According to the list of class data of the JHS/HS, there were 7 haunted houses, 3 casinos, 2 shooting games, 2 maid cafes, and a human zoo with the students wearing animal headbands lying on the ground being fed through cage bars choko boru for their food and protein shakes for drinks.

During the week of school festival preparations, I finally had some downtime between grading and making tests to walk around and help the students and teachers. Below is a list of festival related vents that I personally partiicipated or witnessed where students were practicing English conversation:

• masks being spray painted inside a classroom not well ventilated for a haunted house

• told said high school students to put on masks because of the dangerous fumes

• told high school students to turn on the classroom light because they were sawing wood in the dark using their phones as lights

• wrote cursive for the JHS 1st graders classroom board

• edited an English paper about Japanese culture that was to be displayed in the classroom

• students told me about the new Monster Hunter game coming out

• punctured a hole in the opening of a balloon for students to pump air into

• got a free t-shirt for a Biohazard/Resident Evil themed classroom

• made 30 paper flowers out of confetti paper and 30 paper trains

• decorated a hallway with a smiley face design with above said decorations

• made 20 origami cranes and 10 origami shurikens

• shot a nerf gun for a student to practice running from

• students went shopping at Daiso and Costco to buy materials and supplies

• spun a casino custom slot machine with a students face on it making different poses

• ate 3 cotton candies for the students to practice using the cotton candy machine

• students explained to me the new popcorn game that was on the homepage of Google

• brushed 2 wigs for the performances with many students complimenting them

In the past, the benefits of being an assistant teacher included team teaching and less lesson planning time to connect with students. With the increased time to connect with students, I walked around the school and interacted with students, asking about their lives. I actually knew most of their names and a lot about their family, love rumors, friends, interests, and other kinds of trouble they had going on in their life that I felt so much closer with them.

Now as a main teacher, while I don’t have as much time to connect due to increased role responsibilities as when I was in an assistant role, I still do my best to talk with my students. I really love when the festival season comes around the corner because this is one of the best times I can connect more with my students. Being able to have fun moments inside and outside the classroom is a joy to me and I love seeing my students thrive and improve in their studies. The educational and emotional responsibility we as teachers share for our students is a great task that I take pride in, as showcased during the festival season.

During the festival, the time with my students brings more natural conversations that are so unprompted and organic. While making origami, my students volunteered to become teachers and taught me how to make a crane using easy English and learned new words.

The time together with no lesson plan, but rather just sitting with students creating was the time where I not only learned new names but also their interests and daily life worries. Instead of repeating the textbooks, while making origami students asked the usual questions like what Japanese food do I like and why did I come to Japan but also unusual questions that they never would’ve had the chance to ask me otherwise about mental illness and sexual orientation.

These rare moments outside the classrooms are one of the things I have looked forward to as a teacher as I try to get those interactions every day. One of my favorite things to do when I’m not teaching is to go visit the club rooms and talk with the students. For example, the best place for me is visiting the cooking club. Learning and teaching real world skills is the best motivation for anyone to learn a language and food culture connects us universally.

When I left school during the school festival preparations week to go home, I felt a different kind of accomplishment with my students due to the connections made and look forward to making more.

Image by lifeforstock on Freepik

Immersive learning goes beyond traditional classroom methods and is something that I am sure we all employ to some extent. Rather than focusing solely on grammar drills and vocabulary lists, this approach encourages students to use English actively in real-world contexts. Students can gain confidence and fluency more quickly by creating an environment where English is not just the subject of study but the medium of communication.

Benefits of Immersive Learning

1. Increased Engagement: Immersive learning puts students at the centre of the learning experience. Students actively participate and think in English through simulations, role-playing, or real-life conversations. This heightened engagement fosters a deeper connection to the language.
2. Contextual Understanding: Learning English in context helps students grasp nuances that might be missed through rote memorisation. For instance, understanding idiomatic expressions or cultural references becomes easier when students experience them firsthand in conversation or media.
3. Faster Fluency: The more students are exposed to English in an immersive environment, the faster they develop fluency. They learn to think in English, respond spontaneously, and overcome the hesitation that comes with trying to translate from their native language.

