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Is Eikaiwa better than simply talking to people?

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Mark

Joined: 23 Jan 2003
Posts: 500
Location: Tokyo, Japan

Posted: Sat Mar 12, 2005 12:02 pm Post subject: Is Eikaiwa better than simply talking to people?

Just curious. My school has a couple of types of courses, but the most common one seems no better than simply having a conversation with a native-speaker who agrees to do some correcting as you go. Now, of course, most Japanese don't have access to a native speaker who's willing to give them some speaking tips (and have a long conversation about a boring, everyday topic) for free, but if they did, it seems like they'd do just as well. In fact, in my opinion at least, it would actually be more beneficial to just talk to people rather than to do the listen/repeat routine that's so common at schools in Japan. After all, you can buy a book and do the listen/repeat thing at home. Granted, you don't have a person to check your pronunciation, but most people have no idea how to teach pronunciation, so I don't think it makes much difference anyway. At least in an actual conversation, students are forced to try and negotiate meaning which is where the real learning and improvement happens. So, how about the big Eikaiwa? Is the curriculum more effective than simply talking to a native-speaker would be?

Glenski

Joined: 15 Jan 2003
Posts: 12844
Location: Hokkaido, JAPAN

Posted: Sat Mar 12, 2005 1:24 pm Post subject:

Quote:

in my opinion at least, it would actually be more beneficial to just talk to people rather than to do the listen/repeat routine that's so common at schools in Japan.

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After all, you can buy a book and do the listen/repeat thing at home.

Yup, tried one myself to learn Japanese. Couldn't focus. Didn't have much discipline. Realized too late that what I was learning was textbook language, not real conversational Japanese. I think the same things hold for Japanese learning English, and that's a major reason why they attend formal classes rather than try learning it on their own. Personally, I think that the majority of those who hire private tutors are willing to pay for something much more personalized and something that, in a one-on-one situation, feels more comfortable. They may think the opportunity is there to learn more about the culture by direct interaction with the teacher rather than by being part of a crowd (albeit small) in an eikaiwa classroom.

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Is the curriculum more effective than simply talking to a native-speaker would be?

I would look at this question in a few ways.
1. Depends on the teacher in both situations.
2. Depends on the teaching format (curriculum), too.
3. Depends on what the goals of the student are. Many eikaiwa students are just there to gawk at the foreign teacher, or to socialize with their friends (or to make some), not to seriously study a foreign language. Remember, they've had exposure to it in 6 years of JHS and SHS already.
4. "Simply talking to a native speaker" could be pretty useless, depending on circumstances. Put just this way (simply talking), I would have to say it is almost useless unless the goal is to give the student time to speak and practice what he already knows.
5. Depends on the age of the student and his ability to focus in a class group vs. in a one-on-one situation.
6. Depends on the level of the student. I've taught private lessons to some high level people who came to me because the eikaiwa lessons didn't give them what they wanted. Other high level people took my eikaiwa classes and picked up whatever they wanted.
7. Depends on where you teach. In private lessons in noisy cafes, the distractions are just too much for enjoyable pair work sometimes.

Mark

Joined: 23 Jan 2003
Posts: 500
Location: Tokyo, Japan

Posted: Sun Mar 13, 2005 6:33 am Post subject:

Quote:

Well, it's true that I don't know how all eikaiwa work, but it just seems like most of them focus on chorusing, using target language in very specific ways, and corrected chatting.

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I didn't mean to imply that people could learn at home, just that memorizing set phrases and doing substitutions and whatnot can be done at home and more effective things can be done in class.

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1, 2 and 3 I definitely agree, although for 3 I was thinking of students who do want to learn.

4 I disagree a little. Japanese people have very few opportunities to use the language in a situation where they have no idea what the other person is going to say next and where they're obliged to at least try and hold up their end of the conversation. This can tell them a lot about where their weaknesses are and what they should focus on. And while their conversation partner may not be able to offer them much help to remedy their weakness, odds are the eikaiwa teacher can't either.

5, 6 & 7 I'm with you.

I suppose it depends on the school, too. I have a lot of drop-in classes where I don't see the students regularly, so perhaps I'm just overly frustrated because of that. But, my uderstanding was that the big schools are quite strict in requiring you to follow their program, so if the curriculum is bad, then there's only a limited amount that you can do.

PAULH

Joined: 28 Jan 2003
Posts: 4672
Location: Western Japan

Posted: Sun Mar 13, 2005 11:44 am Post subject:

Mark wrote:

[Well, it's true that I don't know how all eikaiwa work, but it just seems like most of them focus on chorusing, using target language in very specific ways, and corrected chatting.

