Kitakyushu JALT Meeting Reports: Archive for 2000
Our meeting reports archive contains reports of our meetings from 1999 to June 2008.
To see reports for later events, visit the reports page.
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8 January 2000
Neil McClelland
Goal Orientations in Japanese College Students Learning EFL
McClelland's presentation was based on a questionnaire he administered to 250 second-year college students in Yamaguchi and Fukuoka Prefectures and follow-up interviews. Having long felt that Gardner's findings about instrumental and integrative motivations were not applicable to EFL students, he built upon the research of Clement, Dornyei, and others to design a questionnaire to elicit the most likely reasons for his students' study of English. Using the Varimax Rotated Factor Pattern Matrix, he identified seven orientations, listed here in order of descending student endorsement: Travel, Xenophilia, English Media, Personal Development (perhaps better defined as Meeting Societal Expectations), Socio-Cultural, Identification, and Curricular Importance. Average student responses in each category, based on a Likert Scale with 5 for strongly agree and 1 for strongly disagree, ranged from 4.1 to 2.9. McClelland attributes the neutral response to questions dealing with Identification (Integration) to lack of experience with native English speakers, particularly in an English-speaking environment.
Because of students' low regard for the pragmatic value of English, McClelland recommends that at the syllabus level, teachers should capitalize on students' interest in movies and pop songs as well as lifestyles around the world, with practice in asking about and describing ways of life. Because students see English as a bridge to the rest of the world, there should be less stress on adopting the accent, usage, or body language of a particular English-speaking community.
Reported by Margaret Orleans
12 February 2000
Dennis Woolbright
Teaching Public Speaking
Throughout his presentation on February 12, Dennis Woolbright, of Seinan Jo Gakuin Junior College, stressed breaking down speeches into manageable parts that can be taught to and practiced by students. Thus he began by illustrating the correct way to get up from one's seat and approach the podium, and continued through such steps as being comfortable speaking in front of a group, maintaining eye contact, brainstorming for topics, refining a topic, doing interviews and other research, cutting apart a speech and pasting it together into a better order, rewriting, memorizing from a tape rather than a manuscript, etc. A list of opening statements written by students and videotapes by prize-winning students illustrated the practicality of his approach. Woolbright feels that speaking in front of an audience for a minimum of three minutes is an essential part of English education. It is such a confidence-builder that no student should be denied this experience.
Reported by Margaret Orleans
11 March 2000
Daniel T. Kirk
Aliens in University Language Programs
From 1982, the category of "special, irregular, temporary/part-time foreign teachers" was created for the non-Japanese members of the faculty at PUK. Those teachers protested their status as discriminatory, since their obligations were the same as those of regular faculty members. In 1994, when the university wanted Monbusho approval of a new department, it hired a number of foreigners, as well as Japanese, as "sennin kyouin", which it translated as "full-time faculty members" in the English version of the documents, but in fact, only the foreigners had limited-term contracts. Years later, when this discrepancy was called to the attention of the Monbusho, which agreed that the translation was accurate, the ministry gave the university the Orwellian advice to retroactively alter the documents.
Barred from joining the university professors' union because of their irregular status, the foreign teachers formed the Kumamoto General Union in 1997, but within five months the university had broken off negotiations with them (in contravention of labor law). On the advice of their lawyers, the union members have refused to sign contracts that single them out for special status, and have been working to build awareness and support in the local community. These efforts have been rewarded by positive press coverage and support in the community, except for the other faculty of their own university.
At the end of last September, all six special-status teachers were told their contracts would not be renewed. Recently, the two remaining teachers, both family breadwinners, were told to vacate not only their university offices but also their homes (for which the university had served as guarantor). The union has filed for an injunction to halt the firing and eviction process until differences can be settled through negotiation.
Kirk stressed that the situation at his university is not unique (except that the union is suing the prefectural university) and that all workers should be union members and aware of the law that governs their situations.
He discussed at some length the negative impact of discriminatory employment practices on students and the wider community. In his own case, for example, the university's overhauling of the curriculum to eliminate the need for foreign teachers resulted in fewer classes of much larger enrollments.
While he appreciates the community support the union has received, he is sometimestaken aback by those people who say, "When in Rome, do as the Romans," since working within the Japanese system of unions and labor laws is "doing as the Romans," to his way of thinking. More encouraging is the remark of one student at a recent rally: "When enough nails finally stand up, no one will be able to hammer them down."
Reported by Margaret Orleans
8 April 2000
Margaret Orleans, Meiji Gakuen
Playing with Language: Consciousness Raising Games for the Classroom
Peg Orleans started us all off for the first term back at school well-armed with that staple of the EFL classroom, games. Most games designed specifically for learning English tend to be "pretty lame" in her opinion; they are more like exercises than games and lack that essential element, fun. Games designed for native speakers may be usefully adapted, however.
Games are important to help students break out of the idea of a one to one correlation between English and Japanese, the mind-set that the object of language learning is simply to discover the exact correspondence between one's native language and the target anguage. New neural links may be formed, new ways to retrieve appropriate vocabulary and make associations between words by playing with them and using them creatively.
Ms. Orleans advises us, even with games that have "right" answers, to try to find those that have an interesting pattern. This can free students to continue the games independently of the instructor, and actually invent new ones - finding new ways to play with language on their own.
