English is really a miracle tool! We communicated with Koreans, Chinese, Filipinos, and Spanish in English.
--a student at Kobe Kaisei Women's Junior College
As the themes of the JALT international conferences for the past two years ("Crossing Borders" of 1996, and "Trends and Transitions" of 1997) have shown, there has been a notable shift in EFL from focusing on language structure and topics specific to the culture and customs of English speaking countries, to approaches based on interactive skills and content dealing with social, cross-cultural, and global issues (Dyer & Bushell, 1996). In this article, I will explain how I use stories and accounts of authentic personal experiences by women from different cultures in the communication and research seminar course for second-year students at my women's junior college.
Communication is essentially a personal interaction between two people: one has something important to tell, and the other is interested in hearing about it. The main task of instructors for good communication classes is to help students acquire skills both to tell their stories, and to become involved in others' stories by asking relevant questions. Several articles have addressed this task in the "My Share" column of The Language Teacher by describing ways to encourage students to talk about their hobbies or daily activities, use games, or ways to adapt popular TV programs for classroom instruction (Hayes, 1996; Robbie, 1996; Stewart, 1997). The Language Teacher has also published feature articles on the topic of empowering students with skills to ask meaningful and relevant questions to draw out what they want to hear. For example, students interviewed native speakers of English in their communities or their Japanese sempai (seniors) in society at large in preparation for employment after graduation (Shang-Ikeda, 1996; Foley, 1996).
Such skills are indeed essential for students to function well in their careers today when information flows in English between countries on the Internet or through other communication networks. To facilitate this, I wanted to enable my students to encounter more of the world by asking questions of people from other cultures, focusing on women's issues as the major subject for communication. I believe women's issues are effective for generating lively interactions among people of various nationalities, including young Japanese college women, because they touch the lives of half the world's population, transcending cultural, social, or linguistic differences.
Instead of using newspaper or journal articles and simply exposing my students to general problems, such as hunger or poverty, which many women the world over face, I used stories about individual women. This is, in a sense, an approach similar to Anderson's (1996) approach to global issues: "to encourage students to see themselves as players in the world...I began to attempt to nurture the idea that my students' future --not just that of the poor people in other countries--depend on them making the right decision." I took it a step further and gave names to these poor people. They should not simply remain anonymous suffering people, rather each has her own name, like Tambu, Catalina, Sharmila, and Mika. Only when we see an individual with her own name can real communication--personal interaction--take place, and we can become truly involved with her fate and ours.
Using Existing Women's Stories
I normally have about 10 students in my seminar course, which meets for one 100-minute session every week. Most of the stories I use in class are from a booklet titled Action Guide for Girls' Education (1995) which was compiled four years ago by a volunteer group of eight women (including me) of various nationalities to be presented as workshop material at the UN World Conference on Women in Beijing. I also rely on the Web Site of one of the group members, who posts stories of women in world history on her home page (Reese, 1997). In addition, my students enjoy reading Kuraoka's Five American Women (1986), narrative autobiographical accounts by her former high school friends on their families' ethnic heritage and their lives up to the age of 32. A week before we take it up in class, I give students a story in English to read as homework, and supplementary handouts in English or in Japanese, which explain some underlying situations of the society the story comes from. Some UN publications (1991, 1991a), Morgan's anthology (1984) , Agonito's source book on women (1977) and Sorifu's Josei-no-Genjo to Shisaku (1996) are good resources.
In the first ten minutes of the class, I clarify points in the story that the students find difficult, and help them comprehend the main message. Then, after dividing the class into small groups of three or four, I have one student in each group role play the main figure of the story, and retell it as if it were her own story. Those narrative stories are easy for non-English major students like mine to understand and act out. As the contents are also relevant to their interests and concerns at this stage in life, students often identify with the main figure of a story--a woman or a girl--thus making it a personally relevant and interesting activity for them. Once the story has been told, I distribute a prepared card listing possible questions among the audience. Each person chooses and asks one question of the storyteller. I encourage them to make up their own questions as well.
For example, the story "Maize Seeds for Education" (Dangarembga, 1988; see Appendix) is one that I have used successfully. In this story, Tambu, a young African girl, must stop her schooling because there is not enough money to educate both her and her brother. However, Tambu finds a way to grow and sell maize for herself. With the support of her mother and her teacher, she succeeds in raising the money necessary to pay for her own education. In spite of her father's objections, she even goes on to college.
By generating and asking the following questions, students are able to feel connected to Tambu and sympathize with her situation:
- How did you feel when your father said that you couldn't go to school any more? Were you sad or angry?
- Did your mother help you? If she did, what did she do? If not, what could she have done to help you?
- Which is more important for girls: to get an education or to learn how to grow and cook vegetables? Why?
- Why do you think your teacher helped you by taking you to the market?
- What did you do/become after you finished college? Why?