Mark you seem to make several incorrect asumptions here. You seem to assume that a student who has had six years of high school English will suddenly be able to walk into a class and speak complete sentences and have a wide vocabulary.

In high school students are taught English in Japanese, with the teacher explaining grammar rules in Japanese, (often with a katakana pronunciation of the English word). the teacher will translate English sentences into Japanese. Students can understand as they have had the English put into their own language but they never hear actual English.

They go to NOVA sign up for lessons and they will get maybe one hour a week of class where they hear a native speaker. The teacher will probably speak 40-50% of the class. Being able to hear English does not mean you produce it straight away. Babies take 2 or 3 years of listening to their mother before they can start to talk. Students at a beginning level will speak some English but that is once you have got them relaxed enough to open their mouths. Then you have to get them to stop speaking in 'katakana' English and get their tongues around English vowels and consonants.

Students at a lower level need structure, they need a goal for the lesson and need to know why they are doing a drill or a task. Just chatting to them for 50 minutes achieves no purpose if they can not use the language they have learned. Higher students want free conversation which is fine as they know the basics and its ingrained, but higher students still need instruction in higher level skills, such as passives, conditionals, looking for 'gist' of a conversation etc.

NOVA has these methods in place, though they are boring for the teacher, is like a security blanket for the rather nervous student. Im not saying drills and repetition are the best way (I work in a university with first years, and we do role play, TPR, but these are hard to do in a small eikaiwa classroom. Once students have come to grips with how to do an activity they will also gain confidence. If you just sit them down and talk at them you are not doing them any favors. Its simply easier for you, and being able to speak confidently in a foreign language doesnt happen by magic. Remember your students are functionally monolingual, and still thinking in Japanese.

Students often like structure, and you can use conversation or what ever in the lesson as long as you know what you are doing and it has an educational purpose.

Its like showing students a video. You can put them in front of a video for half an hour and students wont learn anything from dialog. Break it up into 30 second manageable chunks with a grammar point, a task exercise, reading a dialog etc and it becomes more manageable

The average NOVA teacher with no training in these techniques will be just like the teacher who puts his students in front of a VCR for thirty minutes by just talking to them and 'expecting' them to hold up their end of the conversation or magically be able to speak fluid sentences.

Mark wrote:

I didn't mean to imply that people could learn at home, just that memorizing set phrases and doing substitutions and whatnot can be done at home and more effective things can be done in class.

The goal is not to get students to memorize phrases. thats what they do in high school. The goal is to get them to internalise grammatical patterns so they can use in different situations. Not everyone speaks the same way and the goal is to get them trying out the language, using the grammar form in different situations, or being able to recognise it when they see it.

For example, all my studnets have learned "How are you? I'm fine thank you" as a chunk of language but if you say "Hows it going? or How are things? you get stunned stares. What teachers try to do is to let students let go of familiar cliched language and chunks and experiment. You can not really do that if you are sitting at home memorising sentences out of a book. That is what high school students do for a test, with no idea what they are memorising and why, or how to use it in a real situation.

Secondly, you are assuming students will study at home. I study at home too, not all that I study sinks in, and sometimes its a bit over my head, so I give up. If students think its too difficult they stop doing it. Most want to speak English but they expect the teacher to do all the work for them.

Students also need someone to talk with and bounce a conversation of, something you cant do by sitting at home by yourself. You can learn and study at home, but you still need to speak, and for most people it might be a 40-minute lesson once a week.

Mark wrote:

4 I disagree a little. Japanese people have very few opportunities to use the language in a situation where they have no idea what the other person is going to say next and where they're obliged to at least try and hold up their end of the conversation. This can tell them a lot about where their weaknesses are and what they should focus on. And while their conversation partner may not be able to offer them much help to remedy their weakness, odds are the eikaiwa teacher can't either.

See my quote above. A student studying once a week will get about 40 or 50 hours of lessons in a year, while it takes 400-500 hours to reach an intermediate level where they are thinking in the language. Partners wont be able to pick out mistakes or teach students for you, but the other student also gets input from the student, the teacher is talking less in the lesson and students are talking to each other in English. that is what communication is, not just speaking with a native speaker. In my class I speak about 10% of the lesson.

I wont catch every mistake, but at each level you can predict after a while the mistakes people make, and mention those that cause the most problems. Being able to see mistakes is easy. How to explain and rectify is a lot harder (how do you teach "r" and "l" for example, and the difference between lend, rent and borrow?)

