This article describes a pilot study into writing poems and song lyrics in the EFL classroom. The study had the dual aims of a) offering students the opportunity to engage in creative writing and b) facilitating language acquisition. The paper describes the procedures and gives some examples and discussion of student writing. Although some interesting poems and songs were produced, the paper suggests that more structured procedures are necessary to achieve benefits in language acquisition and improved writing and offers some possible improvements.

Possible Benefits of Writing Poems and Song Lyrics

Researchers such as Continue reading →

Recently, when I was preparing for a talk, I was thinking about the teachers who really made a difference for me. Perhaps there are two who really stood out when I look at them from my present world.

The first was a pre-school teacher when I was about three years old. We were learning to write our names. I made a mistake and wrote an ‘o’ instead of an ‘a’. I was so upset and started to cry. My teacher came over, looked at the mistake very seriously for a moment, and then added a stroke on the right hand side of the ‘o’, thus magically transforming it into an ‘a’. I was completely transformed too.

The second was an English teacher at the end of secondary school at the age of 17. I wrote a crazy essay about a guru on top of a hill which I was so sure was a work of inspired genius that I didn’t bother rereading it before I turned it in. The teacher was considerably less impressed. He wrote the comment “You are such a good writer that it is really disappointing to see work of such low quality.” It was only years later that I realized what his comment had done. He separated the writer from the writing and the person from the work. He criticized the writing, but supported me as a person and a writer who was capable of so much more.

The behaviour of all teachers is governed by their assumptions about learning, motivation, and people. In many cases, these assumptions are never made explicit even to the teachers themselves, but in the two memorable cases above, the underlying assumption that mistakes are just little learning steps came through to me very positively and has stayed with me throughout my life.

Who are the teachers that made a difference in your life?

Because of my work as an editor and author of EFL materials over the years, I always have a strong interest in talking to materials developers and textbook writers. By going through the process of writing materials, these people have generally thought through issues and questions that all language teachers can benefit from. The Material Writers SIG of JALT is a group of people within JALT who also believe that material writing is an extremely important part of EFL.

In the past, the SIG has done a lot of interesting things such as organizing material writing competitions, hosting forums at JALT national, and generally raising the standard of material writing in Japanese EFL.

This year, I’ve learned a lot of things from my students and hope that they are learning as much from me. Classrooms are interesting places. Teachers teach something and students manage to learn something completely different. Students answer a question and manage to change the teacher’s beliefs.

One of my students was giving a presentation this morning and introduced the NHK Business English webpage. NHK have always offered a wonderful English language learning service. When I came to Japan first in 1991, I remember seeing the books in the bookstores for about 500 yen. This covered the entire television course which lasted for months – broadcasting once a day or once week depending on the course.

NHK has made it so much easier now by putting some of their programs on the Internet. The student explained that the Internet website was always a week behind the television version, but pointed out that it doesn’t matter at all. He also pointed out the interesting fact that it is now completely free. Apparently, there still are printed books for the courses, but it also appears that most of the materials are available right there on the website, too. NHK is offering free well-produced English lessons that this student and his friends are learning from. A friend of his has studied from NHK for years and is now quite fluent.

So, why I asked him, why do people pay money to go to language schools – in many cases a lot of money over a long period of time? His answer was very concise and to the point: “these people pay money because they want to learn something and they think it will be better if they pay money for it … but they are wrong.”
And I agree with him that in the majority of cases, paying money for something when an equivalent is available online is generally wrong. By paying for something, we perceive it as having a greater value and are therefore likely to give it more attention. Another student pointed out that ‘attention’ was the important point because we will learn if we give attention to someone. So if we can perceive the free materials as having equal value, then we will apply the same attention to them, and therefore learn just as much.

I’m not saying that this is the first time that I learned this important idea, but to learn it again from my students was a powerful experience which has made me look again at the areas in my life where I spend money because of a higher perceived value. Am I sometimes paying for something and then applying attention to it because I have paid for it? With the economic downturn, I am sure that the student and me are not the only people who will be looking much more carefully about whether our money should only be spent after looking very carefully at the places where our attention can generate the best results without charge.

I just received my author’s copy of a lovely new book edited by Brian Tomlinson and Hitomi Masuhara titled Research for Materials Development in Language Learning. This was an enormous project for the editors as they worked to draw together strands of research into materials development from all around the world. They have done a fine job indeed.

The book is divided into five parts.

• Part I: Research on the Effects of Extensive Reading
• Part II: Research on the Effects of In-House Materials for University Students
• Part III: Research on the Effects of In-House Materials on Language Learning
• Part IV: Research on the Effectiveness of Materials
• Part V: Applications of the Research Results

I’ll be posting further comments as I begin reading the book in detail over the next few weeks or months. It is a fine resource for anyone involved in materials design.

My own chapter draws on my PhD research with Japanese songwriters and is titled The L2 Songwriter. When I get time, I will be posting some summaries of the findings until it becomes more widely available in published form.