In the school year 2004

3-2. Takahashi’s episode 1: The power of portfolios

In the writing class for second-year students, I asked the students to write a semester report assessing their own portfolio at the end of the school year in March. When they looked over all the worksheets in their file, they noticed improvements. By reflecting on their learning history, students gained confidence in their learning.

However, slow learners seemed to make so little improvement that even I often did not notice it in class. For example, I was discouraged to see them fail to have three-minute conversations even in December, and to see them spending one period even in December to write only ten sentences. Thus I didn’t expect that they could find any improvements and I had already started to wonder whether this class was helpful for their learning. However, their semester reports showed that they did improve in speaking and writing skills, and that they gained confidence in learning English. Some students wrote the following comments:

Hiromi: It was very difficult or almost impossible to have a 2-minute conversation even in October. I didn’t know how to keep a conversation going. It’s still difficult to ask new questions but I came to use conversation strategies more and more. (3rd portfolio, February 2003)
Ichiro: I couldn’t speak English at all in April, but now I can use the expression “How ya doin’?” to open a conversation, “How ‘bout you?” to ask the same question, and “Nice talking with you!” to close a conversation. This is a big change for me. (3rd portfolio, February 2003)
Kaori: I didn’t know any conversation strategies. But I now use the shadowing strategy and it is very helpful to keep a conversation going. (3rd portfolio, February 2003)

In the speaking test held in December, most students in the general class failed to have a three-minute conversation. I gave a speaking test after covering a couple of topics three times a year. In the test, students could prepare for the topics, but they didn’t know which topic they would talk about and who would be their partner until the test started. However, after writing semester reports they gained confidence. I was surprised to find that most of them succeeded in having a three-minute conversation in the speaking test held in March.

3-3. Student learning: The pleasure of communicating with other classmates

The second-year students evaluated their own writing and speaking skills in October, and February, comparing them with those in the previous April (This included students in the other teachers’ classes as well). These evaluations showed that they noticed that their speaking and writing skills improved through interacting during speaking and writing activities. For writing skills, as Table 7 shows, the number of students who felt “I can hardly write what I want to say” decreased from 23% to 4% over ten months. The number of students who felt “I can write what I want to say with grammatical mistakes” increased from 11% to 46%.

Table 7: Writing skills

(
197 second-year students)

As for speaking skills, the survey asked students about timed-conversations. The students had timed-conversations based on the writing assignments done as homework, where they described what they wanted to say, vocabulary they wanted for the topic, and three questions. They were encouraged not to look at the writing assignment (the composition) when they had the timed-conversation. Table 8 shows the number of students who felt “I can hardly speak for two minutes” decreased from 32% to 5%. The number of students who felt “I can speak without a composition for two minutes” increased from 8% to 33%.

Table 8:
Speaking skills (two- minute conversation)

(197 second-year students)

As Table 9 shows, the number of students who felt “I can hardly speak for three minutes” decreased from 61% to 36%, and those who felt “I can speak without a composition for three minutes” increased from 19% to 40%, and from 6% to 15% for those who felt “I can speak aloud without a composition for three minutes”.
T
able 9: Speaking skills (three-minute conversation)

(197 second-year students)

In summary, students made progress in both speaking and writing skills through constant self-assessment and setting a specific goal for the conversation. Students initially wrote only five to six sentences about a topic and had a conversation for two minutes at most, but in the end, students in advanced classes wrote about 20 sentences about a topic, and achieved four to five-minute conversations. In general classes, students wrote 10 to 15 sentences and had conversations for three minutes without looking at their compositions.
4. After the First Project: Teaching on Their Own

The next school year started in April. Teachers finally got together to talk about what they were going to do and how they were going to teach. As for goals, Takahashi proposed in a meeting, following Sato’s advice, that they continue to use the integrated approach and develop students’ communication skills by using discussion and debate. Nonetheless, teachers could not come to an agreement mainly because the other teachers thought it would be too difficult for their students. Another reason might be that they had never tried debate in English as students themselves. While they finally agreed to use “Impact Topics” (Longman) instead of a MEXT approved textbook, they disagreed concerning speaking tests. Mori and Takahashi decided to try discussion and debate, whereas Kawai and Goto, a new teacher, preferred individual presentations with which they were familiar. The four third-year teachers started to teach on their own with minimal communication with others.