Jeremy White: Thank you for your time today. Language systems of young learners seem like a challenging area for you to have focused your research on. How did you get there?
Yuko Butler: I got interested in assessment through my initial interest in language teaching and language policies. Assessment should be closely tied with teaching and learning, but they are often discussed separately, and I always think that this is very unfortunate. I have been very interested in language policies as well, and of course, assessment and policies are quite connected. When I started my graduate program in California, I was very interested in language policies around English-learning immigrant children in the US, and that’s how I started my research among children. When I realized that many East Asian countries started introducing English as a foreign language at the primary school level, it was a natural transition for me to look into the policy impacts. There were a lot of issues around the policies, and I felt like I heard echoes: East Asian countries faced the same challenges that I heard about in California. Then coincidentally, I had some opportunities to work with language assessment agencies that were interested in developing assessments for young learners as a consultant or in other capacities. These opportunities helped me a lot to better understand the assessment and its consequences, and I became more and more interested in the assessment issue.
Much of your research is with young learners, so I wonder how you think we can better conduct research with young learners?
That’s a big question, and I sort of touched upon that issue in my second talk at the JALT2021 conference. I wouldn’t say that research with children is uncontroversial, and the idea has been interpreted in so many different ways by researchers. I have been interested in research with children, but at the same time, I’ve been struggling to figure out how best to implement it in my research. What I proposed (in my talk) was that participatory research could be one way to answer that question. Of course, that’s not the only way. Participatory research can grant greater autonomy to students, and students can be more involved in research. In order to grant children greater autonomy in research, we really need to understand what their needs are. In one of my participatory studies, I had three groups of participants, namely students, teachers, and researchers. My view towards research with children is that children do not have to be involved in all phases of the research, such as planning, data collecting, analyses of the data, and so forth, as researchers do. Some people advocate that way (i.e., children should be involved in all phases of research), but I don’t think that’s necessary. In my view, the most critical element of doing research with children is to make sure that children, by participating in a project, can learn something from the project. Children can have their own objectives in the project, which do not have to be the same as the researcher’s objectives. Teacher participants can have their own objectives in the project as well. In my study, I laid out the objectives for all three parties (i.e., children, teachers, and researchers). An advantage of doing it is that it makes it easier for all the parties to participate in the research. I also think it is important to acknowledge that all the participants have their distinctive expertise and to make sure that they can bring their expertise to the project. Thus, in my project, I also laid out the expertise of each group of participants. By doing that, we can respect the participants’ autonomy because they have their own goals to achieve, and they can contribute to the project in their distinct ways as well.
But, I have to confess that I’m still in the process of figuring out how best to conduct research with children in my research. I also acknowledge that, depending on the type of research, research with children may not work well, but everybody can start with having greater reflection on his or her research. Even in experimental studies, the researchers can reflect on their research. They can think, for example, if the instruments and task procedures are appropriate developmentally, if the children have a good time during the activities in the research, if their rights are well-protected, and so forth. I know saying this is much easier than actually doing it though. Annamaria Pinter at Warwick University in the UK is one of the major researchers to talk about ethical issues in doing research among young learners. I’ve learned a lot from her research by collaborating with her. We’re working on a book project now, and in that book project, we are asking leading scholars of child language development and pedagogy to describe how they conceptualize the “child-centered approach” in their research. We are asking them to write reflection papers on their own research experience and how they have incorporated (or not incorporated) the “child-centeredness” in their research. We anticipate that the experts may conceptualize it very differently, which itself would be interesting to know.
Your research takes place in many countries, including the U.S., Japan, and China as well. Can you explain a little bit how assessment differs in these countries, and do you think any of the countries you know have got it right, and have the magic bullet there?
Well, unfortunately, there’s no magic bullet. I think all the countries that I have worked with are still struggling with how to assess young learners. I think one of the challenges is that the teachers themselves tend to have a set notion about what assessment should look like, and their practice tends to be very constrained by that idea. A lot of teachers still have a very traditional way of looking at assessment; this is probably because that was what they experienced as a student. When English was introduced at the primary school level in East Asia, the teachers couldn’t get away from the old notion of assessment. Importantly, assessment is not just measuring students’ achievement. It should be used for assisting their learning primarily. So, the concept of assessment for learning, not just assessment of learning, is quite important. But it takes some time for many teachers to fully understand the notion of assessment for learning. The assessment for learning is not implemented sufficiently or effectively in any of the countries that I have closely worked with. The situation is probably changing a little bit at the individual level, and I am sure that some teachers are already effectively implementing “assessment for learning” in their classes, but by and large, I think you can still see the very old-fashioned assessment practice in many parts of the world. That’s really unfortunate, so I think we need to promote assessment for learning more through professional development for teachers. We can’t simply assume that teachers can implement “assessment for learning” easily if they haven’t experienced it themselves as a student, so, the teachers definitely need professional development.
