wonder, then, that I approach each new ELT catalogue with the delight of a child in a candy store!

Nowadays, there is a vast selection of course books for every age group and ESL level to choose from - most of them accompanied by audiocassettes, some by videocassettes, CD's and, most recently, interactive material; there are ESP (English for Specific Purposes) course books for an incredibly wide range of particular needs; there is supplementary material graded readers, music, word games to complement almost any teaching style.

Selecting appropriate material is one of the crucial factors in the success of a course. Note that I said 'appropriate', not 'good'. Almost all of the material being produced nowadays is of high quality; the question is how to determine which EFL material is most suitable for your student/s. To best accomplish this, let me suggest the following:

Familiarize yourself with what is available. Check out the online catalogues of
1. Major ELT publishers:
  Oxford University Press (www.oup.com/elt)
  Longman Publishers (www.longman-elt.com)
  Cambridge University Press (www.cambridge.org/elt)
  Macmillan Heinemann (www.onestopenglish.com)
  Penguin graded readers (www.penguinreaders.com)
2. Worldwide distributors:
  The English Book Centre (www.ebcoxford.co.uk)
  Alta - California (www.altaesl.com)
Profile your student/s.
1. If you are looking for a course book, what level is most suitable? Which skill/s do you want to concentrate on? General courses integrate the four language skills (listening comprehension, speaking, reading comprehension, writing) in an organized and carefully graded manner. Other types of course books are structured in such a way as to emphasize one particular skill.
2. If your course book has already been selected, what kinds of supplementary material could enhance it?
Get as much input as you possibly can before ordering.
1. Publishers and distributors employ consultants for this purpose. Use them.
2. Some ESL websites have teachers' forums. Ask others what their experience has been.
3. Ask around locally. Teachers are very approachable on this issue - as are students.

GOOD LUCK!

Miriam Lavi is the author of the popular e-guide How to Become a Personal ESL Trainer. For more information, check out her website www.esltrainers.com.

Travelers' Tales - Vietnam

2004-09-05T09:12:16Z

Marc Helgesen
(see also our interview with Mr. Helgesen)

Travelers take pictures. Not just those we shoot with a camera. More important are the mental photographs we use to remember the sights, sounds and feelings of our experiences and adventures. One of my favorites happened in Vientiane, Laos. I was there with an old friend, someone I hadn't seen in a few years. It was evening. We were sitting on the banks of the Mekong River, nursing a cold Beer Lao. That evening we had eaten Lao food -- delicious. Watched Lao dance -- beautiful. Heard traditional music -- interesting (always a loaded adjective). We had just spent a couple days talking to people and making friends in Vientiane -- magnificent. So, there we were, a couple of severely middle-aged guys experiencing this fascinating culture, relaxing on the bank of this important river. Life is good.

“What if we all were clearer about who are, and especially who are not, our enemies? As a teacher, what values am I teaching every day that I don't even notice?”

I'm just back from my first trip to Vietnam. It is a beautiful country. Stunning. The people are wonderful. Go there. You'll love it.

As an American, especially one of my age, Vietnam has a special meaning and a special curiosity. The country was for years torn apart by war. In the process, my own country was equally torn apart, politically and culturally. If you've been following recent politics, you know that that war is not exactly over for many people in the States.

How, I wondered, would Vietnamese feel about Americans? I needn't have worried, or even wondered. "We were taught in school," a Vietnamese explained, "that the American people were never our enemies. Neither were the French people. Our enemies were the armies and the governments, not the people. " I was there shortly after the problems between the Chinese spectators and the Japanese soccer team at the Asia Cup. "We were taught." What, I thought, if Chinese and Japanese were specifically taught to deal with their sad history and then move beyond it? What if we all were clearer about who are, and especially who are not, our enemies? As a teacher, what values am I teaching every day that I don't even notice?

