From Templates to Voice: Helping Japanese EFL Students to Find Their Own Words

Yuka Yonemura, High School English Teacher, Kyoto, Japan

“How can English teachers encourage students to express their own voice and ideas in English?” I have been asking this question since I started teaching English at a public high school in Japan. In Japan, students learn English as a Foreign Language (EFL) for 9 years, starting from elementary school. They memorize and practice English vocabulary, grammar, and simple sentences in everyday contexts in middle schools, and focus shifts to cramming knowledge for college exams, alongside interactive classroom activities, such as presentations and discussions. From my observation, my students’ English presentations and essays tend to be formulaic and lack originality. For example, when I had them write about “Do you agree or disagree with the idea that all zoos in Japan should be abolished in terms of Animal Welfare?,” they wrote very ’templaty’ essays with little meaningful connections with the topic, including personal experiences in zoos. At first, I attributed this stressful situation to the lack of students’ lexical and grammatical competencies. However, it was wrong. In my research, I found that this is attributable to various sociocultural and pedagogical reasons.

Many articles about the comparison between Western teaching practices and Japanese point out that Japanese collectivist values, hierarchical traditions and homogeneous cultural features discourage creative and original thinking. Japanese product-oriented culture also makes students afraid of making mistakes and have strong speaking anxiety (Onoda, 2022). Furthermore, under the present educational framework, students have less opportunity for self-expression to negotiate their intellectual growth with reflection because instruction often relies on a monotonous deductive approach for college exams (Dunn, 2015). These articles seem to suggest that in spite of the Japanese governments’ emphasis on original and creative thinking in English education, Japanese students have great difficulty in expressing their own ideas in English in a complex and incompatible context.

At an international scale, there has been an increased demand that EFL students can speak English clearly and logically in this globalized information society. Japanese English teachers’ mission is to bridge the gap between 21st century communication skills and perception of Japanese English learners. To help students to overcome the above difficulty, I started to look at my classroom from a completely different viewpoint. When I start my class, I always tell my students as follows:

“Don’t be afraid of making mistakes in my class! In my English class, mistakes are natural. What matters is what you think and feel. Don’t be afraid of struggling with yourself.”

During class, I put a lot of energy into creating a highly interactive atmosphere. They can talk freely with their classmates to think about the topic to learn from their friends. I think weak learners prefer it because they can become more comfortable and strong students try to help them. By synthesizing various viewpoints, they can find new perspectives in themselves and make their opinions more persuasive. Also, I will not impose my opinions in any cases. I ask my students to brainstorm as many reasons as possible in Japanese, drawing on their lived experience (e.g., childhood memories at the zoo) for both the yes and no positions. This strategy will enable students to figure out ways to frame their arguments for making natural claims (Mckinley, 2013). Thinking with Japanese based on their own sociocultural backgrounds works as a scaffolded device to let them have a big picture of their learning and how to connect themselves to the topic with agency.

Breaking the process into small steps with ample feedback makes a real difference. Once students finish giving their own ideas in Japanese, I collect them and categorize a variety of key ideas and concepts that appear in their Japanese drafts, crafting prefabricated English expressions lists to describe them. Most of my students feel overwhelmed when they are asked to write English essays with precise grammar and appropriate vocabulary even though they have good Japanese drafts. For example, in the same topic about zoos, I showed them the expressions, “put stress on animals,”“shut animals in the cages,” “opportunities to watch (interact with) animals” to let them pick up and combine them to explain their positions consistently. After writing their drafts, I provide them with positive feedback to promote multiple-revision. By this phase, students become less afraid of making mistakes, so they try to take more academic risks to improve their drafts for themselves. From their elaborate ideas, I understand how they perceive their life experience, which is useful as the springboard for the next lesson.

Through this approach, many of my students have demonstrated small or drastic changes. The most notable point is that some students stopped using AI to present ideas. Although their essays became less proficient and shorter with more grammatical errors, they clearly indicate their ownership and personal world that were not seen before. In presentations, they speak with more confidence as they develop the sense of self-worth from self-discovery. The other day, one student wrote that she was pleased with my class because she was learning in a safe learning environment where mistakes are welcome. From her reflection sheet, I recognized how much I had formerly emphasized not their learning process but their products, which discouraged them from making decisions and meanings.

Again, the Japanese English educational framework is still said to suppress students’ creativity and self-expression, focusing on memorization and single answers for exams. However, we teachers should know that this situation has been socially constructed and initiate changes with critical awareness. As Dixon (2017) discusses the synergy of Western thinking and Japanese traditions to enhance intercultural thinking skills, Japanese English teachers can help students to make use of a purposeful and balanced combination of both Japanese and Western thinking to use English knowledge effectively, considering students’individual abilities, interests and cultural identity. I hope that my readers can take away a few small tips for empowering their students to learn English for long-term global citizenship, not just for exams.

References 

Dixon, C. I. (2017). Introducing the Western tradition of critical-thinking into a Japanese national education A preliminary consideration. The Journal of Research into IB Education, 1, 4-9.

Dunn, J. (2015). Critical Thinking in Japanese secondary education: Student and Teacher Perspectives. Critical Thinking and Language Learning, 2(1), 28-38.

McKinley, J. (2013). Displaying critical thinking in EFL academic writing: A discussion of Japanese to English contrastive rhetoric. RELC journal, 44(2), 195-208.

Onoda, S. (2022). Enhancing Creative Thinking, Critical Thinking, and Interactional Skills through Problem-Solving Group Projects among Undergraduate English Majors in Japan. 3L: Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies, 28(2).

Yuka Yonemura, M.A. is a high school teacher in Japan. She has been teaching English as a Foreign Language for 8 years. She is passionate about promoting critical thinking with communicative competencies in Japanese English education.