In any conversation you will never know what a person will say (and nothing like the textbook) so we do our best to help them to predict, anticipate, improve their listening skills. let them know they dont have to understand everything.

Japanese have few opportunities to hear and use English full stop. 99% of the population does not use English in their daily lives and there is no need for English, even for many people who learn it at NOVA and study once a week.

Mark

Joined: 23 Jan 2003
Posts: 500
Location: Tokyo, Japan

Posted: Tue Mar 15, 2005 2:28 pm Post subject:

Quote:

Yes, I am assuming this. Students who don't study at home and rely solely on their eikaiwa lesson will rarely progress. If students expect their teacher to do all the work, they'll never progress much beyond an intermediate level. Language is unbelievable complicated, and it's impossible to explain it all to a student. Teachers have to prepare students to navigate that maze by themselves at some point.

Again, I agree with much of what you say. I just wonder if the average NOVA student would be better off with a buddy they go drinking with once a week. Now, I haven't seen NOVA's curriculum, so perhaps I'm being too harsh. But, from what I've seen of eikaiwa, I just don't consider it terribly effective.

Students have to be coached on how to learn languages as they have never learnt before. Kids here are spoonfed by their teachers, everything broken down into bite-size morsels for digestion so they can pass the entrance exam, which is not deisgned to teach communication or converstion. Students study for TOEIC and TOEFL but those tests are not designed to teach conversation either. they teach you how to pass a proficiency test and test your "passive" knowledge of English. Many get 700 on TOEIC but can still not speak English well or order a hamburger.

NOVA doesnt really have much of a curriculum, as they take the text book and get students working their way up the levels with level tests etc.
They simply plug students into slots depending on their level. Books and curriculums do not teach English, teachers do. there are good and bad curriculums depending on what the goals are.
I wont say that NOVAs is good or bad as its based on communicative ELT theory. Direct approach, no Japanese, massive input. student participation etc. The actual method leaves a lot to be desired, but the curriculum is like a blueprint or a road map that shows you how to get from A to B. How you get there will depend on the individual skill of the teachers.

People do learn English at NOVA despite its flaws, if they go often enough, hear in lesson fees to make progress though, which is money that many students dont have or they give up half way.

PAULH

Joined: 28 Jan 2003
Posts: 4672
Location: Western Japan

Posted: Tue Mar 15, 2005 3:41 pm Post subject:

Mark wrote:

[

Quote:

They go to NOVA sign up for lessons and they will get maybe one hour a week of class where they hear a native speaker. The teacher will probably speak 40-50% of the class. Being able to hear English does not mean you produce it straight away.

The teachers speak for half the class? Wow.
.

Maybe not half but there is a lot of drill and repetition, teacher talk, the teacher one on one with each student. When i worked there I used Streamline which has replacement drills and I talked my head off during the lesson. Most newbies dont know any better.

Mark wrote:

[

Quote:

Babies take 2 or 3 years of listening to their mother before they can start to talk.

True, but first and second language acquisition are completely different. Babies are like blank slates whose mental circuits are being set to match the language they're hearing around them. This process continues through adolescence and beyond. 2nd language learners already have all their switches set, and the trick is to get them to learn how to reset them for the new language. This is part of the problem for Japanese students. Japanese is so different from English on so many levels and in so many ways, that they have so much resetting to do.
.

Well I wont argue with you here but whole books have been written on the similarities between learning a mother tongue and the second language. The only real variable is the age one starts learning which determines whether you end up with a 'native' accent or not and whether you achieve fluency. Kids up to puberty can acquire native like fluency but older kids cant.

Its easier for younger kids to pick up language as their brains are more flexible but it takes longer as kids have not concept of grammar and sentence structure. they dont 'learn' language but acquire it by massive input. Kids who learn English at 5 or 6 are no different than babies in that they can still learn the language like babies do. Kids dont learn like adults or teenagers.

There is nothing intrinsically different about Japanese that is not found in other languages. It would be the same as learning Aramaic or Persian. Some languages are easier for English native speakers, though Chinese have no trouble learning japanese as it has Kanji etc. They are different languages, but difficulty in learning is relative to what your native tongue is. My 10 year old is bilingual and learnt both without breaking a sweat.

Mark wrote:

I agree with much of what you say. I think I've given you the impression that I have no knowledge of linguistics or language acquisition. I do have a background in these things and I'm not suggesting that chatting is more beneficial than a good lesson, just that it may be more beneficial for some eikaiwa students especially when you consider the money they spend on lessons, the complete lack of training of their instructor, and the quality of the curriculum.
from what I've seen of eikaiwa, I just don't consider it terribly effective.

