NSJLE 2016 Proceedings: Visible and Valuable

Using creative and imaginative texts to teach Japanese
Natalie Pearce
Beechboro Christian School (WA)Introduction
The Japanese Second Language P-10 Scope and sequence was released in the middle of 2016(SCSA, 2016). The inclusion of the Creating substrand and many references to creative andimaginative texts made it different to the curriculum that had been used previously in WA. I
wanted to investigate the potential benefits of using creative texts in our languages classrooms,and to examine what the literature suggested as models for teaching with creative texts so that I
could apply this in my teaching. I also aimed to collate quality resources that I could use with myprimary Japanese classes.
As a primary school Japanese teacher, I had often read simple Japanese picture books, sungJapanese children’s songs and studied an occasional Japanese traditional folktale play with mystudents, but I wanted to do this in a more effective and integrated way.

Background
Beechboro Christian School is a small primary school in a semi-rural setting on the fringe of thePerth metropolitan area. There are just over 200 students at the school. I started teaching
Japanese at this school in the middle of 2016 to all of the students from Year One to Year Six forone 30-minute class a week.
Definitions
The SCSA Glossary (2016) defines ‘imaginative texts’ as follows:
Their primary purpose is to entertain through their imaginative use of literary elements.
They are recognised for their form, style and artistic or aesthetic value. These texts include
novels, traditional tales, poetry, stories, plays, fiction for young adults and children
including picture books and multimodal texts such as film.
Regarding the Creating substrand, SCSA (2016) explains that:
Creating involves engaging with imaginative experience by participating in, responding toand creating a range of texts, such as stories, songs, drama and music.

Looking at the Literature
The first article that I read on the topic of using creative texts was by Morgan (2011, pages 2029), who wrote:
Stories can be introduced as texts to be listened to and read aloud, for familiarisinglearners with the sounds, rhythms, ‘feel’ and forms of language, or as models for learning
contextualised language use or to engage learners with the ideas and issues addressed inthe stories.

NSJLE 2016 Proceedings: Visible and Valuable

I could see that there were benefits to be gained by using creative texts for language teaching but
wanted to have some scaffolding or models to work with. The first model for using picture books
to teach language that I came across was the ‘Tell me’ approach by Chambers (1983), which iselaborated on by Mourao (cited in Bland, 2015, chapter 11). This model encourages the students
to participate in ‘authentic talk’ as they engage with the themes and ideas raised in a story. Themodel involves three stages, each of which sets key questions to discuss with students. A fellow
Japanese teacher and native speaker, Junko Nichols, helped me to adapt and translate thesequestions into Japanese, as shown below.

Questions adapted from Mourao (cited in Bland, 2015)

The second model that I explored was ‘nine story steps for scaffolding through story and drama’by Carol Read, as elaborated by Bland (illustrated below). I used both these models to guide myuse of stories and picture books with my students. I realised that if I really wanted to exploit atext for language learning I needed to revisit the story many times with my students and guidethem in different activities so that eventually they would be able to internalise and use thelanguage from the texts.
Cameron (2001, chapter 7) discusses the importance of choosing ‘quality’ stories so that thestudents can ‘enter the imaginative world that the story creates’:
Quality stories have characters and a plot that engage children, often the artwork is as
important as the text in telling the story, and they create a strong feeling of satisfaction
when the end is reached.
I realised that in the past I had read stories with very simple repetitive language in them to mystudents; now I wanted to explore stories that still contained simple language but with deeper
themes, plots and characters.
I came across a chapter by Janice Bland (2015, chapter 8) titled ‘Grammar Templates for theFuture with Poetry for Children’ which outlines many benefits of using poetry and practicalexamples of this from her experience of teaching English as a Second Language. After readingNSJLE 2016 Proceedings: Visible and Valuable

this chapter on poetry I felt convinced that using simple poems could be beneficial for teaching
Japanese to young learners as well. However, I realised that despite many years of studying
Japanese I didn’t know even one Japanese poem. I set out to find some Japanese poems thatwould be engaging and suitable to use with my primary students.

Read (2008) Scaffolding through story and drama (cited in Bland, 2015, chapter 10)

ProgramPoetryThe first poem that I taught my students was the Pikachu Haiku by Kerry Forrest. This poem
was ideal for students as it was about Pokemon – very popular with my students – and was shortenough to be learnt by heart easily. Using a suggestion from Bland (2015, chapter 8) I
incorporated actions into the retelling of the haiku.
ぴかちゅう はうみ で あそんでたのしそう

Here is Pikachu
He’s playing at the seaside
It looks like such fun

By Kerry Forrest

When I taught this Pikachu haiku to my students, I was pleased with how quickly they learnt thewords and how much they enjoyed it. We had an interesting discussion about the different word
order, comparing the Japanese and English version (which maintains the traditional syllabicpattern), we clapped out and counted the syllables and discussed how Japanese traditional haiku
have references to nature and the seasons. The students were surprised to hear that Japanese
doesn’t have rhyme, which is something they readily associate with a poem. A few weeks after
we had learnt this haiku I was explaining the particle は (wa) to my students and how it tells us
the topic of the sentence when one of my Year Three students put their hand up with great
enthusiasm to inform me that ‘that’s the wa in our Pikachu poem’. A couple of weeks after I
taught this poem, the Year Three teacher commented to me that she had heard her students
chanting the Pikachu haiku when she was out on duty at lunchtime.

