“Did you write in Japanese?” It started with a student’s simple question and a teacher’s mild embarrassment. It’s leading to a more robust language learning community in my classroom.
While I typically read and write with my ELA and EFL students, last year I switched to more closely mirroring my EFL students’ experience by reading in my foreign language, Japanese, while they read in their foreign language, English. I wrote about that switch in this blog post. Currently I’m reading an elementary level graphic novel about Alfred Nobel. We start each class with 10 minutes of independent choice reading followed by 5 minutes of quickwriting, sometimes related to the reading, sometimes not.
This past Monday, after the students shared their writing and as I prepared to share mine, a student quietly ventured with a little twinkle in his eye, “Did you write in Japanese?”
“No,” I had to admit. “No, I didn’t.” I had tried it once or twice last year, but I am just so slow. I can hardly get a complete thought on the paper in 5 minutes. I wanted to be able to model the kind of thinking that can be done in quickwriting, and I couldn’t do that in the one sentence I could produce in Japanese. However, I was feeling slightly guilty about it. It wasn’t lost on me that the student who’d asked was one who sometimes didn’t get a full sentence out.
“But you are right—I should be writing in Japanese. Starting tomorrow, I will,” I promised them. And I did. I learned a lot, and I think the students did, too. I learned some Japanese, I learned some empathy, I learned about language learning, I modeled characteristics of good language learners, and I gave students the opportunity show their expertise by teaching me. We became a more dynamic learning community.
Here are a few stories from that community so far:
The first day as I shared my writing in Japanese, I said, “I’m not sure this is the right word.” A student confirmed that it was. But after I’d finished, he corrected a different word. I was surprised at how threatening it felt to share something with my students that I knew they were better at than me. (It’s even a little scary to publish the photo of my writing because while it will look super cool to people who don’t know any Japanese, any readers who know Japanese will see its awkwardness and errors.) But that’s what students do every day. It’s good for me to share the vulnerability of risk taking that is an inevitable part of learning. And the student who offered the corrections just lit up with the opportunity to teach the teacher.
When the student corrected the word, he repeated the whole phrase, and while chagrined that I’d gotten one word wrong, I was happy that the verb at the end he said exactly as I’d written. I hadn’t been entirely confidently that I’d written it naturally. I know I’ve read about the value of repeating corrected phrases back to students, and now I really get it.
I realized that one of the things that prevents me getting much writing on the page is stopping to look up each word I’m unsure of as I come to it. So I’d just write it in English and then, if I had time once I’d gotten the whole thought out, I could go back and look up the Japanese word. Finland. Weapon. Be involved. I showed the students the page in my notebook, and their “Oh!” revealed they could see the benefit of the strategy--a strategy I’ve read about and encouraged students to do with little, and now we’ve all seen it in action.
One day I wrote about my process to determine the meaning of a new word. The word was shizumu. I recognized -mu as a verb ending, and I knew shizuka means quiet. So I guessed it had something to do with being quiet or making something quiet. But the rest of the sentence was about ships, war, and gunpowder. Didn’t sound quiet to me. I had to resort to Google Translate, which revealed the meaning as sink. Now it all made sense! The students laughed and shared their insight that English word relationships show up in similar sounds, but Japanese word relationships don't. You have to look at the kanji, or Chinese characters. "Yes," I responded, "but because the book I’m reading is so simple, it doesn't have the kanji for shizumu—only the hiragana" (syllabic characters). “Aaah!” they nodded, better understanding my confusion. A little metacognition about problem-solving skills in language acquisition and differences between English and Japanese is always interesting.
I’m thankful for that student’s question, “Did you write in Japanese?” I’m glad it pushed me to do something I knew I should be doing to deepen the language learning community in my classroom. It helped me continue my metamorphosis from the chief English speaker in my classroom to the chief language learner.
How exactly have I grown? I’ve grown in my…
- Empathy for students: Language learning is HARD…and humbling.
- Best practices of language learning: I’ve had the opportunity to model best language learning practices we’ve talked about in class—risk taking, learning from mistakes, perseverance, and ability to teach.
- Best practices of language teaching: I’ve had eureka moments of gut understanding of why certain best practices I’ve read about are effective, making me more likely to consistently practice them; for example, assets-based approach, worrying less about correctness and more about flow, using first language when necessary to not interrupt writing flow, correcting on a limited basis by repeating to reinforce what’s right.
What helps you grow in your empathy for students? In your understanding of best teaching practices? In your role as the chief learner in your classroom?
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