What I found recently is that children, especially when they get to the upper-grade levels at primary school, already have a very sophisticated understanding of how assessment works; namely, they already have a good degree of language assessment literacy. Researchers have not discussed the importance of learners’ assessment literacy much at all in the literature, but I strongly believe that learners, as well as teachers and test developers, should have good language assessment literacy. If you ask children what language assessment should capture, how it should be developed and administered, what the consequences of assessment are, and what is fair (or not fair) in the assessment practice, you will find out how much they already know about language assessment and how much their view can be incorporated to improve our current assessment practices. It is unfortunate that we have not yet paid sufficient attention to children’s knowledge, experience, and feelings about assessment. We need to listen to their voices more seriously because they’re the major stakeholders of the assessment.
Listening to children’s voices also can resonate well with the idea of a child-centered approach. Recently, I conducted a study where I asked children what they thought about the idea of developing assessments together with their teachers. Many of them were very excited about that idea. If we invite children to develop assessments, they will be able to provide us with lots of interesting ideas concerning what kind of assessments they want to take and why. It’s fascinating to ask them and let them be involved in the process of developing assessments. That’s something that I’m interested in promoting at this point. But to answer your question, if you look at the assessment practice in many countries, there’s no magic bullet at this point as far as I can see.
How do you think Japan is doing with English language assessment? They have only just, in the last ten years, really brought English into elementary schools. They have Eiken tests, Junior Eiken, and some assessments like that. How do you think it’s going in Japan?
The Japanese case is very difficult to discuss because it’s been only one year since English was introduced at primary school as an academic subject. Before English became an academic subject, it was really up to individual teachers or schools to conduct any kind of assessment. The difficulty was that, as I mentioned already, the assessment should be closely tied with teaching and learning. So, if the teaching objectives are not clearly defined, it is difficult to implement proper assessments, and that was the case in Japan for quite some time. Now since English has become an academic subject, teachers are required to do some sort of assessment. In my view, teachers are still struggling to figure out how to assess the children in their English classes. The assessment criteria specified by MEXT at the primary school level are not specifically designed for English per se; they are meant for all academic subjects. Thus, some teachers may find it difficult to use them in their English classes. Moreover, constructs of assessment in English are not clearly defined in my view. For example, one of the challenging criteria is learning attitude, but how do you assess children’s attitudes? I don’t think that we have a very good consensus on how to evaluate children’s attitudes toward learning English. More critically, we need to better understand how to conduct an assessment for learning, as I mentioned already. I think that, in many cases, children don’t get sufficient and appropriate feedback in English to improve their learning. I think that the current assessment practice does not deal with individual differences in language learning very well either. Some students are fond of producing English (i.e., speaking English), but others are not. I think receiving sufficient input (listening) is generally more important than making production (speaking) at the primary school level, especially when you have English only for a couple of hours per week. How do you expect them to produce a lot of English? Children take different strategies, and the rate of learning is different as well, but we don’t know how best to accommodate such individual differences among children in our assessment practice.
I think that’s a point, one hour a week, basically 35 hours in a year. What can you get out of that?
Exactly. Some researchers suggest we need to pay more attention to input-based tasks, and I completely agree with that. So, an assessment should also include the idea of input-based task assessment. Of course, if some students want to say a lot of things in English, that’s fine, but I’m not quite sure everybody should be expected to speak up uniformly.
I’m sure you’ve heard of Prensky (2001) talking about digital natives, but I noticed in your second talk you used the term digital generation. Is there any reason for that?
Actually, I talked about the reason in my first presentation. The reason why I used “digital generation” in my talk is that “digital natives” has been a controversial term. In applied linguistics, people try to avoid using the term “natives.” I know that “digital natives” is a popular term among the general public, but language teaching educators prefer not to use the term. First, there has been criticism towards the notion of native speakers and its uncontested assumption that native speakers should be the goal of language learning. The “natives” in the “digital natives” implies that “digital natives” are superior to “digital non-natives.” Indeed, Prensky addressed that non-digital natives have “an accent” in that their use of digital technology deviated from the natives’ use. This way of characterizing digital natives versus non-digital natives has been questioned, and thus I did not use the term “digital natives” in my talk. I looked for a good alternative term. There are many terms, but none of them were appealing to me. Many terms also come and go quickly, so, I decided to use “digital generation.” I know it’s very generic, but at least it is less controversial.
