The Language Teacher
September 2002
Real English Real Early: A Partial Immersion Program from Elementary School
Rebecca Keogh
Toyoyama Junior High School, Aichi
This year the Japanese Ministry of Education implemented the period of integrated study from Grade 3 at elementary schools. Schools may choose English as a Foreign Language (EFL) as an educational activity. To this end the Ministry plans to create a strong English curriculum that is supported by a progressive teacher-training program and effective use of Assistant English Teachers (AETs) from Grade 3 onwards. The goal is to "expose elementary school children to foreign language and let them learn about the culture and the lives of the people that speak the language" (Nakata, 2001). The goal in itself is not a dramatic departure from what is already being experienced at any number of elementary schools. Once a week/month/year an AET/JET is wheeled into the elementary classroom to sing songs, drill flash cards, answer potentially embarrassing questions, and of course play bingo. The children deserve a higher meta-cognitive experience. I proposed a different goal to my local elementary schools and translated it into the nuts and bolts of an average school day. Administrators, teachers and parents in the local area were invited to look at the proposal and respond. This paper will outline the various stages of the program and discuss the implications of issues raised by teachers, administrators and parents.
Type of Program Proposed
The proposed program is loosely based on the "staircase model" developed by Michael Berthold for partial immersion programs in Australia. It has been used to teach French, German, Indonesian and Japanese from K3 to senior in Australia. The concept of the staircase model is that students with no prior knowledge of the target language are gradually introduced to it through a progression of stages from basic language awareness to eventually being taught some content in the target language. Content refers to other curriculum areas such as math and physical education. It is a gradual, flexible program that can be tailored to the needs of individual schools. The program I proposed to my local schools begins in Grade 1 with language awareness and steadily progresses to a mixture of partial immersion and enriched language arts. The educational goal is simple but succinct. To produce individuals with well developed communicative and social sensitivity.
Stage One: Language Awareness Program (Grades 1 and 2)
The learners will be exposed to English for 15 minutes a day, preferably in morning homeroom class. These sessions will be activity-based with children participating in such activities as singing songs, learning simple chants, playing games and physically responding to simple commands. The fun activities will encourage and interest the children, develop a positive attitude to speaking other languages and learning about foreign cultures and help begin the process of language acquisition. The language outcome of this stage will be almost exclusively oral/aural based. Learners will be able to physically respond to classroom commands and orally produce and aurally recognize simple vocabulary like numbers, colors, animals, vehicles and body parts. Alphabet and simple word recognition could be introduced in the second grade.
Discussion
The overall feedback from administrators, teachers and parents was very positive concerning all elements of Stage One of the program. Ten of the 18 elementary teachers surveyed felt capable of teaching this stage but expressed that a part-time AET at the school would be welcome.
Two of the five parents surveyed expressed concern about their child's developing L1 ability. This issue always seems to be raised whenever an early immersion program is proposed. Parents need to be reassured that children develop language awareness and the ability to differentiate between languages, to some extent, by increasing their knowledge of both languages. Moreover, 15 minutes a day of English time should not impair a child's developing L1 linguistic ability as they use their L1 at all other times.
Stage Two: Language Learning Program (Grades 3 and 4)
The learners will be exposed to 25 minutes of English language learning a day, preferably 15 minutes in the morning and 10 minutes after lunch. They will be enlarging their repertoire of activities and exercises to move to the stage of language learning. Homeroom time can be used to review/introduce vocabulary or dialogue chants and after lunch the students can run their own activities where they use the target language. A morning session, for example, may involve learning/revising some body parts. The lunch session could then involve student leaders giving directions for the game Simon Says. Oral and aural skills will still be the basis of communication but literacy in the L2 will be very gradually encouraged. Stage One activities will be encouraged but teaching strategies will widen and intensify. Whereas in Stage One the teacher may have labeled some simple classroom objects in English, in Stage Two there will be a proliferation of labels around the classroom and an introduction to reading strategies. Members of the local community who speak English could be invited to the school to serve as good role models to the children. In addition, members of the foreign community could visit the school and enrich the students' awareness of different cultures and different types of English.
Discussion
In the initial proposal many teachers and administrators felt it would be difficult to find 25 minutes everyday to teach English. Therefore the time was split into the morning and after-lunch session. At these schools students run their own class activities for 10 to 15 minutes directly after lunch. In Grades 3 and 4 it is typically whole class games like Jun Ken Po or Drop the Hanky.
