Student-orientated Teaching

One thing you hear a lot in schools in Japan is, 'yes, but Japan is different'. Maybe x and y work in your country, but Japan is different. Well, yes, it is. And often, this is where the discussion ends. You had a good idea, but trust the JTE; it won't work. And unsurprisingly, oftentimes the JTE is in fact correct. During your tenure as a language teacher, you may find the JTE and their way of thinking makes more and more sense to you - the students actually want that direct translation exercise in there, and perhaps repeating after x-sensei is useful afterall.

But one must delve deeper into the world of teaching foreign (in the case of Japan) and second languages to first find out why a particular idea might not work, and secondly, how to overcome any limitations that you might experience when implementing said idea. This essentially comes down to pedagogy and language learning strategies.

Basically, pedagogy is the term for how one teaches. Two teachers teaching the same content in the same curriculum in the same school with the same students will have two separate pedagogies. Every teacher has their own pedagogy. It is designed around their own strengths and weaknesses, their experiences, their students, among other factors. Language learning strategies (LLS) are exactly that. They are strategies, methods employed by the students to assist with achieving their language goals. I will discuss these in another post later.

Two very important points here: LLS are focussed on the student, and are designed to achieve language goals. Let's begin with the focus on students. There is student-orientated teaching, and teacher-orientated teaching. Traditional teaching methods, which are still largely employed in Asia (I would like to point out that this is a generalisation and that this is not the case everywhere) are the latter. The teacher is the vessel of knowledge, passing said knowledge down to the students, just as a mother sparrow regurgitates the day's bounty to her babies.

Essentially, cutting a few (read: lot) corners here and there, teacher-orientated classrooms do not create knowledge, but instead the focus is on the preservation of knowledge (look up Socratic and Confucian traditions of teaching if you are interested in this). And thus, accuracy becomes a big deal. Student-orientated classrooms on the other hand, are often concerned with the creation of knowledge.

Now I've sidetracked quite a bit, so let's return to the emphasis on students. Language learning strategies are focussed on the student. However, you cannot expect a student to suddenly begin using a range of strategies that the teacher has not introduced to them or had them practice. You can't expect to dropkick a baby into a pool and tell it to swim to safety before the starved piranhas are released, regardless of how strong its burning desire to seek revenge is. It simply will be unable to swim. Furthermore, LLS preferences are largely based on what the student is used to. For example, a reading exercise dealing with inferring from the context is considerably difficult, and disliked by my students because the only reading activities they do is reading a textbook dialogue line by line, which happens to be devoid of context and all the unknowns easily known. If teachers focus on direct translation into Japanese, students will develop a preference for this, and will begin to feel uncomfortable without having the 'correct' translation, whether or not they understand the meaning already. Many experiments prove this. For example, it was found that exposing a young child to Justin Bieber for three weeks resulted in that child actually wanting to hear more from the Biebs, rather than jumping into the pool prepared with piranhas.

In summary, the teacher's pedagogy affects what LLS the student can and prefer to use. The, 'this doesn't work in Japan' argument is no longer valid. The students are simply not used to knowing another way because of the teacher's pedagogy. If you want to change this, if you want your students to be able to infer the meaning of a word from a contextualised reading, do not expect them to be able to do it first time, or even like it first time. Tell the JTE it will be rough at first, not that it simply doesn't work, only it will take a bit of time. The baby requires swimming lessons before it is ready to swim. I would also advise against betting money on the baby to perform 200m butterfly on it's first day.

Now to the last point about goals. Or so you thought. You can read about goals in another post later. There's a lot more going on behind the scenes with pedagogy and language learning strategies and although I have successfully managed to keep some of that out of this post for the sake of length, I will need to bring it up another time. It goes to show, the scope of foreign/second language teaching is vast, and even a large number of JTEs are really only scratching the surface. Trying to improve one's own class is wrought with difficulty in trying to figure out why something won't work, or why students respond counter to what you had expected. Hopefully this blog can clear up at least some of these difficulties.

Nick