Ideas and suggestions for the English Club

The following is a kind of write up that I did before I met with the leadership of the English club, just to get my head together more than anything else and to brainstorm some ideas.

Yeah, the TOEIC... I have a love/hate relationship with that thing. On the one hand, it is important for our students to get some kind of certification for skills that they have worked so long and hard to acquire. The TOEIC test is well regarded in the Japanese and Korean business world, and according to other people's stories, it will become more well regarded at least in the near future.

On the other hand I hate it because lots of time is spent in exercises like we have had in the past, answering some questions from the TOEIC test that are just way over our students' heads. They will never be able to profit as much in two hours from that kind of study as they would with the same time working on materials that matched their levels. If the TOEIC test is supposed to me a measure of a person's ability to communicate in English, then anything we do to help the students improve their language ability should help them with the test.

The membership's English skills are important, and I think we should encourage them to work together with the common goal of raising thier TOEIC test scores AS WELL AS other skills. We should also encourage them to do English outside of the English Club. This time just isn't enough. If they spend a few minutes every day, if they commit themselves to a program of developing their English skills, they will improve greatly in the 4 years that they are here, and some of them can graduate from here with well over a 400 on the TOEIC test.

Therefore, I think we should work on some activities that will help them grow as people and as language learners, but I don't want to and cannot force anyone into anything. Here are some ideas:
1. spend less time on fun, game-like activities, and spend it on working together to improve levels
a. sempai helping kohai to develop along a chosen path
b. language learning strategies, setting up individual goals and strategies
2. create English Club matierials, learning matierials, hints for English learners, books in English on topics such as Yokkaichi, Mie, Yokkaichi University, Gero Onsen, Ise, life in Japan 50 years ago, recipes, travel guides, whatever. Put them on the internet, publish them, sell them for money for the club.

There is a difference in levels among the members. I think that is natural and may be something the members could work out. Put themselves in groups, with the members of the highest level group teaching the lower level people. Teaching is a great way to learn, because they not only have to be able to do it, but tell someone else what they need to do. That would take some of the pressure of you to do all the work.

The club will take a club trip at some point, I would suggest that we come up with some project that they could put together and have a product to show at the end. A play about their lives as students. Art work about how they feel when they think of graduating. A visitors guide in English to the place that they are going, with pictures and interviews of the people that live in the area. Make two or three groups, send them out with notebooks and a digital camera, and have them go to town. Have them put the thing together in English, and then publish it for sale to the town or on the internet. Then I can stay at the hotel and read a book while they are out doing their work.

These suggestions were met with mixed reactions, but on the whole they seemed to be relatively attractive. Now it goes on to the membership.

English Club TOEIC

As the advisor for the English Club at this University, I attend as many of the gatherings as possible. This last gathering was on Monday. The club has various themes. This week's was TOEIC preparation.

I'm not really in favor of TOEIC preparation as a theme. It seems shallow and less effective than other potential activities, but it isn't my club. As a matter of fact, I have a meeting with the club leadership today to express my feelings about this and other issues. I'll write about that later.

The activity, for two hours was this. The group in charge of the activity copied some listening questions on a piece of paper and as we listened to a CD, we tried to answer the questions. At the end of the question, and after people had heard the passage enough times, we analysed the question and what the answers were and were not. I'm not sure how the questions were chosen. My guess is that they were chosen randomly. They were very difficult, with words in them that I was not familiar with, some locations in Washington State, and "dungenss spit." After looking on the internet for a location I finally know what it is. It's on the Puget Sound. For this Hillbilly, the only spit I knew was the kind you do when you're chewing tobacco. And I couldn't figure out why spitting in a dungeon would be a tourist attraction.

At the end of the activity, the students were feeling pretty beat up, and I was feeling like they had just spent 2 hours finding out what they couldn't do. I made three points.

1. The TOEIC is not real communication. As for the listening, in real communication, if you don't understand what the other person is saying, you can ask them to repeat, simplify, or change the words in their statement. There are pictures, maps, gestures and context to rely on. All of them absent in a test.
2. Most of the TOEIC test is above their level. If the average score in the club was 300, and I'm being generous, then there are 690 points above them. Two-thirds of the test is going to be beyond them. They can practice and develop their language ability to reduce that amount, but the test itself is going to be that way.
3. The questions are tricky. In the listening test there is a section where the speaker makes a statement or asks a question. The test takers must choose from three spoken responses which would be the best to respond to the innitial statement. One is the correct response. One is a distractor. One is totally off base. First, the initial statements or questions are totally without context. Second, in real communication no one would respond in the way the test is arranged unless they misunderstood, were intellectually challenged, or unless they were being funny or rude.