Visitors to Vietnam often use the word "charming" to describe the country. It fits. The nature is breathtaking. The French influence on the architecture and the wide, green boulevards is evident. French bread, I was told, is the omiyage of choice for rural Vietnamese. At the edges of cities, you see vendors selling fresh French bread to students and others motorcycling to their homes in the country.

And, if the French colonial history is part of what gives Vietnam it's charm, the irony is that it contributed so directly to the tears and pain and death and struggle of the colonial era.

I was surprised to learn that Ho Chi Minh's 1945 Declaration of Independence was patterned on America's. And that he wrote President Truman asking for help. Truman never wrote back. What would have happened if he had? Nothing, perhaps. American politicians were busy asking "Who lost China?" For Americans, it was us vs. the Soviets, being played out on a gameboard called Asia. For the Vietnamese, it was about nationalism. People fight colonialism, whatever the guise. Still, one wonders how history could have been altered if there had been dialog. The lesson? I'm not sure. Answer your mail?

The war has been over for thirty years but the reminders are frequent. At the War Remnants Museum, you see documentation of horrors: the tiger cages used to keep Viet Cong prisoners, the guillotine the French used on "troublemakers", left-over bombs, and photographs of the destruction. At the Viet Cong tunnels, you see the ingeniously evil low-tech booby traps made of bamboo stakes and scrap metal. What strikes visitors is the level, on both sides, of savagery. I recall a quote from Harvard theologian Harvey Cox from that period: "The opposite of human is not animal," he said. "The opposite of human is demonic." War is the demonic application of that side of people. Savagery.

The hardest thing for me for me was seeing the burned, melted faces of napalm victims. They were like the character in Edvard Munch's "The Scream." But these are real, living human beings. Like in Munch's famous painting, you hear the scream in your heart.

I realize I am being morose. I shouldn't be. If this piece seems sad, maybe it's because that's the part that makes you think. The positive is brilliant. The rest is hard. Please understand: Vietnam is beautiful. The food is superb. The people are wonderful.

Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) is an exciting international city. Hanoi is more provincial, less modern. I found Hanoi delightful. My wife and son found it a bit funky. The rugged islands of Ha Long bay are spectacular.

One travels for experiences. The things you learn and the people you learn them from can be unexpected.

The street children in HCMC can be annoying. I recall one little boy following me. "Mister, buy chewing gum?" "Mister, buy postcards?" I don't chew gum. When is the last time I mailed anything that needed a stamp? Then he asked, "Mister. Help me?" It's not about whether I wanted gum. It's not about whether I wanted postcards. Would I buy something, not for me to acquire it but to help him get through the day? It's different. You learn.

But if street kids can be annoying teachers, they can also be delightful. The first week I was in Vietnam, I was at a conference. A good friend at the conference, Al, sort of adopted a small group of kids or perhaps they adapted him. There was Vinh, a 10-year with a shy smile. She acted as the "little mama" to a bright-eyed girl named Cho and a little boy called Du. Al took the kids to dinner several times. That way, he knew the money would be well used. Al left Vietnam a week earlier than I. I was going to be back in HCMC the following week, so I told my friend I'd see how the kids were doing.

Rainy season had begun by the time I returned. It wasn't the long, depressing, sunless rainy season we have in Japan. Rather, it clouded up and rained for a few hours each afternoon, sometimes stretching into the evening. Because of the rain, I didn't see Vinh and her friends on the street where they usually stayed, trying to make a little money.

On my last night, I went out specifically looking for them. It must have been obvious that I was searching because two people, a hooker and her pimp (I assume), asked what I was looking for. I explained and the pimp said he knew who I was talking about. He told me to wait. He jumped on his motorbike. A few minutes later, he showed up with the kids - four people on a bike is not at all rare. I tipped him. (If you go to Vietnam, bring lots of one-dollar bills for tips. A dollar is about 100 yen - almost nothing for us but a half-day's wages for a lot of Vietnamese. It helps.)

