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Supporting your Japanese language program

Manten Resources

The Over-Justification Effect

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In December, many teachers are either rejoicing or lamenting the numbers in their elective cohort. Our teaching community is incredibly generous, and I have seen many extensive lists shared, promoting the numerous positive outcomes of studying a language.

I was thus horrified to learn of the “Over-justification effect” and whilst I do not suggest you abandon your current marketing campaign, you may want to declutter it somewhat in light of the following research.

In 1973 a study was conducted by psychologist Mark Lepper that discovered that having too many incentives actually decreases the effectiveness of the original incentive and can undermine or dilute the central reason we pursue an activity. (page 39, Get it done – surprising lessons from the science of motivation” by Dr Ayelet Fishbach)

This concept was developed further by research by Maimaran and Fishbach. The 2014 project encouraged preschoolers to eat healthy foods by telling them eating such foods had benefits including making you strong or helping you learn to count. This had the surprising effect of actually reducing the children’s consumption of the healthy snacks as they assumed that a snack that served multiple purposes (such as making you strong and helping you learn) was less likely to be meet the main reason they were originally interested in the snacks – because they tasted good. This is also supported by another concept called the “Dilution principle” that suggests that the more incentives there are the more a person is distracted from their original intrinsic motivation. (page 41, Fishbach)

This gave me cause to reflect on the mixed messages I may be sending my students.

If they are naturally motivated to study Japanese because they want to communicate in that language, want to visit Japan and are interested in Japanese culture, am I really helping the cause my mentioning it will improve their literacy skills and brain function.

I then became curious and googled the question “Why should you learn a second language, art or music?”.

The gist of the quote was that music would help bring balance and harmony into my life, art could make me better at whatever I do whilst languages would help me retain lists and concentrate for longer!

If I was a kid choosing an elective, it stands to reason that the more we tell them it is “good for them” the less it will seem to be a fun option. 

Despite what we are told, people don’t hate learning languages and don’t find it boring – when it is not in the school context. My own teenage son and his mates have been learning random languages based purely on interest via Duolingo. Their language choices were not based on any cultural affiliation or actual desire to study that language for gains in the future, they just thought it would be fun.

Duolingo are obviously doing something right as they are quoted as having generated $250 million in revenue in 2021, a 55% year-on-year increase with over 500 million registered users and 37 million users active each month. By contrast, the HSC enrolments in Japanese for both Beginners and Continuers hover around 1200 per course each year – we could use some Duolingo 55% year-on-year increases!

If you look at the Duolingo website the benefits they list for learning a language are all about human connection. They sight examples of how it has helped a footballer connect with his teammates, others to connect with their spouse’s family or the local community, or as a fun activity to do with a partner. This fun perspective of language learning is not crowded out by any extraneous incentives.

Perhaps it is time we also begin to focus on these original reasons why people learn a language, predominately for human connection, and just maybe then our cohorts will remember too, why they loved us in the first place.

Time for some Christmas Cheer!

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I was shocked to realize that there are only 5 weeks left until Christmas. This time of year is an enjoyable time for me as I love to hear from teachers who are setting up new programs and adding new resources to their tool kit for the following year.

I have also been inspired to launch a new resource for Stage 6 Beginners targeting scaffolding text types. This resource will be called The Kaeru Project, and the workbooks can be used parallel to classwork, so it does not matter if you are using Jblog 4 or a combination of your own materials. The booklets provide students with 3 short writing lessons (5-15 minutes each) working through scaffolds that unpack sample responses to HSC style questions. These will be launched for 2024 with the following booklets currently in the review stage:

Course 1: Diaries and Dialogues (plain form)

Course 2: Casual emails and letters (plain form)

Course 3: Transitioning from Casual to Polite texts (including speeches)

Although they specifically target Stage 6 Beginners, they would also be of use to Stage 5 and Stage 6 Continuers students or as a resource to use when compiling your own reading exams.

I currently have a work experience student who has been testing these out for me and they suggested we run a Christmas contest offering a free copy of Course 1 as a prize.

We will have 3 draws with two winners each week:

November 20th, December 4th and December 11th.

All non-winners from Week 1 will be automatically entered into the following week’s draw.

To enter, please complete the survey via this link. (Don’t worry – it only has one real question!)

You just need to share with us a message of how Manten resources have helped you in your educational setting. Your kind messages and tales of how you incorporate our resources into your programs are so inspiring.

So spread a little Christmas cheer and enter today!

Learning from Assessments

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Being a student is difficult. Many of us may have forgotten what it feels like now we spend our days on the other side of the desk. Learning makes us vulnerable and most of us are not sufficiently comfortable with the inevitable errors and failures that accompany progress.

