s RockellR

1
 CONTENTS
From the Editors ........................................................................................................................................ 3

INTERVIEWS ......................................................................................................................................... 7
Interview 1: Interview with Rod Ellis on Performance Assisted Learning
Reprint of article by David Kluge..................................................................................................... 9
Interview 2: Interview with Rod Ellis on Performance Assisted Learning, Part 2
Reprint of article by David Kluge..................................................................................................... 22

CONTENT ............................................................................................................................................. 38
The Māori Haka: Understanding Culture Through Traditional Performance
Matthew Cotter ................................................................................................................................. 39
Active, Creative, Collaborative Learning Through Performance Activities Deepens
Connections to Art History Class Content in Japan
Will Hall ........................................................................................................................................... 49

PERFORMANCE ................................................................................................................................. 69
“Nanzan Bossa”: A Spontaneous Musical Encounter in Nagoya
Kim Rockell, Vivian Bussinguer-Khavari ......................................................................................... 70
Musical Integration in the Language Classroom
Chelsea Schwartz ............................................................................................................................. 80
Star-Crossed Lovers: The “Given and Added” in the Magic of an English Noh Performance
Kim Rockell ...................................................................................................................................... 83

PRESENTATION ................................................................................................................................ 102

PowerPoint as a “Modified Teleprompter”
James Higa ..................................................................................................................................... 103

RESEARCH ......................................................................................................................................... 119

Dance the Data! Matching Form with Content in Presenting Performance in Education
Research
David Kluge.................................................................................................................................... 108
The Relationship Between University Students’ Global Self-Esteem and
Foreign Language Self- Esteem
Takanori Omura ............................................................................................................................. 120
Introducing the Performance in Education SIG ..................................................................................... 139

2
Messages from the Editors

Philip Head (Series Editor, Performance in Education SIG Publications Chair)

Welcome to the first volume of the Performance in Education Review series. I would
like to thank the authors for their many fine contributions to this publication. I would
also like to thank the many volunteers who took the time to help with proofreading or
who offered advice throughout this process.

David Kluge (Editor, Performance in Education SIG Coordinator)

The PIE SIG is happy to announce its first Performance in Education Review. Although
published in 2022, the 2020 in the title indicates that the book is a review of the year
2020 in terms of articles based on presentations given at PIE SIG conferences
conducted in the 2020-2021 academic year. Since this is the first book in the series, it
has taken quite a few years to put this together, but with the great articles by the authors
and the wonderfully sharp eagle-eye of the copy editors and proofreaders, this second
issue has finally been realized. A great thank you to all who have been involved. We
hope to have an issue of this title published every two years, if not every year. However,
we need people to submit their amazing PIE articles. We are looking forward to reading
your submission soon!

Beginnings: Performance in Education Review

At each of the Performance in Education SIG conferences I think it was a shame that
more people couldn’t see the amazingly interesting and useful presentations given in
such engaging style. To show these wonderful presentations, we started a YouTube
channel. However, these presenters are also academics, so I have asked some of the
conference presenters to write scholarly articles on their presentations, workshops, and
performances.

The intention of this journal is to create a montage of the year in PIE conferences, but
this first volume was three years in the making, so it covers 2018 to 2020 academic
years. Papers from some of the ten conferences over these three years are featured

3
2018-2019 Academic Year (April to March)
Nagoya, Nanzan University
Shonan, Shonan Institute of Technology
Nishinomiya, Kwansei Gakuin University
Meio University, Nago, Okinawa
Gero, Synergy Conference Center
Sapporo, MK Conference Center

2019-2020 (April to March)

Nagoya, Nanzan University
Okinawa, Mahaina Wellness Resort
Sapporo, Hokusei University

Many of the ideas for the 2018 general conferences and the 2019 1st Performance in
Education: Research & Practice Conference and Student Showcase were developed in
conversations and discussions with Rod Ellis.

The INTRODUCTORY MATERIALS section includes two interviews with Rod Ellis
that were the basis for two articles in JALT’s The Language Teacher, used by
permission from the editors.

The CONTENT section includes two articles by Mathew Cotter and by Will Hall that
describe in detail several lessons using Performance in Education for the teaching of
content in classes that were not English language classes per se.

The PERFORMANCE section includes descriptions of three artistic performances at the

conferences.

The PRESENTATION section includes a description of a speech/presentation way to

encourage students to get away from reading a script.

4
The RESEARCH article describes a research study of the constructs of Global Self-
Esteem and Foreign Language Self-Esteem, two constructs important in all Performance
in Education projects.

I hope that you find the articles interesting and useful and will be inspired to present at
the Performance in Education SIG’s conference and write it up for a future Performance
in Education Review.

The pie pictured above was a homemade plum pie that Rod Ellis baked for my wife and
me which I thought was appropriate for inclusion in this PIE extravaganza.

This first volume is rich with a wide variety of papers based on presentations over the
last three years. The next volume intends to cover the 2021-2022 academic year
conferences. Please plan to write up your excellent presentation and share it with us all.

David Kluge
Editor and Conferences Chair
JALT Performance in Education SIG

5
Performance in Education Review Staff
Series Editor
Philip Head

Editor
David Kluge

Copy Editing and Proofreading Team

Darren Kinsman
Steve McGuire
Philip Head
David Kluge

All material in this publication is copyright © of the JALT Performance in Education SIG.

How to cite an article in this book:

Author Surname, First Initial. Second Initial. (2022). Article title. In D. Kluge (Ed.), Performance in Education

Review 2020 (pp. page range of article or chapter). JALT Performance in Education SIG.

6
This section includes two reprinted interviews

with Rod Ellis regarding Performance in

Education (PIE) and Performance-Assisted

Learning, both terms coined by the editor.

Unlike most published interviews, these retain

elements of natural speech and comments by

the interviewer appended at the end of the

interview.

7
Rod Ellis giving the Plenary Address at the Performance in Education: Research &
Practice Conference, Nanzan University, Nagoya, Japan, June 15, 2019

The following is a reprint of a shorter version of an interview that was conducted before
the conference published in an issue of JALT’s The Language Teacher, Interviews column,
2019, issue 43/2, page numbers 14-17. Thanks go to the TLT editors for giving
authorization for this reprint. This is the original manuscript submitted to JALT’s The
Language Teacher and published as Interview with Rod Ellis on Researching
Performance-Assisted Learning. It had had to be shortened in order to fit the space
constraints of the publication. What was deleted were some of the content of the interview,
the natural speech markers, and comments by the interviewer in response to the content
of the interview. All these are restored in this version.

Keywords: Creativity, speech, debate, drama, oral interpretation/Readers Theatre

Interview 1 with Rod Ellis on Performance-

Assisted Learning with Comments

David Kluge
Nanzan University
[email protected]
Interview conducted on May 10, 2018

8
W
hile sitting in a comfortable café near Perth, Australia, Rod Ellis talked to
me about Performance-Assisted Learning, which is the use of performances
such as speech drama, debate, or oral interpretation to learn, consolidate
learning, and evaluate learning on any subject. We talked about creativity, Rod’s personal
experiences with drama and debate as a student and teacher, the value of reading dialogs
aloud, some interesting research areas to explore, the way that PowerPoint has affected
the giving of speeches, and the possible value of performance in language learning.

DK: Hello, Rod. Thank you for coming and agreeing to this interview.
RE: You’re welcome.

DK: I want to talk about your professional life and your performance life. So, what first
interested you in your own life about the topic of creativity in language teaching and
learning?
RE: Ahh. To be truthful, I don’t think I’ve really thought very much about creativity in
language teaching, I think I’ve thought about it a little bit more in terms of creativity in
language learning because from all my various research and studies of second language
learners, it’s very clear to me that in many ways second language learners are inherently
creative because they use their linguistic resources as best they can in order to express
whatever meanings they want to express. And in order to do that effectively they have to
use those resources flexibly and creatively.

DK: But was there anything in your own experience that led you to this topic of creativity?
RE: Ummm. No, [DK chuckles] to be truthful. As I said, I don’t think I’ve thought very
much about creativity in language teaching. I’ve thought about it in terms of the language
learner being creative, and in what sense the language learner is creative. I think that
perhaps as an extension of that, I’d begun to see Task-Based Language Teaching as an
approach that actually encourages the kind of creativity in learner language that I’ve just
described. Right? Any approach to language teaching that makes the expression of
meaning primary, that requires learners to try to express themselves meaningfully in the
foreign language, in English, say, to my mind is going to encourage creativity. I’m not

9
really even convinced that a lot is to be gained by trying to supposedly identify which
teaching activities are creative and which are not creative, etc. My definition of a creative
language teaching activity would be one that encourages learners to engage in this process
of creative construction that is a natural process of language learning and language use.

DK: What do you think of the topic of my particular interest, that is Performance-Assisted
Learning – performance activities to help learn, consolidate learning, and evaluate
learning across the curriculum)?
RE: Yeah. I mean, uh, it seems to me that one of the essential features of Performance-
Assisted Learning [activities] is that they make the expression of meaning, the
conveyance of meaningful messages primary. And they also require learners to make use
of whatever linguistic resources they have in order to carry out the performance. Right?
Um, so there is potentially a spontaneity, although also I think there is a danger that a
performance can be memorized and then performed as a memorized performance. I’m
not sure to what extent that is terribly useful. I would much rather prefer to see
performances be extemporary.

DK: What is your own experience with Performance-Assisted Learning activities as a

student, teacher, and researcher?
RE: Well, as a student, both at secondary school and at university, I engaged greatly in
acting, taking quite major roles, in fact.

DK: For example?

RE: I performed in Ben Jonson plays. I performed in an Auden and Isherwood play, I
can’t remember the name of it, etc. I performed in several plays at university, Galileo’s
umm, umm, I can’t remember the name of that. Memory is a terrible thing. But yeah,
basically, I mean I was so keen on drama, that, for some time, I thought about possibly of
trying to become a professional actor when I left university. But I think I was also aware
of my limitations as an actor, and I was aware that it’s a terribly difficult profession to
establish yourself in, and therefore, I opted for a much easier life as a teacher. Right?

10
DK: What was your most memorable acting experience?
RE: Umm, I remember I played Little Monk in Brecht’s Galileo—now I can remember
the title of it—and that was a memorable experience. Umm, I think also the various roles
that I took part in at school, also I have quite clear memories, School for Scandal, Sheridan,
I played a major role there. I can’t remember what the actual role was, but I certainly
enjoyed being on stage and having an audience captivated. Yeah.

DK: Do you think that . . .

RE: Actually, my acting started in primary school, when again I had one of the major
roles. I think one of the reasons they gave me a major role was because I had a very clear
voice, and I could project my voice very clearly. I think that’s why I got it, more than
perhaps my acting skills.

DK: Also, your enunciation is quite good.

RE: That’s it. That’s what I mean.

DK: And what about any interesting stories when you were an actor?
RE: No, I can’t really remember any clear stories. I can remember once when I forgot my
lines, and had to be prompted, and how annoyed and self-recriminating I was about that.
I think all actors are when that happens.

DK: How about as a teacher?

RE: As a teacher, speech, no, I never was engaged in any formal-type speech events,
right? Nor did I use it as a technique in my classes asking students to prepare speeches on
topics, say. Drama? Yes. As a teacher I used to function as a director, and I directed a
number of small plays with my students. Also, when I was a . . .

DK: For example, what plays?

RE: I can’t remember. I mean, we’re going back to the 1960s, and I can’t remember. These
were short plays, and they were largely specially written, improvised plays rather than
published plays. What I do remember most vividly is when I was a teacher educator, and

11
again, I elected to direct the annual play for the college, and again it was a one . . . and
I’m struggling to remember the name of it. But what I elected to do with that was again
not use a script, but rather to produce a synopsis of the story, and then work with the
actors to enact the story using their own words as much as possible, etc., right?

DK: Very good, very good.

RE: I have to say that that was very ambitious with those particular students. And I’m not
sure that as a piece of drama it was terribly successful. I wasn’t really satisfied with the
final product. It wasn’t kind of smooth enough for my liking. But was it better than having
people memorize lines and then just perform lines? Maybe as an educational experience
it was better for those students to have had to do that.

DK: How about Oral Interpretation or Readers Theater with a script in hand, and
interpretive reading?
RE: No. Never done it. I’ve never been involved in any sort of Readers Theater, reading
scripts, etc. I’ve never used them. I’m not sure I have a lot of belief in that. I don’t actually
think that giving second language learners scripts and asking them to read and perform
them actually does very much for them. Because I don’t think that it involves them really
in the fundamental processing of language that contributes to language learning. I could
be wrong.

DK: That also brings up one of the common language teaching activities is to have
students read a dialog.
RE: I think that’s useless as well. I give that as an example of what is not a task, and what
is arguably not going to contribute very much to language learning.

DK: Unless it’s set phrases there’s not much there that students can take away.
RE: I think that the only thing that it could possibly help a little is with pronunciation. I
don’t think it’s going to help with fundamental processes of helping people express what
they want to say in a foreign language if they are simply memorizing and performing a
complete script.

12
DK: One topic we haven’t mentioned so far is debate.
RE: Yes, debates I have used in class. Not extensively, but I have used them. I have
some reservations about debates used in a whole class situation, because let’s assume it
more or less follows a standard pattern, of having a main speaker and a supporting speaker
for and against the motion and then perhaps having the situation where people from the
floor can either ask questions or make statements. My reservation was that it actually
typically only involves a fairly small number of students in a large class. Yeah? And for
that reason, I wasn’t entirely convinced that debate was the most effective use of class
time, but I have used them when I taught in Africa. Yeah? And I think also we did organize
one or two formal debates as well. Yeah?

DK: So, as a teacher, of the four areas that I am most interested in, speech, drama, oral
interpretation or readers theater, and debate, the one that you find most valuable is
drama . . .
RE: No, I’m not sure that that’s correct. It’s just that perhaps drama is the one that I’ve
been most actively involved in as a student, as a teacher, etc. I think I can see merit in
students giving speeches. And I think it would be quite interesting to actually develop a
methodology for using speeches that both involve the opportunity for them to prepare
their speech and then perform it but also to be able to give extemporary speeches as well.
Right? And I would be quite interested to see whether letting them practice a planned
performed speech, what effect it had on their ability to do extemporary speeches.

DK: That would be a good research topic.

RE: I think that that would be a good one, yeah? Because ultimately, I think it’s all about
what people can do when they are not simply performing a prepared script or prepared
speech.

DK: Going to the next area, which is as a researcher, have you done research in this
Performance-Assisted Learning type of thing?
RE: No, I haven’t, mainly because most of my research is focused on the role of

13
interaction in language learning, and it seems to me that what you are looking at here is
non-interactive language use rather than interactive language use. That’s not entirely true
because drama does involve interactive use, but certainly, formal debates, readers theater,
speeches, etc., do not involve interactive language use. And that really comes from my
work in second language acquisition where interaction is seen as one of the principal
motors for language learning, for language acquisition. Right?

DK: That goes to the next question, which is how has the experience you’ve had, as a
student, as a teacher, as a researcher affected you? In other words, what do you think are
the benefits of these experiences? I realize that as a researcher you have not done any
research on these kinds of things . . .
RE: I mean that obviously I think that there is a case for research. I mean, one of the
things I mentioned to you earlier [the other day], is that many of these performances
involve what I call long turns, and maybe the emphasis on interaction which typically
involves shorter turns, right, often very short turns, has led to the neglect of the value of
the performance of long turns. I mean, there is some research that’s looked at long turns.
Some of the research on Task Based Language Teaching has looked at learners performing
monologic narratives where they’re given pictures or they watch a video, and then they
have to tell the narrative, tell the story, etc. so that involves a long turn. And to my mind
that’s the equivalent of a performance, yeah? And there has been research that has looked
to see what factors are likely to influence effective performance of long turns like that,
right? Such as, say, the role of planning.
But has my drama experience at school and university benefited me? Well,
probably yes, because if you are going to act you need to project your voice, you need to
have a very clear voice, and one of the things that I’m constantly told by students all over
the world is that I am very easy to listen to, I’m very clear, so in terms of enunciation, I
think that that drama experience was quite valuable to me, and has fed into my role as a
teacher and my role as a teacher educator. Yeah?

DK: And how about your role as a speaker at conferences in front of large audiences?
RE: Mm, no, I don’t think that drama fed into that. Except in terms of the ability to project

14
my voice, to enunciate, yeah? And respond to an audience, be aware of an audience.

DK: When was the last time you personally were involved in a performance?
RE: Well, you mean as a director or as an actor?
DK: As an actor.
RE: Oh, university. I haven’t since. I have done no acting since.

DK: Would you be interested in performing with us, perhaps?

RE: No, because I do enough performances in the talks that I give. I consider my talks
performances.

DK: That’s what I was wondering, if the performance experiences you’ve had apply to
your speeches, your talks you give.
RE: Well, yeah, I don’t . . . I think that learning to give a talk in front of a large audience
is something that I have acquired through giving talks in front of large audiences. And the
only way that my drama experience has fed into it is really in terms of enunciation.

DK: Yes, but you say when you perform your presentations at conferences or in front of
large groups of people, that’s your performance . . .
RE: I consider them a sort of performance.