Do you think there’s a digital divide between private (fee-paying) and public (free) education due to the COVID pandemic? If so, how do you think we could address this?
Yes, I definitely agree with that. I think that, during the pandemic, the disparities between those who could access online education or any other digital-based learning and those who couldn’t became much wider. How much wider, that I don’t know. There have been heated discussions about the gaps in access to technology-based learning opportunities everywhere, not just in Japan. This is also a serious concern here in the U.S. as well. Yesterday, on the radio, I heard U.S. educators discussing many challenges that children face if they do not have sufficient access to digital technology at home and at school, and how that would impact their long-term education and career goals. One of the educators said that we would probably need to wait for five to ten years, or even longer, to see the real impact. We may see if there are any differences in terms of college admissions or getting jobs among children according to their accessibility to digital technology. What kinds of job-related preparation did the children have or miss out on during the pandemic? At this point, I don’t think people have a very clear idea of how much impact the pandemic had on children’s education, but it’s probably fair to say that there will be a huge gap according to children’s socioeconomic status. I mean, we probably created a big gap between students in the public school systems and students who had greater access to systematic and higher-quality digital-based learning during the pandemic. When it comes to Japan, public schools did so little during the pandemic (during the academic year of 2020-2021). According to an OECD report, other developed countries, by and large, tried to make more effort than Japan to provide their children with systematic digital-based learning during the pandemic. In Japan, systematic online education, with few exceptions, was not offered to public school children. Of course, there were some individual teachers who implemented digital technology in their lessons, but the majority of the teachers were not sufficiently trained to use digital technology in class at that time.
Could you please outline the communicative competencies that you believe are needed for the digital generation?
Yes, I discussed my (tentative) conceptualization of communicative competence in the talk. I expanded on the notion of traditional language communicative competence, such as Canale and Swain’s (1980). My notion includes multimodal abilities, not just limited to linguistic abilities. First, it contains basic linguistic knowledge, including knowledge of phonology, semantics, vocabulary, grammar, pragmatics, and so forth. That knowledge-based competence has been strongly emphasized in the traditional school system. This competence remains important, but I believe that’s not good enough. Even if you have good knowledge of the language, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you use the knowledge. We need to have abilities to use the language. Then I emphasize three abilities to use language in the era of digital technology. One is the ability to use language autonomously, the second is the ability to use language socially, and the third one is the ability to use language creatively. The ability to use language autonomously refers to the ability to manage and control your own language use. It includes not only language processing but also cognitive and metacognitive processing as well. There is so much information on the Internet nowadays; therefore, you need to be good at selecting information that is useful for you. There’s no way that you can access everything, and you don’t need to. Among the massive amount of information available on the Internet, you have to select the information that is important for you and also true, not fake, information. You need to be selective and strategic. You need to understand the intention of the writers, and you must quickly process multimodal information. You have to be proactive as well. You need to be autonomous, otherwise you’re going to be consumed by the Internet, and you’re going to be used by digital technology.
The second ability is to use language socially. We should not forget that we use language for social purposes. We use language in social spaces and social interactions. In essence, the ability to use language socially means the ability to use language for effectively building social networks both in the virtual and physical worlds. In my talk, I mentioned a recent study that examined more than 140,000 job advertisements in the U.S. The researchers tried to understand what kinds of abilities the companies or labor markets were looking for. They found a clear difference in trends between the past and present advertisements. Currently, the number-one quality that companies value is oral communication ability, the second quality is written communication ability, and the third one is collaborative skills. In other words, companies are looking for people who have high oral and written communication skills and can collaborate with others to get the job done. Whereas in the previous generation, the important qualifications included self-organization skills, professionalism, leadership skills, and so forth. You can say that they are primarily individual-based qualifications. You can see that desired qualifications have changed in the last 20 years or so. As this example shows, in the 21st century, you need to be able to use language in social contexts and in collaboration with others. “Others” may include non-humans as well as humans. You increasingly need to communicate with AI or use multiple avatars. AI may not be as accommodating as human speakers. They may say something like “I don’t understand you.” Humans would not say something like that because it is considered rude, but AI may say it. Instead of being upset about the AI, you need to be flexible in communicating with AI or any other “others.”
The last competence is the ability to use language creatively. To be able to use multimodal communication tools effectively, you must be creative in your communication. Creativity means rebuilding or reorganizing the existing knowledge or applying the existing knowledge to a new context. In order to be able to use language creatively, you need to have good foundational knowledge. Without having the foundational knowledge, you can’t be creative. This is an important point. This is my proposal for the communicative competencies for the era of digital technology. Learning about vocabulary, grammar, syntax, and so forth—acquiring basic knowledge—is still important, but we have to take a step further and think about how to use language effectively in multimodal contexts through digital technology.
