A creative, energetic, fully qualified teacher of Japanese is employed on a yearly contract for three days per week in a primary school to teach all 500 students for 30 or 40 min per class per week (depending on the year level). The teacher has excellent language and cultural skills and a passion for Japan, Japanese and teaching. The teacher designs interesting and engaging activities but has no set curriculum, and responds to students’ interests and needs or the current ‘integrated curriculum’ topic without long-term planning. The course is based on maximising student engagement rather than language outcomes.
Issues
The teacher teaches every year level over three days: 500 students in total.
The teacher is only in the school three days per week and only teaches each class once. She needs to teach in another school to make up a full-time load. In both schools, she is isolated as she is the only Japanese teacher, and is not a full-time or permanent staff member.
At times the program is interrupted by other whole school or whole year level events such as swimming lessons. The teacher may not see a particular class for weeks on end.
The teacher cannot adhere to curriculum and assessment frameworks because the time allocation per class is less than one-fifth of that recommended in the state or territory.
The teacher is at times required to teach cross- curriculum modules integrating Japanese with other subject areas. However, this occurs with little consideration for the Japanese program and how the language involved will be beneficial to the students’ overall learning. Often little language development results.
Due to time and organisational restrictions, students from P–6 all study the same topic at the same time, with some variation in activities and expectations.
The teacher is capable of providing a quality program but is not being supported to do so by the system.
The teacher believes that a sequential program would be more productive and satisfying and is frustrated at the inability to implement a program with the depth and structure to develop sequential linguistic and sociocultural knowledge and skills.
Results
The students ‘do’ Japanese for seven years but retain little due to insufficient time for exposure and repetition.
The program is enjoyable and fun but does not provide a sequential language learning experience and offers limited educational outcomes.
The time allocation sends a message indirectly to students and to the school community that the learning of Japanese is unimportant.
The opportunity provided by a competent and enthusiastic teacher is not maximised.
There is little satisfaction for the teacher in the present job structure and she will move on if the opportunity arises, so the school experiences a constant ‘churn’ of teaching staff.
Comment
The situation described here is typical of primary schools across Australia and may be worse. Quality primary school Japanese programs cannot be delivered within a structure where the Japanese language program fits around all other teaching and learning, and is not valued by the school, which does not or cannot offer the teacher a permanent full-time position and is not concerned that a comprehensive curriculum is not being delivered. Programs like this fulfil government requirements on paper but waste students’ time and teachers’ talent, commitment and enthusiasm.
Japanese is taught from P–4 by a full-time, committed Japanese teacher (native speaker of Japanese, trained in Japan and Australia) who has developed a curriculum that maximises language learning in the time allocation of 90-minutes per week. Language development is the focus of classroom activities that aim to develop students’ intercultural skills and include the use of ICT as a communication tool. At Years 5 and 6, students enter a middle school program taught by another teacher.
Timetabling is driven by pedagogic considerations. A deliberate decision by the teacher resulted in a change from 2 x 45 min to 3 x 30 min sessions at P–2. More frequent Japanese classes meant less repetition of content was required and the students valued Japanese more because they had more classes. The students’ ability and progress improved. At Years 3 and 4, the students were able to concentrate for a longer period and scheduling reverted to 2 x 45 min, giving students time to work independently on tasks.
The teacher approaches the teaching and learning of Japanese through the application of principles of Japanese second language acquisition. There is an organised and sequential approach to Japanese language and literacy development.
The teacher uses, wherever relevant, new methodologies and strategies but only after careful consideration of how they fit with the existing program and how they will result in improvement of student learning.
The teacher believes that use of technology and exchanges with Japanese students are two key aspects of the program which particularly encourage engagement in the Japanese class. The use of technology is incorporated into the curriculum extensively where it can be justified in terms of language outcomes.
In addition to games on the computer designed to improve language skills, the Year 4 students are involved in a web conferencing program which enables them to communicate with a class of similar age in Japan. The classes have exchanged a soft toy which each student took home for a few days. Students took photographs of the toy in their homes and wrote a diary in Japanese about what the student and the soft toy did. This diary was then sent to the class in Japan. This gave the students’ writing purpose, context and an audience. It also linked their web conferencing to other classroom work and allowed the students to gain an insight into the lives of their peers in Japan, and an opportunity to reflect on differences and similarities with their own lives.
Results
By Year 4, students have acquired rudimentary linguistic and communicative skills, as well as the cognitive benefits and language awareness associated with such learning. They use these skills to engage in meaningful communicative activities with peers in Japan, which they find exciting and satisfying. At the same time, they gain cultural knowledge and insights and have the opportunity to reflect on their own and others’ lives.
Comment
Factors which enable the delivery of a quality primary program include commitment by the school to employing a permanent, well-qualified teacher, allocation of adequate teaching time (90 min) and resources. This has allowed the teacher to develop a detailed, sequential language learning program, which incorporates meaningful communication and an intercultural focus. If the teaching time were increased to the recommended 150 min prevailing in the state or territory, it could be expected that results would be even more impressive.