DK: Yes.
RE: You know, it would come under your label of speeches, speech, yeah? Of course,
these days one always uses a PowerPoint together with a speech, and therefore you have
enormous support for what you are saying, right? And you can use a mixture of
extemporary comment together with reading bits and pieces from the PowerPoint, etc.,
right? So, I think one thing that has probably changed enormously with PowerPoint is the
nature of speeches.

DK: I agree, and I think there even may be a distinction between speeches and
presentations.

15
RE: Well, I think that speeches are becoming almost redundant in the world. You know, I
mean, presumably politicians still give speeches, yeah? Without PowerPoint. If you are
in an inside venue and talking to an audience, nearly always these days, there will always
be a PowerPoint to support your talk . . .

DK: Although teachers often give lectures, basically speeches, for a lecture class rather
than a skills class . . .
RE: Not in the universities that I work in. In universities that I work in there is a
PowerPoint in every single classroom, and most teachers, I would say 95% of them, are
going to give PowerPoint speeches.

DK: Very interesting.

RE: I don’t know what happens in Japan.

DK: In Japan there are some teachers who use PowerPoint, but I think the majority of
university[language] teachers do not use it regularly [for lectures]. I think they use the
whiteboard or chalkboard more than they use PowerPoint.
RE: My goodness. If you go to a decent high school in China, all classrooms will have
PowerPoints, and the teachers use PowerPoint.

DK: Do you have any final words that you would like to leave us in terms of our work in
speech, drama, and debate?
RE: I think probably if I was to sort of get involved in this, what I would like to do is to
sit down and figure out how performances could be researched and evaluated, right? That
would be my interest actually now, more the sort of academic interest. I mean obviously,
the main purpose of speeches or performances is to enhance proficiency, yeah? Along
with possibly some affective reasons like increased people’s motivation and their
confidence in actually using the language as well, right? So, by and large I would see that
these performances are directed at proficiency, in particular fluency and self-expression,
right? And confidence in so doing, right? So, I think it would be quite interesting to
investigate to what extent engaging learners in these performances does contribute to

16
proficiency, does contribute to increased confidence, or does it just lead to more anxiety?

DK: Do you have any words for researchers who want to research the efficacy of these
techniques, rather than just saying do the research, is there anything in particular they
should be looking at, or looking for, or doing?
RE: Well, I think that one of the big issues with performance is to think about how you
can match the type of performance to the proficiency level of the students, right? I mean
a speech, for example, could be an hour, or a half an hour, or ten minutes, or two minutes,
right, and probably, I think it would be quite interesting to look at that issue, the issue of
time, and are you giving one-minute speeches, two-minute speeches, etc., right? I think
that time is a potentially quite an important issue. The other issue that I think is quite
important is planning, and there’s a huge amount of research that’s looked at what’s called
pre-task planning which would be equally applicable to this, what is the role of planning,
does it actually improve performances, in what ways does it improve performances, in
what ways would performance people be interested in measuring the effect that planning
might have on improvement of performances, These are the kinds of issues that I would
probably be interested in.
It seems to me that performances of these various kinds are probably going to be
a lot more useful for enhancing language proficiency than a lot of other things that go on
inside a Japanese English language classroom, right?

DK: All right!

RE: But maybe there is a need to collect evidence about that.
DK: And that’s our mission for the near future. Thank you very much.
**********
Comments by David Kluge
This was the first of two interviews. What is there in what Rod said that is valuable take-
away? The easy answer is “everything,” but these seven points I thought were most
important:

1. A “creative language teaching activity would be one that encourages learners to

17
 engage in this process of creative construction that is a natural process of language
learning and language use.”

Some EFL teachers (I included) pride themselves on being creative in the way they
conduct their classes in unusual and interesting ways. They are also proud of their
creative use of multimedia – music, graphics, photos, video in their lesson plans and in
the creation of classroom materials, making their classes interesting to the modern
student. In addition, some teachers are excited by the ways they use technology in the
classroom, among other things making it easier for the teacher to do essential classroom
management tasks concerning attendance, homework, and evaluation. Although all
these creative classroom teaching activities are important for classroom management
and motivation, the comment by Rod should remind all teachers that the most important
use of creativity in language teaching is to create activities where students can learn
language effectively.

2. “it seems to me that one of the essential features of Performance-Assisted Learning

[activities] is that they make the expression of meaning, the conveyance of
meaningful messages primary. And they also require learners to make use of
whatever linguistic resources they have in order to carry out the performance. Right?
Um, so there is potentially a spontaneity, although also I think there is a danger that
a performance can be memorized and then performed as a memorized performance.
I’m not sure to what extent that is terribly useful. I would much rather prefer to see
performances be extemporary.”
In performances like speech, drama, and oral interpretation, a large focus is on the often-
memorized finished product, but more focus should be placed on target language use
during the process of creating the final product.

3. “I don’t actually think that giving second language learners scripts and asking them to
read and perform them actually does very much for them. Because I don’t think that
it involves them really in the fundamental processing of language that contributes to
language learning. I could be wrong.”
Is Rod correct about the lack of merit in using scripts in learning a language? If yes, then

18
that brings into doubt the value of the use of plays and oral interpretation in language
classes. However, focus on process rather than product, as mentioned in the response to
quotation number 2, applies here as well. In addition, drama in education means much
more than performing scripted plays, and includes the use of drama games, role-play,
simulation, and process drama. Correcting elements of the prosody, or music, of language
in non-scripted communication has limited value as the chances of the individual saying
that exact expression may be unlikely. However, it is almost certain in scripted
performances that the individual will repeat the phrase are highly likely as that is the
purpose of rehearsal. This gives the individual the opportunity to play with prosody. The
main point regarding this quotation is not the arguing of value of doing script-based
performances but should be the need for conducting research on the value of this type of
classroom activity.

4. “I have some reservations about debates used in a whole class situation, because let’s
assume it more or less follows a standard pattern, of having a main speaker and a
supporting speaker for and against the motion and then perhaps having the situation
where people from the floor can either ask questions or make statements. My
reservation from it was that it actually typically only involves a fairly small number
of students in a large class. Yeah? And for that reason, I wasn’t entirely convinced
that doing debates was the most effective use of class time . . .”
No matter which of the many debate formats used (parliamentary, policy, Lincoln-
Douglas, public forum, Karl Popper, etc.), the problem of having only a few students in a
class performing the activity at any one time has to be addressed. I believe that there are
ways of doing debates that efficiently and effectively use class time and maximize student
participation, but these creative practices need to be disseminated. In addition, there are
cases where debate activities involve whole-class participation rather than participation
of a few individuals.
5. “I think it would be quite interesting to actually develop a methodology for using
speeches that both involve the opportunity for them to prepare their speech and then
perform it but also to be able to give extemporary speeches as well. Right? And I
would be quite interested to see whether letting them practice a planned performed

19
 speech, what effect it had on their ability to do extemporary speeches.”
This is a challenge for teachers to develop ways to emphasize spontaneity in speech-
making classroom projects and also to conduct research on the value of memorized
speeches in the ability to perform speeches extemporaneously.
6. “but certainly, formal debates, readers theater, speeches, etc., do not involve
interactive language use. And that really comes from my work in second language
acquisition where interaction is seen as one of the principal motors for language
learning, for language acquisition.”
Rod is correct when only considering the product of debate, readers theater, and speech,
but again, the focus on process, if conducted in the target language, mitigates this to a
large degree. And again, more research is needed in this area.
7. “Well, I think that speeches are becoming almost redundant in the world. You know, I
mean, presumably politicians still give speeches, yeah? Without PowerPoint. If you
are in an inside venue and talking to an audience, nearly always these days, there
will always be a PowerPoint to support your talk . . .”
Is this true about the decline of speeches? It is a question worth debating as the teaching
and giving of speeches is still a part of high school practice and university curriculum. Is
a PowerPoint presentation still considered a speech, or is it a different beast entirely?
Traditional speechmaking concerns such as facial expression, eye contact, gestures, and
movement are certainly diminished when the bright, colorful, giant screen dwarfs the
speaker, who is often hidden in darkness (although technological advances have improved
visibility of projections in a normally bright classroom). Is PowerPoint used that
frequently in EFL skills classes? Is speech-making still an important world skill to teach?
These questions and more related to Rod’s statement need to be discussed and researched.
Is that all there is to learn from this interview? No, because for other readers there may
be other points of value that take them to make different investigations.
The next interview will focus on how to conduct research for Performance-Assisted
Learning, much of which also applies to conducting research on any EFL area.

20
References
Ellis, R. (2003). Task-based language learning and teaching. Oxford University Press.

Ellis, R. (2015). Creativity and language learning. In R. H. Jones & J. C. Richards

(Eds.), Creativity in language teaching. Routledge.

NOTE: The previously published version of this can be accessed from the JALT
Publications page of The Language Teacher archives https://jalt-
publications.org/articles/25273-interview-rod-ellis-performance-assisted-learning
(accessible by JALT members):
Interview with Rod Ellis on Researching Performance-Assisted Learning,
(2019), The Language Teacher, 43, Number 2, The Japan Association for
Language Teaching, pp.14-17. (4 p.).

21
The following is a reprint of a shorter version of the interview that was published
in an issue of JALT’s The Language Teacher, Interviews column, 2019, issue 43/3,
page numbers 25-27. Thanks go to The Language Teacher editors for giving
authorization for this reprint.

Note from the Author: This is the original manuscript submitted to JALT’s The
Language Teacher and published as Interview with Rod Ellis on Researching
Performance-Assisted Learning: Part 2. It had to be shortened in order to fit the
space constraints of the publication. What was deleted were some of the
content of the interview, the natural speech markers, and comments by the
interviewer in response to the content of the interview. All these are restored in
this version.

Keywords: Research, skill-getting, skill-using, focus on meaning, focus on form,

problem-solution text structures, logic, critical thinking, turns, Task-Based Language
Teaching, preparation stage

Interview 2 with Rod Ellis on

Research on Performance-Assisted Learning

with Comments

David Kluge
Nanzan University
[email protected]

Interview conducted on June 1, 2018

22
R
eturning to the same café as the first interview, Rod Ellis answered a few
questions on the practice of teaching, but mostly focused on questions regarding
research on Performance-Assisted Learning, touching on the following topics:
the strengths and weaknesses of Performance-Assisted Learning, including the
distinctions between skill-getting and skill-using and between focus on meaning and
focus on form; the usefulness of the problem-solution text structures as a basis for
performance tasks; the development of logical and critical thinking; the benefit of short
turns versus long turns; Task-Based Language Teaching; what is happening in the
preparation stage of Performance-Assisted Learning; preparing in groups versus
preparing individually; a variety of research topics and research methods; and ethics in
research.

David Kluge: Good morning, Rod. Thank you for coming and agreeing to do this
interview. I’d like to first ask a few questions related to the practice of Performance-
Assisted Learning, or PAL. What do you think are the strengths and weaknesses of a PAL
approach to language learning and teaching?
Rod Ellis: Umm. Well, obviously, a performance-assisted approach is really focusing on
encouraging use of English, so I think that in any approach to language teaching, one
needs to think to a certain extent about how it is one is going to help learners to acquire
the language system of English, to acquire English, and secondly, how they are going to
use English. In other words, there is a sort of skill-getting approach to language learning
and there is a skill-using approach to language learning. It seems to me that probably the
Performance-Assisted Learning as you have previously discussed with me focuses more
on the skill-using than on the skill-getting. Right? Thus, I think one thing that one
probably will need to think about is how Performance-Assisted Learning fits in with an
overall approach that also caters to skill-getting, knowledge-getting.

DK: Of course, an important part of many of these Performance-Assisted Learning

activities is to teach the moves in a particular speaking activity, such as debate, how to
introduce opinions and facts, and so on, so there is some skill getting, but I do understand
what you are saying.

23
RE: Obviously, you have to teach students the format of debate. I view debates very much
in terms of skill using rather than skill getting. Right? And looking back on those years
teaching in Africa there were some lessons that were clearly directed more at skill getting.
Obviously, the grammar lessons, and also direct teaching of writing strategies and things
like that, very much skill-getting. But there were also a lot of lessons that were skill-using,
like there was an extensive reading program, and we used to do debates, etc. And, of
course, out of class, students were engaged in drama and there were drama presentations,
etc.

DK: You know, I always tell students that the way we teach you to act in debate should be
a lesson for you to use when you do academic writing: that is, you state your position,
you support it with evidence, then you make some conclusions about the evidence and
how it supports the position. Would you call that skill-using or skill-getting?
RE: Well, there’s a certain amount of skill teaching which is aimed at skill-getting, but
the actual performance itself is obviously much more concerned with skill-using, with the
hope that they will apply the declarative knowledge about how to organize something in
their writing in their actual performances. Yeah?

DK: And also, another thing is the evaluation of their sources. We teach that certain kinds
of support are stronger than other kinds of support. That is, opinions of general people,
or even famous people do not have the same weight as actual statistics and numbers,
figures in support.
RE: Yeah. That is definitely skill-getting. Yeah?

DK: Yes. In addition, in terms of the use of logic and the ability to analyze statements and
say, “That’s not true,” or “It’s just not one or the other—it’s more of a continuum” that
kind of logic that we teach in debate I would also say is skill getting rather than skill
using.
RE: Yeah, I mean in terms of skill getting I think there are other things that you could
do. I mean, one of the discourse structures that has been most investigated and written
about is what is called the problem-solution structure where typically they would be given

24
some relevant situation information and then statement of the problem, and they would
be asked to present a report. And that report would typically involve first of all specifying
the situation, then clearly stating the problem, then going on to suggest one possible
solution and evaluating it, then another possible solution and then evaluating it, then
another possible solution and then evaluating it, and then trying to come to some sort of
conclusion as to which of these possible solutions is perhaps the best one. Now, the thing
that I like about problem-solution is that it really does give a very tight framework for
organizing a presentation, whereas a lot of the other kind of rhetorical advice that is given
like having to be in support of the evidence is really rather vague. Right? But there is a
very clear definite structure to problem-solution.

DK: Which is also not just an oral communication act but also a writing one.
RE: Oh, very much so. I have a doctoral student currently that is writing a proposal for a
writing study that is going to use problem-solution tasks. Problem-solution also doesn’t
just occur in expository mode. It actually also occurs in narrative because many stories
typically involve a situation, a problem encountered by one of the characters, how that
problem is handled, the solution that they try, whether in fact the solution works out or
not, and what eventuates, etc.

DK: That’s one of the common story arcs of TV shows, short stories, and novels.
RE: Yeah, the problem-solution is absolutely ubiquitous. And thus, it seems to me a very
useful structure to actually teach students and get them to actually practice performing.
You know, it seems to me a much more concrete way of dealing with what you call logical
thinking. Right? I mean logical thinking is quite difficult to tie down because it can
actually mean many different things.

DK: It does, and critical thinking, being able to distinguish between the different kinds of
sources, which are reputable or not, being able to look at the source logically, logic is
one of those critical thinking skills.
RE: I agree about critical thinking. Problem-solution is definitely going to generate
critical thinking, but it can do so much more than that. Michael Hurley wrote a whole

25
book about problem-solution in which he analyzed the kind of language that you get in
the situation, the kind of language that you get in the statement of the problem, the kind
of language that you get. So, it’s tied down in quite nitty gritty ways to particular language
patterns that people need access to in order to perform the different components of the
problem-solution discourse pattern.

DK: One of the activities that I especially like is the Lincoln-Douglas Debate which is
one person debating against one other person which very much puts the pressure on one
person to quickly on their feet to come up with responses to another person’s presentation.
Rather than having a group activity, but I do both group debate as well as individual
debate. I think the question always is in these activities how much individual focus should
be on these activities. I talk mostly about group activities.
RE: Problem-solution lends itself ideally to say a group presentation. You can give them
a problem-solution task and you can then divide it up. You say one person is responsible
for providing a clear statement of the situation, right? Yeah? One person then actually
formulates the problem very clearly. Another student can come up with solution number
1 or the solution. And then the fourth person in the group provides the evaluation. So, the
structure can be divided up amongst the people. Problem-solution seems to me to be
enormously powerful and perhaps would be very useful for people in Performance-
Assisted Learning activities to take a look at.

DK: What about other weaknesses of the approach?

RE: Well, as you know I’m an advocate of Task-Based Language Teaching, and one of
the features of Task-Based Language Teaching is what Michael Long called Focus on
Form which is the drawing of learner’s attention to linguistic form while they’re trying to
communicate, right? So, one of the things that I think Performance-Assisted Learning has
got to take a look at is what you are actually doing to draw learners’ attention to linguistic
form in their performances. Now, in Task-Based Language Teaching, this is typically
done interactionally because there are not long turns, there are typically short turns, so
teachers, through corrective feedback, can draw learners’ attention to form. But,
Performance-Assisted Learning basically, as I understand it, requires students to engage

26
in long, relatively uninterrupted turns, that is to say, turns that are not going to be
interrupted by the teacher, so one of the issues that I think you need to think about if Long
is right and Focus on Form is one of the mechanisms by which skill getting is built up,
then, you might want to think about how you are actually handling the whole issue of
getting learners to not just attend to meaning and the structure of their performance, but
actually focusing on the nitty gritty bits of language, etc., because ultimately, competence
in a language is built up by learners paying attention to the nitty grit bits of language.
How does that happen in PAL, and I’m not really clear?

