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I realized the other day that I usually include a sentence like, “Many of my students didn’t attend junior high school,” in my blog posts. It’s my shorthand for explaining my school environment. But it probably doesn’t do much by way of giving a full picture of what my school is all about. So I thought I would take a few minutes and do a better job of putting the issues I deal with on this blog in context.
Most of my students, about 80%, have suffered from school refusal syndrome. Before I worked here, I had never heard of school refusal syndrome. And even though it puts me at risk for loosing my A+ Empathy rating, I had always figured that students who didn’t come to school fell into one of two groups, those who were ill and those who were truant.
But after talking with a large number of students who actually woke up in the morning, got dressed, and put their school bags to next to the front door to grab on the way out only to find that they couldn’t bring themselves to walk out the door, I realized that these students weren’t just skipping out on their education. They wanted to go to school. They just couldn’t get out the door to do it. Not surprising as school refusal syndrome is usually marked by a kind of generalized and pervasive anxiety about school. It can sometimes result in somatic features such as upset stomach or headaches. But if you ask students suffering from school refusal syndrome, they will insist that in spite of the anxiety, stomachaches, and whatever else they might be feeling, they would like nothing more than to go to school (Hersov, 1972).
Aside from the syndrome presenting itself as physical symptoms, there are other major psychological symptoms which correlate strongly with school refusal syndrome, including: avoidant disorder, social phobia, fear of evaluative situations, depression, attention deficit disorder (Kearney and Silverman, 1993)…actually the list stretches on and on. One striking aspect of most of these symptoms is how closely they align with the kinds of issues that impede second language acquisition. And on top of that, in Japan
So my classes are made up of a dizzying array of students with varying levels of English ability. There are students who like English, studied on their own at home, and are at an intermediate level or abov. And then there are students who are almost entirely unfamiliar with the English alphabet. With that in mind, I’ve tried to find and implement activities which can engage students of all levels. The activities need to be challenging enough so as not to induce boredom, but not so difficult that they result in the kind of anxiety that keeps a student from walking out the door in the morning.
One of the first things I noticed in class was that regardless of the level of a student’s other skills, almost all the students were true-beginners when it came to listening. But because some of the students cannot write, dictation, one of my favorite listening activities, is pretty much unusable in class, especially at the beginning of the year. So in place of words, I do a simple substitution table activity during which students keep a running dictation of the sentences by drawing pictures, an activity adapted from an in-service run by John Fanselow and expanded upon in his booklet Nveer epxailn gaammr relus or aks yuor stutends to (n.d.a). Interestingly, image based tabling also closely mirrors a number of low stress early literacy activities recommend for very young L1 learners by the Center for Early Literacy Learning (CELL, 2010).
As when using a traditional substitution table, the teacher chooses students to verbally produce sentences from tabled components. In our first year classes, the preliminary sentence components are drawn on the board in picture form by the teacher. The teacher chooses a student to combine the images into a basic sentence. The remaining students do not merely listen, but must transcribe each spoken sentence into picture form. As the students acquire more vocabulary, they are encouraged to create novel sentences based on the basic grammar pattern. Here is a series of picture-based transcriptions produced by a student while the class was tabling ‘be’ verb in the simple present tense:
['be' tabled in simple present tense]
As can be seen from the image above, even at the elementary level, students find novel ways to translate function words such as the possessive adjective ‘my,’ into pictures. As students’ reading and writing skills increase over the course of the year, students are encouraged to replace pictures with words to a larger and larger extent, but we always return occasionally to pictures. Once students have developed a set of stable images to represent words, drawing the pictures often takes less time than writing words and allows for greater amounts of language exposure during any given class period.
In addition, requiring students to translate information from words to images and then back, results in a series of decoding and encoding steps which requires a deep level of cognitive processing. This deeper level of processing, especially as it relates to image creation, has been shown to lead to high levels of retention (Craik and Tulving, 1975). Paul Nation (2009, p. 47-49) also points out that these types of transformation exercises provide good opportunities to not only learn vocabulary, but, “grammatical items contained in the spoken or written text,” as well. And students become quite adept at visually representing grammar items.
[picture based transcription of 'be' tabled the simple past tense]
As can be seen in the student produced table, a small arrow served to help remind the student of verb tense, and a cluster of the same symbols (in this case an equal sign) likewise served to help students remember that the form of the verb changed to agree with the subject of the sentence.
All in all, the activity allows all students to engage with the language on a pretty even playing field. It is challenging enough for the upper level students to stay engaged, but accessible enough for even the lowest level student to succeed. And by giving students five to ten minutes at the end of class to convert each image-based sentence into words, I can also provide students with the kind of practice they need to develop some fundamental writing skills without the pressure of orally decoding and writing at the same time.
I was talking to one of my coworkers today about the particular challenges our students face when it comes to learning English. He said, “It’s kind of a difficult situation. The more I know about our students, the more I feel we’ve set ourselves an impossible task.” I would be lying if I said I didn’t sometimes feel the same way myself. But all learners have their own obstacles to overcome when learning English. Even for the students at my school, it’s really just a question of degree. I have a third year student now who started her high school career without being able to read even the most simple sentence. She sometimes would hover outside the classroom door, afraid to turn the handle and walk in. She went from drawing pictures, to writing sentences, to being able to engage in full dictation exercises without any visible signs of anxiety. And lately, she has been helping to coach the first year students to prepare for their mid-term exams. Part of it is just the fact that she has grown up and grown out of some of her symptoms. But I would like to think that picture based dictation and the other challenging yet low anxiety activities we use in class were the soil which, at least in part, helped make her growth possible.
[This blog post is based in part on a longer, unpublished article detailing a series of lessons using a more involved, image-based transcription method called pictogloss. The pictogloss method was developed and implemented over the course of one school semester and with the assistance and timely feedback provided by my school’s International Course intermediate-level language students.]
References:
Center for Early Literacy Learning. 2010. Center
Craik, F.I.M. and Tulving, E. (1975). Depth of Processing and the retention of words in episodic memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology 104: 268-284.
Hersov, L. (1972). School Refusal. British Medical Journal 3: 102-104.
Fanselow, J. (n.d.a), Nveer epxailn gaammr relus or aks your stutends to: tapping the richness of sketches/images/icons for generating language
Nation, I.P.S. and Newton New York
