Creative Course Design edited by Daniel J. McIntyre
In various fields of English for Special Purposes, including Global Issues, there has been much discussion of the enhancing effect the use of authentic materials, those not originally produced specifically for EF/SL instruction, can have on acquisition of language and mastery of content knowledge. This article proposes that such adapted materials can also promote learner motivation, convey elements of culture, and can even serve the practical interests of exam-oriented learners in the context of the educational system of Japan.
Media texts can be used to great effect in the language classroom. In Japan, where Ministry of Education approved textbooks dominate both the public and private sectors of education, the use of such materials in the class has, in general, been limited. This need not be the case.
With the initiation, in 1989, of the New Revised Course of Study: Emphasis on Oral Communication (NRCOS), a new language emphasis, resource utilisation, and classroom teaching style were introduced, all of which were in diametric opposition to those used previously. Problems were compounded for Japanese teachers of English by the fact that high school students would continue to sit for examinations based on the old formal grammar/structure literacy-centred curriculum while being taught a new curriculum aiming for communicative oracy.
I hope to demonstrate in this paper, through the use of practical materials and examples (in areas such as listening comprehension, debating and discussing, and analysis of discourse modes), that media texts can be used in the classroom in Japan either as freestanding, or as a supplement to the existing textbooks. Moreover, far from prejudicing student performance in entrance examinations, through the added advantages of relevance, interest, novelty, and fun, they can actively generate a positive student response, in addition to fulfilling the requirements of the NRCOS and connecting the students with English in use and as a living medium. The examples will include full-length movies, songs, poems, magazines, newpapers, and comics.
I have recently been working with Japanese students developing their English in Britain. One of the things that is different for overseas students studying in Britain, rather than in their home countries, is that they are surrounded by the language and are, therefore, obliged to engage with it to survive. It is true that in Japan, as in most developed countries, students do have some access to aspects of English as western popular culture; for example: songs, magazines, and movies, but this is rarely reflected in English lessons. I believe that pop culture can provide positive teaching resources for Japanese EFL learners. With a little thought, imagination, and preparation popular media texts can be successfully implemented in EFL/ESL classes.
EFL, Media Texts, and Popular Culture
The use of media texts is by no means a new idea for EFL classes (Hadfield, 1990; Lonergan, 1984), but my experience suggests that it often remains simply that, an idea. It seldom appears to be carried over into practice. What I now suggest is not offered as a model of ideal EFL practice, but as a set of ideas and resources that I have used in EFL classes with Japanese students. Only the particular teacher with particular students can be reasonably confident about what specific methods and materials might be effective in specific situations. What I can promise, however, is that the use of adapted materials allows teachers to adopt methods that ensure their classes generally will become livelier and considerably more learner-centred.
Comprehension
Aural and literal comprehension work is a stock in trade activity for EFL teachers. All materials give opportunity for comprehension work, but a common complaint about the kinds of materials generally used in textbooks for reading comprehension or on associated tapes for aural comprehension is that they are irrelevant to students' interests. They are selected for a particular course design purpose and their use has implications about the relationship of teacher to students. Unless great care is taken, the students individually work their way through a set of questions demanding written responses which are then reworked orally by the whole class under the teacher's direction, with the errors being duly pointed out and corrected. It is possible to use newspapers, magazines, comics, video film, and recorded TV programmes to achieve precisely the same learning outcomes with much less formality. Figure 1 presents the initial stages of an advanced class using actual British newspapers, and introducing related vocabulary.
Figure 1: Using Newspapers
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In the News
1. In groups discuss where you think the following newspapers should be placed on the grid below:
Broadsheet
Left Wing --------|-------- Right Wing
Tabloid
2. Select one member of your group to present your findings. 3. Considering your answers to number 1, match the front page headlines with the appropriate newspapers:
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Using authentic newspapers, the students, in groups, discuss the newspapers in terms of political bias and potential audience, complete the grid shown in the figure, and then one member of the group presents their findings. A more detailed analysis follows, with the students discussing the front page headlines and attempting to match them with their respective newspapers. This particular activity would then be followed by a scanning of a selected article (from Figure 1, no. 3). In small groups, students would report back their findings.
The particular all-male group that I worked with used headlines, selected articles, news photographs, and advertisements from newspapers such as The Guardian and The Observer, entire copies of general interest magazines, and "male" magazines, such as Shoot! and Top Gear. They also explored the delights of less male-targeted productions such as Just 17 and Jackie (fashion, relationships, music, etc.). Rather than present the magazines formally to them myself, I would divide them into small groups and have them complete a magazine search, giving them the opportunity to choose which one they would like to look at first and letting them actually handle the entire magazine (Figure 2).