DK: As we talked about yesterday, one of the things about Performance-Assisted

Learning is that the focus for many of the practitioners is on the preparation stage for the
performance. Now, the preparation is done among students. However, the teacher stands
a step back from the group and perhaps does not address the issues of Focus on Form,
and that perhaps may be a weakness of Performance-Assisted Learning in that the teacher
is not putting the focus on form.
RE: Well, we know that when students are engaging in interaction in the preparation stage,
for example in Performance-Assisted Learning, we know that students don’t attend to
form a lot; they tend to focus on meaning.

DK: Yes.
RE: That’s why, really, to ensure that you get this nitty gritty attention to form, to a large
extent is going to devolve on the teacher. Right?

DK: Yes.
RE: The other thing, that I would point out, is that you, obviously, are wedded to the idea
that when learners are preparing for Performance-Assisted Learning activities, that they
do this in groups, they do it interactively, and I think there is a lot to recommend it. But
again, drawing on Task-Based Language Learning, there’s a lot to be said for letting
learners prepare the performance of the task by themselves individually, and one of the
things, I think this is your second question, “For teachers involved with PAL, what general
advice would you give?” Start to think a little bit more about the preparation stage. Don’t

27
simply assume that putting people into groups or pairs in order to prepare is necessarily
the best way because it may well be that students would, one, prefer to prepare
individually, and two, would produce better performances if they actually prepare
individually rather than in groups. And that really takes me into research, because the
preparation stage is clearly crucially important, and I wonder what research you’ve done
on that preparation stage. Have you looked to see how students actually work when
they’re in pairs or groups preparing their performance activity? And, as I have just said,
maybe you need to start thinking about different participatory structures for that
preparation activity, and not necessarily always assuming that the best way is to put
students into pairs to do it. Right? In other words, I think that that is a place for research.
“What do you think are useful areas in which to conduct primary research in the field of
PAL?” I think that you should start looking at the preparation end, the preparation stage
of the PAL activity. And secondly, I think that you should start to look at where the focus
on form is occurring. Is it occurring in an effective way? Etc. Right?

DK: Actually, in the practice of PAL, teachers need to think about how they structure the
preparation stages, so this does relate to the practice of PAL.
RE: Yes, right.

DK: In terms of research, you talked about areas in which they can conduct primary
research, but what approach or approaches would you recommend to researchers of PAL?
RE: You’ve got to really research two areas: one area being to look closely at the
preparation stage and second, maybe to start investigating different ways of preparing
students, different participatory structures.
Umm, I mean there are many possible approaches here, but the one that I would
probably initially be interested in is a more descriptive approach. That is to say I would
like to start looking closely at what learners do to prepare, whether they are preparing
individually or whether they are preparing in groups and finding ways of investigating
that. Right? In groups or pairs, it means that you transcribe and then you proceed to carry
out a descriptive analysis as to what strategies they’re using, to what extent they’re
focusing on form, what issues they are looking at, etc. In other words, to get detailed

28
information as to what students are doing during the preparation stage. And that would
really call for descriptive research.

DK: One of my colleagues requires students to do the transcription. They would record
their preparation with other people and then transcribe that. This would help the students
to become aware of their language use, giving them a good idea of what they are good at
and what they need to improve, and would also relieve the teacher of the burden of
transcribing so many discussions.
RE: That’s one way in which focus on form can come because you can not only ask
students to prepare a transcription, but you can ask them to actually edit their transcription
and attempt to correct whatever errors they see. And arguably they should have a go at
doing that themselves before the transcript goes to the teacher, who might also offer a
little bit of corrective feedback, etc. And that’s one way of getting Focus on Form in, in
effect. So, I mean there are interesting questions like if you are asking students to
transcribe, then to what extent are they able to correct errors, what types of errors are they
able to correct and what types of errors they are not able to correct, etc.?
I think another approach would be an experimental approach. I mean, I suggested
for example that you might want to take a closer look at the preparation stage and
obviously one way that one could investigate what impact the preparation stage has on
actual performance would be to record performances. And so, if one was asking students
to prepare individually before a performance or asking students to prepare in groups or
pairs before a performance, one might want to compare the quality of the performances
you get from individual preparation as opposed to pairwork or group preparation.

DK: In terms of vocabulary and grammar? Moves?

RE: Ahhh . . . there are various ways in which you could do this. One could do it
holistically by getting people to rate the quality of it in terms of organization,
pronunciation, etc. That’s one way. Or one could use a discourse analytic approach where
one may look at micro-aspects of their language, complexity, accuracy, fluency, and there
is a whole range of different measures available for measuring those constructs. Right?
So, you know, I mean, if the preparation stage is important, it’s worth investigating

29
different types of preparation and seeing what impact they have on the quality of
performance, and the quality of the language that’s used in the performance.

DK: Previously you said that one of the things that you would like to look at is a
description of what the students are actually doing in the preparation stage. To my mind
that brings up a qualitative research method more than a quantitative research method.
Do you think a mixed-method approach would be better—to have both quantitative and
qualitative aspects?
RE: Possibly, but I used the word “descriptive,” because, you know, if students are
working in pairs or groups to prepare, what are they doing, what strategies are they using?
To what extent are they attending to language? And that calls for transcribing, and then
proceeding to do a detailed descriptive analysis to find out what it is they’re actually doing
in that preparation stage, right? So that’s descriptive research. Ethnographic research can
also involve observation, but it doesn’t necessarily involve the detailed analysis of
linguistic transcripts which I am talking about, and for that I much prefer the word
“descriptive” research.

DK: I do have to make a note here that researchers in Japanese universities need to follow
the rules of the university for ethics in research.
RE: That’s standard everywhere these days.

DK: Yes, and many Japanese universities are getting stricter about this, but there are a
lot of teachers in Japan who even show videos of their students at presentations at JALT,
and I wonder if they have received permission from the students to do so.
RE: Quite likely in Japan, not. Although you know, Australian, American, British
universities, etc. now have very really rigorous ethics processes. It actually makes it very
difficult to do research. And, by and large, one of the main reasons why the universities
have implemented this is not really to ensure that the research is ethical, but to protect
themselves against any possible damages and claims against them in the future. It’s a
legalistic procedure, unfortunately, and I would hope that Japan doesn’t feel the need to
go to the extent that, say, my university here has done with a kind of 30, 40-page form

30
that you’ve got to fill in, yeah?

DK: Yes, my university is quite strict about research ethics, but not to the extent of your
university. Many practitioners of PAL have not done quantitative research before. For
most of the people doing research, they tend to focus on surveys and questionnaires of the
students because it’s easier to do. For these kinds of people, could you outline the steps
that beginning researchers should take when doing quantitative research on
Performance-Assisted Learning?
RE: Well, you know, surveys and questionnaires are useful in tapping into learners’
attitudes and beliefs towards Performance-Assisted Learning. But they’re not going to
tell you very much about whether any learning actually takes place, right? And they’re
not really going to necessarily accurately tell you what learners did in order to prepare for
it, etc. To my mind, that type of questionnaire research is, to be absolutely honest, an easy
cop-out. An easy cop-out. Because what we really want to know is, what do they do when
they’re preparing, what impact does the preparation have on their performance, what
impact do cumulative performances have on their long-term proficiency in English, etc.
I mean, these are the questions, and you can’t answer those by means of a questionnaire.

DK: And, in the final analysis, the results of a questionnaire are not that convincing to
people reading the research. They look at it and say, “Your students may just like you as
a teacher, as a person.”
RE: Absolutely, absolutely.

DK: So, the main point is for the teacher’s own professional development it may be
interesting to get attitudes of the students towards these activities, but in terms of
convincing other people, we do need to use more quantitative research methods to
describe what learning has occurred.
RE: Yeah, I mean, you know the quantitative research methods don’t necessarily involve
heavy statistics. Descriptive research can simply tell you the frequencies with which this
move or that move is being used, that feature is present or not present. So, it can give you
a picture of what is actually going on. I’m not so sure that people who work in

31
Performance-Assisted Learning want to engage in very heavy experimental-type research
that involves inferential statistics, and I’m not suggesting it. But I am suggesting that
you actually get down to look at the language that the learners are using, and not just
resort to a questionnaire where they tell you what they think about X, Y, and Zed because
I feel it’s not going to take this area a lot further.

DK: You’ve already talked about some of this, but what do you think are things that
researchers in the field of PAL should be careful about or concerned about when
conducting research? I know you’ve just talked about some of these things, but what are
some others?
RE: Hmm . . . well, you know, good research starts with clear research questions, right?
So, you know, what your group might want to do would be to sit around and think about
some of the key research questions that you would like to try to find answers to with
regard to Performance-Assisted Learning. Yeah? Umm. I’ve been suggesting some in
what I’ve said previously, but there are probably a lot of others that you would be
interested in, right? And remember that the idea of a clearly formulated research question
is that it’s got to be answerable with data.

DK: That’s right.

RE: The question drives the data that you will need in order to answer it, which means
that the question itself cannot be sort of very vaguely formulated. Right?
Perhaps I should say one last thing and that is that I wrote a little paper once that got
published in ELT Journal and I talked about sort of three ways of carrying out an
evaluation of an activity, and this would apply to Task-Based Teaching, but equally to
Performance-Assisted Learning. And I talked about student-based evaluation, which is
typically done by means of a questionnaire. I talked about response-based evaluation,
which is something that you might want to think about. Response-based evaluation is to
what extent do you end up with a quality or kind of performance that was intended by the
task, the activity, the performance activity that was specified for the students? What is the
relationship between what you intended to achieve with a particular performance activity
and what students actually do? Right? Is there a match between the aims and the goals of

32
the activity and the actual performance itself? Right? And then the third type was a
learning-based approach to evaluation which asks, “What did they learn?” Right? And
that is much more difficult to answer, particularly in the short term because possibly what
learners learn from doing a single performance is not measurable because its microscopic,
or it’s going to vary very much from learner to learner, so it’s difficult. But one might
want to try to set out conducting a learning-based evaluation of say a whole course
involving Performance-Assisted Learning. Right? You know, “What did they learn at the
end?” And again, learning cannot really be effectively measured by questionnaire where
you ask the students, “What have you learned?” because half the time they don’t know
what they’ve learned, right? Because a lot of the learning goes on incidentally. Yeah?
And they may not be fully aware of what they’re learning. You might be interested in the
effect that it has on oral fluency. You might be interested in what effect it has on delivering
a well-structured performance, etc. Whatever. To what extent does participating in a
semester-long set of Performance-Assisted Learning activities actually result in learning?
Right? And that would call for an experimental approach. You would need to measure
where they are at the beginning and where they are at the end and then look to see if there
are any differences. Right? So that would involve a slightly more quantitative approach,
but it wouldn’t be where I would go initially. You know, you mentioned that people tend
to focus on questionnaires. That doesn’t surprise me. Right? It’s what you tend to find.
And that does provide a student-based evaluation. But I think the response-based
evaluation, yeah? If you want students to sit together and prepare, what are they doing
when they are doing that? And are they preparing in a way that you think is effective? Etc.
That’s response-based evaluation, and that involves descriptive research. So yes, I would
want to emphasize at this stage for people who probably are not used to doing research, I
would emphasize two things: one, sit down and formulate a set of meaningful research
questions that can be answered by collecting data, and two, focus initially on response-
based evaluations involving descriptive data. Do you agree?

DK: I agree completely. As a matter of fact, this is the purpose of this kind of interview is
to start a large-scale quantitative research on the value of PAL because these surveys
would not convince other teachers because most of the research is on whether students

33
are happy with the activities, whether they were motivated, and whether they would like
to do this type of activity again.
RE: Yeah. That’s it.
DK: Thank you very much, a lot to think about, food for thought, and thank you for
sharing your ideas with us.
**********
Comments by David Kluge
The interview was interesting and thought-provoking. Some of the more interesting points
were the following:
1. “so I think that in any approach to language teaching, one needs to think to a
certain extent about how it is one is going to help learners to acquire the language
system of English, to acquire English”
It is very easy in Performance-Assisted Learning to focus on the performance, and this is
a reminder that teachers also need to pay attention to helping learners learn grammar,
vocabulary and improve their pronunciation.

2. “there’s a certain amount of skill teaching which is aimed at skill getting, but
the actual performance itself is obviously much more concerned with skill using”
This is another reminder that in addition to teaching grammar, vocabulary, and
pronunciation, the actual structure of the particular performance type and general skills
of performance need to be taught. Otherwise, giving students the assignment of
performing something, and then evaluating their performance is testing without first
teaching.

3. “Now, the thing that I like about problem-solution is that it really does give a
very tight framework for organizing a presentation, whereas a lot of the other kind
of rhetorical advice that is given like supporting main ideas with evidence is really
rather vague.”
Rod presents an interesting area to explore. The problem-solution structure, although
sometimes used as a speech type and sometimes as a discussion format, as well as a
writing assignment, there are possibilities for a variety of performance activities such as

34
the creation of a problem-solution debate format where two sides debate the better
solution to a problem, a problem-solution essay done as oral interpretation, original drama,
or role-play. Also, problem solution figures in narrative – story telling

4. “one of the features of Task-Based Language Teaching is what Michael Long

called Focus on Form which is the drawing of learner’s attention to linguistic
form while they’re trying to communicate, right? So, one of the things that I think
Performance-Assisted Learning has got to take a look at is what you are actually
doing to draw learners’ attention to linguistic form in their performances.”
Focus on Form needs to be more frequently incorporated into Performance-Assisted
Learning as part of the preparation stage and perhaps also in the performance evaluation
stage to add to the language learning experience.

5. “I think this is your second question, ‘For teachers involved with PAL, what
general advice would you give?’, start to think a little bit more about the
preparation stage.”
The preparation stage of Performance-Assisted Learning is where the language
improvement, skill-getting, and Focus-on-Form can occur, and more attention needs to
be paid to this important stage. Rod goes on to describe what kind of research could be
done to examine what happens in the preparation stage.
6. “You’ve got to really research two areas: one area being to look closely at the
preparation activities stage and second, maybe to start investigating different
ways in which students can prepare for their performance, different participatory
structures.”
Rod sets out two interesting areas of research for teachers in the future to investigate.

7. “I mean there are many possible [research] approaches here, but the one that
I would probably initially be interested in is a more descriptive approach. . .. I
think another approach would be an experimental approach.”
Rod gives good general advice on how to conduct the research and then gives concrete
advice on how to do it.

35
 8. “Well, you know, surveys and questionnaires are useful in tapping into learners’
attitudes and beliefs towards Performance-Assisted Learning. But they’re not
going to tell you very much about whether any learning actually takes place,
right?”
Although Rod was initially quite severe about teachers relying on surveys of learner
attitudes toward performance activities as their research, he goes on to say that this is just
the one of three areas of evaluating an activity.

9. “well, you know, good research starts with clear research questions, right? So,
you know, what your group might want to do would be to sit around and think
about some of the key research questions that you would like to try to find answers
to with regard to Performance-Assisted Learning.”
This is excellent advice for any group of language teacher/researchers.

10. “three ways of carrying out an evaluation of an activity . . . student-based

evaluation, which is typically done by means of a questionnaire. . . . response-
based evaluation, which . . . is to what extent do you end up with a quality or kind
of performance that was intended by the task, the activity, the performance activity
that was specified for the students? What is the relationship between what you
intended to achieve with a particular performance activity and what students
actually do? . . . And then the third type was a learning-based approach to
evaluation which asks, ‘What did they learn?’”
This is an excellent outline of how to completely evaluate an activity which also indicates
how to research the effectiveness of an activity.

The interview provided a good roadmap to improving the teaching of and researching the
use of presentations in language teaching.

36
References
Ellis, R. (1997). The empirical evaluation of language teaching materials. ELT Journal
51(1). Oxford University Press, 36-42.
Hoey, M. (1983). On the surface of discourse. George Allen & Unwin.
Long, M. H. (1997). Focus on form in task-based language teaching. McGraw-Hill
Companies. www.mhhe.com

NOTE: The previously published version of this can be accessed from the JALT
Publications page of The Language Teacher archives https://jalt-
publications.org/sites/default/files/pdf-article/43.3tlt-interview.pdf (accessible by
JALT members)

Interview with Rod Ellis on Researching Performance-Assisted Learning: Part 2,

(2019), The Language Teacher, 43, Number 3, The Japan Association for
Language Teaching, pp.25-27. (3 p.)

37
This section introduces two articles on using
performance to teach content: culture and art.
⚫ Matthew Cotter takes the reader through the
appropriate steps for teaching one of his cultural
traditions, a Māori haka dance.
⚫ Will Hall describes two unique projects he does
to teach art history in ways that for the students
are unforgettable.

38
The Māori Haka: Understanding Culture Through

Traditional Performance

Matthew Cotter
Hokusei Gakuen University Junior College
[email protected]

Abstract
The use of performance to teach content material such as culture is more effective than
the typical lecturing style. This is certainly true of lessons I created regarding Māori
culture, specifically the haka. How this teaching is done is described in detail.

