『教育研究所紀要第5号』文教大学付属教育研究所1996年発行

Bilingual Education:

Its Application in the Japanese University Classroom

Hiromi Kobayashi

Faculty of International Studies,Bunkyo University

 

This is part of a joint research on bilingual education done by Shinya Tanaka, Cary Duval, and Hiromi Kobayashi at Bunkyo University Faculty of International Studies.

 Previous studies have shown that second languages are most effectively acquired when learners have not passed the so-called "critical age" of ten. In Japan's current educational curriculum, however, students do not start learning a foreign language, until they are over 12 years of age, and English is usually the only one available. While starting to learn a second language at an earlierage might be best, the fact remains that, in Japan, the overall English levels of most university students are less than proficient, despite six years of English-language education in junior and senior high schools. At Bunkyo University's Faculty of International Studies, for instance, most students score less than 60% on the standardized English placement test, estimated to be below a score of 400 on the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL).

How could such proficiency be improved within the amount of time left to university students? The conventional "translation method" is clearly inadequate, since its products are the non-proficient students described above. In an attempt to find an alternative to the current curriculum in Japan, I looked into bilingual education in the U.S. city of Los Angeles, California, hoping to find hints for a method more suitable for the Japanese classroom.

Bilingual Education at Denker Avenue Elementary School in Los Angeles

The Korean-English immersion program at Denker Avenue Elementary School in Los Angeles, California, has provided some useful guidelines. The school was chosen partly because it had some experience in Japanese-English immersion programs in the past and partly because the Korean program's newness would presumably provide a better example for Bunkyo University to follow.

The Denker program was developed to fulfill the need of Korean immigrants in Los Angeles who wanted their children to learn English so that they could function well socially in their new country without losing their Korean language and cultural identity.(1) It is modeled on other immersion programs that have already demonstrated their effectiveness by producing a large number of successful bilinguals who interact and work between English and other societies.

The Denker program is structured as follows: The Los Angeles Unified School District introduced a two-way immersion program in Korean in three elementary schools. Denker was one of them. The program emphasizes mathematics and science, and computer technology is used to facilitate the interdisciplinary approach in these areas.

Classes are about 30 in size, one half of whom are Korean-Americans (KAs) and the other half of whom are English- speaking children from different ethnic origins (EOs). All teachers, who act as the Korean role model, and possess Bilingual Cross Language Academic Development Certificate (BCLAD), are fully qualified to participate in bilingual education. Assistants, who act as the English role model, must be enrolled in or have graduated from a program granting a teaching license and/or BCLAD. All teaching materials in Korean meet California State standards corresponding to the same levels as standard English-only programs so they can be evaluated by standardized tests.

At the kindergarten level, class time is divided roughly into 70% Korean and 30% English; English is being used only to teach language arts and for tutorials. The percentage of English is gradually increased until it reaches 50% in the fourth grade, and remains at this level throughout the rest of elementary school.

One of the Denker program's important features is that fluency is regarded as more important than strict accuracy in promoting student spontaneity and communications skills. Following the general trend in teaching English as a second language, content, rather than the language itself, is emphasized. Teachers do not continually correct students' minor mistakes, for example, but wait for the students or others to discover their own errors. The teacher makes corrections only when students seemed unable to understand what is being taught. Students are not reprimanded, either, if they respond in their native language, but the teacher and the assistant consistently use the target language.

The spontaneous nature of this approach helps prevent students from reacting negatively to enforced second- language acquisition and keep them from stigmatizing their own culture and language, which is caused by the denial of the validity of their native tongue in some other teaching methods. A student who seems to be having problems promptly receives individual attention through tutorials or counseling--another important point.

Another feature of the methods used at Denker is the emphasis on listening comprehension through a "silent period, "during which students listen to a variety of comprehension-oriented materials. This method is based upon findings that listening comprehension improves first in the natural progression of language development, and methods that take this finding into account have proved to be effective.(2)

The Denker program also has a comprehensive evaluation system: it uses several tests to evaluate student progress. One is the Student Oral Language Observation Matrix in which language proficiency is divided into five areas: comprehension, fluency, vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar. Each area is then divided into five levels--level 1 indicating practically no comprehension or communication and level 5 indicating near-native language proficiency. Another test is the Korean Literacy Test developed by the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA); this test is divided into reading and writing sections.

In addition to these two independent tests, the evaluation system is substantiated by the comparison of results with other control groups. The Korean Literacy Test has been given to Denker students, KAs in regular classes and students in Seoul, Korea. The result shows that KAs in the program generally do better than EOs. While Koreans in Seoul do better than KAs, especially on the kindergarten level, the scores for the first-grade KAs are comparable to those for native Koreans. On the whole, the evaluation indicates that the program has been successful.