- Could you have acted in a different way?
- What might your life be like if you had not gone beyond the primary grades?
Through these activities, the students learn to ask appropriate and sensible questions in English. To answer these questions, they must look into their own lives and experiences, not rely on the lines of a textbook. Following such an exercise, we often get into a lively discussion. For example, one student pointed out that she had experienced a problem similar to Tambu's, when her parents sent her brother to Tokyo to study but told her that she must stay in Kobe and go to college. With the graphs from a UN publication (1991) I provide as supplementary material for this story, I drew students' attention to the decrease in school enrollment of female students in Africa or South America in the '80s, in contrast to the remarkable increase in the '70s. The students became curious about why such a change had taken place. In the following week, I gave them a section from another UN publication (1991a), which explained the economic crisis of the '80s and the subsequent remedial social structuring directed by international financial institutions in those regions. Through this cycle of reading a story, asking prepared questions, generating their own questions, and doing research to answer them, students come to realize the similarities as well as the diversities of women's problems and issues around the world. Their eyes are opened not only to the fates of both women and men from other cultures, but also to a deeper awareness of the students themselves: to who they are, and to what they can do with their lives in the future. Some of the stories we take up in class deal with the following issues:
- Subtle discriminatory practices are exercised against girls in math and science classes at school in developed nations.
- Some groups of high school students in the US and Europe fought against sexual harassment in their school environments.
- A group of Indian women organized a self-help campaign to get their small enterprise funded by the government.
- Cambodian women must bear hard farming labor today, following the massacre of many men under Pol Pot in the '70s.
- Higher education may lead women to isolation from their own people physically and mentally, and cause conflicts in terms of their expectations of life.
In the last ten minutes, I usually have the students express their opinions in Japanese. This is to encourage lower proficiency students to participate as well. Whenever we get strong, convincing opinions, I help them translate these. This last portion of the class is very important because we are able to alleviate students' frustration caused by a simple lack of English ability. Furthermore, students are eager and attentive to learn how to express their personal opinions and ideas in English.
The Communication Project: Collecting Women's Stories
After I've conducted several of these sessions, I show a video on the UN World Conference on Women in Beijing (NHK, 1995), and remind students that the women they have read about in the stories are real people with diverse backgrounds like those who converged on Beijing. I also add that students may be able to communicate with these women in English, because many delegates to the convention speak English, regardless of their nationalities.
At this point, I encourage students to summon all their English knowledge to create a questionnaire in English about lifestyles expected by young women of their age from other cultures. The questionnaire usually consists of ten questions like these:
- What kind of career do you plan to pursue in the future?
- What level of education do you need for such a career?
- Do you think you'll get married?
- Do you want to have children?
- Will you consider adopting children?
- Will you stop work when you get married and start a family?
- If you stop work when you have a family, when will you go back to work? Or, won't you go back to work any more?
- Do you plan to go back to school for a higher degree or retraining in mid-career?
- Compared with men, do you think that women are disadvantaged in their career paths in your society? If so, what must change?
- Please choose three of the things below that you regard most important in your life:
| Family | Friends | Money | Work/Career | Education | Religion |
| Myself | Peace | Human rights | Freedom | Security | |
| Marriage | Dream | Ability | Fame | Courage | Luck |
| Safety | Others ( ) |
We finish this part of the project before the summer vacation. During the vacation, each student chooses one country and must have at least five women of about their age fill out the questionnaire. Each student must decide which country to choose and how to find respondents. Last year, for example, two students relied on their fathers' business acquaintances in Korea and the Philippines; some contacted penpals in England, host families in Canada, or a former high school friend living in Singapore; one went to a Spanish nun and her former high school teacher who got in touch with her nieces and their friends in Madrid; one faxed her Cantonese teacher on vacation in Hong Kong to look for respondents. By this point in the process, the students had become quite excited about their individual projects, which generated a sense of competition as to the number and variety of responses they would get. Eager to get to know their respondents more personally, students asked for some pictures of the respondents, festivals, scenery, or anything typical of their countries.
When we came back in the fall, we found that not only did all the students have the questionnaires filled out by more than five people (one student received 20 replies), but they had also gathered additional information on some aspects of situations surrounding women in their chosen country. Those who went to Canada during the vacation searched local libraries for statistics on Canadian women in higher education. A Spanish college student majoring in history wrote to explain how General Franco's regime had hindered progress in women's rights in her country. Several respondents from Hong Kong and Singapore said that their problem was less one of sex discrimination but rather of class discrimination. According to a Filipino graduate student, many young women in the Philippines are eager to receive a higher level of education, because women usually require a higher academic degree than men when applying for the same job.