Preparing for the TOEIC test is all well and good, but there needs to be more of a systematic approach to it for this Enlgish Club.

JTop court endorses sports festival's ban on foreigners

This is a follow-up to a previous post. An American resident of Japan was prohibited from participating in Japan's National Sports Festival because he was a foreigner, as I blogged sometime last week. He took the issue to court, and up to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court rejected the claim, as I predicted they would.

Hey, I paid 30% of my income in taxes last month, and I bet Douglas Shukert did, too. Something stinks.
Japan Today - News - Top court endorses sports festival's ban on foreigners

Negativity on the Internet

Until just now I had been getting a little down about all the negativity on the Internet. Maybe it's just that I consume too much news. That's pretty negative. I thought about doing a survey to see how much negative stuff is out there. My solution was to search for a on Google. That's pretty random. Here are my results. Not as bad as I thought.

Big Conversation

I teach one "conversation" class, which is probably more closely related to dentistry since it's like pulling teeth. They don't want to talk, and sometimes I get discouraged. Today, though, I was looking around the Internet, looking at sites related to conversation, and I came back to an old favorite, "New Dimensions Radio." On this particular day, they were airing a show entitled "Circles, Conversation and Community with Vicki Robin, Juanita Brown, Leif Utne." It was a great show on conversation cafes. I'm going to see what I can borrow to plug into an intermediate or advanced course using some of these concepts. Maybe not for my regular classes, but for community college classes at least. It might be really interesting.

Students given zero mark for agreeing with SDF dispatch

Wow! Someone felt strongly about this. I'd give all the students a top score for expressing their opinions.
Mainichi Interactive - Top News

Korean Censorship

This isn't about Japan, but it is about English teachers in Korea. It appears that the Korean goverment has pulled the plug on internet connections to certain bloggers that may, but probably are not, posting links to video of the Korean national who was beheaded in Iraq.

Blinger has alot of posts about the issue.

Garbage Day

Yes, I know this post is one post away from the photo. I just thought I would play catch up this morning. The last Sunday of the month is recycle day in our neighborhood. This time was my neighborhood's turn to staff the recycle center. Our job was to help people unload their cars and make sure that the stuff that they brought went into the right bins. Our trash is separated into the following types:

corrigated paper, cardboard, newspapers and advertisements, books and magazines, old clothes, general plastic, styrofoam, PET bottles, brown glass, green glass, clear glass, aluminum, steel, batteries, and light bulbs

Everything is clean with labels removed, or it is returned to the owner. We worked from 9 to noon, and around 12, the trucks arrived to take away the stuff. It was a great system. My guess is that the recycling companies aren't really making a go of this alone. They must be getting some money from the township.

I was impressed by the honest hard work of the volunteers, and that this activity gives people a chance to sit around among other people's garbage and discuss various ways of reducing the amount of it that people produce. It was a great opportunity for people to raise their environmental IQ's.

Learner motivations

Last Thursday I volunteered to visit a class that one of the teachers attending the Teachers' Seminar teaches. She is Japanese and her class of about 15 people wanted to talk to a "foreigner." I won't get into how I feel about that particular situation right now. I want to focus here on the motivations that the students have for learning English. All of the people in the group are over 65. Their language ablilty is very much at the beginner level. I was curious about what the people wanted to get out of the series of classes.

The class was basically a getting-to-know-you kind of effort. The learners would introduce themselves and I would ask some questions about them. I also requested at the beginning of the session that they tell me why they are studying English. Some of the motivations were very practical. They want to study so that they can speak more when they travel or speak with foreign nationals at their church. Two of the people had dual-citizenship grandchildren living in other countries, and one person had a daughter living in Singapore. Other people wanted to learn English to become "an international human," to prevent senility, or simply as a hobby. Two people said that they had no real motivation. I'm not sure what gets them into the classroom every week, but they were there.

I was encouraged to see so many people interested in learning English. Near the end of the class, they asked me what they could do to improve their language ability. I suggested that they focus on the most basic grammar and vocabulary and build a strong base. Make sure that they can listen, speak, read, and write all of it. Then with that base they can do most anything they want with language. If they find that they need more, then build on that.

I was really unsure about going to this before the fact. I was glad that I made the effort. It was good to meet people in that age group who are learning language and find out something about what motivates them.

Recycle Day

Today was recycle day in the neighborhood. This is a shot of the venue. People from each of the homes in the section responsible for that day's collection volunteer to help people unload their month's worth of recyclable trash and separate it into the correct container. Great system.