High school students are even more vulnerable. They are in the midst of a physical and emotional transformation that make it difficult to hear and take on advice – particularly from adults. They are incredibly judgemental of themselves and are surrounded by a world where anyone can “comment” on virtually anything. No wonder they are paranoid about making mistakes in class.

Some take the self-sabotaging highway to avoid the vulnerability. Student A yesterday informed me they had spent all weekend playing computer games and were tired today as a result – today being the first day of their 2-week exam period. The fact that they chose to tell me this was not meant as an insult but rather a justification to themselves as to why they were about to perform poorly. They know the behaviour is not going to lead them to success but in their minds, it does have the benefit of shielding them from the anxiety of putting your best out there for judgement.

Student B in my class is the complete opposite. They have developed a thicker skin against the pain of feedback by putting themselves out there in every single class task. They never skip a task even if it is optional or challenging and they apply my feedback to subsequent tasks.

Teaching Student A and Student B reminds me of what it is like to be a parent. You can have two children raised by the same parents in the same emotional and economic environment, but the children may end up very different. As teachers, all our students may not experience the same level of success in our courses despite our best efforts.

Students cannot control what will be in the assessment or the grade they will receive. They cannot even control their mindset on the day, the level of anxiety they feel or what may be happening at home in the lead-up to the task. What they can control though is what they choose to learn from the experience, and this is where we can help them the most.

Share how to prepare

Many students genuinely have a limited idea of how to prepare for a test. Marie Kondo talks about how parents assume children know how to clean-up their room and as a result no one explicitly teaches them how to do it efficiently and effectively. The same could be said for study.

For speaking exams, writing sample answers is a good start because if they have never created those sentences before, they are unlikely to spontaneously come up with fabulous answers during the test. Although the exam requires the ability to answer unseen questions, in the early days providing set questions to build upon is a great start.

The next step is detailed feedback about what they did well and where they can improve. This needs to be explicit though eg Great use of connectives and conjunctions to link ideas such as the te form, でも、そして、それから、てから. I like to use the single point rubric feedback scale to do this.

A vital final step is then what you have the students do with that feedback. For example, you could make them select 5 questions they could have answered better, draft new responses to those questions and after feedback from you on the written redraft, record in pairs the 5 questions. This has the benefit of helping the student who is simply asking the questions, be exposed to how others are responding and the type of vocabulary and grammar they are favouring.

For more passive sections such as listening and reading, you can focus the post-assessment task on reflection. These ideas are then collated by the teacher into checklists lists under the headings what I planned to do, what I did, what I think will be a successful strategy next time. The teacher should go through with the class these strategies explicitly and elicit from students the pros and cons of each strategy.

And finally, don’t forget to learn from the experience as well. What does the performance of each student in the assessment tell you about their learning? How can you embed further regular review and practice in class for these weaker areas? One benefit of online learning has been the ability to use breakout rooms to specifically pair students to work on differentiated tasks and jump between the rooms as needed. The students will help you if the technology is an issue – another opportunity to demonstrate a growth mindset to them!

 

Jblog 4 Year 12 Resources including workbook tasks, sound files and google forms are now available. Email jblog1help@gmail.com to order these or the sample Year 12 assessment tasks.

Year 12 2022 Assessment ideas

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“Many people wish they started sooner. Almost nobody wishes they started later.” James Clear

Term 3 has been a long and difficult term for many regions due to lockdowns and restrictions. It is heartbreaking to watch some of our students crumble a little at the edges and difficult to offer support through the barrier of a screen. The preoccupation for many has been our Year 12 2021 students, particularly in NSW regarding the timing and format of a 2021 HSC.

The dust has finally settled, and we have a plan to aim for. We now need to turn our attention to our plans for the Year 11 cohort as they move into Year 12 in Term 4. With one week of term left, deadlines for assessment task schedules may be looming. To assist with this we have created three Year 12 tasks that are designed to work in with your 4th formal Trial HSC task.

Each task is $70 or $210 for the set of three and the suggested weighting grid.

The topics assessed are:

Task 1: School trip preparation – Written response to an oral text (Reading and writing skills)

Task 2: Well-being Centre – Response to written and spoken texts (Listening, reading and writing skills)

Task 3: House Swap – Response to a written text/interview (Reading and speaking skills)

Although these tasks are specifically designed for the Stage 6 Beginners course, teachers of other courses may find them useful as inspiration for their own teacher developed tasks. As always, you are encouraged to edit the tasks to suit your cohort.

To order, email me at jblog1help@gmail.com

Lockdown lessons

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“Learning lessons does not end. There’s no part of life that doesn’t contain its lessons. If you’re alive, that means there are still lessons to be learned.”