You had children designing computer games for English education. What did the children think was effective and attractive in a game?
I asked children why playing games was so fun; namely, what the “motivation elements” were in games. I assumed that children had a good idea of what motivated them to play games. For example, many games have “staging” functions: Once you master a stage, you can move up to the next stage. That would motivate players. Time limitations may stimulate the players’ motivation as well. I was also interested in understanding how children thought about facilitating their own language learning; in other words, “learning elements” in their view. Many games give players instant feedback, and that would help them learn various strategies to win the game, for example. So, I asked children to identify what the motivation and learning elements were through playing some existing instructional games and discussing them in small groups. Once they identified motivation and learning elements, I then asked each group to design a game for English vocabulary learning while incorporating both the motivation and learning elements. As expected, children came up with a number of motivation and learning elements and used them to design the games. One thing that stood out was that children strongly want to control their own learning. For example, they want to choose their own difficulty level. They want to control the time to learn and decide what kinds of words to learn. Having a choice like that, or controlling their own learning, seemed to be very important for them. Another element that children valued a lot was learning in context, particularly learning vocabulary in stories. They are not interested in learning vocabulary in a decontextualized fashion, such as using flash cards. Children often indicate that they like to learn words in stories because they can learn words much more easily in stories. For them, understanding stories is primary; they learn words because they want to understand stories but not the other way around.
But don’t we preselect words for children to learn first and then give them some texts or stories to make sure that they learned the words?
When it comes to the learning elements, children valued “repetition.” Children even had fun with repetition, but importantly, repetition can be fun and enjoyable only if they don’t repeat the same things. They want to have control over their repetitive activities: They want to decide what to repeat, when to repeat it, and how to repeat it. They don’t like to be told “repeat after me” by their teachers. Having control over their own learning is important. This element seemed to be the key for the children in my study.
Interestingly, competition was not part of the important motivation elements for children, which I thought was very interesting because a lot of games have competitive elements. But, some children in my project clearly articulated that when it came to English learning, competition would not be necessary. I also worked with Chinese children, and they valued competition very much, so there may be some cultural differences. In any event, the Japanese children in my project did not think that having competition is necessary to motivate them. Another element that we anticipated to be important, but the Japanese children did not mention, was an interactive element, but this may be something to do with our project design. In the project, we let the children play some existing instructional games to identify motivation and learning elements. The instructional games that they played didn’t have social interactive components reflecting reality; many existing instructional games in Japan do not make much use of social elements. So, this could have influenced the results of this study. But, in the end, we found that collaboration appeared to be important for the children anyway. After we created a game based on the children’s game designs and brought it back to the children for their opinion, they told us that we should have incorporated interactive functions in the game to be more effective. So, they believed that the interactive element would be important for game designs, but they didn’t include it when they designed the games.
Did any of these games get beyond the design stage?
Yes. We told the children that we were going to make a real game based on their game designs, so they needed to identify the best design. They took our word very seriously and evaluated each other’s designs through a peer assessment, but we made a mistake. We, teachers and researchers, couldn’t make a decision on which one was the best design. There were 15 game plans generated by the children altogether. Because for us, all the designs that the children came up with looked great, we took one element from one game design and another element for another game design and so forth, and we ended up doing some patchwork. After we created a game based on “the patchwork” and brought it back to the fifth graders for their review, they kind of liked it. They thought it was fun to learn vocabulary using the game. By the way, the 6th graders were told to design a game for the 5th graders; that was why we asked the 5th graders to review the game first. But later, when we had a chance to ask a selected number of the 6th graders, the original game designers, for their opinion, they didn’t like the game much because, I suspected that, the game that we created was a patchwork: it was not their idea anymore. Unfortunately, in the process of making the actual game, the adults’ perspectives came into play, and the children did not like it. Children are full of ideas, and they’re so creative, absolutely creative. I have to say that this is probably the most enjoyable research project that I’ve ever done in my life. The children constantly impressed me, and it was very exciting to see them being so creative.
Thank you, this was all very helpful. Hopefully, we can see you again face-to-face sometime soon.
References
Butler, Y. G., & Huang, B. H. (Eds.). (2022). Research methods for understanding child second language development. Routledge.
Canale, M. & Swain, M. (1980). Theoretical bases of communicative language teaching and testing. Applied Linguistics, 1(1), 1–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/applin/I.1.1
Prensky, M. (2001). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, Part 1. On The Horizon, 9(5), 1–6.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/10748120110424816
Zein, S., & Butler, Y. G. (Eds.). (2022). English for young learners in Asia: Challenges and directions for teacher education. Routledge.