I was happy to see the kids. They knew I was Uncle Al's friend and were happy to see me. I said I'd take them to dinner. I asked Vee, the prostitute, if she wanted to join us. She shook her head and said she couldn't. She had to earn money. I asked her how much she got for one time. "Fifteen dollars." "How about if I give you fifteen dollars to not have sex? Then you can have dinner with us." She gave me a puzzled look. It was clear this was not a proposition she gets a lot. But then she smiled and said yes. And I thought, "18-years-old and her best offer is $15 to not turn a trick. Street life's got to be a killer.") I don't know what happened to the pimp. He sort of disappeared. But a bookseller - a sixteen-year-old who makes her living selling fake Lonely Planets to tourists - joined us. Her street name was Peanut, because she was small. Her English was pretty good. She made it much easier to understand the others. Peanut would like to go to school. She can't afford it. Her mom and dad are gone. She works to stay alive.

So there we sat, on plastic chairs on a street in Ho Chi Minh City, eating chicken and talking and laughing.

And I couldn't help thinking about all the kids, but especially Vinh. So nice. Trying so hard, for herself and the little ones. And trusting. She trusts Uncle Al. She trusts me. And someday, she's going to trust the wrong person. And then- you know what will happen. She'll be raped. When Vinh and the other little ones were off talking to the mama-san, I mentioned this worry to Peanut and Vee. They looked at me sadly. Their eyes told me they knew. It was true. And so wrong. And there was nothing any of us could do.

All of these kids, Vinh, Cho, Du, Vee, Peanut. What are the chances that any of them will even be alive in ten years? Poverty. Drugs. AIDS. You see street kids. You don't see many homeless in their 20's and 30's in Vietnam. I remembered my image of my friend and me on the banks of the Mekong, thinking "Life is good." Here I was, a few blocks from the Saigon River. For these kids, life sucks.

But we had a nice dinner. And then it was time to go. I kissed them on the forehead and gave each of them some money - I hope it will get them through a few days. And then I went back to my room, their young faces still smiling in the pictures in my mind. And then I cried.

In Defense of Eikaiwa

2004-09-03T09:21:14Z

Tony DePrato

What is Eikaiwa?
In Japan, Eikaiwa is the Japanese name given to the English Conversation Schools which exist through out the entire country. These schools are privately owned for-profit-organizations.

What are some examples of Eikaiwa companies?
As of 2004, the largest and most popular Eikaiwa schools are Nova, ECC, GEOS, and. AEON. However, there are numerous other smaller schools which exist in almost every average sized community in Japan.

What are the main criticisms of the Eikaiwa industry?
There are many ways to approach this topic. Alls schools are slightly different, but there are some similarities. Looking at the topic of criticism from an educational perspective is the path I have chosen for this essay.

Eikaiwa schools have no formal way to certify or accredit themselves. They also do not keep or make public records regarding student performance. In fact many students simply study as a hobby and do not care about their overall education. Therefore the schools are usually considered to be 59% Entertainment and 41% Education.

To reflect this fact, most schools will hire anyone meeting the very basic requirements set forth by the Japanese Government. These requirements are:

A Passport from a native English speaking country
English must be the individuals first language
A BA of any type from an accredited college

This hardly qualifies someone to be a competent teacher or even mentor to students of English.

Finally, most of the people managing Eikaiwa schools and developing curriculums do not have a background in education. Many of them are Japanese nationals or former Eikaiwa teachers. Their resumes usually include ESL training in the form of certifications earned within Japan. These certifications are not transferable to the United States (I do not know about other countries), and they cannot be used to apply for US teaching certificates.

As an educational professional, how can you defend this type of industry?
Eikaiwa itself cannot be defended, but teachers within the system need a positive voice. They should not be stereotyped and pigeonholed in a negative context for working at an Eikaiwa school. As a matter of fact, Eikaiwa teachers probably can manage classes and develop materials better than most "professional teachers", if those said teachers have been working in a good Eikaiwa environment. Not to mention the fact that their (Eikaiwa teachers) communication skills and ability to work cross-culturally far exceed that of most people- regardless of industry or profession. To push forward this point, focused needs to be shifted to those who are criticizing the Eikaiwa system: The Institutions of the United States Educational System at home and abroad.

