I've taught oral English, or shall we say English conversation, for twenty years, formally for sixteen. Over that span of time I've thought a lot about how our brains process language input, thoughts and language output. Theories haven't satisfied, and I've just gone on along finding out what works and keeping track of what seems to make sense. This page will gradually fill with my observations and success/failure records.

One example of what I'm talking about, one low-level example, is the case of students doing a simple activity where they ask each other questions from a list on a printo (a clear bit of Japlish equivalent to the American English "handout".) If each student in the group of three or four has a copy of the printo, the group will sit there looking at the paper and reading to each other. Cute and intimate as this may look, I find it scary for the visual emphasis; what Japanese students are already good at is getting information from text, and what they're abysmal at is getting information from auditory input. So: give each group one copy instead of a set, and let the person asking the questions read while the others are forced to get information with their ears. This may strike you as foolishly fundamental, but in fact if we look at the moves the students make in each of our activities, we can often see an inroad to sending the students into the language-processing parts of their brainsB