Job Discussion Forums

[azarashi sushi]

Good morning!

I'm just about to race out the door to work so this is a bit quick... I'll write a bit more when I get back tonight.

Just wondering if there's anyone here with experience teaching returnee children?

I have three elementary school classes of returnee kids... Most of them have lived most of their lives so far in English speaking countries and only just returned to Japan recently...so basically native speakers.

The main objective of the classes is to give them an opportunity to continue speaking English and be with other children like themselves... Not actually strictly teaching them so much.

A lot of the regualr kids games/activities seem a bit too easy... Yet the more advanced games are a bit hard.

If you're teaching returnee classes now, what kinds of things are you doing?

Thanks for any help.

A.S.

[Glenski]

I have a few returnees in my HS classes. The school created a special series of courses called Discovery for them for English. A Japanese teacher gives them grammar, a native English speaker teaches them higher level writing, and I teach a reading/literature course based on extensive reading to improve their overall reading skills. These kids are not the only ones in the class; they have higher than average level classmates from the local population of students, too. Overall class size is 17-20.

Be aware that returnees may not want to speak as much English as you expect because of peer pressure. It might look like bragging to others if they speak well.

[TokyoLiz]

Azarashi,

I teach at a combined jr and sr high school which has a very large returnee program. The junior high school kids that we examined in March were capable of writing simple essays generally free of typical EFL errors, and one child used the word lugubrious in a suitable context while we were interviewing him!

I'm guessing that your returnee kids are in the later years of elementary school.

The demands of your program really depend on the language skills, both first language Japanese and second language English, that the kids have built to date.

The kinds of activities you do with them will depend on how much time you get every week with them. Our juniors and seniors get 4 hours with an international teacher (that's me or my fellow foreign coworkers) and two hours or more a week with a Japanese teacher who coaches them on international issues and works on building fully bilingual skills with the kids. Our Japanese teachers are native or near native speakers of English.

To keep the kids stimulated, and depending on your contact time with them, you might consider graded readers, projects that require lots of writing (concentrating on writing at the sentence level), presentations, recitations and dramatizations of the works they read.

If your students at the elementary level are high EFL, then I'm sure you can find vast amounts of teaching material on the Internet or in kids activity books that are appropriate.

If the kids are in fact native speakers of English, then you should probably consider elementary school language arts programs.

There are huge resources for teachers on the Internet.

http://www.csun.edu/~vceed009/languagearts.html

http://www.lessonplanspage.com/

http://falcon.jmu.edu/~ramseyil/tradless.htm


To give you an idea of what we do in our J1 classes, our syllabus includes two novels, paragraph and essay writing, presentation skills, reading aloud (recorded on cassette tape) and comprehensive tests.

[guest of Japan]

That was the first time I've ever seen the word "lugrubrious."

[azarashi sushi]

Liz...

Thank you very much for those links. I haven't had a chance to look at all of them, but at first glance they look very useful.

These particular classes are only for the returnee children, so they feel quite OK speaking English in class (no peer group pressure).

Unfortunately it's only twice a month for one hour, so doing any kind of more involved activity spread over a number of classes is not really possible.

The idea is also not to get too heavily bogged down in writing and grammar with these classes... The objective is keep up their interest in the language as a form of communication and also maintain their "western" personalities.

So for the lessons I'm looking more to use fast paced communication games and activities, rather than anything too heavy. High School is the time for that.

[Ailian]

[TokyoLiz]

Azarashi sushi,

That's a shame they don't have more contact time with native speakers. The kids at our school told some interesting anecdotes. One girl, a high school senior, went to a reunion with her old school chums she had met in California. All are Japanese-born and kikokushijo. The difference between her and her old classmates is that she had 5 years of language arts with us in our returnee program, 4-6 hours a week, and her old friends had been enrolled in regular Japanese school. She told us that her friends, though they'd done some eikaiwa lessons, couldn't keep up in English conversation and they all had to resort to Japanese language. The buddies were really shocked at the difference - all of them had been native-level English fluency when they returned to Japan less than five years ago.

Oh, Guest of Japan, the word is l u g u b r i o u s. Heck, we international teachers had to look that one up, too.

Ailian, that game rocks! Thank you for reminding me. I used to play that and a bunch of crazy card games with some Chinese Canadian folks at my home university (UBC grad). I'll give Mafia a shot in my EFL classes.

[azarashi sushi]

[guest of Japan]

Please pardon my spelling mistake. I'm feeling intensly melancholy right now. You might even say I'm lugubrious.

[Brooks]

where I work, the returnee program at the junior high is fixed. They have it for all grades. It has a three strikes and you`re out policy. Sometimes students have been kicked out and moved to another English class if they had bad grades, behavior problems, etc.
I remember meeting with a father of a returnee boy. He said his son was a banana (yellow on the outside and white on the inside). He was having a hard time adjusting to being at a conservative Japanese school and ended up going to the American School in Tokyo.

Teachers have done different things at the junior high: projects, a lot of reading and writing, etc.
They used to have the time divided between Japanese teachers and native speakers, but they stopped doing that and the students only have foreign teachers. The Japanese teachers used to teach grammar only.
At the high school, I have asked former students of the English program what they didn`t like about it and they said they didn`t have enough listening and speaking practice.

At our elementary school they only have classes twice a month on Saturday mornings as far as I know. I think they just focus on oral skills.
They don`t have a fixed curiculum.
The problem is that when they enter junior high, classes with a Japanese English teacher are just too easy, so that`s why they have special classes with American teachers.

If you want to do any reading on the subject, I have books about returnees I can recommend.

[azarashi sushi]

[Brooks]

there are more books but right now what comes to mind are the Japanese Overseas by Merry White and Japan`s International Youth by Roger Goodman.

Both have written other books about Japan. White is a sociologist from Boston University and Goodman is a British professor, I think.

Teaching and Learning in Japan is from Oxford (or Cambridge - can`t remember) and a lot of the book is about elementary school education.

[azarashi sushi]

Thank you for that Brooks.