I suppose I should talk about this since it’s
something that all junior high schools do here.
What it is, is a speaking competition that pits
students together in groups of 3-4 per round. They have five minutes to
converse on a given topic, in English. Sounds pretty cool, especially as you
review the topics for the 8th graders. They have things like,
favorite music, favorite subject, sport, school event, etc. Very basic topics
that you’d expect junior high EFL students to be able to answer.
But then we get into the 9th graders;
topics. What do you think about video games for children? What do you think
about junior high students having cell phones? What do you do to save the
earth? And my personal favorite: What do you do to understand your classmates?
As a language learner myself, I'm of the mind that these are high school level,
if not flat-out college level, questions. I studied Japanese for a long time in
college and I am not capable of holding a quality conversation in Japanese
about such things. In fact, the last question about understanding one's class
mates? I couldn't even hold a decent conversation about that in English. I had a lot of trouble helping
them practice with that one.
One trick I told my four kids to go for was to allow
the conversation to drift onto tangents, since that is something that normal
conversations do. By the time of the actual competition, they and the other
students managed to do that fairly well, with that question in particular, but
then we came to find out, during closing ceremonies, that they aren't supposed
to do that. “Please try harder to stay on topic,” we were told. I'm sorry, but
conversations should not be so structured and rigid, I don't care if this is a
competition. The entire point is to see if they can speak English coherently,
and if they can wander off topic (as young people often do) and keep talking
with each other in English, they are obviously doing that. So, that bit of
feedback didn't sit well with me, especially since nowhere in the practice and
info packets did it say to do that. These topics are awkward enough. I couldn't
even fill the air for five minutes talking about what I “do to understand my
classmates”, and it's my damn language.
All that aside, I did have a lot of fun prepping
them for the Save the Earth topic, but unfortunately neither of my 9th
graders got to have that one. M-kun was rather disappointed about that, because
he was looking forward to using my trump card should anyone mention global
warming during the topic. Instead he got the cell phone topic. M-chan, the poor
thing, got stuck with the understanding one's classmates topic. She did really
well with it, and I made sure she knew how proud I was of her, because sadly…
M-kun was the only one of our four students to go on
to the next round. He had vastly improved in his speaking ability during our
minimal practice sessions, and obviously the judges noticed. His pronunciation
still needs work, but he did a great job with leading and redirecting the flow
of the conversation. When there was dead air, he was always the first to pick
things back up and keep talking, and he had a strong voice and listened to the
others very well.
I was a little surprised that M-chan didn't do so
well in their eyes, but on the other hand there were quite a few students that
had an edge on her, such as stronger pronunciation ability. Once we were all
dismissed, I could tell she was a little upset about the results, so I did my
best to remind her that it didn’t matter, we were all proud of her for going as
far as she did and doing as well as she did. The other thing about her is, I
know what she can do. The week prior, I had walked her home after school and
she chatted with me, in English, about anime that she liked and how she was
going to meet a voice actor in a couple weeks and how excited she was about it.
None of the others kids so far has done anything like that. I drew one of her
favorite characters on the back of her paper to try to cheer her up, and it
made her smile. :3
All this talk about the 9th graders and
hardly a word about the 8th graders. Here's why: At first, during
practice, they showed interest in wanting to compete and do well, and they
began to improve. The last week or so, however, that improvement disappeared
and they didn't seem to care too much anymore. Come the competition, it was
obvious that they were done. They didn't seem to care that they had lost; they
were happy to be done with it. XP They did fairly well, and there were quite a
few students that did worse than they, but yeah. They didn't care anymore.
As for how the school handled the whole thing… I'm
of the mind that it wasn't a top priority to them. Some schools start practice
in early May, and we didn't begin until June. We'd get 15 minutes after lunch
most days, and 50 minutes after school (unless it was a Monday or the week of a
test, in which case there was no practice at all). They could have used a lot
more time, but we weren't given that, and in my opinion it showed. I figure
they care more about sports events.
So, enough about my kids and the prep work. Let's
talk about the actual competition some more! Ono sensei and I were to accompany
the kids to the event. I was told to dress up like I do for my bi-monthly
meetings, which meant pants and button-down blouse in July. And we stood out there waiting for the taxis (and one of
the students) for a good ten minutes, in the sun… I could feel the sweat
dripping down my legs and back and the day hadn't even started yet.
Nevertheless, we finally took off. I knew almost all
of the ALTs that were there, but two or three were complete strangers to me.
One ALT was the MC, and two elementary school ALTs were the judges, to avoid
partiality. There were three rooms with 4 groups of students at any given time.
Each grade had 3 rounds that alternated, and the set up more or less allowed
for us to jump from room to room if need be to give our students support. After
the first three rounds we broke for lunch, which was rather interesting: I had
been told to bring my lunch to this thing, only to find out that there were bentos provided (and I'm assuming we had
to pay for them). I sat down with our students, whom all had to bring their own
lunches, and I overheard a teacher behind me saying how she looked forward to
this bento each year. I could kind of
see why: It was pretty fancy looking, but honestly I felt bad for the students
and was happy to have my meager home-cooked meal alongside them. Seemed a
little arrogant to make the students do all this practice and put all this
pressure on them, and have the teachers eat a congratulatory lunch while the
kids eat whatever they were able to throw together that morning. But I digress.
The final three rounds worked the same way as the
first three, but we were fortunate in that, for the final pair of rounds, both
students were in the same room and both Ono sensei and I were able to stay with
them both and cheer them on (silently).
Once that was over, we all piled back into the main
room for Closing ceremonies, but while we waited they decided to have an
Interactive Japanese Forum with the ALTs. My students goaded me into the
second, intermediate round, where I was more or less drowned out by the four
guys as they talked about what they did during recess (which I don't have…).
But whatever. The students got a kick out of it. :D
Then the feedback was given about how they need to
work on their pronunciation and clarity (yep…), their volume level, listening
skills, and finally staying on topic. After that, the winners were announced.
None of the MC's students was going on to the next round, and while they were
of course bummed about that, he saw it as a relief: No more practice! And I don't
blame him. After getting a taste for this competition, I'm not all that
impressed with it. I'd rather they focus on having a practical conversation with
another person about things that interest them. Fifteen-year olds discussing
saving the earth? How far do you expect them to take that? I encouraged mine to
keep it local, like picking up trash and turning off lights and faucets. When
they asked me about global warming, I gave them a crash course in terminology
and what certain things mean, and gave them the phrase, “climate change”, and
what it meant, as a way to shut down the competition. XD They both got a kick
out of that. I was bummed they didn't get to talk about it at all.
Well, once the winners were announced and
certificates handed out, we took a few commemorative photos and then called the
taxis back. Headed back to the school and announced to the vice principal how
well they did. All in a day's work! Heh…
No comments:
Post a Comment