Potential Ways to Create an Immersive Learning Environment

1. Encourage English-Only Spaces: One effective way to create an immersive experience is by establishing English-only zones in the classroom or even outside of it. Encouraging students to use only English during group activities or casual conversations helps build their confidence. This is something we encourage at the elementary school I work in.
2. Utilise Technology: The digital world offers numerous opportunities for immersion. Encourage students to watch English-language films, listen to podcasts, or engage in online communities where English is the primary language. Interactive platforms like language learning apps or virtual language exchanges can also simulate an immersive environment. The aim is not just to use technology for its own sake but to achieve specific pedagogic goals.
3. Incorporate Authentic Materials: Exposing students to real-world English, such as newspapers, menus, social media posts, and TV commercials, can help them learn how the language is used daily. These materials not only make learning more fun but also give students a chance to see how the language evolves.
4. Host English-Language Events: Organizing events like English-only debates, book clubs, or cultural immersion days where students explore English-speaking cultures can provide meaningful practice. These activities help students apply their language skills in informal, enjoyable settings. My school hosts an inter-school language exchange class once a year with our sister school in Australia. Thre students really enjoy the experience and gain real-world confidence in their English.

Overcoming Challenges

While immersive learning is a powerful method, it can be challenging for some students, especially those at the beginner level. Teachers can support students by scaffolding the learning process. This can start with basic language use and gradually increasing the complexity of activities. Encouragement and patience are key, as students may initially feel overwhelmed. Additionally, creating an inclusive environment where mistakes are viewed as part of the learning journey helps reduce anxiety and build student confidence. 

Not all of these ideas will be possible within our teaching environments, however,  continuing to work towards a more immersive environment is a worthwhile goal. Decisions on which methods our students respond well to can then be made throughout the process.

Immersive learning transforms the TEFL experience from passive to active, making the learning process more enjoyable and effective. By incorporating immersion strategies, we can help our students not only learn English but live it giving them the tools they need to thrive in an English-speaking world.

Image Source: Freepik

One of our client schools has a class that our teachers really enjoy planning and teaching, but I have never been a fan of, either as an observer or as a substitute teacher. It is a current affairs class for third year high school students. Our teachers choose a topic and prepare texts and vocabulary lists related to the topic. The instructor stands in front of the class lecturing to students who are asked to answer questions or give their opinion from time to time.

In my experience teaching and observing this class I have not seen much engagement beyond a handful of high-level students. I wondered why there wasn’t more engagement.  Was it because the language or topics were too difficult, the students were not interested in the topics, or the students did not have the tools or opportunity to discuss?

Thinking that deeper student engagement with the material was the key to increasing student participation, I suggested in one observation report that our instructor consider  doing a jigsaw activity– breaking up the reading into sections, giving a group one section, then reforming groups so that each student in a group had read a different section and could explain to each other their assigned reading  -- to encourage discussion and increase comprehension. However, I received feedback that the teacher I had observed felt that all I was doing was telling him to have the kids play more games, to be more fun.

Looking back at my report, I probably was too blunt in my general criticism of the class – though over the years I have not  been shy in repeating my thoughts about the class to our teachers at the school -- but I am still at a bit of a loss as to why this activity perceived to be a game.

Games are a touchy subject for some EFL teachers in Japan. There are those, and  I would say I am one of them, who are wary about being associated with the stereotype of the genki English teacher, who doesn’t really teach – or know how to teach -- but just plays games and has fun with the kids while the serious learning occurs elsewhere. Whether a legitimate criticism or not, having that self-image as a teacher can be demotivating for ambitious and motivated professionals.

Games and gamification of learning can, however, be an important part of an English class, whether it is an old school board game like sugoroku  or having all the kids pull out their smart phones or tablets to play Kahoot. Some students are motivated by winning a game, it can encourage language use, and it just adds some variety to the classroom environment.

Teachers, though, should be judicious in their use of competitive games during lessons. Not all kids are motivated by competition, losing can be highly demotivating and in the worst case, though in my experience not a rare case, competition can create unnecessary and unconstructive conflict in the class. The English used in a game can also be completely disassociated from its actual context or meaning, making its usage transactional and ephemeral.

