Speak up / Why chatting is part of learning
Marshall R. Childs, in his column of Dec. 15, pointed out the importance of offering Japanese students as many opportunities as possible to interact socially with English speakers to accomplish real-life goals, and not restricting them to speaking perfect English. He asserts that their struggle to communicate in English even though their English abilities may be limited will help Japanese students to develop a strong motivation for studying English in Japan's EFL (English as a foreign language) environment.
Similarly, many theorists/researchers have pointed out from different perspectives the significance of learners' social interaction with others in improving their English or any other target language (TL) skills.
For example, psychologist Lev Vygotsky, in his theory of learning through social interaction ("Mind in Society"--1978), which has been adopted in the field of language acquisition, states that people learn language through social interaction with skilled partners who can assist them in ways categorized as scaffolding, training, and modeling. Linguist Michael Long states in his interaction hypothesis published in 1983 that interactions with others help language learners internalize a lot of language inputs indispensable for improving their TL skills.
I agree with Childs, and believe that Japanese learners of English should have many chances to interact socially with both nonnative and native English speakers, inside and outside classrooms to make themselves realize that the foreign language they are studying works as a medium of meaningful communication in their real lives and that it could connect them to new cultures and information resources in and outside of their native country.
Through such experiences, Japanese students would be able to see that English is not just a school subject, but a means of connecting to a larger world.
However, in many cases, it is very difficult for Japanese students living in Japan to have contact with English speakers. I suggest that English teachers should take a major role in solving this issue.
Having taught English for five years at Meisei University in western Tokyo, I have striven to create such opportunities for my students. For example, along with colleague Prof. Hiromasa Tanaka, I arranged school trips to Malta and the United States for students in 2004 and 2005, and offered them an activity called "the fieldwork game," in which students in groups competed with others to collect information about the countries' customs and cultures through observation and social interaction with local people.
Similar attempts were also made in Japan. Firstly, I offered my students an "interview activity" in which they elicited information on culture shock experiences from foreign faculty and staff through unstructured or conversational interviews. The students received permission to interview, developed a list of interview questions, and interviewed five foreign professors all in English outside the classroom. They transcribed and analyzed the collected data by categorizing them according to content, and finally presented the results using PowerPoint.
Secondly, Prof. Tanaka and I have offered since 2002 an English teacher training program titled "the Meisei summer school project" as part of the teaching certificate curriculum, in which students in teams manage English classes for primary, middle and high school students on campus.
As a new challenge, we started from 2005 to invite approximately 10 international volunteers from South Korea, China, Hungary, France, Germany and England to the project. Since then, the student participants have had many chances to interact socially with the English speakers in real-life settings including the preparation of lesson plans and teaching materials, excursions, eating lunch and cooking dinner.
As Childs pointed out, when students were given such opportunities, they were eager to communicate in English. I observed many students who had been hesitant to speak English actively ask questions in the language to local people during the fieldwork game. In the interviews, all the student teams had additional conversations with the foreign professors on topics not directly related to their interview questions. In MSSP, I frequently observed that the university students were striving to develop good relationships with the international volunteers through English conversations.
Of course, in all of the cases, the English they used in social interaction was not perfect. They frequently made mistakes of grammar and pronunciation, and sometimes had trouble in communicating their messages. However, I found in my research that such struggles helped them look back at their current English abilities and also motivated them to be involved in social interactions in English thereafter.
I hope this column will contribute to increasing Japanese students' chances of experiencing the excitement and pleasure of meaningfully communicating in English.
Fukada, EdD, is an associate professor at Meisei University, Tokyo. His specialties are English pedagogy and sociolinguistics.