Source: If Life Is a Game, These Are the Rules by Cherie Carter-Scott

As the lockdown period continues for many of us, there are no shortage of lessons to be learned about our current experience. Whilst there have been many disappointments and disruptions to the school calendar, there have been many opportunities for us to develop our skills as educators in the zoom environment. As a parent of a Year 8 boy, I am also aware of the students’ perspective of the online learning environment. Here are 3 quick reminders of Zoom lesson plans that students dislike.

1.The random generated group function for breakout rooms

My son was placed in a random group with just himself and a girl he didn’t know. They didn’t turn on their video or say anything the entire lesson. They are teenagers – of course this is bound to happen! Students would rather work alone than with people they don’t know or are not friends with. So would I for the most part …

2.“You can’t be trusted to work with your friends”.

Really? It is pandemic – if they go off task and talk to someone they like for part of the lesson, is that actually such a bad thing in the current climate? Instead, build in structures so that you can see how they are working together. Have them use a shared document that you observe in real time, or pop into the rooms of pairs you are concerned about using the “join” function.

3.Stick to the 5:2 rule as much as you can

My son is a fairly focused, conscientious student but nothing gives him anxiety more than the teacher who talks for the majority of the lesson and then gives them only a short amount of time to complete the actual work. Either be clear that the deadline for submission is by 8am the next day or stop talking after 10 minutes. The students should be active 5 parts to your 2 parts of the lesson.

How to make Zoom lessons more engaging and successful

I teach a year 11 Japanese Beginners class every week on Friday afternoon for 2 hours. In a conference setting, this is the graveyard spot where the speaker knows they have to work extra hard to keep the audience engaged and awake after the lunchtime slump. Here are a couple of quick techniques that are popular with my students.

1.The Lucky number warm-up

Begin the lesson by asking a student to pick a number from 1 to 10. I have a list of topics that corresponds to the number they choose. This week we did days of the week, months, verbs, adjectives, Japanese foods, zodiac animals, languages, transport words, hobbies and dates. If a student picked the number 4, for example, they had to tell me any 3 adjectives in Japanese. (You can do this in small groups too for larger classes and increase the number of words the group needs to tell you.) If they can not tell you 3 words, the class can help, and you write the 3 words in the chat. The student copies these three words down into their book for review. The student needs only list the words, they do not even need to know what they mean. The rest of the class can then be called upon to translate these words.

2.Focus phrases

For each chapter of Jblog 4 Express, I wrote two lists of 10 phrases or sample sentences for the unit. (These are part of the student workbook and have matching sound files.) As a listening warm-up, I regularly select a few of these phrases and have students jot down the translation. If a student does not know what the sentence means, they must write down at least one word they heard. They then add the translation for just that one word as we go through the answers. This can be done having the teacher read out the sentences, by playing the sound file to the group or by having a student leader read out the sentences on a rotational basis.

3.Group rotations

Online breakout rooms can work well if you survey the students in advance and establish set groups for a period of time eg 2 week cycles. When sent to work in a group, give the students specific roles and tasks to do and rotate after 5-10 minutes. For example you could have six groups of 5 students with Student A the Kanji master for rotation 1. They would have access to a stack of kanji cards that they test the group on. Then, in rotation 2, Student B might be the Speaking task leader and read out the speaking questions from a list supplied by the teacher. Another option is to keep the leaders where they are in those roles for one lesson, and move everyone else through the rotations. This is best used for review work. Student leaders could even nominate anonymously 3 excellent students each lesson to the teacher for merit award points.

Zoom lessons can be a challenge but they also provide us with many opportunities. Keep embracing the lessons to be learned and you will come out of this pandemic an even more incredible educator. 

For questions about any of these ideas or resources, please feel free to email me at jblog1help@gmail.com

 

Stage 5 virtual excursion Assessment task

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Inspired perhaps, by Greater Sydney’s return to a Covid lockdown, I have created a new assessment task for Stage 5 (Year 9 and 10). Although it is matched to NSW syllabus outcomes, it can be easily modified for any Curriculum.

It includes a class pre-task unpacking the phenomenon of  リモートでしゅうがくりょこう  (Virtual school excursions) before moving into an assessment that focuses on speaking and writing. There are three parts to the task but teachers can modify it to include all or some of the tasks as they deem appropriate.

The gist of the task is:

Your school has a Japanese sister school that visits annually. Due to Covid-19 they are unable to visit this year, so your Japanese teacher has been asked to prepare a virtual exchange visit. Your class is responsible for the virtual homestay component.

Each member of your class has been matched with a “visiting student”. You are to prepare an asynchronous homestay experience.

Although the task is designed as an assessment, teachers who have a sister school could use the task as a “real life” learning experience.

The task is $70 and includes a student handout, teacher marking guidelines and the pre-task activity.

Email me at jblog1help@gmail.com to order or for more information.

For those of us in lockdown and returning to school, good luck in the following weeks.