How different are they?
There are numerous books, essays, documentaries, etc, which document the incredible faults of the United States Education system. Some of the books which I have personally studied include:

"Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools", by Jonathan Kozol
"The Book of Learning and Forgetting", by Frank Smith
"Experience And Education ", by John Dewey
"The Children's Machine: Rethinking School In The Age Of The Computer ", by Seymour Papert
"Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation ", by Don Tapscott

These books all address similar problems: teachers who have degrees and certification, but seemingly cannot teach or hate teaching; poor administration with little or no training in educational administration; improperly managed projects and budgets due to a lack of proper professional training; and finally curriculums which are not designed for the students, but often dictated by text books and text book companies.

When put side-by-side the US Public Education System and the Japanese Eikaiwa School System are very similar.

It is true that to get a job in the US a schoolteacher must possess a degree that demonstrates a completion of specific course work and a teaching certificate in one or more areas of expertise. However, this clearly does not mean the teacher is prepared to teach. Why? Because the teacher was probably educated in the same poor education system which they are now working in.

So does this mean that all public school teachers in the United States or US accredited international schools are bad teachers? Of course not! The same is true about Eikaiwa teachers.

The point of this essay is not to truly defend Eikaiwa. It is to help organizations outside of the Eikaiwa system to understand how to tell the difference between a teacher who is a professional working in Eikaiwa and one who is simply working in Japan.

So how can an organization know the difference between these two types of Eikaiwa teachers?
There are many skilled people working in Eikaiwa who have the proper teaching credentials and education to move in "mainstream education", but many US accredited schools will not count Eikaiwa teaching as experience. Therefore, good teachers often get passed over for others who have been working in traditional environments. If you are an organization who has in the past not accepted Eikaiwa teaching experience, please carefully read the list of candidate questions you should have asked or should be asking in the future.

Class Planning

Did you prepare your own lessons? If so, how much time were you given per week to develop materials etc?
Was your curriculum strictly dictated or was it flexible?
Were you allowed to help plan the curriculum based on the needs of students?
As a teacher what resources did you have available for planning classes and making materials?

Class Structure

Did you teach the same classes every week with the same students?
How long was each class and how many times a month did most students come?
Were you allowed to assign homework or special work for students with unique problems?
How many students were in each class and how were those students selected for those classes?
How long did the average student study at your school: one year, two years etc?
Did your school have special classes for grammar, pronunciation, business communication, etc?
How were your lessons structured? For example: A different topic each week; a reinforcement-based system which spanned a week, month etc; open structure with very little preparation; topics were student driven; or the textbook(s) determined the order.

Training and Development

Did your school cover the cost of and provide time for you to attend seminars or certification courses?
Did you have regular staff meetings with the entire school, including management and Japanese staff?
Did your school encourage and support your studying of the Japanese Language?
Did you have fairly regular conversations with students or the guardians of students concerning their education?

School Reform and Change

Was it possible to for you to create and or change an existing school policy by going through the proper channels? If so how long would you say a fairly simple change would take to be implemented?
Did you have regular access to all school administrators and personnel?
Were you given time to work on school projects, such as curriculum development, during working hours?
Were students who misbehaved in anyway scolded by the school or even removed from the school?

If an individual has been working at an Eikaiwa school that was focused on education, then most of the questions will be answered "Yes + details". In my experience, the entertainment-based schools do not allow teachers very much freedom. And those schools do not in anyway support training and development outside of their own proprietary environments. Therefore, teachers from entertainment based schools will answer "No +details" to most of these questions or "Yes + very sparse or shallow details".

