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.

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

One of the most difficult parts of debating for both native speakers and ESL students is rebuttal. From my experience the rebuttal part for Japanese ESL learners is especially hard since debating is not something that they commonly do even in Japanese. The most important aspect is providing them with a structure to follow. 

To rebut effectively in English debates, here are some essential tips:

Active Listening: Understand your opponent's arguments by actively listening and taking notes.

Preparation: Anticipate your opponent's points and prepare your arguments in advance.

Signposting: Structure your rebuttal by starting with an acknowledgment of the opponent's point.

Address Key Points: Focus on the most crucial aspects of your opponent's argument in your rebuttal.

Provide Evidence: Support your counterarguments with facts, statistics, or examples.

Expand Vocabulary: Enhance your English vocabulary to express your ideas more effectively.

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.

1. Start with Basic Topics

Begin with simple, relatable topics that ESL students can easily understand and express opinions about. Gradually progress to more complex subjects as their language skills improve.

2. Emphasize Vocabulary

Introduce debate-specific vocabulary and phrases, such as "opening statement," "rebuttal," and "counterargument." Encourage students to incorporate these terms into their speeches to enhance their language proficiency.

3. Provide Structured Practice

Break the debate process into manageable steps. Teach students how to outline their arguments, provide evidence, and refute opposing viewpoints. Practice each step separately before combining them into full debates.

4. Foster a Supportive Environment

Create a safe and inclusive classroom environment where ESL students feel comfortable expressing their opinions and making mistakes. Encourage peer feedback and constructive criticism.

5. Incorporate Technology

Use online resources, debate platforms, and multimedia materials to make learning engaging and interactive. ESL students can watch and analyze debates in English, helping them grasp the art of persuasion.

6. Encourage Research

Encourage ESL students to research thoroughly before debates. This not only improves their argumentation skills but also enhances their knowledge of the topic.

7. Practice, Practice, Practice

Regular practice is key to mastering debate skills. Host mock debates, organize debates within the class, or even encourage ESL students to join debate clubs or competitions outside of school.

I wanted to thank everyone at Project Genius for their hard work this year at their schools, especially considering the many difficulties the world has faced these past few years. I hope our team can enjoy their holidays, whether it is here in Japan or abroad.

For the last several years at the junior high school where I teach we do a crafts activity in the last class junior high school first grade class of the year. I am from California, so I never experienced a "White Christmas" until I came to Japan. The few instructions needed to explain how to make a snowflake using just a pair of scissors and a piece of paper (cut, triangle, fold) is well within our student's English ability. I am also pretty bad at crafts myself, so once students understand what to do they inevitably create much more elaborate snowflakes than I could even imagine.

And while the two instructors from Project Genius at my school are from the west coast of the US, our school's JET instructor from Australia. She described what having Christmas in Australia was like while also having our students listen to an Australian version of Jingle Bells.

I also learned some new words through this lesson, such as ute and swaggie.

We are also entering our recruiting season. If you are interested in working for us please check Craigslist or Gaijinpot for our latest openings or send us your resume directly via this form.

Please have a safe and enjoyable holiday season!

Links to materials and lesson plan below.

Lesson Plan

Model conversation and worksheet