The program had only been in place three years when I visited Denker in 1995, so a final analysis remains to be made, but initial results appear quite encouraging.(3) One foreseeable problem with the program, however, is the lack of follow-up at the junior and senior high school levels.

Japanese Situation vs. Denker

Before the promising results at Denker can be applied to the Japanese university situation, the environments at Denker and in Japan must be meaningfully compared. Unlike students in Japan, for example, the students at Denker are in an ideal situation for second- language acquisition. At home, they are immersed in the native tongue of their parents, which is Korean in this case, and once they go outside the home, they are immersed in English. Having substantial exposure to both languages, they can learn the two languages more easily, given the right incentives.

The incentive factor cannot be ignored. In certain social situations, the parents' language may be looked down upon, and the children may refuse to learn it, hoping thereby to blend in better with the dominant society. In other cases, the society may force children to use only the "proper language," e.g., English instead of Korean. In either case, children often end up monolingual in the dominant, socially acceptable language.

The reverse can also happen. If a family is ostracized from society, they may, either as an expression of defiance or purely in self-defense, refuse to learn the dominant language, thereby creating a protective mental barrier that helps maintain their original identity and self-esteem.

Although similar problems may arise in Japan, these cases are not currently directly applicable in the Japanese classroom, where no comparable linguistic rivalry exists. Japan is essentially a monoracial, monolingual society. Its only large ethnic group is its Korean community, which makes up 0.5% of the total population, or slightly less than 60% of all foreign residents. Thus, Japan, as a nation, has no direct exposure to foreign languages, making the acquisition of a second language unnecessary for all practical and domestic intents and purposes.

Japan's centuries-long story of self- imposed isolation also created an environment where foreign languages were anathema for long years. Its foreign trade, for example, was so limited that an extremely small number of government-approved professional translators and interpreters was sufficient for the nation to survive. This background still influences the Japanese mentality. Although Japan's role in today's global society requires a large cadre at least possessing a working knowledge of foreign languages -- particularly English, rapidly becoming the globe's lingua franca -- the majority of Japanese still feel at heart that a few well-trained professionals should be able to meet the demand, or, if necessary, the nation can "rise to the occasion" if no other alternative exists.

Today's comprehensive and instantaneous communication networks are swiftly shrinking the globe and rendering boundaries almost meaningless. The easygoing attitudes held by most Japanese ignore the fact that report after research report has repeatedly shown that foreign-language acquisition, to be effective, requires a large amount of time and effort be invested. Precisely for this reason, both the government and the public are dragging their feet. The Ministry of Education recently announced a new foreign- language education guideline for high schools that emphasizes communicative skills, but has failed to increase the available staffing and financial resources required to implement such a guideline.

The Ministry's strict, comprehensive control makes it practically impossible to amend the present curriculum to match the new guideline. In a social complication of this untenable situation, the "successful" performance of English teachers in Japanese high schools is generally judged by both parents and students based on the number of students these teachers have placed successfully in top-ranking universities. This involves drilling students in ways such as rote memorization that will enable students to pass college entrance examinations. College entrance exams tend to test only written vocabulary and reading skills, partly because of the current practical difficulties that universities would have in securing audio facilities adequate enough to test the listening comprehension skills of entrance exam applicants.

The problem, in short, is: what can be done to improve the university-level English-language skills of students who typically arrive in the class with 6 years of out-dated, inapplicable reading training only? Bilingual education as practiced at Denker provides us with several possible measures that can be effectively implemented. They would actually be best used on a junior high school level when students are first given English instruction, but under the present conditions, they could be used as corrective measures to help incoming students at the university level.

Language-Study Experiment at Bunkyo University's Faculty of International Studies

Before discussing the new policy adapted in part from the Denker program, the English program at Bunkyo's Faculty of International Studies (FIS) must be reviewed. When I started teaching at FISin spring 1994, the existing curriculum for the entire Faculty was in its fifth year and plans were being made for a new curriculum to be implemented the following year.

The new curriculum, which was to become effective for incoming students could not be implemented immediately, however, because it first had to be approved by FIS and then by the Ministry of Education. Basic strucural plans for the new curriculum had, unfortunately, already been decided by the curriculum committee before I started supervising the English program, so here I will simply describe and analyze the system and its problems under the old and new curricula and propose possible directions to be taken in future. The following is the skeleton of the English programs under the two curricula:

Old Curriculum

Eight required courses in 3 years
First year 3 courses: Reading, speaking, and listening (LL)
Second year 2 courses: Reading, and speaking
Third year 3 courses: Reading, speaking, and writing

New Curriculum

Seven required courses + 1 elective in 3 years
First year 3 courses: Reading, speaking,and listening(LL)
Second year 3 courses: Reading, speaking and writing
Third year 1 course: Writing + 1 elective: Speaking, business English, computer English, TOEFL training, etc.

