[EDLING:1310] Super English Language High School in action

[Francis M. Hult]

Daily Yomiuri Online

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/features/language/20060307TDY16001.htm

SELHi in action / Schools' water study helps English flow

By Yoko Mizui Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

This is the 17th installment in a series on the government-designated Super 
English Language High School (SELHi) pilot project. 


MATSUYAMA--Relating English to specialized technical subjects and the issue of 
cultivating a communicative ability in English have been the main challenges 
faced by Ehime Prefectural Matsuyama Technical High School since its 
designation as a SELHi in 2004. 

Of 101 SELHi schools throughout the country, Matsuyama is the only technical 
high school. 

"As there is no previous school to provide an example or offer us advice, it 
has been very difficult for us to create a curriculum that can address these 
issues," said Kiwame Kono, 52, chief of the school's multimedia education 
department and head of its SELHi project. Of the school's nine courses, the 
students who are now in the second year of its Information Technology course 
were chosen as a SELHi class in 2004, partly because English is typically 
needed for circulating information as widely as possible on the Internet. 

They chose environmental issues as a key subject for combining their English 
and IT studies and set a goal of collecting information on the local water 
environment and posting it on the Web in English in collaboration with a high 
school in the United States. 

The students researched water quality and the presence of aquatic creatures in 
the nearby Ishitegawa river last year and input their data into a Geographic 
Information System (GIS) computer mapping application. In conducting the 
research, students worked with a local nonprofit organization concerned with 
water-related environmental preservation. 

The students in the SELHi class have been in regular e-mail and 
videoconference contact with students from McKinley High School in Canton, 
Ohio, so that their data can be compiled along with data from the U.S. school 
into a joint report. 

Matsuyama's connection with McKinley is a result of the Japan Fulbright 
Memorial Fund's Master Teacher Program. Participating in the program are a 
total of 25 primary, middle and high schools in Japan and an equal number of 
counterpart schools in the United States. Each school pairs up with a partner 
school in the other country and the paired schools develop and run two 
projects jointly for a period of 10 months. 

Matsuyama and McKinley have been researching bugs, soil, water quality and 
aquatic insects. The two schools have been holding monthly videoconferences 
and exchanging data since September. In the new school year, Matsuyama is 
scheduled to pair up with Shoreline High School in Tomales, Calif. 

"As our students are majoring in information technology, they need to be able 
to convey information overseas. I think this Master Teacher Program offers 
students a great opportunity to do just that and exchange information with 
students overseas," Kono said. 

Besides the overseas connection and the unusual subject matter, the format of 
the English lessons in the SELHi-designated class are also quite different 
from regular classes. Not only does the SELHi class have three hours of 
English per week instead of two, the 40 students in the class are divided into 
five groups and each one has an assigned teacher. Although the groups 
basically cover the same material, they study at different levels and in a way 
that best corresponds with their level. From time to time, the groups meet in 
a classroom and review together what they have learned. 

The Daily Yomiuri observed one of these classes with all groups present in 
February. The 40 students met in an audiovisual classroom on the second floor 
of the school library. The class was attended by five Japanese English-
language teachers and Vania Wai Yan Ling, an assistant language teacher (ALT) 
from Canada. 

"Last week, each group studied one different aspect relating to bullfrogs. 
Today, we'll review last week's lesson together," said Koji Toyama, an English-
language teacher. 

"Today, we'll play Who Wants to Be a SELHi Millionaire?, hosted by me," Ling 
said. In Ling's game, modeled after the popular TV quiz show, students were 
required to choose a correct answer from multiple choices starting from a 100 
dollars easy question--"What does hikigaeru mean in English"--to the 1 million 
dollars question-- "How can we stop bullfrogs from increasing their numbers?" 

All the questions were related to what they had learned in previous lessons. 

After the quiz, students were told to discuss the last question in their 
respective groups. The five teachers spread out to assist them. The students 
discussed the issue for about 10 minutes and representatives of each group 
offered their conclusions to the rest of the class. 

"I think it's important to study grammar, but I also think this kind of 
lesson, which cannot be done in a regular class, can also be very useful. 
Teachers say that we should study practical English," said Yuto Kubo, a second-
year student. 

A classmate, Tomoya Kawamoto, described the class as interesting. 

Yasuhisa Kajiwara, principal of the high school, said Japanese teachers of 
English were working hard to figure out what they could achieve with a limited 
number of English lessons. 

"I hear that at some SELHi schools, they teach English six hours a week. But 
as our school isn't aiming at college entrance, we cannot devote so many hours 
just to English. So the English taught in our school is not for use in passing 
college entrance exams but as a tool of communication," he said. He also 
mentioned that thanks to the SELHi designation, the school can have an ALT 
stationed at the school every day. 

Matsuyama is the first school at which Ling has ever taught English. 

"I was surprised to come to this school as I'm not only teaching English, I'm 
also helping to teach biology. Most schools teach with a regular English 
textbook. However, we are teaching using information that the students have 
gathered. We don't have a textbook that was provided by the board of 
education," she said. 

Instead of using stipulated textbooks, Matsuyama uses original materials for 
its SELHi class. Until last October, students used texts relating to aquatic 
wildlife that Kono found on the Internet, and prepared presentations to be 
made in their monthly videoconferences held in September and November. 

For the more detailed November videoconference, each group made a presentation 
in English about different invasive alien species. Since then, each group has 
used the presentation content created by the other groups--subject to some 
editing by the teachers--as its own study material. 

"We were lucky as Vania majored in biology at a university," Kono said. 

"Multiteam teaching is very challenging, but I think it's a good opportunity 
to combine many different ideas and to try to think of the best way to teach 
students about English and about science," Ling said. 

Kono thinks Ling's presence at the school helps a lot to motivate students to 
study English. 

"I think her friendly personality and her curiosity in all kinds of things 
have a great influence on students and teachers," he said. 

Kono moved to this school four years ago after teaching at a number of high 
schools with good records of sending students to prestigious universities. He 
believes English should be taught so that students can utilize it for life 
rather than just as a tool to pass university entrance examinations. 

"It's not just a case of teaching English. I also want to have students learn 
about their local environment in cooperation with other organizations. By 
focusing on the environment around them, I hope students' interest in the 
environment will grow from a local to a global scale," he said. 

(Mar. 7, 2006)