NSJLE 2016 Proceedings: Visible and Valuable

An additional advantage of using the Pokemon-themed poem was that students were able toconnect with things that their peers in Japan are interested in. Many of my primary school
students enjoy collecting and exchanging Pokemon cards, reading Pokemon books and playing
the Pokemon Go game on their parents’ phones. Pokemon is also very popular with primary age
children in Japan. I would like to further explore how Pokemon stories and comics could be used
to engage my learners.
Adapting a picture book into a class drama
After seeing a Japanese translation by Japanese teacher Kathleen Duquemin of the English
picture book You are (not) small by Anna Kang, I purchased the book and looked at how I could
use this with my classes. The dialogue in the book is centred around two characters eachlabelling the other as big or small and arguing over this until a much smaller pink character and amuch larger green character arrive, which changes the perceptions of the first two of big andsmall. I added speech bubbles so that the text all became dialogue; and after an initial reading I
had my students act out the story as a drama. The students laughed as they acted out the text withdramatic actions. I was thrilled to hear Year One students starting to use the language that they
were exposed to in the text. For example, one of the students said to me, ‘I have a chiisai dog’. Ialso asked the students the questions from the ‘Tell me’ approach and was surprised when one of
the students told me that this story was just like him and his brother, who often argued about whowas bigger and cleverer.
I was reminded of what I had read by Cameron (2015, chapter 7) that
Stories offer a whole imaginary world created by language, that children can enter andenjoy, learning language as they go.
Motivating learners and making learning visible to a wider audience
Beechboro Christian School is part of a wider network ofschools in Perth called the Swan Christian Education
Association (SCEA). Under the guidance of the SCEA
Languages Consultant, Mariel Howard, an annual foreign
languages performance contest has been set up called‘SCEA Vision’. At this event primary school and highschool students from the eight SCEA schools perform
songs, poetry or drama in a language other than English.
Some of the students perform in a language from theirbackground while others perform in a language they arelearning at school or one that they simply have an interestin. From attending and having my students participate inthis event, I have seen students excited and motivated to beusing a language other than English. Last year I taught mystudents the first verse of the Christmas song ‘Silent Night’in Japanese, which they sang at the annual school
Christmas Carols event. I enlisted the help of the musicteacher, who also runs the school choir, so that they could
practise in music classes. The students sang ‘Silent Night’beautifully at the concert and I was thrilled when the musicteacher told me that after the concert students from the choir had approached her saying that they
had so enjoyed singing in Japanese that they would like to learn a Japanese song for the choir tosing at SCEA Vision 2017!

NSJLE 2016 Proceedings: Visible and Valuable

Integrate with Cross Curricular Priorities
The Australian Curriculum (ACARA, 2016) has three Cross-curriculum priorities that aredesigned to be incorporated across all of the subjects of the curriculum. When we were first
becoming familiar with the draft ACARA Curriculum in 2015 my colleague Kaoru Tulloch and I
wondered how we might incorporate the priority of Sustainability into our Japanese program.
We decided to run incursion workshops for our primary school classes teaching on the theme ofmottainai, which we termed ‘Learning about sustainability Japanese-style’. We read the picturebook Mottainai Baasan by Mariko Shinju (2004) to the students and had them then create theirown mottainai comics. We also adapted a mottainai song which we taught the students withaccompanying dance moves. The students also enjoyed having the opportunity to revise daily
routine verbs through a repetitive chant on mottainai. The students participated in ‘mottainai
origami’ (making kabuto hats from newspaper), ‘mottainai omocha’ (boomerang flying toys
from recycled cereal boxes) and ‘mottainai furoshiki’ where we wrapped up items in donatedfabric. The Mottanai Baasan picture book, mottainai song and the chant provided rich
opportunities for language learning and cultural insights for our students.

Challenges
One of my biggest challenges in teaching Japanese is having only 30 minutes a week. In thetable below, I outline other factors that can be difficult when using creative texts to teachJapanese, along with some suggestions for how these might be addressed.

Conclusion
There are many possible benefits of using creative and imaginative texts, which include:motivating students, raising the profile of language learning, supporting intercultural language
learning, integrating with the cross-curricular sustainability priority, and supporting language

NSJLE 2016 Proceedings: Visible and Valuableacquisition and learning. Following on from the success of my initial efforts to integrate poetry
into my primary Japanese program, I have collected a number of traditional haiku and modern
poems written by Japanese children which I am now using with my students. They are enjoying
the cultural insights from these poems as they start to acquire the new language that they areexposed to from studying them. I continue to collate new picture books that I can use with mystudents and to look at new activities to engage the students. The majority of the literature that I
read focuses on using creative texts to teach English as a Second Language, but I am hoping that
there will be more resources published with examples of how poems and picture books are used
to engage students in learning Japanese.

References
ACARA (Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority) (2016). AustralianCurriculum. Available: acara.edu.au.
Bland, J. (ed.) (2015). Teaching English to young learners: critical issues in language teachingwith 3-12 year olds. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Cameron, L. (2001). Teaching Languages to Young Learners. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.
Forrest, K. (2015). Pikachu Haiku. Available at http://www.japanesejoy.com/wpcontent/uploads/Pikachu-Haiku-1.pdf
Kang, A. (2015). You are (not) small. London: Hachette Children’s Group.
Morgan, A. (2011). Language, literacy, literature: Using storytelling in the languages classroom.
Babel 46(2/3), 20-29.
SCSA (School Curriculum and Standards Authority, Government of Western Australia) (2016).
Japanese: Second Language Scope and Sequence P-10. Available atK10outline.scsa.wa.edu.auShinju, M. (2004). Mottainai baasan. Tokyo: Kodansha.