Our client schools are private schools with many of them wanting to have as many of their students as possible accepted into top level universities, which means their students are successfully passing college entrance exams. The incentive for these schools and the instructors they hire is to teach English as a Test Subject, emphasizing teacher fronted lecture courses, devaluing activities that provide opportunities to acquire language within a communicative context. We want our students to succeed in life, of course, and in Japan that means passing exams to get into universities. So, it is important for our teachers to support our clients and students in these goals. But, just like overemphasizing competitive games, teachers who attempt to motivate students solely on the basis of passing exams can also demotivate some students and lessen engagement in the classroom by promoting a way of thinking  that any activity  that is not directly related to explicitly passing exams is a waste of time within a competitive educational and career environment. 

Both competitive games and teaching to the test are similar in that they have easily identifiable outcomes. However, does that mean activities in which students are given the opportunity to engage with each other in an unstructured or lightly structured environment will ultimately have negative outcomes for student learning or development? Professor Laitha Vasudevan of Teachers College Columbia argues instead that it is essential. In an article entitled "Adolescents, Embodiment, and Play" she writes “adolescents need time and space for unfettered opportunities for experimentation and exploration of the changing world in which they live. Free play, or the full freedom to make all the decisions about play from materials to activity to location, is vital for young people’s development and sense-making about the world.” This is “because it is often in play that intertextual connections, imaginations, and other raw materials for literate engagements are sourced and nurtured.” 

How can we as teachers motivate students to use English in a more integrated way beyond just receiving a reward, whether that means becoming the daily champion or getting into their university of choice? Activities like jigsaw discussions are one way to bridge the gap between the two. A jigsaw activity puts the responsibility on students to speak and use English in their own time and their own way. In the context of the current affairs class, students can independently discuss and talk about the topic and come to their own understanding with several different classmates. The act of breaking up the essay into a number of parts and then asking students to summarize their section to other students who haven’t read it ensures that everyone will be required to engage with their classmates and the material in different ways. Understanding is then confirmed by the teacher through a whole class discussion. A jigsaw activity does introduce constraints that unfettered play would not, but, as the famous mid-20^th century designer Charles Eames discussed, how one decides how to  work within constraints is an important aspect of creativity.  This activity provides both students and teachers the space to use English and interact with each other in ways that can not only help them acquire English but also, though a less constrained environment, allow them to more fully identify themselves  as English speakers.

I strongly believe that we can add plus alpha to our client schools by providing opportunities to our students to express themselves and make interpersonal connections through English. Of course it takes time to build such a culture and it is much easier for everyone to fall back on either top down, highly structured lectures or competitive games where there are clear outcomes with winners and losers, correct and incorrect answers, and everyone can rate their success by the amount (rather than quality) of  English spoken in one finite class period and have  our classroom management skills judged by how students quietly stayed in their seats and talked only when spoken to, allowing everyone to quickly and quietly get through our days as teachers and students without much trouble or stress.

By challenging ourselves and our students to do more and be better, we do risk the possibility of failure, and that some chaos and messiness will ensue. But by giving our students more autonomy in lessons in the short term we can challenge them to be better learners and help cultivate more positive attitudes and outcomes in their English-speaking journey outside of class in the long term.

The article I referenced by Prof. Vasudevan was published in the  April/May/June 2023 of LITERACY TODAY, a publication of the International Literacy Association

I took the title from a video by Project Genius’ first Chief of English Services, Peter Ackerly.

Header image "RDECOM presents STEM opportunties at Edgewood High School" by U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Have you implemented these same techniques in your school as well? I hope you will learn at least one new technique today or perhaps agree or disagree with my rating system of each technique. 

 Can you get bingo from below? 

Here is the list of techniques used above for getting a classroom quiet and my efficiency rating for all::

Header image by Miroslavik from Pixabay

Practitioner inquiry begins with identifying a problem or issue in the classroom. This could be a challenging area for students, an activity with unsatisfactory results, or behavioural issues. In my case, I focused on helping students with pronunciation and listening, specifically the English /r/ and /l/ sounds. While my research project had a narrow focus, practitioner inquiry is highly adaptable. You could easily expand the topic to address a wide range of issues. 

Next, a plan of action needs to be devised to tackle the issue. The action itself involves an intervention into the current practices used in the classroom to improve the situation. In this case, I felt that the current pronunciation and listening practices I was employing were not really tackling the issue. So I wanted to assess whether incorporating songs that target problematic sounds could help. The current curriculum already uses songs as part of warm-ups and vocabulary practice for each new unit of the textbook. Hence, the students are already familiar with their use, and it will not be an intrusive intervention or require large amounts of time to be diverted. Over two months, I plan to incorporate songs that target the usage of English /r/ and /l/ to assess whether any effects can be detected at all. 