Not all eikaiwa teachers are untrained and many do have ESl qualifications. After 2 years of teaching you must learn something through sheer experience. Reading books on theory or doing a CELTA will tell you why rather than intuition.

It really just comes down to money. Students want to pay as little as possible for a lesson, NOVA wants a teacher that they pay as little as possible for the most bang, and teachers dont want to spend money on training so they can get a job here. You get paid no extra for having CELTA and many consider it a waste if they are only here for a year between jobs.

PS Eikaiwa is not a method but an industry. You can not "teach" eikaiwa (Japanese word for conversation) but you might use a number of techniques to teach using a communicative method. Eikaiwa may use TPR, drills, task based learning, role play, listening excercises, direct method, which are all valid ways of teaching. A conversation school is just a place where a person can walk in off the street and get a language lesson with a foreigner, just like you would go in get a haircut. There are hairstylists who can botch your haircut as there are incompetent lor novice language teachers. Most students dont want to pay 4000-5000 yen for a private lesson with a guy who has a CELTA and a Masters degree.

PS I teach university students using Headway, which is the same book they use in eikaiwas. i do the same things but my classes are bigger and the location is different. The techniques are essentially identical, as I use a communicative method.

Eikaiwa itself is not the problem, but simply that language learning has become commercialised, mass produced industry, and packaged as a way of learning a foregn language. You can learn in a NOVA class with a trained teacher who knows what he is doing.

To get better at English students need lots and lots of input, use th language in a comprehensible setting (i.e. language at a level they can acquire words and language) which means hearing English every day, 3 or 4 times a week for a year. Most people dont have the time or money to do that.

Mark wrote:

Personally, I don't think this really works very well past very simple things. I think that you internalize language by finding yourself in a situation where you don't know what to say, and then being helped to find a way to express your meaning. I think it's more effective than memorizing patterns and then hoping to be able to recall them when you need them. Students need to find themselves in a situation where they need to communicate something. That way they're more likely to associate meaning and form..

I can only speak for myself but as an adult I cant learn Japanese by osmosis. You have people living here 10 years but still can not speak any Japanese. Others learn it in a year as they study hard, as I mentioned before, it becomes conscious learning, and language is not acquired or "picked up" naturally like children. You have to learn and memorise vocabulary and grammar, keigo etc. There is an order to language learning e.g. you will learn the word "orange" before you learn "sophistication" and "stubbornness". or past tense after you learn present tense etc

In a foreign situation (I am in the UK but I have trouble understanding some of the local dialect here) you can pick up some language but not all, but you make educated guesses, gist etc. I have heard of experiments where people hear a language like Swahili and Urdu and can work out which are verbs, which are nound simply by listening to endings of words,even without knowing what they mean.

Many Japanese are not taught about how to "read between the lines" of language. When does "no" mean "no"? In Japan, "possibly" or "I'lll think about it" can mean no but not stated directly.

Just being in a situation doesnt mean you know what to say, This week I will be going to Germany- I dont speak German and I have no idea how to ask the time or the bus in German. You have to learn the grammar, and vocabulary but be aware that there may be half a dozen different ways of saying the same thing. Japanese learn only one and that the one in their high school textbooks. Native teachers have even been told they are wrong as they use an expression different from the one the student learn.

I learnt Japanese by listening to people, hearing what was around me and "working out" the rules of language. Social status (boss.employee? teacher student?), formality (polite/informal?) , situation, location will mean people speak differently. How do you teach politeness, body language and gesture. There are a dozen ways to say sorry or apologize for something.

people here do not speak like textbooks and you wont be taught Osaka-ben in a language lesson. Learning Keigo (poliet language) I found was a matter of trial and error. You have to fall off a few times before people understand you or be understood.

Most Japanese are too scared to get on the bike in the first place.

PAULH

Joined: 28 Jan 2003
Posts: 4672
Location: Western Japan

Posted: Tue Mar 15, 2005 4:16 pm Post subject: Sorry I edited out your post

If by schools, you mean eikaiwas, who's to say that the majority of them do a listen/repeat routine? Mine certainly didn't.

I think most eikaiwas have a sort of agenda that involves throwing some grammar point at the student(s), and presented in such a way that they practice using it in applications directed toward conversation.
[/quote]

Well, it's true that I don't know how all eikaiwa work, but it just seems like most of them focus on chorusing, using target language in very specific ways, and corrected chatting.

Quote:

I didn't mean to imply that people could learn at home, just that memorizing set phrases and doing substitutions and whatnot can be done at home and more effective things can be done in class.

Quote:

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