2012 Report on the Puan Program: Hints for teaching about the Japanese culture in English

The Puan Program, or "Friendship Program," was started in 2003 and sends students from the Iwate University Faculty of Education English Department to secondary schools in Thailand to conduct teaching practice for approximately two weeks. In this teaching practice, students conduct content-based lessons, teaching about aspects of the Japanese culture, in English (see Under, Yamazaki & Hall,2007, and Hall, 2010, for a more detailed explanation of the program). In January 2012, the English Department sent three students to the Wat Nuannoradit School (hereafter, the WN School), which is coeducational, and two students to the Stri Wat Absornsawan School (hereafter, the SWA School), which is an all-girls school, to teach for a period of four days. Both schools are secondary schools which, in Thailand, means that they begin from the equivalent of the first year of Japanese junior high school to the last year of Japanese high school. I have described both schools in detail in the 2010 Report of the Puan Program (Hall, 2010). Professor Tomoko Yamazaki of the English Department supervised the student-teachers at the SWASchool, and I supervised the student-teachers at the WN School. Because I spent most of my time observing WN classes, I will limit my discussion to classes at that school. The student-teachers had the challenge of teaching about the history of tsunamis in Japan to students with whom they shared no common language other than the target language of the class, English. Compared to previous teaching practices at the WN School, the 2012 classes were more successful in getting a higher percentage of students to participate in class activities. I will argue that the reasons behind their success were that the student-teachers kept the students busy with individual or pair work, presented the content in an interesting and comprehensible way, and also devoted time for language focus in addition to learning about tsunamis. It should be noted, though, that since the context of the WN and SWA Schools differ, the characteristics of a successful class at each school might also differ. This paper is written for students who will teach in the Puan Program or for people interested in teaching content•focused lessons which use the target language exclusively