My students had no difficulty reading these letters written by nonnative speakers of English despite grammatical mistakes. Rather, those grammar errors encouraged my students to use their own imperfect but comprehensible English. The responses to the questionnaire may not be representative of the complete range of young women's lifestyles in those countries because the number of the respondents was very small, and the scope of sample choice limited. However, students radiated with affection for their respondents when each told an individual's story based on the results of the questionnaire, proudly showing the pictures of their newly acquired friends, their country's festivities, and scenery.
Conclusion
Reading stories of other women, and creating and administering the questionnaire spurred my students into action. These activities drove them out into the real world and connected them with individuals from other cultures. They communicated with their counterparts and received answers to the questions they were interested in, something that cannot be found in any book. This was not a game played in an English classroom. They successfully conducted a research project in a mature and academic fashion, appropriate for college students. This experience of communication for a specific and personal purpose certainly raised the students' sense of accomplishment and morale, brought home to them the universal nature of English, and enhanced their desire to acquire more communication skills in English.
Lastly, as one student noted in the comments about my seminar course, stories about women from different cultures can be the windows through which we see problems around the world. Through the questionnaire, we also found out that women in all cultures deeply care for their families, friends, and neighbors. Language teachers can instill compassion for others through personal narratives from other cultures. They can indeed provide a compelling motivation to students, both female and male, to strengthen mutual understanding and personal contact as individual citizens in our global society.
References
Action guide for girls' education.. (1995). A Volunteer Group of Eight Women, San Francisco Bay Area Girls' Education Network, San Francisco: Internet Homepage <http://www.well.net/bagen>.
Agonito, R. (1977). History of ideas on women.. New York: Perigee Books.
Anderson, G. G. (1996). Global issues in the university ESL classroom. The Language Teacher, 20 (11), 20-25.
Dangarembga, T. (1988). Nervous conditions. London: The Women's Press.
Dyer, B. & Bushell, B. (1996). World issues or a global perspective? The Language Teacher, 20 (11), 10-16.
Foley, K. S. (1996). Successfully integrating the job search into the English language classroom. The Language Teacher, 20 (6), 14-17.
Hayes, E. L. (1996). Photo collages for show and tell. The Language Teacher, 20 (11), 41.
Kuraoka, B. (1985). Five American women. Kobe: Kobe YWCA.
Morgan, R. (Ed.) (1984). Sisterhood is global: The international women's movement anthology. New York: Double Day.
NHK. (1995). TV Program titled Pekin Josei Kaigi aired in September, '95.
Reese, L. (1997). Story of women in world history on internet homepage [on-line], available: <http:/home.earthlink.net/~women whist/>
Robbie, N. (1996). "Kazuki kosakai" game. The Language Teacher, 20 (11), 43.
Shang-Ikeda, S. (l996). The interview project. The Language Teacher, 20 (7), 34-35.
Sorifu (The Prime Minister's Office. ed.) (1996). Josei-no-genjo to shisaku (Measures for addressing the present conditions of women). Tokyo: Ohkurasho Insatsukyoku (Printing Office of the Ministry of Finance).
Stewart, T. (1997). Your instruction with home movies and photographs. The Language Teacher, 21 (4), 37-38.
The United Nations. (1991). The World's Women 1970-1990: Trends and Statistics. New York: The United Nations Publication.
The United Nations. (1991a). Women: Challenges to the Year 2000. New York: The United Nations Department of Public Information.
Appendix
Adapted from the original text by Dangarembga (1988) Maize Seeds for Education
When Tambu was seven years old, she began primary school, one year after her brother Nhamo. The next year, their family had little money. Their mother boiled eggs and grew vegetables to sell at the bus station. In this way, she was able to raise enough money for Nhamo's fees, but not for Tambu's. Tambu was unhappy because she loved school. Her father insisted that she would learn more important things, like growing and cooking vegetables, by staying home with her mother. Her mother told her that being a woman required many sacrifices and that the earlier she learned to do so, the better.
Tambu thought over her parents' words for several days, then announced to them that she was determined to go to school. She asked her father for maize seeds so that she could grow maize and sell it at the market for her school fees. Her father objected that there was no money. Her mother pointed out that seeds were not money, and that they had some seeds to spare. So Tambu began to rise before dawn to haul water for the family before she went off to plant, weed, and water her maize. When she finished the work in her own plot, she helped her mother in the family garden.
As the maize grew, Nhamo began to steal it from Tambu's field to share with his classmates. When Tambu learned of this, she got very angry and began to fight with him. One of the teachers intervened in the fight. When he learned of the cause, he offered to take Tambu to the nearest large town to get a good price for her maize. This plan made Tambu's father very angry. He did not want to let her go. Her mother said that she should go so that she could learn firsthand about failure and disappointment. Otherwise, she said, Tambu would only be angry at her father for prohibiting her from going.
The teacher and Tambu thus went to town and sold the maize, making enough money to pay Tambu's fees for three years. Again, her father was angry because