As at Denker, FIS emphasizes practical skills that help prepare students for international business and academic work. Each course meets once a week for 90 minutes only and students are generally poorly prepared because they have so many other required courses. The curriculum committee was against increasing class hours. In fact, they reduced the number of required English courses. One possible solution was to put all the English courses in the first two years. Even this was rejected, however, because the committee felt that specialized courses should be introduced as early as possible so students would have a better idea of what they want to major in.

Under the old English program, in- coming students were first divided into seven groups by student ID number, then subdivided into two smaller groups of roughly 20 each based on placement test results--14 groups in all. Repeaters were distributed evenly so that the actual class size was roughly 25. This division was implemented up through the third year, the last year of English-language training at FIS.

The placement test examined listening comprehension only, based on the as- sumption that Japanese students who did well in listening comprehension would do well in other areas, such as reading.Although this may be largely true, this places students good at reading but poor at listening in a lower class. Since scheduling makes it impossible to have different grouping for each area of skill, such students are placed in a low class even in reading. Understand- ably, this leaves both students and instructors--most instructors are part-time, incidentally--dissatisfied, particularly because the grouping in the first year became, for lack of staffing and funds, a fixed arrangement.

University management wanted to enlarge classes to 25, partly to meet the Ministry of Education regulation on the number of part-timers, but mainly for financial reasons. The total number of groups was decided at 12, with an extra group added for repeaters so they could receive more individual attention. Some flexibility was allowed for repeaters, because even a class of 25 is difficult to manage. For speech classes, especially, where the number of repeaters exceeded 25, students are divided into two groups.

At any rate, a better grouping system was required to offset the larger class size. The first step was to include reading in the placement test to judge students' general English proficiency levels. The second step was to track them completely so that materials and methods suitable for individual students' abilities could be used. The third step was the introduction of placement tests for second- and third-year students so they would be placed in suitable classes each year.

The placement test was standardized to measure student progress objectively. The old listening test used for the last five years enabled only a limited comparison, being used by few other universities. A modified TOEFL version was initially considered to ensure an international comparison, but TOEFL is not necessarily practical for FIS students, for several reasons. First, TOEFL tests are too American-education- oriented for Japanese students. Second, the Ministry of Education has not recognized TOEFL as a qualification for exemption. Third, most FIS students would score so low that evaluation would become meaningless.

For these reasons, FIS chose the Japanese English Proficiency Test, which tests both listening comprehension and reading and is approved by the Ministry of Education. The target is to have the majority of Bunkyo students pass the second level of this test, so a modified second-level version was given.

One notable feature of the old English program was that all speech classes were taught by native English speakers, even though they were not all qualified bilingual teachers as in the case of Denker. This feature has been retained in the new program because exposure to spoken native English is essential to improving students' listening comprehension, which, in turn, is vital to practical skills as the Denker case indicates. Under the new program, language lab and reading, taught by Japanese teachers, are also conducted in English whenever possible.

Students reacted initially with surprise because most were not used to this method, but most responded favorably. I taught reading to the lowest class last year, and the students responded in the questionnaire that they wanted me to speak a little more slowly, but did not want me to stop using English. In fact, about half progressed to more advanced groups this year, with one student scoring highest in the placement test.

Our first target area for improving listening was language lab (LL). Under the old program, LL hours were divided into two activities--listening and speed reading. This was done because of the short student attention span that made it difficult to maintain concentration for 90 minutes. Because we have only one LL and scheduling is so complex, it is difficult to divide the 90 minutes into 45 minutes or to combine it with reading or speaking course so students can have LL twice a week. To find a way to keep students alert 90 minutes so the course would improve students' listening comprehension, LL activities are now divided into two parts. The first half of the class hour is devoted to listening to tapes and the second half involves a video to add some variety.

This seems to work fairly well. However, to push students further, it might be useful to introduce dictation. I am currently experimenting with two groups--one at the lowest and the other at the second-best level. Interestingly enough, the bottom can manage its task if given sufficient time and help, and if ready to work hard. Currently, the performance of roughly half of the students in the bottom class is on a par with the other group. This is remarkable, considering that some of the students in the bottom class scored zero in the listening comprehension section of the placement test.