This leads into the observation phase, which involves observing the results through the data collected during the action phase above and analysing them. Lastly, and most importantly, is the reflection phase. This involves reflecting on the entire process, the results, final interpretations, and whether you will incorporate any new ideas into your teaching or whether you have thought of new ideas or areas that you can further research going forward. This process of reflection is something we are all familiar with as teachers, but I must admit that personally, I was fairly haphazard with this in the past. Going through the entire process systematically will allow me to be reflective in my practice far more easily in the future and is something I intend to keep doing for my professional development, regardless of whether it is tied to external study. 

By doing research in our classrooms, we can enact research that actually leads to tangible outcomes for not just ourselves but our students. Improvements can made in real time, not simply published in a journal or a university textbook. I understand that for all of us, time is an issue, but if you ever find yourself with some free time at work or you think you may have noticed a recurring problem area that isn't being addressed by current practices, then I would urge you to give practitioner inquiry a try. It doesn't need to be as formal as a university project or a publication. It can be something as simple as keeping detailed notes on what things worked well regarding problem areas and what didn't, something I’m sure many of you are already doing. But if, like me, that is something that you haven't done much of in the past, then I would encourage you to take the time to give it a go. The feeling when you can see ideas working for your student's benefit in real-time is one that we can all enjoy as teachers.

Image Source: Pexels from Pixabay

These concerns were less relevant when I was working with middle school students who had been exposed to a broader range of English. However, as I now teach at an elementary school, I have learned that it is even more important to provide students with a consistent model of English as the teacher. Elementary students need clarification when they encounter something new in their own language, let alone a foreign one. I must admit I struggled at first to use language that my elementary year 2 students could understand as I was unfamiliar with the textbook or their English level initially. I fell into bad habits of using half sentences or single words to convey meaning. Both my school and I are against doing this if possible, and so eventually, I realised something had to be done to resolve this issue.

I decided to record audio recordings of myself periodically during class when appropriate. The goal here wasn’t to record the students but myself and the language I was using. I could then listen back to myself and assess whether I was using the target language for each lesson sufficiently and whether I was falling into bad habits mentioned above. I was then able to work out at which points during the lesson I struggled to keep consistency and write notes for myself to take into class. This is still an ongoing work in progress to this day. However, it has allowed me to greatly enhance the understanding of my students, the flow of my lessons and ultimately ensure that a balance is struck between using target language as well as authentic and natural speech in the classroom. I would encourage anyone with similar concerns to attempt the same method or a variation to assess their language usage in class. It has been a very rewarding process, and I will continue the process moving forward.

Image Source: RDNE Stock project from Pexels

For new teachers who are new at creating tests, here are some examples that I have seen from my schools using Japan’s English Junior High  School textbooks: New Horizon, New Treasure, My Way, and the Sunshine series.

Below is a format with real, altered questions and real Japanese used on past tests.

The number of questions and points in the parenthesis per section is what I’ve personally seen being used as well. Usually, tests are about one hour and use 60-80 questions, 1-2 minutes per question on average.

Vocabulary: Translation (10 questions, 1 point each)

Grammar Table: (10 questions, 1 point each)

Rearranging (5 questions, 2-3 points)

Fill in the Blank: ( 5 questions, 2 points)

Multiple Choice: (15-20 questions, 1-3 points)

Passage Reading ( 5 questions, 2-3 points each)

Word Box: (5-10 Questions, 2 points each)

Short Answer (3-5 questions, 3 points each)

Essay (3-5 sentences, 6-10 points)

Follow this guide and well done! You will have made up the majority real English questions used in the Japanese public and private education sector.

For veterans and beginners alike, I hope you have learned a new assessment method from the above and good luck making your next test!

Header image "Solo exam" by Perrimoon is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Recently, I have noticed something during my time teaching in Japan is the lack of mnemonic acronyms. Although I have only worked at a couple schools as well as having talked with a few other native teachers of their experience with mnemonic acronyms, my experience with this topic is still undeveloped and will of course need more research in the future.