As someone who is at least well educated in and well read in the realm of education and theory, I beckon to all organizations to consider these questions as a test of a former Eikaiwa teacher's experience. Please do not assume that all people and schools are the same. Consider the uniqueness of what an individual may have done with their lives.

And then consider that the most important thing is that a new member of any group be walking the same path as the entire organization. It should not matter if they are wearing different shoes.

Japanese Committee Meetings for Dummies

2004-09-02T09:47:12Z

Curtis Kelly
Long-reigning chairperson of meeting dummies, with help from wise man Bernie Susser of Doshisha

For twenty years, I was a real meeting dummy. My participation in university committee meetings was characterized by grief, confusion, and saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. Recently, though, I feel like I am getting a handle on meetings, and although I cannot claim to be an expert on meeting form or finessing technique, I will give you a few points on how to organize or attend them. If you were like I was twenty years ago, these pointers might be just what you need.

Note that Department meetings are similar to committee meetings, but General Faculty meetings (Kyoujukai), being more formal, have more restrictions on discussion.

1) AGENDA
Have a hard copy of the meeting agenda to pass out to everyone. If possible, pass it out a few days before the meeting. It should have the meeting name, committee name, date, and a numbered list of topics and presenters. An agenda 1) gives everyone a chance to prepare ideas beforehand, 2) provides a "map" of the meeting so they know what is going on, and (extremely important to Japanese) 3) provides a kind of meeting report, an organizer, to file or pass on to other groups.

I was in a committee meeting recently and saw a real live example of why a written agenda is important. No written agenda was provided for the meeting, attended mainly by foreigners. Halfway through, one of the attendees started talking about an issue that did not seem to be related to the committee's function. He was prepared and had documents, but his 30-minute report (or was it a proposal?) left us disoriented. His presentation might have been cleared with the chair, but since there was no agenda, we did not know. It seemed that we spent half the meeting listening to something that had nothing to do with us.

Instead, the meeting topics should have been organized beforehand on a sheet of paper. That way, we would have known that this was an issue we should hear about or decide on. If it were not part of the meeting plan, it could still have been presented after we finished the other work, in "Sonota" (other business) section. "Sonota" topics should also be relevant to the duties of the committee, and the chairperson should be informed of them beforehand.

A written agenda is a must, but even with an agenda someone is bound to digress, and it is the hazardous job of the chairperson to get the meeting back on track without hurting feelings. A good chairperson is seen as someone who helps the committee get its work done as quickly and efficiently as possible.

2) ORGANIZING THE AGENDA
The topics in the agenda are usually organized with all announcements first (things already decided) and all proposals later (things to decide). (To be accurate, there is usually an "advisory," or something like that, section in between, but this one is even confusing to Japanese, so I am ignoring it.) Whatever the case, sometimes part of the topic will be announced in the first part, and then brought back up much later for argument and decision. (When permitted, I prefer to organize meetings by topics, with the announcements and proposals for that topic together.)

The agenda should just be a list of the topics and who will present them. Information on the topics are provided as additional pages. The last item on the agenda is always "Sonota" - "other topics." That gives everyone a chance to bring up other pressing issues not on the agenda. It also allows the leader to instruct someone who suddenly goes into another topic, to hold off until "Sonota."

3) CONDUCTING MEETINGS
Meetings are seen by most people as formal gatherings, not free discussion sessions (although I sometimes prefer the latter style myself). If someone has given up other work to come (especially Japanese staff or faculty), they don't want to sit around chatting. Sitting around and chatting is also important, but a discussion like that should not be called a "meeting." Therefore, most of what must be decided should be decided, or at least narrowed down, before the meeting, not at the meeting. Meetings are primarily reporting and approval-giving sessions. For important things that need the whole group to decide on, a list of alternatives should be prepared before the meeting and written up.

For example, it seems poor style to ask a question like "What should we name our new Website? Any ideas?" Ideally, ideas should be gathered before the meeting and then the attendees should be asked to choose among them or suggest others. A chairperson will still ask "Any ideas?" from time to time, but it makes that person seem a bit unprepared.