To this end she gave us photocopies of several dozen games, along with a practice sheet containing duplicates of some of them, to try out during the presentation. A lively time was enjoyed by all, even "the running sap" who got trapped by the final game of the evening!
Reported by Dave Pite
13 May 2000
Catherine Roach, Fukuoka University
Consciousness Raising in Writing Classes
At our May meeting, Catherine Roach described an experiment she carried out with two classes at Fukuoka University in order to test the effectiveness of consciously applied strategies in improving student writing. She taught both the control and experimental groups, eleven and thirteen in number, using a process approach to genre-based writing, requiring three drafts of each composition. She spent fifteen minutes in each experimental class session drawing students' attention to various strategies they could use in making their writing more reader-targeted; in the control group that time was devoted to student-initiated questions. To insure that both groups spent equal amounts of time writing, she required journals--a free-form journal for the control group and a very structured response about their use of strategies (based on the work of Noonan) for the experimental group.
Unfortunately, though the students had been randomly assigned, the pre-test revealed that the experimental group were already better writers and the post-test showed both groups averaging about the same. Both pre-and post-tests were 50-minute timed writings, the second drafts of different compositions, the first administered in April and the latter in December of the same school year. Students also filled out protocols concerning their use of writing strategies. Regression anaylsis of the protocols and post-tests (scored by multiple raters according to the EFL Writing Profile) showed high correlation for the experimental group.
Roach thinks a great deal of work still needs to be done in identifying strategies in writing, and distinguishing between mental strategies and more active ones. Nearly all of the work in strategies has been done in the area of spoken language. Nevertheless she urges writing teachers to use the circular movement of generating ideas, organizing ideas, writing, reading and editing to help students become more aware of what they are doing in the writing process.
Reported by Margaret Orleans
10 June 2000
Dominic Marini, Fukuoka International University
Don't Ask, Just do it: Teaching debate in the College Classroom
In a brief ninety minutes, Dominic Marini explained how, with the help of student feedback, he transformed a disastrous college debate class into the successful course it is today. Key problems included reluctance to express disagreement, unfamiliarity with the debate process, inability to conduct research, and a habit of inattention to classmates input.
Once he had discerned that students considered debate unpleasant and trivial, Marini began to explain clearly the difference between having an argument and making an argument. As students came to appreciate the discovery and articulation of their own opinions on various topics and realized that not all students held the same opinions, interest in the debate process grew. Though he had been a college debater himself, Marini had never analyzed the thought processes involved in creating and responding to arguments. He highly recommends the conversation-based "An Introduction to Reasoning" by Stephen Toulmin (1984), now out of print but available through the university interlibrary loan system for helping students grasp formal logic, and has further reduced the six main parts of an argument outlined there to asking about every claim, How do I know that is true? and Why is that important?
Because of the shortcomings of Japanese university libraries and webpages, Marini suggests choosing debate topics that touch students lives directly and have some sort of local angle to facilitate research. Having the two teams negotiate the definitions of key terms in the propositions, which are reported to the audience at the beginning of each debate, and giving every student a role to play in each debate (debater, emcee, timekeeper, note-taking judge) resulted in greater attentiveness during the debates themselves.
Marini also outlined a series of pre-debate exercises designed to expose students to increasing levels of confrontation while leading students to continually articulate and refine their ideas and arguments and to anticipate those of their opponents. He stressed the need for constant anonymous student feedback and introduced three of his students, who responded to questions from the participants of his workshop-like presentation.
Reported by Margaret Orleans
8 July 2000
Malcolm Swanson, Dennis Woolbright, Miki Niiyama, Fumiko Yamazaki, and Lyuda Fudzikata
Polishing Your Presentation
July's meeting was a two-parter, with whoever was interested in polishing their presentation skills meeting for two hours in the afternoon at a local college. Participants brought along the results of their research or other materials and worked one-on-one with Malcolm Swanson in putting together a power-point presentation of their outlines and graphics while others rehearsed and practiced their introductions with Dennis Woolbright. Then at the regular evening session the general membership was treated to a taste of their newly acquired skills as they presented a twenty-minute portion of their material.
Miki Niiyama, of Baiko Women's Junior College, reported on a small-scale study she did of peer feedback in EFL writing. Students presented anonymous feedback to their peers on first and second drafts of paragraphs according to the style used by the teacher. Staudents reacted quite favorably and seemed to feel that the biggest benefit was help in realizing when their ideas were not clearly enough presented.
Fumiko Yamazaki, of Meiji Gakuen, is the chapter's sponsored speaker for his year's national conference. She gave us a preview of her presentation on language proficiency tests and real-world tasks, focusing on the appropriateness of tests required of non-native speakers of English matriculating in a graduate EFL program. She concluded that the tests by themselves cannot identify the academic research and writing skills using a very specific jargon required in such coursework.
Finally, Lyuda Fudzikata, a graduate of the Moscow University School of Cinematography who teaches English privately, shared how she became a fluent speaker through the study of movies and TV and how she teaches her students to do the same. Because one must watch the same video a dozen times, she recommends the use of light-hearted comedies and love stories with a lot of everyday conversation. She also illustrated the technique by which Larry King manages to make most of his interviewees look like liars through a skillful use of NLP findings.
Reported by Margaret Orleans