About half of all people surveyed queried the practicality of introducing literacy skills at this early age considering the simultaneous challenge of learning kanji, katakana and hiragana. However, if the literacy skill is kept to simple recognition strategies that develop naturally through repeated exposure to the target language it should not be a burden to the learners. If the activity is not enjoyable it must be stopped because the most important element of this stage is to continue to develop a positive attitude towards learning English.
Only five of the 18 elementary teachers surveyed felt capable of teaching Stage Two and therefore there was a strong call for a full-time AET. At this stage of the program the AET's role would be to help make resources and introduce new games and activities. However, by far the most important role of the AET is to give the teachers the confidence to teach at this level independently. The classroom teacher is the long-term resource of the elementary school and the person who will most likely determine the success or failure of the program.
Stage Three: Partial Language Immersion Program (Grades 5 and 6)
Learners will be exposed to 45 minutes of English language learning everyday. Three 45-minute sessions will be immersion classes. For these sessions the students will be taught an easily demonstrated subject such as art, physical education or cooking through the medium of English. One 45-minute session will focus on the language forms needed to understand the immersion class. The remaining 45-minute session will develop communicative strategies through role-plays, radio/video broadcasts and quizzes. Minato Elementary School in Fukui and Honden Elementary School in Gifu set aside half an hour in the morning for an interactive English video or radio broadcast. The broadcast is prepared and led by the upper grades but every grade in the school participates from their classrooms. Preparation for such broadcasts could be done in the class focusing on communication strategies.
The most important element of Stage Three is that the immersion lessons are delivered entirely in English by the classroom teacher and the AET. The students and classroom teachers are then forced to develop their aural and oral communicative skills out of real necessity. English literacy will increasingly be more developed but the main focus will be on oral and aural communicative skills.
Discussion
The pilot study illuminated two challenging areas for Stage Three. The majority of teachers and administrators felt it would be impossible to have so many lessons devoted to English language learning a week. I have since clarified the structure of Stage Three to leave no doubt that there are actually only two English language learning sessions a week. Even so, one 45-minute session to develop communication strategies may have to suffice. The content-specific language needed for the immersion class can be acquired through necessity during, for example, the cooking or art class.
The other main area of concern was finding teachers willing and able to teach at Stage Three of the program. Only three of the 18 elementary school teachers surveyed felt capable of teaching at this level. This is not surprising. Berthold states that the prerequisites of a good immersion teacher are native to near native language skills, qualifications to teach specialist subject areas (only relevant to junior high school and high school), ESL teaching skills and commitment to and knowledge of immersion teaching (Berthold, 1995), not to mention the time to make extra resources to aid comprehension in a foreign language.
It is in Stage Three that an AET (preferably full-time) can be used most effectively. The classroom teacher and the AET must combine their knowledge to deliver an effective lesson. It will not be a walk in the park. It will be a steep learning curve for the first year, strewn with misunderstandings and frustrations, but if a route is made to the top the vista will be ample reward. To exemplify, Grade 5 could do Art in English and Grade 6 could do Math in English for the whole year. Imagine the empowering effect that successfully teaching a subject in English will give to those classroom teachers. Imagine the great role model the students are seeing when their teacher struggles and succeeds in communicating with the AET.
Another point to consider is that from the outset of this program an elementary school will have five years to get ready for Stage Three. After the first two stages of the program the teachers' English skills should have improved and hopefully there will be a positive attitude towards tackling Stage Three.
Stage Four: Language Arts and Culture (Junior High School Grades 1, 2, 3)
The program at junior high school will be enriched language arts and culture. Beginning this year, English is taught four times a week in Grades 1,2, and 3. One of these classes is scheduled for a team teaching class although officially it is called sougo gakushu (period of integrated study). First year students may also take an English, Math, Science, Japanese, or Social Studies elective. In the second year the pattern is repeated but they can take another elective from the Music, Art, Physical Education, or Home Economics stream. In the third year students can take two different electives from both streams. In my area the three local elementary schools feed into the one junior high school. The English program at the junior high school will have to cater to the influx of students with enriched language skills. Such a program could involve developing communicative and cultural sensitivity through, for example, sophisticated role-plays, radio plays, DJ broadcasts involving interviews, street surveys, quizzes, and intra- and inter-school email exchanges. The English elective class could be led by the AET and involve cultural activities like cooking, dance, sport taught through the medium of English and computer-based activities to allow individual progression.
Discussion
Stage Four of the original staircase model proposed by Michael Berthold aims at 50% of the school program being taught through the target language. However, the aim of this program is to develop individuals with a high sense of communicative and social sensitivity, not bilinguals. By the end of junior high school, students will have developed oral, aural, reading, and writing communication skills that allow them to function comfortably in English exchanges. These social linguistic aims and the predicted unavailability of suitable immersion teachers largely influenced the design of this stage of the program.
