Teaching Policy for the Native Part of the SEG English Program

Hi, my name is Mark. I’m the head native teacher here at SEG. I’d like to tell
you about the native part of the English program.
Our main goal is to produce students who can communicate successfully.
Communication is about more than speaking. If you want to communicate well,
you have to understand other people. When you are communicating, there is notime to stop and think about grammar rules or dictionary explanations.
Research shows that we learn to speak by listening. But not all listening isthe same. We need to listen because we actually want to understand. Many
students practice saying dialogues over and over again for years, but they don’t
learn to speak. If we provide lots of interesting and interactive input,
students will naturally start to speak when they are ready.
We also develop students’ writing ability. We focus on writing ascommunication rather than writing as pattern practice. Students express their realideas and opinions in writing. Eventually, they are able to write their own storiesand essays.
When students start at SEG, their English level is low. How do we havemeaningful communication with them? We do it through characters andstories. But we don’t tell stories, we ask stories. The teacher asks questions, andthe students give ideas for the story. Stories are personalized to the students andevery class makes a different story. This personalization creates a lot ofstudent interest.
Our approach is very different from the way grammar is taught in almost all
Japanese schools. In school, students often learn abstract rules or formulas.
They’re given a pattern like have+pp+for+period of time = a situation which
was true in the past and is still true now. Then they study some exceptions orsome conditions for using the formula. Then they are tested on whether they canremember and use the grammatical formula correctly.
Unfortunately, we can’t learn languages this way. There are thousands of rules
to learn, if not more. Every lesson students are given more and more formulas,exceptions and conditions. But many students can’t even say basic things
fluently. This is because students have not been learning English, they have beenlearning about English. Speaking and understanding English is an ability. We
don’t learn languages the way we learn history or chemistry.
In our program, we don’t give students grammatical formulas. We teachphrases. For example, if the class decides that a character lives in Paris, I can
ask “How long? How many years?” Maybe the class decides on 7 years. So I canthen say “Ok, he has lived in Paris for 7 years.” We then contrast “He lives inParis” with “He has lived in Paris for 7 years”. We haven’t taught a formula,we’ve taught a phrase that has natural grammar in it. And students can easily
understand the meaning because of the context.
This is important for cases where English and Japanese are different. 東京に住んでいる。十年間東京に住んでいる。The verb form is the same in Japanese, but
it’s different in English. It will take students some time to get used to this.
We introduce most of the major grammatical patterns in Chu1. In Chu2,
we review these basic patterns, add more advanced patterns, and begin to focus
more on vocabulary building. We continue making stories together, but we alsobegin to use TV shows and scenes from films. By the end of Chu3, students areable to study a complete film and read sections of the junior novelization.
When students move into the high school program, they are ready to begin
working with TED talks and articles from news sources like the BBC. They also
move from creative writing to academic writing and they are able to movefrom discussing their daily lives or imaginary characters to discussing social
issues and academic topics.
Thank you for reading this article and I hope we’ll see you at SEG.

Ver.1.0