Keywords: Māori, haka, indigenous, knowledge, culture, history, performance

Background

I
n recent years the reputation of the haka has grown. Before, it was largely known as
the “dance” that the All Blacks, the New Zealand rugby team, did before international
rugby games. However, today the haka has become even more widespread due to

39
social network services taking its culture out into the world. But just what is the haka?
Many would say it is a war cry done before battle to intimidate the opposition and to hype
up the those who are about to go to battle. But to confine the reasons for the haka into
such a narrow definition would be to do the performers and the culture of haka itself an
enormous injustice. The haka is in fact, used for a variety of occasions including, but not
limited to, times such as welcoming visitors, in celebration, in sadness such as at funerals,
and also as a way to express tribal identity.
In New Zealand, a kapa haka or “Māori preforming arts” competition called
Matatini, is now a very serious event drawing enormous crowds. This event requires
teams to train throughout the year as they need to win competitive provincial
championships before going on to represent at the national level. This resurgence in kapa
haka has helped revitalize pride and identity throughout Māoridom, hoping to shrug off
many of the effects of colonization. It is a
Figure 1
serious part of Māori culture and should be
Introducing Background Information on the Haka
respected as such.
Due to the ever-growing fame of
the All Blacks, the “Ka Mate” haka is
arguably the most well-known haka
worldwide. However, it is by no means the
only haka. There are in fact hundreds of
haka, all with differing actions and lyrics.
As an example, most high schools in New
Zealand will have their own haka and each
tribe, subtribe, or even family group may be
notorious for their own style of haka or individual haka. That being said, due to its
familiarity “Ka Mate” is a good place to start when teaching about the haka, cultural
understanding, and teaching the performance of the haka itself.

40
Teaching Procedure

The following is one way to teach culture and is the way I teach the haka.
1) History of the haka
2) Word meaning and pronunciation
3) Actions. It is useful to pay attention to which action starts on which side and
how many times it is repeated.
4) Put words and actions together.
5) Repeat one or two more times until it is remembered well.
6) Finally, do the haka for real. The teachers should build up motivation by telling
students to imagine their enemy is front of them and they are about to go to
war…maybe to their deaths!
The steps are described in detail below.

Step 1: History of the Ka Mate

Figure 2
Teaching the History of the Haka haka.
Before any teaching of the actions or
words is done, the history of “Ka Mate”
and its composer need to be understood
to set the scene and to also acknowledge
the owners of this haka. To understand
why this haka was composed and by
whom is paramount to make sure its
learning is given the appropriate
reverence and respect. “Ka Mate” was
composed by the great warrior chief Te Rauparaha of the Ngāti Toa tribe. In the years
surrounding 1810, Ngāti Toa was constantly under threat by neighboring tribes due to the
rich resources of where the tribe resides, the Kawhia area on the Kapiti coast near
Wellington. The area was well known for its abundant fish and seafood which were a
staple of the diet at that time.
Wanting to strengthen his position, Te Rauparaha decided to go in search of

41
supporters as allies to help him. He decided to go by himself to his mother’s tribe more
inland, around Taupo. But to get there, he would have to cross through enemy tribe lands.
Unfortunately, he was found out by enemy Ngai Maniapoto and Waikato tribes and was
chased by them. Hotly pursued, he arrived at the village of his cousin, chief Te
Wharerangi. Te Wharerangi was renowned for being very hairy, which is important when
we look at the words of the haka later. Te Whareangi said he would shelter Te Rauparaha
and told him to hide down in a kumara (sweet potato) storage pit. Te Wharerangi’s own
wife said she would stand over the door entrance of the pit to deter the war party if it came
that way (Taringa, 2017).
Therefore, this haka was composed by Te Rauparaha while hiding in a kumara
pit. As the war party entered the village to search for him, Te Rauparaha listened from
inside the dark pit to Te Wharerangi explaining that Te Rauparaha had gone on and was
not there. The war party at first did not believe Te Whareangi so Te Rauparaha thought
that he might die. However, the war party left, and Te Rauparaha thought he would live,
only for it to return for another search, again bringing him to think he may die. But when
the war party was finally diverted and left the village, Te Rauparaha came back up into
the light to live another day.

Step 2: Teaching the Words

Figure 3
When teaching the words of any haka it is
Teaching the Words and Meaning of the Haka
paramount to teach the meaning and how it relates
back to how and when the haka was composed.
This is no different for the “Ka Mate” haka. From
looking at the words below, we can envisage Te
Rauparaha in the dark kumara pit, not knowing
if he will live or die, but being saved by this hairy
man who has let him see the sun shine again.
Pronunciation of the words should be also taught,
and with an audience that has knowledge of the
Japanese language, this comes easier as vowels

42
have the same pronunciation in both languages, as does the rolled “r.” One slight difficulty
is the pronunciation of the “ng” sound of nga, nge, ngi, ngo, ngu where the back of the
tongue is pressed to the roof of the mouth as we would do when pronouncing “singing”
in English. Also, the pronunciation of “wh” is often sounded to be more similar to an “f”
sound. The teacher should make sure there is ample time here for students to ask questions
regarding pronunciation and to repeat and practice difficult words and pronunciation.
Below are the words of the haka with a translation in English.

Ka Mate (Te Rauparaha – Ngāti Toa)

Ka mate, ka mate Tis death! 'tis death! (or: I may die)

ka ora, ka ora ’Tis life! ‘tis life! (Or: I may live)
ka mate, ka mate ’Tis death! ‘Tis death!
ka ora, ka ora ’Tis life! ‘Tis life!

Tenei te tangata puhuruhuru This is the hairy man

nana i tiki mai Who summons the sun and
whakawhiti te ra makes it shine

A hupane A step upward,

a kaupane another step upward!
a hupane, kaupane whiti te ra A step upward, another... the Sun shines!
Hi!

43
Step 3: Teaching the Actions
The actions of “Ka Mate” are fairly uniform with a few minor differences depending on
the performer. (See Figures 4-9.) Customarily the actions shown below in Figure 4 are
performed. Actions should be performed strongly, with tense muscles and the slapping
should be actually painful, with the skin becoming red as a result. This also shows the
opposition your fierceness and heightened emotion, that pain is of no concern to you. In
other haka where the chest is scratched with the fingers, it is considered a good
performance if blood is actually drawn from the scratch. The haka actions and words
should be given 110% effort and performers should be exhausted upon finishing.

Figure 4
Actions for Performing the Haka (Photo: Daily Mail 2015)

Figure 5 Figure 6
Explaining the Actions of the Haka Demonstrating the Actions of the Haka

Steps 4-7: Put the Words and the Actions Together and Repeat
Put the words and actions together in sections. Often when students concentrate on words,
it can come at the expense of the actions, and vice versa. Therefore, one or two slow
practices of doing both words and actions, while also teaching the extras mentioned below
is recommended. Usually, the teacher will be teaching at the front of the classroom for

44
students to follow, but at least one time the teacher should have the students try it without
teacher help while the teacher walks around correcting actions, form or posture of
individuals as they are performing.

Figure 7 Figure 8
Trying the Actions of the Haka Trying the Haka

Extra Teachings

In addition to the steps already described, here are some extra teaching hints.
1) Respect. The teaching and learning of any culture should be done with the
utmost respect for that culture. Learning the haka should be an interesting
learning experience, but it should also be done seriously. As stated above,
performing the haka was often done before going to war where there was a risk
for the performer, family or friends to be injured or killed. Therefore, making
fun of the actions and words and fooling around should not be tolerated. This
would demean the experience and more than likely, Māori culture as a whole.
The haka should always be taught and learned seriously
Figure 9
giving it its due respect.
Male Face in the Haka
2) The wiri. This is the shaking or trembling of the hands or
fingers when doing “open handed” actions as shown in Figure 4.
This action is a personification of the Tane-rore (the god of
quivering heat) who would often dance the haka for his mother
Hine-raumati who was one of the wives of the “sun god”
Tama-nui-te-ra. When the land is hot, the air shimmers and
this is when the god Tane-rore performs a haka for his mother
(“Tane-rore,” n.d.). Other theories are that the wiri personifies the mangopare,

45
 the hammer head shark, as when this great fish is killed, it still quivers and
shakes for hours which looks as though it is still trying to live and fight on. This
signifies the ultimate embodiment of strength which can be conveyed to the
opposition in a haka. That is, “If I die, I will still continue to fight on.”
3) Male style. The common style for men when performing the haka is to be in a
continued state of a “half-squat” with knees slightly splayed. This position is
where actions are performed and when stamping the feet also looks the
strongest. The pukana, involves the rolling or opening the eyes as wide as
possible to intimidate and show fierceness. This is usually done to add emphasis
to the words and actions. (“Haka,” n.d.). The pukana whetero refers to the
protruding tongue which is only done by men. It is used to intimidate and is
often thought to refer to cannibalism where the performer is implying he will eat
his opponent after he has killed them in the battle.

4) Female style. Unlike the men, women usually stand upright, and actions are not
as big or exaggerated as the men’s actions. Women also open their eyes wide but
refrain from protruding their tongues. Instead, they may do the potete where
they close their eyes, tilt their heads to a side and purse their lips in an angry
expression. This may be done for particular parts of the haka or ad lib according
to the timing of the performer. It is also seen during waiata-a-ringa, action
songs which usually more commonly sung rather than chanted like the haka, but
also contain actions.
5) Questions. The teacher should encourage questions from students during the
process as to eliminate mistakes and to correct form.

Conclusion

This activity can not only teach about an aspect of Māori culture that continues to intrigue
the world but can also produce other positive effects on the students and the class as a
whole. It can help to build teamwork and unity within a class as students strive to put on
a good performance. It can appeal to kinesthetic learners who may not usually have an

46
avenue to show their aptitude in more traditional learning environments. It can show that
communication may not be limited to only the traditional academic learning of the skills
of reading, writing, speaking and listening, but we can also use our bodies and facial
expressions to convey a message and feeling. It can also help to shake off inhibitions of
speaking another language in front of others as, depending on the context, most students
will have little or no knowledge of te reo Māori, the Māori language. Everyone is starting
from the same level. On top of all of this, it is just a whole load of fun which can increase
motivation for participating in the next lesson, whatever that may be. Learning a haka is
something that students can enjoy, take home, explain to others, and will most likely never
forget!

References

All Blacks Homepage. https://www.allblacks.com

Dudding, A. (2011). Let’s dance ‘Ka mate’ in perspective. Sunday Star Times, Stuff.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/sunday-star-times/features/5675508/Lets-dance-Ka-mate-
in-perspective
Gardiner, H. (2015). Ngāti Toa haka "Ka mate" internationally exploited again. Te Ao Maori
News. https://www.maoritelevision.com/news/regional/ngati-toa-haka-ka-mate-
internationally-exploited-again
Haka. (n.d.). http://haka.co.nz/haka/
McLintock, A. H. (1966). An encyclopaedia of New Zealand.
https://teara.govt.nz/en/1966/haka
Sportsmail Reporter. (2015). New Zealand will bring their famous Haka to England for
the Rugby World Cup... but what exactly does it all mean? Daily Mail.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/rugbyunion/article-3232065/New-Zealand-
bring-famous-Haka-England-Rugby-World-Cup-exactly-does-mean.html

47
Taringa Podcast Episode 7. (2017). Once upon a Taima – Ka mate (Origins)
https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLnNvdW5kY2xvdWQu
Y29tL3VzZXJzL3NvdW5kY2xvdWQ6dXNlcnM6MzAwMDA2NDYwL3NvdW
5kcy5yc3M=&episode=dGFnOnNvdW5kY2xvdWQsMjAxMDp0cmFja3MvMz
M5OTQ3MTI0

Matt Cotter, formerly a primary school teacher in

New Zealand, currently lectures at Hokusei Gakuen
University Junior College. He is Maori from both the
Te Ati Awa and Ngāti Mutunga iwi groups through
his great gandmother, Wairingiringi Taiaki, on his
father’s line. Matt holds two undergraduate degrees in
Maori Studies and Psychology, and a Diploma of
Primary Teaching. After moving to Japan and making
Sapporo his home, he completed a Master of Education degree specializing in TESOL.
His research interests include CALL, intercultural communication, and indigenous
language and culture.

48
Active, Creative, Collaborative Learning Through

Performance Activities Deepens Connections to

Art History Class Content in Japan

Will Hall
Miyazaki International College
[email protected]

Abstract
The aim of art history classes taught at a private undergraduate liberal arts college in
Japan is to foster a deep understanding of a range of historical art genres while using the
target language of English. The challenge of engaging language learners in content and
language integrated learning (CLIL) classes, however, is twofold. Not only is there the
existing language hurdle, but there is also the added issue of making unfamiliar, and often
challenging content, interesting and relatable. If students are unable to make connections
with the content, it may have a negative effect on their intrinsic motivation to learn. This
paper describes how teachers can deepen students’ connection to, and understanding of,
the content and language of art history classes through active, creative, and collaborative

49
performance activities. The two activities described are first, a Paleolithic cave painting
discovery activity and second, an emaki (Japanese rolling picture scroll) making project:
an extended project spanning several classes and culminating in group presentations.

Keywords: Art history historical art genres, CLIL, active, creative, and collaborative
performance activities

C
ontent and language integrated learning (CLIL) classes are relatively new to
Japan but have been growing in popularity in recent years (Brown, 2015). The
classes aim to help students understand subjects while providing them with a
context for new language. In theory, this dual-focused aim of simultaneous content and
foreign language acquisition sounds like a pedagogical time-saver, yet it does present
several challenges to educators and learners alike in terms of helping students make
connections to unfamiliar topics, while at the same time meeting pre-defined foreign
language goals (Marsh, 2002). This paper introduces art history classes taught in English
at a private undergraduate liberal arts college in Japan, first outlining advantages of the
classes before focusing on some challenges they present. This paper details two activities
which were incorporated into the wider syllabus and which the author has found to be
effective in overcoming such challenges.

Art and Language Learning

While language is arguably the most direct form of communication, it is certainly not the
only one. Ancient civilizations, long before written language, communicated via images
in the form of hieroglyphics and cuneiform; symbolic rock carvings from prehistory
beautifully illustrate the efficacy of the visual to convey meaning. Today’s world, too, is
saturated by visual information. Photographs and images in social media inundate us;
well-known brands, exploiting the power of the image, are known by symbols alone. In
fact, numerous studies into the phenomenon known as the picture superiority effect have
shown that people are considerably more likely to remember images than words (Shepard,
1967).

50
 The immediacy and prevalence of the visual is clear, and when employed in a
language learning environment, can be used to attract students’ attention, aid their
concentration, and help make the connected language more memorable (Gower, Philips,
& Walters, 2010). In order to learn a foreign language effectively, students must not only
be able to use the words and phrases correctly, but also be able to grasp the context on
which those words, phrases, and concepts depend. Visual material can be used as realia
in the classroom to provide this context, allowing students to create a deeper
understanding of these concepts (Hanks, 2013). These arguments present a strong case
for the use of visual material in the language classroom, suggesting that art history classes
would naturally be an engaging and interesting learning environment. However, the task
of creating authentic student connections to class content is complex and its success can
have serious consequences in terms of motivation to learn.

Connection to Content Affects Intrinsic Motivation to Learn

While art and visual material in general can be effective in the language classroom, within
CLIL art history classes there remains the requirement for students to understand the
artwork in a socio-historical context. This theoretical requirement of the course is
generally achieved through a combination of short lectures, discussions, and text-based
active learning activities. Often the artworks and genres being examined come from
unfamiliar cultural contexts and historical time periods to which students have little
exposure. This lack of connection risks having a detrimental effect on students’ intrinsic
motivation to learn. Ultimately, if students are unable to connect a subject to their own
lives, then they will be less likely to value it and less motivated to learn.
The role of motivation is widely accepted to be one of the main determinants in
successful foreign language acquisition (Dornyei, 2001). The challenge is then how to
motivate students to learn about topics they have little connection to, and possibly little
interest in. While experiencing the artworks firsthand through gallery visits and field trips
are, of course, a great way for students to learn, geographical, financial, and time
constraints often make this option unsuitable. However, as we shall see in the example

51
activities in this paper, creative use of the resources available on campus can have
surprisingly effective results. The key to improving student motivation and deepening
connections to class content may lie in the synergistic implementation of active, creative,
and collaborative activities. While there is considerable overlap between these three types
of activities, and a given activity is likely to incorporate elements of more than one, or all
three, it is useful to briefly analyze them individually in order to identify their particular
merits.

Figure 1
A Model of the Way that the Combination of Active, Creative and Collaborative Activities
can be Effective in Deepening Student Connections to Art History Content.

Active Activities
The connection between mind and body is a well-explored topic, and the idea that learning
occurs when the senses are engaged has been the subject of numerous studies (e.g.,
Barsalou, 1999; Beilock, 2015; Shapiro, 2010). In recent years there has been growing
evidence within embodied learning theory research of a positive relationship between
bodily movements, cognitive activities (particularly language acquisition), and overall

52
academic achievements (Kosmas et al., 2018). The implications are clear: engaging
emotions through physical sensory input helps students assign meaning to experiences
and make personal connections with topics. Physical interaction through making art is an
experience that is unique to the individual and helps integrate personal experience into
art appreciation. By providing a rich multisensory learning environment in the art history
classroom, teachers can help students acquire the target language while at the same time
creating meaningful and lasting connections to the artworks.