Figure 2: Magazine Search
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Magazine Search
Look at the six magazines and answer the following: 1) Match the magazine with the topic:
2) Where would you find the following: a) An article about a young Hollywood actor? _________________________________________ b) Information about the new car market? _________________________________________ c) Lots of pictures of football players? _________________________________________ d) Advice on breeding your own fish? _________________________________________ 3) Look at the advertisements in the magazines. Which one do you like the best? Why? __________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________ 4) Which magazines have horoscopes? __________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________ 5) Do you like reading horoscopes? (Give reasons for your answer.) __________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________ |
The questions illustrated in Figure 2 were planned for differentiation and ranged from low-level text searches in order to identify genres and content, up to higher-level, more detailed critical examination of issues (moral, cultural, or political) arising from the materials. The students initially worked in pairs, but sessions often culminated in group debate. In this way, there was considerable control over the structures practised, but they were put into contemporary and relevant contexts.
Comic Culture
One of the major themes of English work in Japan is "internationalisation." It is thought that a language is more easily acquired if it comes with an understanding of the culture it expresses. The use of the kinds of materials I have described supports this particular aim very well. The students confront the culture directly and, more importantly, because lessons tend to be less threatening, they are prepared to talk about cultural differences. With my Japanese students comic book genres sparked considerable interest. There are enormous differences between a British junior school comic like The Beano and a Japanese manga aimed at the same age range like Game Boy, and Graphic Novels show similar differences. Manga culture is a dominant element in the lives of Japanese, to a far greater extent than comic culture in Britain. The students talked about this with considerable freedom and enthusiasm and I, as a teacher, then became a learner, too. A genuine spirit of information exchange ensued.
The differences between the comics (content, audience, graphic quality) say a great deal about the respective cultures that produced them, and the materials themselves provide considerable opportunity for language activity. Cloze procedure is now a well established language extension tool. Words are blocked out from bubbles and students asked, in groups of two or three, to replace them. The result is a collaborative vocabulary hunt as the most basic response, but this can develop to the consideration of language appropriateness, grammatical structures, and discourse styles.
"Communicative competence" ideology prefers spoken comprehension activity to written, and the use of more popular material is more likely to engage the students in oral discussion than textbooks or tapes. The discussion is also more likely to ensure that students operate at levels beyond "literal" (Barrett, 1966) and take them up the skills heirarchy to "inferential" and even "evaluative" levels, where answers are not right or wrong, and it becomes necessary for students to use appropriate discourse modes to justify individual view to others.
Pop Songs and DARTS
Adapting texts like this for students to work on is familiar in reading and spoken language extension in British schools where the techniques are referred to as DARTS: Directed Activities Relating to Texts. They lend themselves well to EFL learners, particularly if a teacher is broad-minded in the choice of resource material. I think that EFL teachers should not be too concerned with the literary quality of the materials they use provided that they offer interest, stimulate motivation, and offer language opportunities. By these criteria, pop songs are an ideal resource. They rhyme and have a regular rhythm (to some extent), often deal with issues of importance to the students, and are short and self-contained. The only limit to what is possible with a pop song is the teacher's own imagination.
My own students were particularly fond of rap music. This was not an area with which I was particularly familiar, so students were able to impress me with their knowledge and recommendations and I tried to use the songs in the classes. One way was to listen to a song and then ask the students to choose any part of it and draw a picture to represent it. They then talked in pairs about their pictures, tried to identify to which part of the song their partner's picture related, and made suggestions for improving it. I played the song again and let the students improve/complete their pictures and then think of appropriate captions. I mounted and displayed end products in order to acknowledge the work the students had done, as well as to enable the end products to make a positive contribution to the overall language environment. Though this activity was teacher organised, it was not teacher centred. Much of the decision-making rested with the students and the session demanded concentration and action. The students could not be passive. I was able to focus the activity sharply because ultimately I had control over the song chosen and could select appropriately for whatever language demands I wanted to make. I also made sure that in ensuing discussion targeted language structures were returned to, produced, and practised.
A commonplace primary school DART with poems, which fortunately transferred to work with songs for EFL students, is a reorganisational activity. I copied the lyric of a song and cut it up for the students to sort out again into the order that most satisfied them. If sentence structure was under the microscope, a couple of lines cut up into smaller segments was sufficient. If the extraction of meaning from larger language units was required, then the entire lyric was cut up into either individual lines or groups of lines depending on the level of difficulty required. The most intensive learning section of the activity came with the follow up discussion which, of course, asked the students to explain and justify their revised order. This gave opportunities for raising questions about structures, word orders and sentence shapes, and language conventions. The students then tested out their decisions against the original by listening to the song, and at the end sometimes they even preferred their own.
Because songs rhyme, they gave opportunities for developing phonic and phonological knowledge and increased understanding. I began by asking students for as many words as they could think of to rhyme with a number of words displayed on the board: in this way a considerable bank of rhyming words were presented. Then I produced doctored copies of the song's lyric which had regular deletions, generally at the end of every other line. The words that had originally been displayed on the board were, of course, the end words undeleted and the students' task was to select from the bank the most appropriate rhyming word to fill in the deletion, as this extract from The Police's Every Breath You Take demonstrates:
Every breath you take
Every move you __________
Every bond you __________
Every step you __________
I'll be watching you
Every single day
Every word you __________
Every game you __________
Every night you __________
I'll be watching you
[answers: make; break, take; say; play; stay]
They were able to check out their responses at the end by listening. More entertaining perhaps was for students to select the least appropriate rhyming word and then explain why they thought it was so.
