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.

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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

After being in Japan for nearly 4 years, one key component of Japanese society is the lack of conversation surrounding headspace. So I think it’s important for us to be able to manage our own headspace.

We’ve all had bad days or days where we just don’t feel like doing anything. I know for me, especially after a long break my headspace tends to be in a weird place. In which I physically feel tired, and mentally blocked. 

Some methods I employ to help manage the lack of motivation and the weird headspace during these periods of time are:

1. Slowing getting myself back into the regular routine. Understanding that it’s normal after a long break to want to continue resting. During this period of time what works best for me is taking naps. Allowing myself to rest and to decompress can help with clearing any sort of weird headspace problems.

2.  Division of work. As work is starting back in full swing, it’s normal for teachers to have a lot of upcoming lessons to prepare for. If your motivation is shot, preparing for lessons can feel like a monstrous task. One way to bypass this is to divide the work. What works best for me is to outline the most important tasks to the least important. Then I make sure to give myself a reasonable deadline to finish the important tasks by. Rather than trying to finish it all right away, I make sure to give myself at least 30 minutes of rest for every 2 hours of working. During that 30 minutes I will do something that can allow me to shut my brain off and to refocus.

3. Understanding that you can only do your best if you are motivated enough and are in the right headspace. Forcing yourself to finish something when physically and mentally you are not there will only add more work for you in the future.

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!

I was told to be ready to have a self introduction lesson when I first came to Japan. It was 1998, I couldn’t just look up online for some photos to insert into a powerpoint and show that in class. I couldn't google anything that summer of 1998, let alone to get ideas for self introduction lessons. I did, though, go around my hometown and took some snapshots to bring. With the developed photos in my bag I got on the plane with plans to do my best in class. The self introduction lesson I remember most clearly now was the one that failed. I went into the class at this small junior high school in the mountains, one where a few months later would be surrounded by 3 meters of snow. As I started talking I could sense the kids had no idea what I was saying, and maybe not much interest, as well.  Finally, when the class was over, I thought the JTE would give some advice at best or be upset at worst, but all he said was, let's do it again in our next class.

I recently observed a veteran teacher who we just hired and he did this lesson quite well, though I wonder how I would have done with the ability to create a powerpoint and show it to the class. So, yes, even though it is possible to successfully do this kind of self-intro lesson I have known some teachers who think self-introduction lessons are, successful or not, not important and a waste of time. I disagree, however. A mentor of mine once mentioned that the teachers most remembered were those who shared some bit of themselves with their students. So I always think it is good that students know a little bit about me.

But how can I guess what they want to know? Although I know I can do a much better job with a self intro lesson today today than I did in 1998, just like what I found interesting in my hometown probably was not interesting to my students in rural Japan at the time, what I find interesting today might not interest my junior high school students today. I realized the way to ensure students find out something they are actually interested in, and also make this a much more interactive activity, was to have the students ask questions about what they want to know about me rather than me telling them what I think is interesting about me to them.

To me, this has several benefits. First, since it is more interactive it keeps the students in the class more involved. Even if they are only listening, they are much more interested to see how I answer their classmates' questions rather than just talking to them. Second, it lets kids ask questions they are interested in. 

Third, and maybe the most important point, is it allows me to talk to the students at their English level.  One of the disadvantages of asking EFL students to ask questions is they are not going to be able to ask all the questions they may have but if they can’t understand me in English from the start it will be difficult to build a trusting relationship in English. By keeping the first class in English and asking and answering questions at their level lets them make a direct connection with me right away with information they are interested in learning in English 

This lesson also acts as a quick level check for the class as a whole and for individual students.  Depending on the size of the class, I try to get every student  to ask a question, which allows me to quickly learn if they are shy or outgoing, if they are strong at English or weak, etc. If it is a one off substitution that isn’t a major concern, but if I am their new teacher for the year, it lets me learn a lot about the class in a short amount of time.

Although I mainly now do this lesson with junior or senior high school students, I have done it at university classes and even small group adult business English lessons. Below are a few examples of some questions and what I do with the questions.

This is from a high school class where I was the substitute for the day. I made it into a quiz and gave students two choices per question.

This was at a class for university students planning on going abroad, so this activity also doubled as a way to prepare students for small talk when they would meet new people. After I answer the questions I put students into pairs and/or small groups. Each group has a small game board and some dice. They roll the dice and when they land on a number they have to answer the question that corresponds to that number.

This is from the first class of this year with the second year students I teach at my junior high school. I do sometimes tell students, especially older students, that they can't ask Yes/No questions but not this day.

English teachers in Japan often tell themselves that one reason students don’t progress is that they are afraid to make mistakes. But are we as teachers just as willing to make mistakes ourselves?

I taught English at public elementary schools in Tokyo in the early 2000s. Teaching English at elementary schools was still experimental at the time and so I was responsible for creating all the lessons I was teaching. I had excitedly prepared all the materials for this interactive lesson that I thought would just mesmerize the students. From the moment the bell rang, however, there was just no response to anything I did that day. I was really down and depressed after that class. I asked the homeroom teacher who I co-taught the class with at that school why the students were so unresponsive and he just said the culture festival was coming up so students were really tired preparing for that. Thinking back, the lesson probably wasn't as great as I thought it was but from then on I have kept an eye on what students are doing outside class while thinking about either the yearly curriculum or an individual lesson.

When I think of language learning mistakes I have made, though, I always come back to one I made when I was living in Niigata as a JET program participant. As you may know, Niigata is snow country. But I grew up on the coast in California, which is defenantly not snow country, and I had only actually seen snow just a few months before coming to Japan. So during my first winter I was glued to the TV trying to figure out weather forcasts. One day I saw on the TV the term 大雪, which means heavy snow. I knew 雪, or snow, was pronounced yuki. I thought the 大 (big) would be pronounced like 大学 (university or daigaku). I was in a meeting a few days later at the local board of education and I said it will be daiyuki. Everyone looked puzzled until they started laughing after trying to understand what I was trying to say. My JTE (Japanese Teacher of English) who was in the meeting explained that it was pronounced ooyuki not daiyuki.

I am sure students are afraid of such an experience. I can’t say I was in good spirits myself immediately after making that mistake, nor am I everytime I make mistakes in my daily life.  When making a mistake in the classroom, though, I try to keep in mind that even the smallest error is, in addition to giving the students a chance to correct their teacher while also being able to teach their fellow students something, an opporunity to show them making mistakes is not something to be embarrassed by but rather an opportunity to learn something new. If we as teachers are willing to show our students that it is okay to make mistakes hopefully they will see the value in taking risks and making mistakes as they progress on their English learning journey.