Creative Activities
Activities in which students create their own original artworks can be very effective in
deepening connections to the focus topic. Atkinson and Dash (2005) propose that students
can learn more from the act of creating art than from knowledge of art history itself.
Gaining a true understanding of an artistic technique requires firsthand experimentation
with the actual materials and methods being discussed. Through this methodical and
deliberate sensory process, students can gain subjective insight which cannot be found in
theoretical study alone. Furthermore, by changing the roles of the learners from student
to artist, the dynamic of the learning environment is drastically altered in interesting ways.
Classmates assume the role of an audience and adrenalin begins to flow as students
prepare for the unfamiliar and exciting experience of their artwork being appraised.
Evidence has shown that the emotional arousal associated with such stressful but
controlled experiences can help create more lasting “flashbulb” memories (Conway,
1995).

Collaborative Activities
Through project-based group activities, students can develop complex interrelationship
skills such as leadership and negotiation and important real-world skills such as the skill
to learn itself. As the teacher steps back from the learning process and takes on the role
of a facilitator, students are encouraged to find meaning by themselves rather than
regurgitate it secondhand. In this way, by giving students responsibility to work in groups,
autonomy in the direction of their project, and time to investigate an area they are
genuinely interested in, intrinsic motivation and a heightened sense of alertness and
interest come naturally (Newell, 2006). According to Vygotsky’s social constructivist

53
theory (1962), working in groups and learning from one another engages students in the
learning process. A concrete example of how this might be implemented in the art history
classroom is by assigning roles (or even better, having students assign roles to themselves)
in a creative project. Through this specialization of the group members, while they work
on a collaborative final outcome (presentation, artwork, or performance), learners very
rapidly become educators as they dynamically assist each other and construct knowledge.

The Activities

Before introducing the two example activities, it is worth mentioning that the first class
listed below, Introduction to Art History, was team-taught between a content and language
teacher. The presence of an extra teacher has clear implications in terms of the kind of
activities possible, enabling the use of multiple rooms for splitting the class into groups,
reducing preparation time, and multiplying the knowledge base. The second class,
Japanese Art, was solo taught.

Activity 1: Enter the Cave! Simulation

Background
Introduction to Art History (HMN101) is a 15-week/ 30-class first year course that
surveys world art with a focus on ancient civilizations and is designed to introduce
students to the root of human artistic creation. The Enter the Cave! simulation activity
was held during a single 90-minute class halfway through the first unit, The Origin of Art.
The topic was Paleolithic cave paintings and the previous 2 classes had been a mixture of
short lectures and text-based active learning group activities. The paintings, discovered
on cave walls in southern France, Spain and other parts of Europe, date back to the Old
Stone Age period, beginning around 37,000 ago. They are not only the oldest, but also
some of the most intriguing artworks we know of. When discovered in the 19th Century,
the paintings baffled archaeologists and art historians who at first refused to believe that
such realistic and vivid representations of mountain lions, horses, mammoths, and other
animals could have been produced by such primitive people (Gombrich, 1995). The most
extensive and best-preserved examples are found in the Lascaux and Chauvet caves in

54
southern France and the importance of the works, both as records of the lives of early
humans and as timeless examples of human creativity, cannot be overestimated.

Figure 2
Prehistoric Cave Paintings, Chauvet, France, Show the Use of Natural Forms of the Cave
Wall to Heighten the Three-dimensional Experience.

The works, rich in form, line, and often color, were painted using the natural shape
of the cave walls to accentuate the three-dimensional illusion of the wild animals.
Reproductions are often shown to eager art students in their early lectures with the aim of
fanning the sparks of artistic curiosity. I, too, remember these lectures from my art school
days in Scotland. I also remember the look of frustration on the tutor’s face as he tried in
vain to impart his obvious passion for the works to the room of undergraduates struggling
to find connections between the ancient works and their own contemporary interests. Here
lies the crux of the problem. The works were intended to be experienced, not just seen,
and need to be appreciated as such: firsthand, lit by torchlight; with the same magic,
mystery, and fear felt by the cave dwellers of the time. Prehistoric people, evidence has
shown, revered these animals not only as a source of food – their lives depended on
avoiding their attack. Seeing the paintings on the walls would surely trigger feelings of
fear. It is unsurprising then, that connections fail to be made when artworks are looked at
through the distant lens of theoretical study: two-dimensional in presentation and stripped
of emotional impact. For students to make connections to the works, they need to

55
physically interact with and experience them for themselves. That is why this activity was
created.

Method
The simulated cave itself was created by blacking-out a small room on the 4th floor of the
university (achieved by covering the windows and cracks around the door with cardboard)
and turning off the lights. Enlarged photocopies of real examples of cave paintings from
the Lascaux and Chauvet caves were positioned around the walls and over protruding
structures. Working in groups of 4, students were assigned the task of entering the cave
armed with one (surprisingly realistic) 100-yen shop battery-powered candle between
them and a worksheet each to complete. While under normal lighting the appearance was
unremarkable, in the pitch-black room, lit only by flickering candlelight, the unfamiliar
effect was realistic enough to evoke excited and nervous feelings of the unknown. In order
to heighten the feeling of surprise, students were deliberately told little about the activity
beforehand. After informing the class that today they were going to be explorers, the first
two groups were handed their candles and worksheets and led to the “cave” by one of the
two teachers.
Outside the cave entrance, the groups were given instructions and asked to close
their eyes while they were led inside. The candlelight was only enough to see within the
immediate vicinity, and with one candle between four “explorers,” students were
encouraged to collaborate; shuffling around the dark space and angling the sole light as
they sketched and made notes. The worksheets required students to write down details
about all the cave paintings they could find, focusing on visual aspects and the kind of
animals represented. They were also asked to make their own sketches of what they saw.
On returning to the classroom, students compared the information they had gathered with
other groups before reflecting on their experience through discussion and a short writing
activity.

56
Figures 3 and 4
Students Worked in Groups During the Cave Discovery Activity.

Prepared worksheets were used to collect visual information and other details.

Feedback
Feedback from students was collected in the form of an open-answer survey (Appendix
A). It was interesting to see the adjectives students used to describe the activity, such as
“scary,” “exciting,” “mysterious,” and “strange.” This use of such emotionally charged
vocabulary suggests that students were able to forge real connections to the experience of
discovering the cave paintings. Several students commented positively on the
collaborative aspect of the activity, although it was noted that some found working as a
team “difficult.” It is important to remember that individual student learning preferences
will always differ. Negative feedback is perhaps a reflection of the limitations of

57
performance activities in terms of collective student enjoyment. Most interesting were
comments from students reflecting their understanding of the emotions of the prehistoric
artists: “I can understand their feeling…,” “…they made art by emotions like scared,
excited…” Such comments suggest that meaningful connections to the topic had indeed
been successfully made.

Activity 2: Emaki Project Presentation

Background
The second year Japanese Art (JAC204) course surveys masterpieces of Japanese art from
pre-history to the present, with emphasis on the interplay between Japanese and Chinese
cultural traditions. Held within unit 4, Medieval Art, and spanning 6 classes, the Emaki
Project was an extended group activity consisting of several distinct sections: learning
and researching, planning, creating, and a final presentation which was open to all
students and faculty. This second project was based on workshops held in Japan and
Europe that I was fortunate enough to have been previously involved in (Shimohara, et
al., 2010).
Emaki are long narrative picture scrolls developed in Japan, which reached the
highest level of artistic expression in the late Heian Period (794-1185 CE). The scrolls,
made of paper or silk, with the longest measuring up to 12 m in length, are unrolled from
right-to-left, scene-by-scene, creating a sense of time unique to this art form. This novel
method of viewing has led to emaki being referred to as the “roots” of anime (Papp, 2010).
The artworks are very intimate objects and, like a book, are designed to be held in the
hands and viewed by only a few people at a time. While Japanese students are generally
aware of the art form, being familiar with famous examples such as The Tale of Genji
Scroll (1120-1140 CE), few had actually seen any in a museum or gallery. No students
had made or even handled an emaki before. Again, we can see the problem. These
fascinating and unique artworks are such precisely because of the way in which they are
viewed, held, and engaged with in a direct physical sense. Once these elements are
removed, so too is the essence of the work, and the allure is lost. Surely then, it is unfair
to expect students to make deep connections to the artworks when they only experience
them passively as text and image-based information. To motivate, interest, and encourage

58
a deep understanding, students require a level of direct contact that can only be attained
from making their own versions.

Method
Students were randomly assigned to groups with 5 or 6 students per group. Working in
their group, they chose 3 backgrounds from a selection of contemporary Japanese and
international landscapes. The images were joined to make one long background of around
240 cm by 20 cm. While this is far shorter than the 12 meters-long original works, it was
a new format for students, requiring them to work on the floor or spread their emaki over
many desks, which gave them an idea of the distinctive qualities of the art form. Each
group discussed the backgrounds and began planning their stories. They had explored
several well-known examples in previous classes, so they were aware of historical
precedents. However, at this stage, they were given total autonomy over the content and
direction of their stories. As noted, students often struggle to make connections with the
narratives and aesthetics of ancient art works, by giving them free reign to contemporize
their creations, they were able to gain access to the works that they had previously felt
denied from.

Figure 5
Students Chose Three Backgrounds per Group from Contemporary Japanese and
International Scenes.

59
The next stage of the project was for students to transform into the characters of their
stories. They were free to use the costumes and props that had been prepared by the
teacher, but it was interesting to see many preferred to work with original and imaginative
costumes of their own.

Figures 6 and 7
Students Transformed into the Characters from their Stories.

The images for the scrolls were made as follows:

1. Students used their smartphones to photograph each other in character and pose.
2. The images were sent as email attachments to the instructor with size requests for each
image (small, medium, or large).
3. After printing out and distributing the images, students cut them out and affixed them
to their backgrounds.

Figures 8 and 9
Using What They Had Learned About Emaki in Previous Classes as a Guide, Groups
Customized Their Scrolls with Drawings and Text.

60
Throughout the whole creative process, students discussed and dynamically altered the
nuances of their narrative by drawing motion effects, positioning the figures, and using
text in the form of both direct speech and narrative. The scrolls were attached to front and
back pieces with a wooden roller in the center to allow them to be stored ready for
presentation. Finally, the titles were attached to the front of the scrolls, and they were tied
using cord and fasteners. This format is true to the original art form itself.

Figures 10 and 11
Emaki Tied with Cord for Storage and Being Viewed.

Presentations
The final presentations took the form of dramatic storytelling. All faculty and staff were
invited to attend the presentations, which further added to the excitement and controlled
stress of the unfamiliar experience. One or two students rolled the work to reveal only
small sections of the story at one time, while the other students took the roles of narrator
and the characters themselves. Although the presentations involved little physical acting,
the dialogue and narration was animated and full of emotion and it was clear that students
were energized by their transformation into the roles of the characters they had created.

61
Figure 12
The Final Presentation was Open to All Faculty and Staff.

Student Feedback
Student feedback was again collected in the form of a survey (Appendix B) about what
students had learned about emaki as an art form and overall impressions of the project
itself. Student responses demonstrated an impressive understanding of the particular
methods used in emaki, such as ways of showing action and movement, the combination
of text and image, and the unique method of viewing the work one scene at a time. It is
worth noting that many students reflected that they were able to understand these details
because they themselves were involved in the production process. In regard to the group
presentation, several students commented that they felt “nervous” but also that it helped
them understand how the works were originally intended to be viewed.

Challenges and Risks

While there are clearly many benefits to incorporating the kind of activities detailed in
this paper, it is also worth noting that they are not entirely risk-free and may present some

62
of the following challenges.
Firstly, the lack of teacher control associated with extended group projects may
prove problematic. Depending on several factors such as class size, student attitudes, and
behavior, increased student autonomy may result in unruly or unproductive classes. While
the additional supervision of an extra teacher could easily remedy this issue, team
teaching is not always possible. In which case, the solo instructor should pay particular
attention to how the groups are structured in order to maximize productivity, while being
careful not to sacrifice the exciting aspects of working as a team on a creative activity.
Experimenting with group sizes most suitable to individual classes can help.
Secondly, these kinds of activities require a lot of preparation time. Teachers with
busy schedules and part-time teachers working at multiple institutions may struggle to
find time to prepare rooms, materials, model artworks, on top of the usual handouts and
lecture materials already needed. Planning new activities that span multiple classes
inevitably demands time and effort, however, if the activity is introduced as a regular part
of the curriculum, and repeated each year or semester, then the initial effort can be worth
it in the long run.
Furthermore, the lack of resources and difficulty acquiring funding from
universities unfamiliar with art-based projects would add to the time and effort needed to
prepare. However, as institutions become aware of the benefits to the educational
experience of students, they may become more open to providing support for such
activities. Opening up the presentations and performances to all faculty and staff to watch
is a great way to demonstrate the worth of creative, active, and collaborative learning
activities, as well as promote the creative output of the students.

Conclusion

A combination of active, creative, and collaborative activities can be effective in helping

students gain a deeper understanding of artworks and genres in art history classes while
simultaneously benefiting their English language acquisition. Unfamiliar and challenging
art historical topics can be made accessible to students by encouraging them to create
meaningful connections through embodied learning, practical art making, and learning

63
from each other in the form of group projects. While the focus of this paper is the use of
such methods in art history classes, the same principles are applicable to any CLIL class.
While these activities do present several challenges to both the teacher and the learner in
terms of the risk of trying something unfamiliar, as well as practicalities such as
preparation time and material budgets, the overall experience can be worth it. Ultimately,
trying something new in the classroom can make us feel anxious, but perhaps getting past
these feelings is a very important way to grow as both educators and learners.

References

Atkinson, D., & Dash, P. (2005). Social and critical practices in art education. Trentham.
Barsalou, LW. (1999). Perceptions of perceptual symbols. Behavioral and Brain Sciences,
22: 637–660.
Beilock, S. (2015). How the body knows its mind: The surprising power of the physical
environment to influence how you think and feel. Atria Books.
Brown, H. (2015). Factors influencing the choice of CLIL classes at university in Japan.
ELTWorldOnline. 1-22. http://blog.nus.edu.sg/eltwo/?p=4810
Conway, M. A. (1995). Flashbulb memories. L. Erlbaum Associates.
Dörnyei, Z. (2001). New themes and approaches in second language motivation research.
Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 21, 43-59.
Gombrich, L. (1995). The story of art. Phaidon.
Gower, R., Phillips, D., & Walters, S. (2010). Teaching practice handbook. Macmillan.
Hanks, P. (2013). Lexical analysis: norms and exploitations. MIT Press.
Kosmas, P., Ioannou, A., & Zaphiris, P. (2018). Implementing embodied learning in the
classroom: effects on children’s memory and language skills. Educational Media
International, 56(1), 59–74.
Macedonia, M. (2019). Embodied learning: Why at school the mind needs the
body. Frontiers in Psychology, 10.
Marsh, David. (2002) LIL/EMILE – The European dimension: Actions, trends and
foresight potential. Public services Contract EG EAC. European Commission.
Newell, R. J. (2006). Passion for learning: How project-based learning meets the needs

64
 of 21st century students. Rowman & Littlefield Education.
Papp, Z. (2010). Anime and its roots in early Japanese monster art. Global Oriental.
Shapiro L. (2010). Embodied cognition. Routledge.
Shepard, R.N. (1967). Recognition memory for words, sentences, and pictures. Journal
of Learning and Verbal Behavior. 6: 156–163.
Shimohara, M., Kamimura, E., Hinohara, K., & Hall, W. (2010). A practical study of
cross-cultural understanding at an independent school in the U.K. Bulletin of the
Education Research and Development of Education Department. Kagoshima
University.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1962). Thought and language. MIT Press.

Note on Figures: All photographs were taken by the author and used with the
permission of all identifiable people with the exception of Figure 2. [Etologic horse
study, Chauvet cave] (2010). Retrieved from
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Etologic_horse_study,_Chauvet_cave.jpg

Will Hall is an artist and teacher. He received his

PhD in Media Art from Kyoto City University of
Arts. His research on art, vision, and language
focusses on experimental technology which
incorporates the physical body and senses into the
process of language acquisition. He teaches a
range of art courses and English at Miyazaki
International College. Go to www.willrhall.com to
view his artwork.

65
Appendix A

66
Appendix B

67
This section shines the spotlight on teachers practicing
what they teach as they perform for the teachers and
students attending the conference.
⚫ Kim Rockell (from New Zealand) and Vivian
Bussinguer-Khavari (from Brazil) met by chance
on the day before the conference and
discovered they are both musicians who love
the Bossa Nova. They put together an
impromptu set of songs and this article describes
how the magic took place.
⚫ Chelsea Schwartz describes her feelings as she
sings and plays for her colleagues.
⚫ Kim Rockell describes an amazing experience
putting together a Noh drama in English.

