The Language Teacher
04 - 2003
Observations on Observing Secondary School English Classes
Torkil Christensen
Hokusei University Junior College
As part of my work I am occasionally entrusted with the job of observing and lending gravitas to the lessons that aspiring teachers teach as the culmination of their practicum at junior or senior high schools. It has been a few years since I last participated in these observations and the lessons I observed this past year rather surprised me. Afterward I asked around, talking to classroom teachers and similarly positioned supervisory teaching staff, and found that my observations may be the norm rather than an exception.
What I had expected, with the newly established Ministry guidelines, was more communicative, practical English teaching than what we were treated to in former years. What I did see, and what my various inquiries have shown to be commonly perceived to be happening, was a near total lack of language teaching/instruction in classes nominally labeled English.
The subject matter-related activities in class were centered on explanations of grammar points, a desultory stab at "drilling" these, and then games where the English content was minimal and/or incidental.
(It must be noted here that the schools I was observing had a number of points working in their favor: fewer than 15 students per class, a native-speaker Assistant English Teacher, a fluent English-speaking Japanese Teacher of English, highly motivated students, and teacher trainees who were ready to spend as much time and effort as it took to prepare lessons.)
My observations left me with the impression that the Ministry guidelines had been accepted only as the remote ideal that need be considered for teaching, and that whatever meat was put on those bones was incidental and needed not be organized in any particular manner. Material could be introduced without much thought of a progression or concerns for repeating or reinforcing.
The language of the classroom was Japanese, and prior to the class there were friendly interactions between teacher and students. At the sound of the bell these were discontinued and a fully teacher centered class, with all initiative held by the teacher, was started.
To me the students seemed frustrated, well aware of not doing meaningful work with meaningful material. When material appeared, it seemed to emerge "out of the blue", and responses of "I don't know" were met with copious explanations in Japanese to jolly the lesson along. We observers were of course provided with detailed plans for the lessons, minute to minute, and the plans were followed closely.
The students at my college, who may be products of the treatment I observed, have not become noticeably better or worse in these recent years, and the awkward and unproductive strategies and expectations they hold for what English study and learning is do not seem to have changed either. This of course points to a learning experience of the kind that I observed, and have heard described by others. So maybe there has not been much change and maybe there is still no serious attempt at teaching communicative English at schools in Japan.
We used to hear much about how schools taught the way they did to make students pass entrance examinations, but today we would expect that to be much less of a problem. I had thought that with the recent changes in the Ministry guidelines, the teaching profession could not wiggle out of getting serious about the job, but I seem to have been shown to be wrong again.
My query now is whether or not my experience was typical just in my neighborhood. I would like to hear the experiences of others who may agree or disagree with these impressions. Then it would be possible to think about what could be done. Somehow, just having these ideas without airing them does not seem right. I can be reached at abtorkil@ma7.seikyou.ne.jp.
It must be possible to provide guidelines so that meaningful language learning becomes possible. However, it would be fair to say that the new guidelines provide very little content to work with, and without clear guidelines for what content to teach, teaching anything could be an unnerving activity for teachers. We hear much talk about the new century, but as for language learning in Japanese schools at least, we seem left with much of what we had in the last century.
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