Another basic rule is that meetings should only be held once a month, except in exceptional circumstances (planning something new and important).

4) MAKING A PROPOSAL
To bring something new up, a "proposal" should be prepared on a separate sheet of paper. The proposal should identify the problem and propose a well defined, data supported, solution. It should also contain, and this is important, a plan of implementation. The implementation should include what must be done, by when, and by whom (although a pre-defined list of duties to be assigned at the meeting can be presented instead). According to the late intercultural communication expert Dean Barnlund, English speakers tend to decide whether or not to do something first (like make a new program) and then work out the details later, whereas Japanese prefer to work out all the details first before deciding. That way, everyone knows what they are getting themselves into.

5) DISTINCTIONS BETWEEN ANNOUNCEMENTS AND PROPOSALS
When an announcement is made (something already decided), everyone should be given a chance to ask questions about it. Opposing or suggesting changes to something presented in an "announcement" (hokoku) is probably the most common mistake non-Japanese make in meetings. They hear some announcement and then try to be helpful by saying, "Hey, why don't we do this instead?" not realizing that what they are commenting on was already decided somewhere else in another meeting, as someone else's job. Any opposition or addition to a hokoku announcement should be given as a gentle suggestion.

When a proposal (teian) is made, everyone should again be given a chance to ask questions about it, but they should also be invited to give their opinions on it too, including changes they think should be made. Sometimes the chairperson will even go around the table polling attendees. When the discussion ends, the chairperson usually summarizes the proposal again, noting changes, and says "Is this okay?" If no one speaks up, it is assumed that everyone agrees and the proposal is passed. Therefore, if you are against a proposal, but you did not say so in the discussion session, and sometimes even if you did, this is the time to register your position (but don't repeat all the grievances laid out earlier). If there is opposition, the leader might call for a vote.

The distinction between announcements and proposals is critically important to understand, and Japanese are sensitive to it. A lot of energy is spent on evaluating whether an item was properly proposed to the right group and properly decided on. Knowing what should be announced and what should be proposed, and to what group, is an important meeting skill.

Anyway, I hope these ideas on conducting meetings are useful. Remember the key points are:

provide a written agenda
decide as much as possible beforehand
distinguish between announcements and proposals
include an implementation plan with a proposal

* The "For Dummies" in the title is a reference to a popular series of books (eg. "MS Word for Dummies") that explain how to do difficult things to novices.

What Does Teaching Children EFL/ESL Mean?

2004-06-30T09:53:16Z

Sean Thompson
Principal E-kids Schools,
Editor, Atom English curriculum

It may seem an obvious question to most of us but I think it is still one worth examining in a little detail. We are here to teach, first and foremost. There may be some debate about what a "real" teacher is here in Japan based on what credentials a teacher may or may not have. In any case, it is necessary for anyone employed in any profession to continually re-evaluate and improve their skills in order to be their very best. As far as any of us need be concerned for the sake of this discussion, however, if you are in a classroom, you had better consider yourself a teacher. You are the adult charged with the class before you and therefore responsible for more than you may realize.

Teaching is many things but it is above all else a responsibility to those in our classrooms. In line with current trends in teaching methodology throughout the world, this responsibility starts with the "whole" child. The younger the child, the greater the responsibility to impart to them words and sentences as well as an understanding of how to participate in a classroom environment.

This includes consideration of such skills as how to share and participate with others as well as how to work both independently and as part of a group to create their own understanding of not only English, but of anything and everything around them. We, as teachers of language, must encourage our students' natural inquisitiveness about the wider world in order to best facilitate their growth with EFL in particular. This is as true for Junior High age students as it is for toddlers.

We must also encourage and support parents to help make our students' experience as rewarding and fulfilling as possible. We work together to build the bridges between the English world and our students' worlds outside of our classrooms. By doing so, we demonstrate to our students that English isn't merely a language of games and simple exercises but a part of that larger world that fascinates and awaits them. It is in this larger context that the language gains real meaning for the children in our classrooms.