68
“Nanzan Bossa”: A Spontaneous Musical

Encounter in Nagoya
Kim Rockell Vivian Bussinguer-Khavari
Komazawa University Kwansei Gakuin University
[email protected] [email protected]

Abstract
This article narrates a spontaneous performance that occurred in the context of an
academic conference, the topic of which was Performance in Education (PIE). Developed
retrospectively by the performers through a process of textual conversation, the article
includes the performers’ background information, descriptions of rehearsal and
performance, as well as a discussion on the role of “scholar-performers” in education.
The article suggests that when teachers are open to spontaneity and allow themselves to
be vulnerable in performance, this attitude can be mirrored by students in a language
education context, encouraging them to use unfamiliar language without fear of failure.

Keywords: Performance in Education, Bossa Nova, EFL, Japan

69
S
ometimes in the course of our busy lives, it is the unexpected and spontaneous
that impacts us most, or as the American writer and cartoonist Allan Saunders
(1899-1986) wrote in 1957, “Life is what happens to us while we are making other
plans.” Something of this sort occurred while participants at the Performance in
Education conference at Nanzan University, 2019, were returning to their
accommodations after a long day of well-planned and interesting activities. Disembarking
the minivan, Dr. Kim Rockell heard what sounded like a remark in the Portuguese
language, as Dr. Vivian Bussinguer-Khavari read a Latin inscription near the entrance of
the Nanzan Gakuen Kenshu Center facility. The recognition of Portuguese-sounding
language, as well as the excitement Rockell felt at the possibility of interacting in it, can
be better understood in the context of the following background information. In Japan,
the café chain Doutor [Doctor], which first opened in Harajuku in 1980, frequently
includes music from Brazil in its playlist, so it is thanks to both Japan and coffee that
Rockell became interested in Bossa Nova and began autodidactic Portuguese language
study using FSI (the American Foreign Service Institute) materials (Jackson & Kaplan,
2001), and his own experimental method (Rockell, 2016). After so much solitary
repetition of antiquated Portuguese “target language,” it appeared that David Kluge and
Nanzan University had provided a first opportunity for a real-life conversation. Rockell
opened his mouth and found himself talking to Bussinguer-Khavari, who, it would be no
exaggeration to say, knows a thing or two about the Portuguese language and the Brazilian
community in Japan (Bussinguer-Khavari & Tanaka, 2010; Bussinguer-Khavari, 2011).
Rockell, an ethnomusicologist who is currently experimenting with English-language
Noh performance in education, is also a trained classical guitarist. He explained to
Bussinguer-Khavari that he had begun studying Portuguese to learn to sing Bossa Nova
standards with the guitar. She then enthusiastically shared her own musical background:
Bussinguer-Khavari grew up in Brazil in a musical family, singing in church,
and for her high school jazz band, in which she also played the saxophone. Although
she did not learn to sing Bossa Nova specifically, it was a genre particularly admired
by her father, so she grew up listening to it and was familiar with many of the most
popular songs before she arrived in Japan at age 18, to attend college.
Bossa Nova first began in the late 1950s, in Rio de Janeiro, performed by young

70
college students, and was a brand-new music genre in Brazil and in the world as
Bussinguer-Khavari’s parents’ generation was growing up. The genre derives from
the Samba, which is “widely thought to be directly descended from the batuque, a
circle dance performed by the slaves of Brazil’s colonial plantations” (Shaw, 2019).
As developed by artists such as Antônio Carlos Jobim (1927 – 1994) and João
Gilberto (1931 – 2019) it was “characterized by a somewhat angular melodic line,
incorporating intervals not usually used in the Samba, such as diminished fourths
and minor sixths” (Fletcher, 2004, pp. 512-513). International awareness of Bossa
Nova arose when the 1959 film Black Orpheus won the Cannes Film Festival grand
prize and the Academy Award for best foreign film (MacGowan & Pessanha, 1993,
p. 13). Bossa Nova gained popularity in the US, and then in various other foreign
nations, bringing much pride to the Brazilian people. In the latter half of the
twentieth century, the style became a “big pop-music trend,” which waned only
with the “English rock invasion led by the Beatles” (MacGowan & Pessanha, 1993,
p. 13), and saw well known Bossa Nova artists coming to Japan to perform (Ishi,
2003, p. 87).
On moving to Japan, as Bussinguer-Khavari made the challenging adjustment
to life in her new environment, she noticed that there was a special interest by the
Japanese people in Brazilian music, not only Samba, but also Bossa Nova.
In Tokyo, one of her classmates was also from Brazil, played the piano
beautifully and knew Bossa Nova well. The two began to practice playing and
singing together on weekends to “relax and forget the kanji tests of the previous
week,” while at the same time allowing other foreign students from their dormitory
and even their Japanese teachers at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies to learn
about their music.
On completing her Japanese course in Tokyo, Bussinguer-Khavari moved to
Kobe. Since then, she has continued to perform when the occasion arises at live
houses, jazz clubs, wedding parties, and other events, and even performing at a
dinner show at Hotel Monterey in Osaka.
Pursuing a professional academic career, this musical activity has been
mainly for personal enjoyment, but Bussinguer-Khavari also recognizes that it has

71
allowed her to share some of her culture with the Japanese people, while learning
more about her own country and identity as a Brazilian in the process. Bussinguer-
Khavari loves to sing and does not let opportunities for improvisation pass her by
when she encounters someone who can play Bossa Nova. Hence the chance
encounter with Rockell at the Nanzan Gakuen Kenshu Center led to the spontaneous
suggestion from conference director David Kluge that they try to perform
something together on stage at the conference. After all, this was the Performance
in Education (PIE) SIG’s conference, in which the main theme was performance.
The spontaneous musical encounter that ensued is reported on here. The article took
form retrospectively through a kind of “textual conversation” between both the authors
and would-be readers, themselves authors, based on the “death of the author” (Aryan,
2020), an idea apparently still very much alive. This paper will discuss (1) the process of
preparing for the performance, (2) the on-stage experience itself, and (3) the role of
scholar-performers and how such an identity influences student-performances in the
language classroom. Terms that refer to notions such as “spontaneity” and “creativity”
resist precise definition. Indeed, it can be suggested that through obfuscation they acquire
an evocative power to elicit an honest account of the subjective experience of creative or
performative processes. In this paper we will not impose an agenda that interrogates these
ideas from an ontological perspective that is a priori hostile to or seeks somehow to justify
performing arts activities. There is no shortage of research work in that vein. Allow this
paper to simply attempt to narrate a story.

Putting It All Together: Evening Rehearsal “Midnight Masterclass”

The hour was late, and participants were tired when David Kluge brought them back to
the Kenshu Center by minivan. However, given the very real possibility of an impending
performance, the authors met in one of the center’s common rooms to try things out.
Although Rockell had brought his guitar (he was preparing for a recital in Aizu-Bandai,
Tohoku, the following month) this was a spontaneous encounter and no chord charts or
lyrics sheets had been prepared in advance. By randomly trying out songs that occurred
to them, Rockell and Bussinguer-Khavari saw if they were able to play and sing each item
together, and whether or not the keys were appropriate. Fortunately, on this occasion, the

72
keys in which Rockell had learned to play standards by Antônio Carlos Jobim, such as
“Dindi”, “Corcovado”, “One Note Samba” and “The Girl from Ipanema,” also worked
for Bussinguer-Khavari, so there was no immediate need to transpose them. Rockell
recalls, “although I had spent quite a bit of time memorizing some of the Bossa Nova
standards that are well known internationally, I was unsure if Vivian (Dr. Bussinguer-
Khavari) would also want to perform them, since the world of Brazilian music is so
dynamic and so many new songs have been composed in the decades since they were
created. It was reassuring to learn that she also valued these classic old standards.”
As the sound of the spontaneous session filtered out into the Kenshu Centre from the
common room, curious listeners were drawn by the music. Their presence meant that the
practice was already a performance in itself, a kind of “improvisation within an
improvisation” and, as the hour drew later, a kind of “midnight masterclass.” Bussinguer-
Khavari recalls: “We could not stop to figure out minor details, we had to go with the
flow and see if the song was a keeper or not.”

On Stage: Rhythms and Reactions:

Figure 1
On Stage at the Nanzan University Theatre – Flatten Hall.

(Photo provided by Maiko Matsumoto, Bussinguer-Khavari’s seminar student)

After the “midnight masterclass,” it was straight to the stage on the final day of the
Performance in Education conference. Nanzan University has an excellent theatre space.
However, spontaneity has some downsides in the contemporary performance context
where amplification, mic placement, seating arrangements and lighting are so complex.

73
On this occasion the duo was able to organize mics, sound, and seating support in a room
backstage before going on to perform. Because the sturdy music stands provided would
have created a visual barrier between performers and audience, the duo continued to
“improvise,” placing a song list and sections of lyrics that required confirmation on a
computer screen, placed on a chair, instead. According to Rockell, “When we went on
stage, I was focusing mainly on adjusting to the acoustic and also couldn’t help looking
out into the audience to see who was listening. I was aware that Vivian was kind of
adjusting the seating and out of the corner of my eye I noticed her practical music stand
solution. I guess language teachers also have to adapt to many different classroom set ups
too, so she is probably used to being adaptable in the moment.”
The atmosphere was cozy and had a special “at-home” feeling to it. The audience
was small, and though the theatre was quite large, the performers were close enough to
the audience to observe their facial expressions throughout the performance. Seated
near the front row in the audience was seasoned scholar Dr. Rod Ellis, who gave his stamp
of approval with hearty applause. Professor Ellis appeared to respond more positively to
the palette of sounds produced by the nylon string guitar and vocal duo than to qualitative
research theories advanced during coffee breaks between academic presentation sessions!

Figure 2
An Intimate Audience Within a Large Theatre

(Photo provided by Maiko Matsumoto, Bussinguer-Khavari’s seminar student)

Despite the midnight masterclass the night before, the on-stage performance was in

74
itself improvisation, as none of the songs had been rehearsed well enough and, beyond
the basic list of songs, the performers had not discussed the introduction or ending of each
song, nor the timing of solo versus duo vocals. In essence, Bussinguer-Khavari led the
vocals while Rockell “orchestrated” (Traube, 2004) the rhythmic accompaniment through
his fingertips. At certain points, the music set was enriched by Rockell joining in with the
singing, creating a magical harmony of bossa1 in duo. This was perhaps the factor most
commented on following the performance: the way in which the two voices effortlessly
complemented each other seemed to have grabbed the audience’s attention. It is true to
say that the subjective experience of those present at this event affirmed that both
performers’ passion for music and love for Bossa Nova was successfully transmitted to
the audience, creating a positive and light breeze within the Nanzan theater.

Discussion: Scholars as performers

Japanese students, who have been characterized as reticent may be “scared off” and shut
down in situations where their teacher is “too performative” (Rockell & Ocampo, 2014).
There is a separateness between teacher and students that is analogous to that of performer
and audience, which only the quality of the performance itself can bridge. Some foreign
instructors try to circumvent the problem of distance between social position by adopting
a “friend” role rather than an authority in the school or campus environment (Alshahrani,
2017; Zeff, 2018).
In interaction there is a “mirroring back”, getting back the energy you put out.
Rockell recalls that his own experience performing music in Japan and his role as an
educator have been met very differently: “After singing or performing in public, Japanese
people have tended to approach me warmly and actively shared aspects of their own
emotional lives. In educational settings however, perhaps as a result of a fixed set of
associations held by students about the role of the teacher, my efforts to get close to
students have often been thwarted.”
Bussinguer-Khavari has had a similar experience and recognizes the value of

1
According to Bussinguer-Khavari, the term bossa, when used by itself (i.e., not preceding nova, as is
most often the case), expresses the intimacy and affection Brazilians feel toward the music genre as a
whole and can also be used to describe any song that is in or is similar to bossa nova style.

75
communal music making. At her current university, she performs Bossa Nova about three
times a year during their chapel hour, inviting students and teachers to attend and even to
join the band if they wish.
When the performance is witnessed by students, but not as a formal part of their
classroom work, it can help them to form a broader and more nuanced image of and
warmer disposition towards their teachers. For Bussinguer-Khavari, “Throughout the
years, it [musical performance] has opened many doors to communication.”

Conclusion
In this article the authors reflect on a past event, combining their impressions in the form
of a “textual conversation” that narrates their experience and leaves it up to the readers to
join in the conversation themselves. This paper has spoken to the magic of spontaneity,
telling the story of an unplanned musical encounter within an academic context. It is an
example of how to “grab the moment” and take part in improvisation, in a way, feeling
the same nervousness and excitement that language teachers often make their students go
through in the classroom setting. The Nanzan Bossa Nova performance, delivered
spontaneously at a conference about performance, revealed itself as the outcome of what
members of the Performance in Education (PIE) SIG strive to have their students
experience: the courage to step outside the box, use the skills one has to perform before
an audience, experience a sense of accomplishment, and grow from the experience,
eventually using it as a stepping stone towards the next opportunity to perform. At a
conference where educators, researchers, and students all got together to present their
work and perform to an audience (in both academic and non-academic manners) the
Nanzan Bossa Nova performance, with all its spontaneity, was a great encouragement and
refreshing example for participants. It can also be noted that by Rockell singing in
Portuguese, one of the several languages he is trying to learn as an adult, his performance
had a special message to the second language learners attending the conference that day:
“Do not hesitate, do not fear mistakes, simply use the skills you already have and perform
to the best of your ability.” At the Performance in Education conference at Nanzan,
Rockell and Bussinguer-Khavari, who are both educators, learners, and performers
themselves, willingly chose to experience what they so often require of their students –

76
to step out of their comfort zone and perform in an unfamiliar context with little
preparation.
The contribution of the spontaneous Nanzan Bossa Nova has been recognized
by the PIE SIG and has also been considered sufficiently memorable by the authors to
warrant documenting in this article. There has also been a suggestion that the Nanzan
Bossa Nova performance be repeated at a future conference or event. Such a collaboration
may indeed turn out to be magical, but spontaneity, which we addressed in this textual
conversation, is another matter and may elude those who deliberately seek it out.

References
Alshahrani, A. (2017). Power distance and individualism-collectivism in EFL learning
environment. Arab World English Journal (AWEJ), 8, 145-159.
Aryan, A. (2020). The rise of theory and the death of the author. In The Post-war Novel
and the Death of the Author (pp. 1-45). Palgrave Macmillan Cham.
Bussinguer-Khavari, V. (2011). Immigrant parents’ attitudes toward children's bilingual
development: The case of Brazilians in Japan. Japan Journal of Multilingualism
and Multiculturalism, 17, 1-29.
Bussinguer-Khavari, V., & Tanaka, J. (2010). マイノリティー児童のバイリテラシ
ー測定の試み: 非集住地区に居住する在日ブラジル人児童を対象に. 母

語・継承語・バイリンガル教育 (MHB) 研究, 6, 23-41. [Attempt to measure

biliteracy of minority children: For Brazilian children living in non-residential
areas. Native Language, Succession Language, Bilingual Education (MHB)
Study, 6, 23-41.]
Fletcher, P. (2004). World musics in context: A comprehensive survey of the world's
major musical cultures: Oxford University Press.
Ishi, A. (2003). Searching for home, wealth, pride, and ‘class’: Japanese Brazilians in
the ‘land of yen’. Searching for home abroad: Japanese Brazilians and
transnationalism, 75-102.
Jackson, F. H., & Kaplan, M. A. (2001). Lessons learned from fifty years of theory and
practice in government language teaching. Georgetown University Round Table
on Languages and Linguistics 1999, 71.

77
MacGowan, C., & Pessanha, R. (1993). The Brazilian sound: Samba, Bossa Nova und
die Klänge Brasiliens: Hannibal-Verlag.
Rockell, K. (2016) Incorporating music in CALL: An exploratory study establishing a
protocol for Computer Assisted Language Learning Incorporating Music
(CALLiM). AsiaCALL Journal, 11, 18–42.
Rockell, K., & Ocampo, M. (2014). Musicians in the language classroom: The
transference of musical skills to teach “speech mode of communication”.
ELTED, 16 (Spring), 34-37.
Shaw, L. (2019). The social history of the Brazilian samba. Routledge.
Traube, C. (2004). An interdisciplinary study of the timbre of the classical guitar.
McGill University.
Zeff, B. B. (2018). Pragmatic Teaching and Japanese EFL Learners’ Use of Greeting
Routines (Doctoral dissertation, Hokkaido University).

Kim Rockell was born and grew up in Christchurch, New Zealand,

and is currently an associate professor at Komazawa University in
Tokyo. His research interests encompass ethnomusicology and
performing arts in education with projects examining plucked-string
traditions, Philippine rondalla and Hispanic musical influences in
the Asia Pacific, migrant music and music in diaspora, and the
music/language nexus. Recently, while learning to perform
traditional Noh in Japan, he has begun to explore the educational
potential of English language Noh. He is also active as a classical
guitarist.

78
Vivian Bussinguer-Khavari teaches at Kwansei Gakuin
University. Her research areas are Applied Linguistics (Second
Language Acquisition, S LA) and heritage language education
(Heritage Language Education, HLE). She is a semi-professional
singer and enjoys travelling and cooking. She is a past Coordinator
of the Performance in Education SIG (when it was the Speech,
Drama, & Debate SIG).