However, through my personal experience I have seen and heard that not only native but Japanese teachers do not use mnemonic acronyms in the classroom. As someone with an American education, we constantly learned mnemonic acronyms to help our memory for learner retention and was interested in bringing mnemonic acronyms to the classroom.

The other day, my students were practicing with coordinated conjunctions and I noticed a repeating mistake of them using the famed western mnemonic acronym FANBOYS, (For, And, Nor, But, Or, Yet, So), at the beginning of their sentence. Another hindering fact is also that many Japanese classroom English textbooks teach students with example sentences that they can begin students with “So” and “Because”, a practice that many students repeat from Junior High School into Senior High School.

When I showed my Japanese English teacher in my school the mnemonic acronym FANBOYS, he had no previous knowledge about it, thought it was very helpful, and will introduce it into his own lessons. While in the west we have ROY G BIV, My Dear Aunt Sally, and many others, this concept strictly speaking of each letter meaning something does not exist in the Japanese language as they only have short form.

For my high school students who are preparing for Eiken levels 3, pre-2, and 2, I tested out FANBOYS with them to see if they could remember English rules better for starting their sentences. Usually in Eiken, there’s an opinion question where the students are given a question such as “which season do you like better, winter or summer?” and then have to give one to two reasons for a perfect score. By providing alternative starting vocabulary examples instead of FANBOYS as well as answering questions as to why they can’t use any of them, I saw a drop in the usage of them.

Moving on to my JHS students, I noticed a trend of many constant mistakes. I chose three mistakes that can be applied to all sentences no matter the question. I developed my own mnemonic acronym for these three mistakes and wanted to test out if it could work in the Japanese classroom.

To do so, I took a picture of a checklist clipboard, added a face to it, and called it SOP-kun.
S - s (games)
O - おー大文字
P - period.
SOP stood for s, as in to make their words plural such as game(s), O, for “oomoji,” the Japanese translation for capital letters for names, cities, beginning of sentences, and P, for period at the end of a sentences. I chose O for “oomoji” instead of “c” for capital letters for Japanese students to remember it easier. Also, it was hard to find a vowel for those three constant mistakes, S, C, P. By adding a -kun, a familiar ending to names in Japan, I made my students interested in him. When I introduced him to my students as my friend, they lightheartedly asked if SOP-kun was my boyfriend and laughed.

After introducing SOP-kun to the classroom, whenever I had a worksheet activity where the students were writing sentences, I would say “remember SOP-kun?” and they would respond “Oh yeah!” instead of me pointing out each individual mistake over and over again. I also would have them do pair work in this style as well where their partners would use SOP-kun to check their friend’s writing.

Header image by Alan Levine from PxHere

This is the 10th year for me at Project Genius and the 10th year teaching at one of our client schools. I decided that this year we should hand out a formal syllabus for the first time to our students. 

Project Genius has two teachers at this school and we teach there two days a week. We teach the first-year junior high school students on one day and the second-year junior high school students on the other. We teach the same lesson to five different homerooms each day. Each homeroom is split between me and another Project Genius teacher, so we have a little less than 20 students in each lesson.

When I have taught at the tertiary level, either as a Teaching Assistant while at graduate school in the US or as an instructor at a college in Japan, I prepared or followed a syllabus and formally evaluated my students.  However, this was not the case in my earlier experience teaching at the primary and secondary level in Japan.  When I was on JET in the late 90s, I just attended lessons to support the JTE.  When I taught at elementary schools in Tokyo in the early 2000s, I was the T1, with the students' homeroom teacher there to support me. That was also the age of Yutari Kyoiku, and the goal of the classes was to give kids a good experience with English. That meant when I planned lessons, I was free to follow my own interests and the interests of the students. I was not supposed to worry about grades or evaluations at all.

When I started at my current school 10 years ago the Project Genius team at the school – we were both new that year – didn’t know until the day before they were due that we had to turn in grades. I had assumed until then it would be like my previous experiences at primary and secondary schools in Japan.  (This is one reason, by the way, I started the school info sheets. I ask everyone in our company to update periodically.) Since then, our team at the school has built-up a curriculum, including exams, presentations, and graded conversations. And, since we don’t use textbooks, we have students keep a notebook, in which they are asked to include all the worksheets we pass out over the year, to help them visualize and remember what they are learning. 