Two administrators from the junior high school, a member of the local Board of Education and the three junior high school Japanese teachers of English were all in favor of the AET leading English elective classes involving cultural and computer-based activities. However, the junior high school English teachers were all opposed to the curriculum ideas for the regular English classes. This is not surprising because it is a dramatic change from their familiar textbook and lesson plans that encourage rote learning and the passing of benchmarks set by the Ministry. However, these benchmarks are changing. This year, for example, junior high school teachers will have to evaluate their students' speaking proficiency. In another example, the junior high school English textbook Horizons has been purged of its long reading comprehension articles in favor of short dialogues. Like it or not, the future of English language teaching in Japanese public schools will be based more on oral and aural communicative skills than on reading and writing skills.
In Australia there are elementary LOTE teacher-training programs through immersion at some universities. It might be feasible for secondary Japanese LOTE immersion programs to also have an in-country practicum, whereby an Australian LOTE trainee spends time in a Japanese secondary school, with a teacher who specializes in the same content area.
Conclusion
This program was designed to fit the current educational infrastructure in my local area. Three elementary schools that feed into one junior high school had committed to early English education, allowing a program design with a sense of continuity. I respect that not all schools are in this fortunate situation and that the program proposed may be an administrative nightmare. However, it's worth considering the main points raised by this proposal and pilot study to reflect on possible educational innovations that the period of integrated studies may allow.
In Stage One some parents were worried that their child's developing L1 ability may be negatively affected by exposure to English. There has already been a number of successful pilot programs at public schools in Japan, where the students have started English education in Grade 1 and are doing very well with no impaired L1 literacy skills. Teachers at these schools enthuse that English activity time enhances the child's ability and receptiveness in other curricular areas (Kawamura, 2000, p. 14). The benefits of starting early are that children are more receptive to language and new ideas and that such a program is more likely to attract a wider range of ability levels and thus a greater number of proficient speakers (Berthold, 1995, p. 25).
In Stage Two the main point to consider is the role of the AET. The AET is there to encourage the classroom teacher to use English inside and outside of the classroom so that one day he or she will feel comfortable in leading English activity time. It is the classroom teacher, not the AET, who will have the more lasting impression upon the students.
Stage Three is the most challenging yet by far the most rewarding and exciting stage of the program. A good working relationship between the AET and the classroom teacher is crucial and both teachers will need support in terms of team teaching training and guidelines. There is room for great personal and professional development at this stage of the program. The children are also receiving two very positive educational experiences. Firstly they see their teacher as a role model of someone struggling and succeeding in communicating in a foreign language. Secondly the bilingual education experience has the potential to improve their meta-cognitive development (Cummins and Swain, 1986, p. 18).
Stage Four is the most flexible because it depends on the level of success of the elementary school program. If the elementary school program is successful the students entering junior high school will need an enriched language arts program. The possibility of continuing immersion style teaching is quite slim due to the difficulty of finding suitable teachers.
The period of integrated studies is a chance to explore unique education initiatives. By pursuing an English language program that involves partial immersion, the students will more likely develop social and communicative sensitivity. The linguistic aim of this program is to produce individuals who can communicate comfortably in English, not bilinguals. However, the following quote from Arnberg is still applicable:
...bilingual children, as a result of their own communicative experiences, may be more able than monolingual to assume the roles of others experiencing communication difficulties to perceive their needs and to respond to these needs…the experience of bilingualism and biculturalism [has] resulted in children showing an early concern about others and a positive reaction to people of other cultures. (Arnberg, 1997, in Berthold, 2000, p.16)
References
Berthold, M. (1995). Rising to the bilingual challenge. Canberra: National Languages and Literacy Institute of Australia.
Berthold, M. (1993). The staircase model: Language awareness to content teaching. Proceedings of the First Biennial Conference, Australian Association of Language Immersion Teachers, Newcastle, Australia, 38-46.
Berthold, M. (2000). Unit 33009: Immersion language teaching study book. University of South Queensland, Faculty of Education, Center for Language Learning and Teaching, DEC.
Cummins, J., & Swain, M. (1986). Bilingualism in education. Essex: Longman.
Kawamura, Y. (2000). Shogako no eigokyoiku o kangeaeru [Examination of English education in elementary schools]. Unpublished report for the Kasagai Board of Education.
Nakata, R. (2001, September). Interim report of the Monbusho's committee goals. ELT News. Retrieved October 5, 2001, from http://www.eltnews.com/columns/kidsworld/2-RitsukoNakata.shtml.
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