Teaching Points

This first version of the ‘teaching points’ page is more aphoristic than I originally planned. Many of these points will some day evolve into short essays, but for now I present them as general principles. If you want to send along your reaction to any of the points I make here, I welcome your comments. If I can, I would like to expand the ‘teaching points’ section to include different points of view.

Please keep it in mind when you read this page that I do not teach in a classroom. Everything I discuss here draws on my experience with individual and very small group classes. Some points are general enough that they can be applied to other teaching contexts, but others are highly specific.

Accuracy versus fluency
in single student conversation classes

I correct as little as possible, because I believe that conversation classes are opportunities to develop fluency, not accuracy. This depends on the kind of error a student makes: if it gets in the way of making sense, I will correct it. In general, I wait for students to produce their most common errors – usually over several sessions – and try to remember them; when patterns become clear, I begin to correct the most frequent, most damaging errors.

The one exception to this is with the student’s transcription of example text from the white board: I watch the written work carefully, and try to catch errors in the student’s written record of the class. Students are usually less discouraged by a correction to their writing than they are to corrections directed at their listening or speaking ability.

What is most important in a conversation class?

Even in a monolingual country like Japan, students have plenty of chances to encounter English in their daily lives. If they want to – and motivation is always the key point – they can hear, read, or write English every day. What they lack is an opportunity to talk, so the main point of a conversation class should be to get the student to produce language. Learn to create a context within which students have the opportunity to demonstrate the range of language they have available, and to push the edges of their fluency. Think of it as an interview rather than a conversation. The teacher must never dominate the discussion: do not tell stories, do not have opinions, and do not comment on the quality of your student’s ideas. There will be exceptional circumstances that stretch the boundaries of all these proscriptions; but it is worth trying to keep them as absolute as you can.

Working through an acquired lack of self-confidence

Japanese popular culture – and even the intellectual culture – holds a number of misconceptions about the ability of Japanese people to communicate effectively in English. Students often tell me that they know their pronunciation is terrible, or that they cannot understand English spoken at normal speeds. In practice, this means that they speak with a slight accent, and that they have a hard time with people who talk too fast. Both of these are cultural problems that have as much to do with speakers of English as they do with learners from Japan: English speakers tend to be intolerant of accents, and we often pay more attention to ourselves than to the people we talk to. You can help your students gain confidence by listening to them: take them seriously, and pay attention to what they say. This may sound like an obvious point, but it stands in front of a more general issue. Most Japanese English conversation students do not need to be taught how to speak English: they need to gain self-confidence in using the English they already have.

2002/05/25

Date posted: 2003-09-15