The result of this year's placement test for the class of 1995 show that they have improved an average of 6 points. This is not particularly remarkable of itself, but the number of students who scored above the minimum passing point of 60 at the English Proficiency Second Class level doubled from 52 last year to 110 this year, or from 17% to 37%.

This improvement was made almost entirely in listening comprehension; little improvement was observed in reading. This is as it should be, because it means students are following a normal natural-language development pattern, in which listening improves first, then then speaking, followed by reading and writing. According to data provided by the Los Angles Unified School District (4) , reading and writing begin developing when listening ability approached minimal school proficiency in English, and reading surpasses speaking slightly before the student reaches functional school proficiency.

Our experience at FIS also supports the above findings. Under the old program, regular English writing courses were not given until the third year because only two courses were available in the second year. Under the new program, it starts in the second year. Currently, the first top half of students is taught by native English speakers and the second half is taught by Japanese teachers, since placement test results indicate that the top half has attained minimal school proficiency, whereas the other half has not. Although native English-speaking teachers now start teaching writing to sophomores, rather than juniors under the old program, they find this more satisfying than the old system, which placed students with highly varied abilities in the same group.

What strikes me most about one writing class I am now teaching to a group in the bottom half, is their poor mastery of simple English sentences. They do not remember basic sentence patterns, even though they can recognize them when reading. This again shows that, on the basic level at least, sentences must be memorized through listening and speaking, not only by reading, if students are to be able to reproduce them.

How can we help these less advanced students? One way is reproduction: let students listen to short passages either recorded or read by the teacher, then reproduce what they hear as well as they can. A more drastic solution would be to have native English speakers teach the first-year reading course so that students would be forced to develop listening comprehension further. This solution cannot be immediately implemented, however, for logistic and financial reasons. Our best bet thus seems to be to introduce reproduction in the first term, then move on to paragraph writing in the second term.

The arrival of Internet and other global computer networks will make basic practical English writing essential for FIS students. As mentioned earlier, however, reading must improve before writing can improve. Our next immediate target, therefore, is reading.

Although students seem to respond well to English-only instruction, their placement tests scores show they have not progressed well in this area. In the past, there was little coordination among part-timers who come in on different days. Because only two full-time English teachers were in residence until1995, part-timers were asked to select select textbooks and teaching methods at their own discretion. Now FIS has four full- -time staff. Considering the fact that FIS accepts 300 students each year and more than one hundred English classes have to be taught altogether, the number is far from sufficient. Currently we employ 23 part-time teacher teachers (12 Japanese and 11 native English speakers). Still, without the two additional full-timers, FIS's current improvement would have been impossible.

Next year, we will assign two types of reading texts for first-year students-- a standardized text and one chosen by the teacher in charge. The standardized text will cover reading strategy, which is not properly taught in most high schools in Japan. Considering the wide range of abilities among incoming students, two standardized texts will be selected, one for beginners and the other for intermediates. We hope that this will also be useful in vocabulary building.

For the second-year reading, we would like to introduce native English speakers in work with more advanced students, to better prepare them for practical work situations or academic experience abroad. We may have to wait one more year to do this, however, because our first priority is planning the third-year elective English course. Questionnaires have been sent to second-year students to see what areas they are most interested in. The results will help us optimally combine available staff and resources.

As mentioned earlier, conventional teaching methods employed in high schools and at FIS have not provided sufficient training in listening comprehension to build up the other three required skills. The new English program is in its second year this year, and we already have important data on both student levels and progress. As the program matures next year, we hope to have a better perspective of the directions in which the program should go next. Current improvements are only the beginning of a series that will be needed to provide our students with a more solid language foundation.

Footnotes

1. That the state of California already has successful two-way immersion programs in Japanese and Spanish undoubtedly helped promote the Korean program at Denker.

2. Their data is primarily based on a study by Ed de Avila.

3. An important factor behind its success seems to be the support of parents, who participate actively in PTA activities, for example.

4. Op. cit.

References

Krashen, Stephen, The Input Hypothesis: Issues and Implications, Laredo Publishing Company, 1985.

Koike, Ikuo, Ed., Second Language Acquisition, Taishukan-shoten, 1994.

Lessow-Hurley, Judith, The Foundations of Dual Language Instruction, Longman, 1990.

Sadtono, Eugenius, Ed., Language Acquisition/Foreign Language Classroom, SEAMEO Regional Language Centre, 1991.

Sadtono, Eugenius, Ed., Language Teacher Education in a Fast-Changing World, SEAMEO Regional Language Centre, 1991.

Tickoo, Makhan L., Ed., Languages and Standards: Issues, Attitudes, Case Studies, SEAMEO Regional Language Centre, 1991.