79
Musical Integration in a Language Conference

Chelsea Schwartz

Juntendo University

[email protected]

Abstract
This article tells the story of the author’s experience playing the guitar and singing a song
for the audience of a Performance in Education conference.

Keywords: Performance in Education

I
n June of 2019, I was presented with the wonderful opportunity to perform in
Nagoya for a language education conference. As a natural performer from a young
age, I was ecstatic to share my love of performing at this event! Although I had
done many performances throughout my life, this one was truly special as it was the
first time to perform at an academic conference. Filled with excitement (and some
nervousness), I vigorously practiced so that I could get all the chords and strumming

80
patterns flawless for the event. I chose to do one of my all-time favorite songs, “Ours”
by Taylor Swift.

The day of the event was filled with anticipation. Before going on the stage, I
snuck off to an empty seating area to squeeze in extra practice time. My heart was
racing, bursting with joy and excitement. Finally, the time had come. I went into the big
500-seat auditorium and prepared my music stand and tuned my guitar to perfection
backstage. Feeling confident and ready, I graced on to the stage with my shiny, blue
guitar and a big smile. Looking out at the crowd made me nervous and exhilarated at the
same time.

As I started explaining about my performance and the relevance of using it in an

English classroom, my worksheets were passed out to the audience. These sheets
contained a gap exercise in which students read and listen to the lyrics, while carefully
selecting the correct missing lyrics. The next step is to answer some questions on the
bottom of the sheets. In my own classes, I often use musical gap exercises for students
to improve listening, reading, grammar, vocabulary and critical thinking skills.

The performance commenced and I was strumming my guitar and singing with
all my heart. The audience was captivated and immersed in the music. Some were
nodding their heads along to the beat. True elation was the only emotion I felt in those
moments. I will never forget this experience and the positive feedback I received
afterwards. I would like to extend heartfelt thanks to the entire Performance in
Education SIG committee, with special thanks to David Kluge, for their dedication to a
truly successful conference and providing me with my chance to shine on the stage.

Note from the Editor: Performance in Education SIG conferences have always provided
a platform for both teachers and students to perform in front of an audience. We
welcome reflections from performers on their experience.

81
 Chelsea Schwartz is an American educator/musician/researcher
who has lived in Tokyo the past eight years. She graduated from
Soka University of Japan in 2014 with an M.A. in TESOL. She had
the opportunity to work at Soka for three years as an Assistant
Lecturer. Additionally, she has over 10 years of experience
teaching English in both Japan and America. Chelsea often
implements music into various activities in her classes, stressing
the importance music has in helping students acquire language
skills. She firmly believes the use of gap exercises, jazz chants and
free writing lyrics to a beat are all useful activities. Her areas of
research include musical integration in the EFL context, academic
advising and educational psychology. In her free time, Chelsea enjoys playing with her pets,
writing songs on her guitar, traveling and spending time with friends and family.

82
 Star-Crossed Lovers: The “Given and Added” in

the Magic of an English Noh Performance

Kim Rockell
Komazawa University
[email protected]

Abstract
This paper reports on the cooperative creation of an English language educational Noh
play, which was performed during a workshop at the Performance in Education
conference at Nanzan University in 2019. The paper shares the background to the
collaboration and considers the way extant or current elements are built on during the
creative process. Participants powerful subjective experiences of this event suggest that
is an avenue worth pursuing in ongoing future research. Written retrospectively during
the global COVID-19 crisis, necessary adjustments to the play in the case of hypothetical
digital delivery, and how they might preserve the magic of theater are also considered.

Keywords: Performance in education (PIE), Noh, Japan, creative process

83
 That which hath been is that which shall be, and that which hath been
done is that which shall be done; and there is nothing new under the
[rising] sun
Ecclesiastes 1:9

A
s the reader may suspect, the word inserted in square brackets above by the
author is not part of the original biblical quotation, which according to Levy,
“raises issues fundamental to contemporary discourse, such as whether we live
in a world that progresses or whether the world is static …” (Levy, 2017). Creativity can
also be seen to involve recombinant processes, drawing on traditions given to us from the
past while making additions and adaptations, guided by a subjective experience of the
magical immediacy of imagination. The “Given and the Added” are presented as
fundamental to the creative process by the late Bruno Nettl in his seminal
Ethnomusicology: Thirty-one Issues and Concepts (Nettl, 1983), who also points out that
among the world’s cultures, the “quantity and nature” of the given (and added) varies
considerably. More recently, these ideas have been taken up by Godart, Seong, and
Phillips (2020), who define creativity as first “a configuration of cultural and material
elements,” (the given) and also containing elements that are “unexpected for a given
audience,” (the added) (Godart, Seong, & Phillips, 2020). When considering a long-
established theatrical form, such as Noh, which “is a form of traditional Japanese theater
with a 700-year history, which combines poetry, drama, music, song and dance,” (Rockell,
2020), the reverence for the past and adherence to traditional practices remains strong.
Practitioners of Noh today enter viscerally into a past world of posture, movement, chant,
and costume. Such given elements, representing the past in the present can be thought of
as what Stiegler called “tertiary retentions” (Stiegler, 1998), evoking “the mystery of
practices that took place in caves 40,000 years ago … as though these ancient practices
were portals to another plane of reality” (Brine, personal communication, 2020).
In this article, I will report on a unique, contemporary iteration of an educational
Noh-style play, which was workshopped and performed during the Performance in
Education: Research & Practice conference held at Nanzan University, in 2019. My

84
experience as a participant/observer, personal correspondence, and freely elicited
feedback from participants inform this writing. Moreover, in doing so, both the creative
process, and also the subjective experience of workshop participants in terms of pre-
expectations and subsequent “live” workshop participation, will be considered from the
point of view of the “given” and the “added.” Extensive preparations were made for at
least six months prior to this event, but in this case, it was revealed that actually
experiencing performance in the moment has the most powerful impact on participants.
Even when extensive preparations are made, as will be seen, the reality is that adjustments
have to be made in the moment of performance, and it is in these real-time adjustments
that the given and added come alive in spontaneous action. Also, reporting on this event
a year later in 2020, means seeing it through the lens of the experience of COVID-19 and
resultant social restrictions. We will consider how this workshop might have been
approached had it occurred during the pandemic, and what adaptations might have been
necessary for it to go ahead. Perhaps it would have been impossible to perform. The 2019
workshop was rich and positive experience, which bore witness to Bhaktar’s statement:
“Theater is a language of the body, the voice, the gestures, a magic spell woven by the
human soul and only comprehensible to all those present in that sacred space,” after which
he states flatly, even somewhat provocatively: “This magic of theater cannot be created
on digital platforms …” (Bhatkar, 2020).

Raising a Glass: To a New Collaboration

It was in Okinawa that I first met David Kluge at a live (face-to-face) conference in 2014,
where he delivered a highly inspiring keynote speech, after which, at a banquet, the sound
of the sanshin and local awamori liquor were equally intoxicating, and those present,
educators and all, were moved to dance with joy and abandonment. Several years later,
my colleague, the corpus linguist John Blake alerted me to an event at Shonan Institute
of Technology, which was being organized by the then JALT Speech, Drama, & Debate
SIG. In Shonan, I encountered Kluge again and after finishing my own presentation on
Noh in English (Rockell 2018), I joined in as Kluge guided participants through the
performance of a Readers Theater (Head et al., 2017; Head et al. 2018; Shanthi & Jaafar,
2020). Experiencing Kluge’s attractive English language setting of the tanabata story

85
firsthand, it occurred to me that his script could also be reworked as an English language
Noh. In keeping with his open, adventurous, and encouraging nature, when I put the
suggestion to Kluge, he immediately agreed. And thus, with a combination of “givens,”
a collaboration had begun.

Preparations: The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Macs

Kluge sent an electronic copy of his readers’ theater script Tanabata: A Romance on July
23, 2018. In the weeks that followed, working mainly at the Fukushima Prefecture
Museum library, I set out to make an English Noh version. This involved reworking the
text so that it generally followed the syllables of tanka style poetry (5-7-5-7-7-), which is
common in traditional Noh texts (Rockell, 2020, p. 8). In addition, I sought to transfer
information provided by main characters in Kluge’s readers theatre to the chorus in the
English language Noh script. At this stage, the practical steps for converting a script to a
basic Noh style, as they appear in the Mask & Gavel (Rockell, 2018), were not yet fully
formulated. For the sake of illustration, a one verse script excerpt is reproduced below:

Table 1
Readers Theater and English Noh Comparative Verse Structure
Jo (Introduction)
Kluge (Kluge, 2018a) Rockell (2018)
Narrator: Once upon a time, up in the Waki (Main actor): Here/ in/ the/
heavens lived some gods. The king of the hea/vens (5)
heavens was I/ live/ in/ the/ Sky/ Pa/lace (7)
named Tentei. King/ Ten/tei’s/ my/ name (5)
Tentei: I am Tentei, the king of the sky. I Strong/ and/ just/ I/ help/ people (7)
am strong and just. I make sure everything Live/ safe/ly and/ work/ smooth/ly (7)
runs
smoothly, that everyone is doing their jobs
and things are always as they should be.

As the script developed, Kluge and I passed it back and forth between ourselves

86
via email. Kluge continued to offer encouraging suggestions, including that we aim to
complete the script in time to try it out at a JALT conferences in Kobe and Shizuoka in
2018, and rehearse it in Nagoya during May 2019, in preparation for a performance the
following month at Nanzan University in June.

Figure 1
David Kluge Practices Suriashi or Noh-style Walking During the JALT Workshop at
Granship in Shizuoka 2018.

In Shizuoka, we were able to hold an English Noh workshop in the publishers’

area in Granship, by placing portable tatami matting near an alcove at the side of the space.
The main aim was to recruit participants for the performance at Nanzan University the
following year, and those that joined this workshop were told some of the basic history
and background of Noh and given the opportunity to try the basic Noh walking style or
suriashi and chanting from the beginning of the play Tsurukame [The Crane and the
Tortoise].
Almost a dozen people were able to join in this workshop, and three members
were sufficiently inspired to accept main roles in the performance planned for 2019. One-
on-one coaching session were offered to these volunteers either remotely or in person and
David Kluge was particularly enthusiastic about taking on the role of King Tentei.

87
However, Kluge anticipated that more detailed preparations would need to be made:

I was thinking that since this is more formal and involved (costumes, masks, set,
hand props, music, etc.) it would be better to take a day to rehearse it in advance,
get all the costumes, masks, music, set, and hand props together, and do a second
day of rehearsals on Sunday, then maybe take an hour during the June conference
as a dress rehearsal before the performance on the stage in the auditorium (Kluge,
2018, personal communication)

Anticipating the expense of costumes, Kluge suggested purchasing yukata [light cotton
kimono], tabi [ankle length socks with a toe separation], geta [wooden clogs], and haori
[jacket worn over a kimono] while they were on sale and asked what colors I
recommended for the planned performance. Kluge also made me aware of potential
resources available for practice in Nagoya, including access to a kenshu center. In addition,
he floated the exciting possibility that the renowned scholar Rod Ellis, who would be in
attendance, might take a role in the play. To give participants a general idea of the
intonation curves of the lines and chant in the script, I marked them above the text with a
series of arrows and included a key describing how the voice should be used when each
particular mark appeared. In the weeks that followed, Kluge also requested an
increasingly detailed array of preparatory materials. These included sample voice
recordings of each character’s lines and those of the chorus, to enable them to practice
separately in various distant locations prior to everyone meeting at the conference event.
He also requested detailed choreographic maps for the main performers, which indicated
direction of movement, relative position, and approximate number of footsteps.
Kluge compiled these resources in a folder and send them to those participants who had
shown initial interest during the workshop in Shizuoka.
I will now go on to add to the description of creative flow given above by
attempting to make the given and added explicit. If our individual presence in Japan as
English language educators represents “Geworfenheit” or “thrownness” after Heidegger
(Lee, 2020), then it is through our initiative and willingness to share that we are able to
add. Kluge draws on a Japanese folktale, itself owning some debt to Confucius (Piao,

88
2019), and applies his keen literary sensibility and experience in education in reworking
it as a readers theater, a form that can itself be traced back to ancient Greece (Csapo &
Miller, 2007), and has now been popular with contemporary educators for several decades.
Kluge’s recombinant result itself becomes a given when willingly shared with the author.
From Noh, comes the syllabary of tanka poetry, which appeares in Noh scripts frequently
and draws on earlier precedents in passages from the 8th century Kojiki and Man’yoshu
(Addiss, 2012), the Japanese aesthetic concept of Jo, Ha, and Kyu, which has been
suggested to have come from India (Hoffman, 2008), the roles of the main characters and
chorus, walking style, certain movements , and costumes. In drawing on these givens, the
guiding aesthetic was to create something accessible, practically performable, appropriate
within an educational context, and, it was hoped, entertaining. Of course, the practical
work of script creation relied on newly developed technologies, themselves the
cumulative result of scientific endeavor.

Figure 2
Participants in English Noh Rehearsal at Nanzan University Theater Under the Direction
of the Author, 2019.

(Photo courtesy of David Kluge)

89
The Workshop and Performance at Nanzan University Theater
Hosting an academic conference involves huge logistical and timetabling challenges and
inevitably adjustments need to be made according to the circumstances. Kluge was able
to position the Noh workshop at a time when the largest number of willing participants
were able to be present at the Nanzan University Theater. Unfortunately, the members
assigned main roles at Shizuoka the previous year were unable to go ahead due to personal
circumstances and there was no opportunity for an initial rehearsal near the beginning of
the conference. So, for many of those present, this was a new experience altogether. They
were coming to the experience with little or no general or specific pre-knowledge or
expectations. The group that assembled for this workshop was diverse, and Kluge
reported being “amazed at the number of people who participated and the wide range of
ages, from university-age students to teachers.”
Prior to the workshop, I gave a solo demonstration of Noh utai (chant) and shimai
(dance) to give participants unfamiliar with Noh a feeling for the traditional performance
style. The theater stage at Nanzan was ideal for this activity. However, physically guiding
the choreography by gently manipulating actors positioned at opposite sides of the stage
alternately was physically exhausting. The carefully prepared choreographic maps needed
to be abandoned and a more immediate, common-sense approach adopted.
At the same time, while directing the event, I felt a great sense of solidarity with
the participants, who were highly focused and appeared to put energy and feeling into
their roles, and a sense of excitement pervaded the large group of participants, whose
presence stood out palpably in contrast to the background of the bare stage. Indeed, the
participants in this event reported it being a memorable and emotionally powerful
experience. Here, the real-time, visceral participation in an aspect of Japanese culture,
meant that what was previously merely interesting when “told,” became “powerful” when
performed. For example, moving with the Noh style suriashi walk and body posture while
holding a Japanese folding fan felt exciting and, in the words of one participant “helped
me get into the world of the story” (written feedback from Participant B, April 4, 2021).
Prior to the workshop, some participants had doubts about whether or not Noh
in English would work, considering it to be a uniquely Japanese artform – to be only
performed in the Japanese language. But after actually experiencing English Noh during

90
the workshop, they reconsidered this view. One Japanese participant commented that on
this occasion “the originality of Noh remained …” (written feedback from Participant A,
April 4, 2021), despite it being rendered in English. The manner of chanting, singing, and
vocalization of traditional Japanese Noh, are some of its distinctive characteristics, from
an aural or sonic perspective. Although synchronizing such sounds with the English
dialogue presented a challenge, and caused some participants to sense an eerie,
“something strange” feeling (written feedback from Participant B, April 4, 2021), their
overall appraisal was very positive.

Discussion: Hypothetical Digital Delivery

At the time of writing, the massive global move to online education as a result of policies
formed in reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic, have become an area of overwhelming
scholarly focus. Given this context, reflecting on the event at Nanzan with the benefit of
hindsight, and bearing in mind Bhaktar’s rather pessimistic view of theater on digital
platforms (Bhatkar, 2020), it seems appropriate to consider how this event might have
been conducted during the 2020 pandemic.
First, given the large stage area at Nanzan University theater, it would have been
possible to position performers more than two meters apart from one another, and given
that masks are a feature of Noh, performers would hardly have felt out of place wearing
them. However, the physical contact required in spontaneous choreographic direction
may have been problematic. Some Salsa dance teachers in Tokyo have experimented by
placing a wooden broom handle between themselves and their students, enabling the
teacher to direct the student’s movements while pair-dancing but without the usual
physical contact. Such an approach may have worked at Nanzan.
In the case of a purely digital event, since digital platforms permit asynchronous
interactions, those performers who for various reasons were unable to attend in 2019, may
have been able to take part online. However, while allowing wider participant access, a
digital platform would result in a highly variable quality of experience based on the
specific conditions of their own computer equipment, internet access, and the physical
location of their computer. Simultaneous physical presence of participants in the Nanzan
University theater, on the other hand, provided the unified experience of a splendid

91
acoustic, and a visually attractive, dedicated space, with none of the restrictions and
constraints in terms of sound that are a fact of life in contemporary urban Japan (Rockell,
2016).
Participants’ kinesthetic experience would also be radically different, and not
necessarily in a good way. Even if individual performers were able to set up personal
external cameras with wide angle lenses sufficient to capture the whole-body movements
of the performer, these movements, viewed by the remaining members on their own
individual computer monitors, would not be felt to transverse, or advance and retreat
relative to their own positions as would occur in a live theatre activity. Using commonly
available conferencing software such as Zoom and Meet, visual access to performers
would frequently be restricted to two-dimensional thumbnail sized upper body or torsos.
With considerations in mind, it is little wonder that Bhaktar charges online theater as
being devoid of “magic.” On the other hand, it is reasonable to suggest that the constraints
mentioned above could be overcome in the future though carefully planned computer
programming, and skillful use of advanced technological features. But this would be
asking for much to be “given” in advance and rob the theatrical experience of its
immediacy.

