Rethinking English Seminars: Stories and Games in a Japanese Vocational College Classroom

A few years ago, our college decided that second-year students at our vocational college should do seminars rather than continue with the “English Communication” classes they’d done in first year.

Now, at the beginning of the spring term, second year students can check out different teachers and courses during the first week of term and then choose which one to attend. There are two seminars a week for the rest of the academic year. In my case, my two seminars are back-to-back on Tuesday afternoons; three hours of post-prandial class contact time with students who, for the most part, are neither intellectually gifted nor highly motivated.

For far too long I persisted in the old habit of assuming that a “seminar” was a forum for serious intellectual challenge, fool that I was!

I spent the spring term wrestling with Erin Meyer’s "The Culture Map," a perfectly good book about intercultural communication, a topic that one would have thought might be relevant to English language students at a vocational college, but actually pitched above the level of most of my students. Well, students are in college to learn, aren’t they?

Actually, most are just passing the time until they can graduate and get a job. Fair enough, I suppose.

In the autumn term, I was still taking the academic side of running college seminars seriously, and setting my students a more literary challenge, such as engaging with George Orwell’s Animal Farm, a novella short enough to get through in an academic term. We got through it - kind of - but it was a slog to say the least, because all but one student lacked the stamina or interest to take the challenge seriously.

The Chess Incentive

What I began to do was to offer them incentives, such as, “if you get this done by the break, we can do something different in the second class. By “something different” I meant “play chess” and I found that a lot of the students, girls and boys, were excited to “play” chess than to “study” literature.

So, last year I attempted something a bit different: Why not teach Lewis Carroll’s "Alice Through the Looking Glass," which sees Alice travel through a fantasy chessboard landscape and meet various chessmen such as the Red Queen, the White Knight, and so on, and combine it with chess training in the second session?

The result: The boys enjoyed playing chess but were completely uninterested in engaging with "Alice Through the Looking Glass," while the lone and passive girl seemed to engage with the text but offered little feedback.

In short, the seminar was still a mostly unsatisfactory slog; fantasy teaching fantasy literature.

##The New Format

So this term I decided that something needed to change, for my own sanity as much as for the students, so I decided to scrap the whole pretence of “academic” study which the term “seminar” would normally imply. I ditched the books and started again with a simple idea: children’s stories and games.

We take a short story, such as one of Aesop’s fables, read and discuss it in the first seminar, then in the second session the students design a game based on the story. They write the rules in English, play their own game, then teach it to each other. That’s the basic shape, though I’m keeping it flexible.

The Hare and the Tortoise

The centrepiece of the first proper week was "The Hare and the Tortoise." I’d introduced the story in the demo class the week before, so we began by reviewing it, getting the students to write the story in English. Then, taking their versions as prompts, I wrote a “final version” on the board, which we read out loud a couple of times. That took up most of the first session, and it went well, with a nice mixture of teacher and student activity.

There are four students in the class, two pairs of friends. So in the second session I had each pair come up with a "hare and tortoise" race game and write the rules of the game in English.

Next, each pair made and played the game. (I supplied dice and counters). Then they swapped partners so that one of the new pair taught the other the game in English, and then played the game, before swapping roles and games so that all four students had taught and learnt and played the games. Both games were simple and worked well.

Here's what one pair designed:

The photo is not very clear, but in the game, each player rolls a die and advances to a square and follows the instruction on the square. There is no difference between the hare and the rabbit's movement rules.

Here is the game the other pair designed:

I liked the way they divided the game into two separate boards, with one student responsible for creating a separate track for one of the animals, with instructions designed for that animal on its track.

The games were fast and simple to play and generated a lot of laughter.

After that, I introduced my game. I’d designed something using a shogi board, counters, dice and cards, with asymmetric movement. The “hare” throws two dice, the “tortoise” throws one but draws a card that either helps her or hinders the hare.

I was curious to see how the probabilities would play out over multiple games. We played it twice, modifying the rules between games, and the second run was smoother. But as a game it was, frankly, a bit dull most of the time, and noticeably less fun than those which the students had made themselves!

Week 3: Monopoly

Last week, with the Golden Week holidays approaching, I decided not to introduce a children’s story but simply to play a game that would most likely last both sessions of the seminar - Monopoly!

When I got to the class, one of the pairs of friends was absent. I didn’t mind at all because they, though pleasant enough, are fairly passive, whereas the other pair are livelier and offer positive feedback. They were clearly excited to play Monopoly for the first time.

We spent the first ninety minutes learning the game and getting into it, and the game had progressed to the point where players have got complete sets and can start buying houses. After the break, one student pulled ahead and eventually won. I went bankrupt first, which seemed to amuse my students!

What’s Next?

After the Golden Week holiday, we’re going to read Beatrix Potter’s "Peter Rabbit," and then the students will design garden-chase games; Peter Rabbit (and friends) gathering vegetables while avoiding the farmer.

Not all the seminars will begin with children’s stories. One week, I want to introduce Dr. Van Tharpe’s “Marble Trading Game,” which I taught a group of adults a while back and we had great fun playing it (admittedly, it was at the end of a drunken games evening…).

Another idea is to create a game around “the prisoner’s dilemma.” In seminars which games take the lead, I might get them to write a short story based on the theme of the game, which they can then recite to each other.

In short, this new approach to running back-to-back seminar sessions is much more flexible, and so far at least, it seems to be much more enjoyable for the students and -even more importantly - for the teacher!

Cheers!

DH
#InspiredFocus

P. S. Let me know if you have any suggestions for stories and/or games in the comments below!