By remaining aware of this we can encourage the "whole" child. This means taking into consideration all that is going on in the development of our students as individuals. We expect results in the lives of our students so we strive to teach in their "real worlds". We must use everyday language both in our instruction and in all interaction with our students to place English in a "real world" context where it belongs. This makes it much easier for our students to extract meaning from the language we provide for them.

By assuming this approach, whereby all students are seen as individual learners with specific needs, there can be no criticism over the possession of a slip of paper. By using your time to reflect upon your efforts, to learn what others are doing and continually raising the standard for yourself and your students, you rise above adversity and truly deserve the respect of your students and colleagues alike.

Know what your goals for your students are. Share them with your students and their parents. Make Homestudy a word your parents know and give them the tools with which to do it! Make yourself the expert that your member parents and their children can count on when they have questions about more than just learning a second-language. Classroom behaviour, sharing, cleaning up after oneself, conflict resolution, social skills, these are all things that children learn in your classroom. Be aware of the impact you have because whether you are aware of it or not, you will have an impact on the lives of those in your classrooms. Will it be a positive impact? That, is up to you.

Sean Thompson has been involved with teaching and managing EFL schools for children since arriving in Japan in 1997. Having graduated with his second degree in education for elementary levels, he has made teaching young learners his professional focus and, in his role as teacher trainer, has encouraged others to more fully develop their understanding of how children learn.

After managing at Britannica Japan's branch schools, he founded E-Kids school in Yokohama (2001) and started the Atom English curriculum to raise the educational standard for E-Kids' members.

The Atom English curriculum and Home Study Rewards program was created to make English a bigger part of your students' lives. Demonstrate to your students in every way that there is an English world they can participate in and enjoy. Set the standard high, and well into the future, with this comprehensive, fully supported and continually upgraded curriculum.

For more information see http://www.atomenglish.com or contact me at sean@ekids.co.jp

Personal bonds key in 'Amy and Ken'

2004-05-31T09:55:42Z

Personal bonds key in 'Amy and Ken'

Amy And Ken Visit Grandma (Kon to Aki)
Written and illustrated by Akiko Hayashi
Fukuinkan Shoten
Translated by Peter Howlett and Richard McNamara
RIC Publications

Amy and Ken Visit Grandma by Akiko Hayashi is certainly one of Japan's most popular storybooks. One picture book Web site, EhonNavi.net, ranks this title as now being the fifth most popular. Hayashi has written and illustrated numerous books, some of her best-known being There's a Hippo in My Bath (Ofuro Daisuki) and Miki's First Errand (Hajimete no Otsukai), and she is today considered to be one of Japan's leading picture book illustrator-writers.

Her endearing pictures and gentle texts have captivated many children not only in Japan but the world over, for her books have been translated into more than 10 languages, this particular title into French, Korean, Dutch and Chinese. Here is a story filled with some of the best qualities of a storybook: exciting adventure, tenderhearted fun and deep friendship. The story goes as follows:

Ken, an overall-clad stuffed toy fox, is a gift from Grandma to Amy, her soon-to-be-born granddaughter. Amy is born and as she grows up, she and Ken become the best of friends and constant companions. Then one day, a seam on Ken's arm splits open. He says "I'm all right, I'm all right, but I will have to go to Grandma's to get her to mend me."

Amy begs to go along and together they jump on the train that goes to Grandma's town: Sakyumachi, or Dunetown in English, situated next to a seaside sand dunes (most likely the ones in Tottori Prefecture).

On the way there, the duo have a number of close calls. First, when the train makes a brief stop, Ken dashes out to buy some box lunches, but just barely makes it back on the train, getting his tail caught in the train door. "I'm all right. I'm all right." says the good-natured Ken as the conductor bandages his tail.

