Almalang_Newsletter2022_EN_WEB

students to speak a second language in class. That was practically unheard of at the time.

any student is guaranteed to do well in, as long as they focus and spend a reasonable amount of energy during class. We make sure that the process of preparing for the tests is both enjoyable (they have inter actions with their classmates) and fruitful (they make some progress, and are aware of it). And we reward them with a mark, a fewpoints that go towards their final grade. We do this from the second class at the very beginning of their university year, so that this process gets ingrained from the outset and then happens during every sin gle class that follows. The students quickly get it. Before they know it, they have devel oped good habits about how to participate in class, the atmosphere is good and the class is just rolling. And later, you find that you no longer depend on conducting tests in class, because at some point the class just doesn’t need that incentive any more. BJ: Well, it does wonders. An important point here is that the tests we are talking about are radically different from tradi tional exams. They are fun, useful, and students are rewarded for their efforts: in short, there is a contract between the students and their teacher, and that con tract makes sense to them. Jerry Talandis Jr. has written a whole book on that top ic: Testing Speaking Skills in Japan . That book was an important step in the refine ment of the Immediate Method. It’s im Isn’t it sad to rely on tests to force stu dents to study?

9 Questions about the Upcoming Certification Teacher Training Course

There weren’t any nice teachers who had successful classes before? Really?

BJ: Of course, there were some teachers who had succeeded in getting various re sults in certain contexts. These teachers did their best to be friendly, create an at mosphere of openness, have students work in pairs, and keep the class as in teractive as possible. And it sometimes worked, especially when the groups were small, the students were not too unmoti vated for some reason, or there was the right gender ratio, situations like that. But as I said earlier, the tremendous power of inertia that Japanese groups seem to pos sess bogged down the class in the major ity of cases. Teachers would try, fail, and fall back to a tried-and-tested approach of a bit of grammar, a bit of this and a bit of that. The IM changed all that by making a few decisive, radical choices.

Bruno Jactat is a tenured professor at the Univer sity of Tsukuba. He was previously in charge of teacher training at the Kumamoto YMCA, and has subsequently given teacher training courses in a number of countries. His research is on the con nection between hearing and learning, embod ied teaching strategies and oral communication teaching techniques. He will lead the first Certi fication Teacher Training Course organized by Alma Publishing and the Labo-MI in February 2023: Teaching Speaking Skills at Japanese Uni versities Why do you think English teachers can benefit from getting trained in a teaching approach that emerged from the field of French teaching in Japan? BJ: Well, English teachers who have to deal with huge, unmotivated “oral communica tion 1”-type classes can have a hard time. But at least there’s a perception that En glish is somehow useful. Imagine that you have to teach a language that is vaguely attractive but serves no obvious practical purpose, like French or German. And you still have the 40+ uninspired students in front of you, ready to counter all your ef forts and goodwill with their formidable collective power of inertia. This is the con text in which the Immediate Method was born, in Japanese university classrooms 25 years ago. It instigated a mini-revolu tion in the world of French teaching in Ja pan. But instead of heads rolling off guillo tines, something else happened: teachers started having success in getting their

What’s the most important of those choices?

BJ: Testing! Grab students’ attention from the start with the magic word that wakes up the sleepiest students when you say it out loud in class: “TEST!” At the begin ning, this is all the traction we have with some classes, and we make full use of it from the get-go. We give short tests that

The Immediate Method: a framework born in the Japanese classroom.

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