The possibilities are multifarious. Students redrafted songs as stories for telling and wrote them as stories for reading. They destroyed originals by changing key words to words of opposite meaning, thus turning love songs into dislike songs, endearments into insults; they changed pronouns to turn songs about girls into songs about boys, and vice versa. They devised activities for each other; they made up new verses for songs. Pop songs often have a very simple and easily imitable structure that makes this task quite achievable. They discussed and compared the meanings of songs. As has already been suggested, the only limit is the teacher's imagination. Even if it does look like a risk to carry pop song lyrics and a tape recorder into the classroom as basic resources, it was in my experience a risk worth taking.
Video Films and TV Programmes
I used all, or extracts from, films like Back to the Future and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade various ways, but mostly for listening comprehension purposes (Figure 3).
Figure 3: Video Films
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Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade
The film you are going to watch is an adventure film. What other film genres (types of films) do you know? Can you think of an example for each? What is your favourite? What is the legend behind the Holy Grail? Mark these statements true or false: - Indiana's father's name is Henry. - Indiana goes to Rome, Italy to look for his father. - Dr. Schneider is a woman. - The three numbers in the church are III, VIII, and X. - Indiana's father is scared to death of rats. Answer the following questions: (i) Indiana went from Italy to where? ___________________________________________ (ii) Who did he find there? ___________________________________________ (iii) How did Indiana and his father escape from Berlin? ___________________________________________ (iv) What three things did Indiana have to do to reach the grail? ____________________________________________ * * * * * * * Discussion: What, in your opinion, should be done with artefacts such as the Holy Grail? |
Before watching the film we would have a previewing activity: an introductory discussion of favourite films, or a brainstorming of types of films. The students would then be required to watch the film, and while viewing, consider a number of questions. It is very easy to play and replay sections as often as necessary, and to invite students to respond at a range of level. I found they were much keener listeners in the context of cinematic narrative than for decontextualised tapes. Importantly, they also had picture cues to help their understanding. The questions asked were as simple or as difficult as I wished to make them, depending on the purpose of the activity and the proficiency of the students. Better still, work could be differentiated for different studentﾕs different abilities.
Programmes recorded from the television gave equally good opportunities for material to supplement the course book. Favourites for my students were Movies, Games, and Videos, and Top Gear. Recorded materials have the same advantages as working with films as opposed to audio tapes, but with the important difference that in these particular programmes language is used for a different purpose. Whereas the films utilise narrative discourse modes, these magazine programmes set out to deliver information as vividly as possible. The language is consequently more formal and more information loaded. The comprehension work that ensued was therefore rather less complicated, giving students the chance to find facts and air their own knowledge, though it was still possible, and desirable, to ask judgmental questions to the more able students.
I found that in all my work with film and video the students needed to be kept active throughout the viewing sessions so they did not become, as Bullock (1975) warned against,"passive receivers of the text." This meant that a film or TV viewing could not be an excuse for no teacher preparation. As shown in the example above, a pre-viewing activity to prepare the students was essential and so was a planned activity during viewing. The students needed to be required to watch for particular purposes, and that meant planning. Further language activity of course came in post-viewing discussion, though this was often based on tasks carried out and notes made during the viewing itself.
Conclusion
Working with media texts allows a teacher to select, structure, and target work as effectively as any course book can, but with the added advantages of relevance, interest, novelty, and fun. Such work is demanding on the teacher's time, requires preparation, and alters the power balance in a classroom by being genuinely investigative. Questions were often asked to which I truly did not know the answers, or to which there were no right or wrong answers.
Readers may be interested to know that the students about whom I have been writing have since returned to Japan, resat their examinations (the same grammar/structure examinations I described earlier) and have all, without exception, passed. I attribute this as much to a greater enthusiasm for the language generated by the resources and materials I used as to any increased knowledge of English grammar.
References
Barrett, T. (1966). Taxonomy of the cognitive and affective dimensions of reading comprehension. Cited in Clymer, T. (1968). What is reading?. In A. Melnick & J. Merritt (Eds.) Reading today and tomorrow. London: University of London Press.
Bullock, A. (1975). A language for life: Report of the committee of inquiry. London: Department of Education and Science: Her Majesty's Stationery Office.
Hadfield, J. (1990). Communication games. Surrey: Nelson.
Holt, J. (1969). How children fail. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Lonergan, J. (1984). Video in language teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ministry of Education. (1989). New revised course of study: Emphasis on oral communication. Tokyo: Author.
Peak, L. (1992). Formal pre-elementary education in Japan. In R. Leestma & H. Walberg (Eds.) Japanese educational productivity. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.