Stop! What am I saying? Stop! Look in the dictionary. Stop! Translate from Japanese. Stop! Think of the right grammar. Stop! Pronounce the word silently first. Stop! What did I say? Stop! Is that the right word? Stop! Did they understand my meaning? Stop! Stop! Stop!
Stop!
This is what I imagine goes on inside the heads of some of my students when they begin a small group discussion in my class. Instead of calmly and fluidly expressing their ideas and opinions to other people in the group, Japanese students stop themselves every sentence. They hesitate. They worry. They check to be sure what they are saying is right. They wait a long time before the first word. They never interrupt. They stop in the middle of the sentence. They search for the exactly right word. They seem to be taking some mental eraser and erasing the sentences in their minds. The discussion grinds to a halt. At times, silence descends on the classroom. It is very frustrating.
What is missing is the quality of flow. Flow is an essential ingredient of all mental activities that are creative and communicative. Flow is an unselfconscious forward momentum when engaged in an attention-grabbing activity. Flow is something that can be learned but is natural to many activities. Anyone who does sports, plays music or gets lost inside a novel knows what flow is. Having a good friend with whom one talks easily is also flow. That sense of doing and doing without even realizing what time it is or where you are is flow. The experience of flow is natural, fluid and most importantly, unstopping.
Of course, when students hesitate, I often ask them an easy question to try to get them started again. But all too often they are choked by their anxiety and simply cannot continue. Students, too, help each other in these situations by asking a question or cueing a re-start of a new sentence, but most students are worrying themselves about what to say next. Or rather, they are worrying about how to say it correctly. They are not lacking ideas and opinions, but simply the means to form those ideas and opinions into a continuous flow of language.
In my classes, I use a lot of discussion, but much less than I might in another country. These discussions should be opportunities to exchange opinions, formulate ideas in their own words, discover deeper meanings, hear contrasting views and to agree and disagree. However, because students are not used to such exchanges, in Japanese either, perhaps, they revert to ingrained test-like thinking where correct form is more important than interesting content. I have to constantly remind students that discussions are not tests and encourage them to simply lose themselves in the give and take of the content. Constant self-correction is a hard habit to break.
While teaching methods have changed recently, ten years ago, it was usual for my students to confess they had not spoken a single word during high school. Ever! I could never imagine how they learned anything, much less English, without speaking. But they did. The then-common one-way flow of teacher talking and students listening is a habit that does not convert easily into the multi-directional flow of discussions. For students to improve their English, it is essential they learn how to enter flow. The flow state of discussions creates new knowledge, personalizes ideas, and enlightens everyone, all the while practicing highly communicative language.
Many factors contribute to stopping flow in the classroom. Often at early levels of English instruction, too much emphasis on accuracy and correctness inhibits students. When that becomes a pattern, of students speaking and teachers correcting, it can permanently disable the ability to enter flow. Over-attention to accuracy and correctness, whether of grammar, pronunciation or ideas, becomes a huge anchor that keeps the ship of discussion from ever sailing. Japan is often said to be a society of group consciousness, but excessive concern about the group can also inhibit discussions and keeps students from naturally entering into flow.
Of all the factors interrupting flow, though, returning constantly to Japanese for explanations is the most deadly. To learn English, students need to develop stamina to stay in flow for longer and longer periods of time. Some students can manage only one or two sentences before going back to Japanese. This habit stops English flow in the same way that a strict referee blowing the whistle every few seconds stops the flow of a basketball game or repeated phone calls interrupts someone’s productivity at work. When Japanese intrudes into English classes too often, English flow can never get going. Occasional and selective uses of Japanese, of course, can sometimes help flow keep going, but it must be done only to return back into English flow.
Early this year, I was at a birthday party for a jazz pianist at a small jazz kissaten in Shibuya. The room was alive with conversation. A couple people there spoke English, but most did not. So, I spoke constantly in Japanese. I didn’t have time to look up any words, though I eyed my bag every so often knowing I had my electronic dictionary in there. As always, I stumbled over phrases, could not explain my meaning and yet I just kept talking. A couple glasses of wine helped, of course. Though the atmosphere and topics are different, a party conversation and a university discussion are not so different in terms of flow.
They are also not so different from music. The nice thing about talking with jazz musicians is that they do not really care too much about accuracy. They like to take in the whole sweep of a conversation, like the entire solo of a musician. Jazz musicians think of creating conversations like creating music in a group. It’s spontaneous and must have flow. Everyone contributes, each person answering, supporting and prodding the others, as if playing jazz. Of course, when I speak in Japanese, I make a lot of mistakes, and those jazz musicians sometimes frown when they cannot penetrate my multiple mistakes, but they are always patient to see where the discussion will go next.
In the jazz world, there is a saying “There are no wrong notes.” What that means is that after any note you can always take the music in another direction or resolve it in an interesting way. That means a ‘mistake’ can always be turned into something else as long as the flow of music continues. No jazz musician would stop in the middle of a solo, hold up their hand, stop the band and say, “Wait, wait, I made a mistake. Let me start over!” They would never stop a song to replay a wrong melody line. Instead, they just keep playing, and fix things as they go. To students in discussion, I say this: Can you please NOT stop talking!
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