Next, as they are walking across the sand dunes, Ken is snatched up and buried alive by a dog. But finally, just when the sun is about to set, they arrive at Grandma's house. Grandma stitches up the bedraggled Ken, and after a long hot Japanese bath together they all feel refreshed and squeaky clean. Staying a few days with Grandma, Amy and Ken return home, agreeing that it sure was good to visit Grandma.

Here is a story about the deep bond that develops between a child and her stuffed animal. What is magical about this storybook is that in the first few pages, Ken is nothing more than a stuffed toy sitting motionless next to the crib, yet it enthralls as the story progresses, and by the end anyone would swear that this fox was really alive.

There are other bonds that this story touches on: the bonds between grandparents and grandchildren. This bond can be seen in the big hug Grandma gives Amy when she comes running into her arms after a long day of adventure. Furthermore, although Hayashi doesn't mention this in the book, she has revealed elsewhere that Ken actually was made of late Grandpa's old jacket, and this is very heartwarming.

This story also gently opens many "cultural windows" on Japan. As one third of this story takes place on a train, it first and foremost introduces the whole culture of trains in Japan--the hard seats, the starched linen head rests, and the conductor's kind and courteous conduct. Trains play a very important role in travel and the transport of passengers, still accounting for about one fourth of Japan's transport-passenger kilometers.

The whole cultural tradition of ekiben, box lunches sold at train stations, usually containing local specialties, is depicted vividly in this story. With more than 2000 varieties of ekibens nationwide, this culture is still very much a part of Japan today, although the very brief station stops of the Shinkansen no longer allow for the thrill of jumping off the train to buy your ekiben on the platform.

The most difficult parts in translating this story were the very beginning and the very end. The very beginning--the title of this story--in Japanese is Kon to Aki, Kon being the fox's name and Aki being the girl's name. Kon in Japanese is a very foxy name in that kon-kon is the onomatopoeia for the yelping sound a fox makes.

Kenji Miyazawa (1896-1933), for example, names one of his foxes in Crossing the Snows (Yukiwatari) Konsaburo or "Kon Boy." A more direct translation of this name might be "Yelper," but this would be too distracting. And the name Kon, most likely pronounced the same as Con in English, doesn't exactly have the best connotations: Con is short for "convict" or "confidence trick."

Aki is a very nice Japanese girl's name, but just to keep the feeling of this story very familiar, we decided to call these two Amy and Ken, names that work both in English and Japanese.

Next, the very end of this story in the original and our translation is as follows.

Omakeni, dekitatenoyoni kireina kitsune ni narimashita. Soshite tsugino tsuginohi, Kon to Aki wa, uchi e kaerimashita.
Yokatta!"
He looked and felt like a brand new fox. After staying two more nights with Grandma, Ken and Amy returned home.
"It was so good to see Grandma, wasn't it?" said Ken.
"Sure was!" said Amy.

Hayashi ends her text with the word Yokatta! (Great!). This is a beautiful finish for this happy-ending adventure, simple and to the point. The whole story is summed up in this one Japanese word and leaves the reader with a warm feeling. Yet, if we tried the same in English, it wouldn't work. If we ended with "That was great!" it would be too abrupt and it would lack the feeling of closure so necessary in English.

So, we chose to end it with this short dialogue between Amy and Ken. This closing was in fact a point of great discussion between us and the original publisher, and we hope we have been successful in conveying the same feeling into English.

In Japanese or in English, here is a gem of a storybook. A storybook that captivates and invites the reader, young or old, to join Amy and Ken on their journey to Grandma's and home again. A reassuring tale reminding us that there is nothing more precious than a good friend.

Howlett, born and raised in Hokkaido, teaches at Hakodate La Salle Junior and Senior High School, while McNamara, a British-trained psychologist, is a lecturer at Kumamoto Prefectural University. Their translation works include the Guri and Gura series. This article was originally published in The Daily Yomiuri on May 4, 2004.