Since we teach at a private junior/senior high school which aims to get kids into top universities in Japan., exams, grades, and other formal evaluations are an essential part of the school culture. I just need to tell my students an activity will be graded and, given the opportunity to prepare on their own, students will practice and work hard in any individual class. Even so, I still feel that many students don’t see beyond a “one point English” view of our lessons and aren’t always thinking that our lessons build upon each other.

I decided that handing out a formal syllabus would be one way to address this. Recently I have been watching my fair share of US teacher TikToks to know that it isn’t just in beginning EFL classes in Japan where adolescents are told several times what to do by teachers and then promptly forget. I don’t want to put too much pressure on myself or my students in terms of expectations, but giving students a formal, written document seems to be a good, time-tested approach to reinforce what we are telling them in class. I am also hopeful that teachers and parents are also able to gain more insight into what we are doing in the classroom, which not only shows the outside world what we are doing but also hopefully gives them the opportunity to encourage our students to participate more in our classes, as well.

Here is what we came up with for the first years and the second years.

So far this term I have been encouraged that providing and reminding students with more explicit expectations provides students with some safety, security, and courage when we ask them to take a jump into the English-speaking pond.

Header image -- Curriculum by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images

A while back, while randomly watching YouTube one night, I was recommended a video entitled Big Bird in Japan. Intrigued, I watched it.

This PBS-NHK co-production ended up being quite interesting. It was produced in the late 1980s at the height of US-Japan tensions; not coincidentally, about the time the JET programme began. Big Bird and Barkley somehow join a tour of Japan and immediately get lost in Shinjuku. A friendly stranger of mysterious origins helps them to rejoin their tour in Kyoto while introducing them to Japanese life and culture. In addition to the time capsule aspect of watching something from the late 1980s, I was reminded of my own first day in Japan in 1995.

I was on my way to my study abroad university dorm room outside of Kyoto with my brand new, never-before-used passport and one full year of Japanese language studies at university under my belt. I got on the wrong train line in Osaka at first, but somehow, I made it to my station. I took a bus when I got there, but only way I knew I was at my stop was when the bus driver called "Gaijin-san!" in a friendly voice -- though I felt a bit self-conscious when everyone on the bus looked at me at the same time.

Unsurprisingly, I went in the opposite direction from the dorm I was staying at for the next month. At a loss of what to do, I just walked into one of those local electronics shops that are in neighborhoods around Japan and thrust the paper I had explaining where I was supposed to go towards them. Luckily, the family that owned that shop was just as friendly as the person Big Bird met. They calmed me down and bought me McDonalds for lunch, my first real meal in Japan, which I happily ate while chatting away. So I ended up feeling a strong affinity towards Big Bird and Barkley, watching them become lost and then found while wandering around Shinjuku and the rest of Japan.

When I showed it to my junior high school students, however, I found the visuals interesting enough—Big Bird and Barkley driving through Japan in a car is easy enough to understand while I noticed some students trying to figure out what Shinkansen station Big Bird and Barkley were at— for them to follow along while the language being at a level that can be understood by my mid-to-high level students.

My students English isn't at a level to have the sociological discussions about the video on Japan-US relations in the 1980s or representations of culture that you could have with older, more advanced students. However, I did want them to actively engage with the video. With my colleagues at my junior high school, we decided to make a listening, fill-in-the-blank worksheet based on the pre-school performance of the Japanese folk tale "The Bamboo Princess" that Big Bird and Barkley somehow stumble into watching. It starts at around the 39 minute mark and, spoiler alert, this story is related to the origins of our heroes' magical friend.

I will share two different worksheets here. First is the one we did in class, where we added a few vocabulary words at the beginning and a few review questions at the end. Looking at it again, I decided another way to do it would be to have students only listen for nouns. I hope you can either use these or that they give you some ideas to make materials better suited for your students.

Incorporating cultural materials such as this video is an effective way to help our students with their English. Though often we want to introduce things from our own country that does provide another layer of complexity to their language learning, as they need to learn not only the language but the cultural context, as well. It is always easier to understand something in a foreign language if you know the material well in your own language, so I believe using materials such as Japanese folk tales is one way to help students' confidence in learning languages.