Conclusion
This paper reported on the cooperative development of an English language Noh, which
culminated in at workshop and performance at the Performance in Education conference
at Nanzan University in 2019. Considering the combined efforts of the author and
conference director David Kluge, the place of the “given” and the “added” in the creative
process was highlighted.
English language Noh explores a unique avenue for education through the arts and
the strong impact reported by participants was testament to the efficacy of the specific
approach and to the use of theater in general in an educational context.
These kinds of activities, and especially the way they are delivered have become
subject to many restrictions in the context of the recent global health crisis which was
touched on in this paper by considering a hypothetical digital delivery of the play. Taking
an optimistic stance, it is hoped that what was achieved theatrically in Nagoya in 2019

92
might itself become a given on which to build a future live performance of the play, under
improved global health conditions in the not-too-distant future.

References

Addiss, S. (2012). The art of haiku: Its history through poems and paintings by
Japanese masters: Shambhala Publications.
Bhatkar, O. (2020). Ontological Crisis of Theater. Sambhāṣaṇ 1 (4).
Csapo, E,, & Miller, M. (2007). The origins of theater in ancient Greece and beyond:
from ritual to drama: Cambridge University Press.
Godart, F., Sorah Seong, S., & Phillips, D. (2020). The sociology of creativity:
Elements, structures, and audiences. Annual Review of Sociology, 46.
Head, P., Kluge, D., Lyons, C., Rees, G., White, J., & Bussinguer-Khavari, V. (2018).
Performance-assisted learning: Enabling students to thrive and jive. In P.
Clements, A. Krause, & P. Bennett (Eds.) Language teaching in a global age:
Shaping the classroom, shaping the world. Tokyo: JALT: 233-241.
Head, P., Kluge, D., Morris, R., & Rees, G. (2017). Transformation through speech,
drama, and debate. In P. Clements, A. Krause, & H. Brown (Eds.),
Transformation in language education. JALT: 314-322.
Hoffman, T. M. (2008). Musico-linguistic culture of India and Japan: Exploring

foundations for collaboration in music and language arts. 国際基督教大学学

報 3-A, アジア文化研究別冊= International Christian University

Publications 3-A, Asian Cultural Studies Special Issue (17):141-161.

Lee, Y. J. (2020). Geworfenheit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5Ab7e0kz98
Levy, A. (2017). Ecclesiastes and contemporary argument. Berghahn Journals.
Nettl, B. (1983). The Study of ethnomusicology: Thirty-one issues and concepts.
University of Illinois Press.
Piao, Ming. (2019). The same background of Confucian culture a study on the
differences between Chinese and Korean myths and stories--Taking the Cowherd

93
 and Weaver Girl as an example. In 2019 9th International Conference on Social
Science and Education Research, Francis Academic Press, 1135-1139. DOI:
10.25236/sser.2019.219
Rockell, K. (2016). Incorporating music in CALL: An exploratory study establishing a
protocol for Computer Assisted Language Learning Incorporating Music
(CALLiM). AsiaCALL Online Journal, 11, A18-A42. http://asiacall.info/acoj
Rockell, K. (2018). English Noh theater workshop: Lessons from a Japanese university
EFL classroom. The Mask & Gavel 7: 38-49.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.37546/JALTSIG.PIE7.1-3
Rockell, K. (2020). Knowing Noh and ‘Nō-ing’ English through Intercultural
Performing Arts. International Journal of Education & the Arts, 21(11). DOI:
http://doi.org/10.26209/ijea21n11.
Shanthi, A,, & Zuraida, J. (2020). Readers theater something old but still an assiduous
tool to acquire English language. Creative Practices in Language Learning and
Teaching (CPLT) 8 (1), 32-42. https://ir.uitm.edu.my/id/eprint/31032/
Stiegler, B. (1998). Technics and time: The fault of Epimetheus. Vol. 1. Stanford
University Press.

Kim Rockell was born and grew up in

Christchurch, New Zealand, and is currently
an associate professor at Komazawa
University in Tokyo. His research interests
encompass ethnomusicology and
performing arts
education with projects examining plucked-
string traditions, Philippine rondalla and
Hispanic musical influences in the Asia Pacific, migrant music and music in
diaspora, and the music/language nexus. Recently, while learning to perform
traditional Noh in Japan, he has begun to explore the educational potential of
English language Noh. He is also active as a classical guitarist.
94
 Appendix A
Workshop Survey

Noh in English workshop and performance. Performance in Education: Research and

Practice. Nanzan University, Nagoya. June 15-17, 2019.

Questions for participants/audience members

1. Do you remember the Noh in English workshop and performance at

Performance in Education: Research and Practice conference at Nanzan
University in Nagoya in June 2019?
2. How did you come to know about it or participate in it?
3. If you have any general memories of the event or if anything stood out, please
share them.
4. Was the experience different from what you expected? If so, how?
5. What was your image of Noh prior to the workshop?
6. Did your ideas, feelings or attitude about Noh change as a result of the workshop
and performance? If so, how?
7. If possible, please comment on the following aspects of the workshop and
performance experience:
• Physical
• Linguistic
• Visual
• Aural
8. This event combined traditional elements and new elements. If possible, please
share below what you thought was traditional and what you thought was new.
9. Based on your experience at the workshop performance, what do you think
makes Noh ‘Japanese’?

95
English Noh Workshop Photo Record

JALT2018 Publishers Exhibition Area Introduction to Basics of Noh

Kim Rockell explaining the key moves of Noh

Kim leading the chorus in chanting

The Director explaining the essence of moving in Noh

96
Kim demonstrating how to walk in Noh style Giving it a try with a folding fan

July 19, 2019, at Nanzan University: The Workshop on Stage

97
98
99
100
This section introduces James Higa’s unusual

use of presentation software as a sort of

teleprompter when students give speeches.

101
PRESENTATION

PowerPoint as a “Modified Teleprompter”

James Higa
Kinjo Gakuin University
[email protected]

Abstract
This article presents a novel way to use a PowerPoint slideshow as a “teleprompter” to
help students when teaching presentation skills.

Keywords: Presentation, presentation app, teleprompter

M
any presenters use PowerPoint, or a similar presentation app, to help illustrate
ideas, graphs, and charts, and pictures in their presentations. The use of
PowerPoint is ubiquitous as tools to exhibit information in a presentation, but
PowerPoint can also be used as a teleprompter. The teleprompter is a proven tool on TV
to aid in the delivery of a speech or presentation. Using the PowerPoint as a “modified
teleprompter” will be illustrated to help students in their presentations and, also with
asking and answering questions in interviews.
To set up the PowerPoint, have questions and instructions like those described in
this article, written out on the slides. When making the slides, anticipate the length of time
each slide may take to answer, depending on what the main points are; each slide may be
of a different time length. An outline format would be best to use. These slides will act
sort of like as cue cards that the student will read and then will have to answer. Example
of eight slides, phrases or questions, and possible answers are shown below:

Presentation #1:
Slide #1: is blank. This gives the student some time before starting their

102
presentation.
Slide#2: Greeting. “Hello, everybody! How are you?”
Slide#3: Name? “My name is Robert Smith.”
Transition: Do you have a nickname? “Please call me Bobby.”
Slide#4: Where are you from? “I am from New York.”
Transition: How long have you been in Japan? “I have been here for
one year.”
Slide#5: Where do you live now? “I live in Hamamatsu.”
Slide#6: Are you married or single? “I am single.”
Slide#7: What do you like to do? “I like to listen to music, cook, and ski.”
Slide#8: Conclusion: “Thank you for your time and I look forward to seeing you.”

Bobby’s self-introduction would be:

First, he will be looking at the audience, then start:
“Hello, everybody! How are you? My name is Robert Smith. Please call me, Bobby.
I am from New York. I have been here for one year. I live in Hamamatsu. I am
single. I like to listen to music, cook and ski. Thank you for your time and I look
forward to seeing you.”
A variation on this activity, using the same questions, but with two students participating,
this slideshow can be used as an interview. One student will be the interviewer asks the
questions, while the other student, the interviewee, answers the questions.

Interview #1
Slide #1: is blank. This gives the students some time before starting their interview.
Slide#2: Greeting: Interviewer: “Hello, how are you?”
Bobby: “I am fine.”
Slide#3: Interviewer: “What is your name?”
Bobby: “My name is Robert Smith.”
Transition: Interviewer: “Do you have a nickname?”
Bobby: “Yes, please call me Bobby.”
Slide#4: Interviewer: “Where are you from, Bobby?”

103
 Bobby: “I am from New York City.”
Transition: Interviewer: How long have you been in Japan?
Bobby: “I have been here for a year.”
Slide#5: Interviewer: “Where do you live now?”
Bobby: “I live in Hamamatsu.”
Slide#6: Interviewer: “Are you married or single?”
Bobby: “I am single.”
Slide#7: Interviewer: “What do you like to do?”
Bobby: “I like to listen to music, cook, and ski.”
Slide#8: Conclusion: Interviewer: “Thank you for your time, Bobby.”
Bobby: “Thank you, and I look forward to seeing you again.”

At the start of the class, give the students the list of questions in the order that they
will appear on the PowerPoint slideshow. Have the students read the questions silently
but answer the questions out loudly. For the presentation, all the students answer the
questions individually as they watch the PowerPoint slideshow. For the interview, have
the students pair up. One student being the interviewer and the other the interviewee, and
as they watch the PowerPoint slideshow, the interviewer asks the questions and the
interviewee answers.
In the interview activity, the interviewer must wait for the interviewee to finish
answering the question before asking the next question. Teamwork and patience are the
keys in this activity. They can switch roles when they have finished.
When making the slideshow, how long each question will take to be asked and
answered, must be taken into consideration. The length of time of each slide, will depend
on what the question or questions are and the answer, and will have a different time length.
If one slide is 20 seconds long, “What is your name?” will take about three seconds to be
answered and the slide should be adjusted to four seconds.
Using transitions will also affect the timing of each individual slide. One transition
or Animation, in a 20 second slide may take ten second to appear. Having three transitions
may take seven seconds each. However, using transitions will be helpful for the students
to expand their answers, which many students could do more of. For example, in

104
Presentation #1, Slide #3, the transition is used to expand information:
Presentation #1
Slide#3: Name? “My name is Robert Smith.
Transition: Do you have a nickname? “Please call me Bobby.”

In Interview #1, Slide #3, the transition is used as a getting more information question:
Interview #1
Slide#3: Interviewer: “What is your name?”
Bobby: “My name is Robert Smith.”
Transition: Interviewer: “Do you have a nickname?”
Bobby: “Yes, please call me Bobby.”

Transitions help the student expand their thoughts and makes the presentations detailed
and sound more interesting.
Using the PowerPoint slideshow as a “modified teleprompter,” can be
beneficial for the students to practice fluency and expand their ideas in presentations.
PowerPoint can also help students get comfortable asking and answering interview
questions from each other.

References

MetroConnections. (n.d.). Using teleprompter to your advantage.

https://www.metroconnections.com/conference-services/meeting-
management/using-teleprompters-to-your-advantage/

Nelsone 2. (n.d.). How to create a PowerPoint presentation.

https://www.instructables.com/How-to-Create-a-PowerPoint-Presentation/

105
James Higa has been living in Aichi, Japan for over 30 years
and is married with two children. Originally from Honolulu,
Hawaii, he graduated from the University of Hawaii at
Manoa in Interpersonal Relations and has a master’s in
Applied Linguistics from Nagoya Gakuin University. He has
taught English to students of various ages, and is presently
teaching oral presentation, reading, writing, and oral
conversation at various universities in and around Nagoya.

106
This section contains an article by David Kluge

on matching form and content when giving

reports on qualitative research results of

Performance in Education research and one

article by Takanori Omura which addresses

performance in a linguistic sense and is

connected to performance art as it describes

an experiment on global self-esteem and

foreign language self-esteem, two constructs

necessary for students

107
to perform in class.
RESEARCH

Dance the Data! Matching Form with Content in

Presenting Performance in Education Research

David Kluge
Nanzan University
[email protected]

Abstract
Matching form and content has been an issue in art for a long time but has not been
discussed so much in the field of reporting on research. This article discusses matching
form and content in reporting performance in education research and also in
organizing performance in education conferences.

Keywords: Form, content, performance, readers theatre, conference reports

I
am Don Quixote on a quest. As a teacher and researcher involved in performance
in education, I have often asked myself this question: “What is the relationship
between form and content?” One of the simplest yet right-sounding answer I have
found was given by Gavin Ritz:

This question is one of the most revealing of all questions ever asked about language,
art, mathematics, and science and has been asked/pondered many times through the
ages.

It goes to the heart of creativity, learning, science, mathematics, knowledge and even

108
 language itself. The very basic fundamentals of science are made from the
multiplication of the two, “Form multiplied by Content”.

I had not encountered this question in my graduate or post-graduate studies in teaching

English as a foreign language (EFL), which has been my field for the last 36 years in
Japan, nor in my undergraduate studies when I first studied chemistry and math, but I now
remember that I did encounter it 42 years ago in my later undergraduate English literature
major of when discussing poetry and drama, but I forgot this study during the first 26
years of teaching EFL as it did not seem to have relevance to my daily life of making
lesson plans, teaching classes, and grading homework. I looked up the concept of Form
Matching Content and found that it has its roots in art theory. A standard art education
textbook since 1960 and now in its 12th edition, Art Fundamentals: Theory and Practice
by Ocvirk, Stinson, Wigg, Bone, and Cayton (1997) explained the relationships among
subject, form, and content:
•
On The Three Components of Art: Subject, form, and content have always been
the three basic components of a work of art, and they are wed in a way that is
inseparable. In general, subject may be thought of as the “what” (the topic, focus,
or image); form, as the “how” (the development of the work, composition, or the
substantiation); and content, as the “why” (the artist's intention, communication,
or meaning behind the work). pp. 10-13
Okay. What does it mean for Performance in Education? If you are the kind of person
who peeks at the last page of a murder mystery to find out who did it, you can find the
answer to this in the Conclusion section of this paper. For more patient readers, continue
on down the path to the windmill.
I have been thinking about the question more as I became frustrated with the way
I was giving presentations, especially when I started concentrating research in teaching
English through performance and giving presentations on this topic at EFL academic
conferences, and more often in the last few years as I started planning and producing my
own conferences in teaching through performance. Three events happened that nudged
me down the road to this quixotic quest.
The first event was related to a research project investigating the teaching of

109
Performance in Education. I had heard of a student showcase event sponsored by the Oral
Presentation & Performance (OPP) SIG of JACET and was lucky enough to have been
invited to attend it. By chance my colleague, Ashley Ford, and I were to give a
presentation on student showcasing at an international language teaching conference, so
I thought this would be a good chance to interview some teachers and students to provide
some data for the presentation. On December 15, 2019, I went to the 11th Intercollegiate
Event of English Oral Presentation & Performance (2019) sponsored by JACET’s OPP
SIG and Hiroshima Chapter of JACET at Yasuda Women’s University, Hiroshima. I
recorded interviews of six teachers and six students about what they thought the value of
showcasing events like this was. Great! Now I had some data! I included the data in a
slide of our multi-slide presentation on student showcasing, gave the presentation, and
then went on with other projects.
The second event was in 2020, while researching for a chapter about
performance in education in a book about EFL in Japan, I came across the term, “dancing
the data.” “Dancing the data?” Is this literal? Is it a metaphor? Or is it both? It is the title
of a book with accompanying CD-ROM edited by Bagley and Cancienne (2002) as the
proceedings of The Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE)
Conference. All the presentations featured in the proceedings were performances such
as dance and readers theatre used to communicate the results of research that the
performers had conducted. Here are some reviews of the book (Peter Lang International
Academic Publishers):

“Simultaneously splintering and magnifying, this performative collection is

compelling, aesthetically and pedagogically. A break-through book in art-based
educational inquiry.” (William F. Pinar, St. Bernard Parish Alumni Endowed
Professor, Louisiana State University)

“This is a wonderful project – innovative and bold. Richly imaginative, ‘Dancing

the Data’ comes alive in the CD-ROM where the researchers literally dance and
perform their interpretive work. This innovative aspect of the work allows the
authors to show, and not tell, thereby showing educational researchers how to be

110
 artists, dancers, poets, and dramatists. The use of this technology takes qualitative
inquiry into a new dimension.” (Norman K. Denzin, Professor, Institute of
Communications Research, University of Illinois)

“Dancing the Data’ represents a lively challenge to regnant paradigms in the field
of educational research. Utilizing the advances in dramaturgy, ritology, and
performance theory, this book ‘dances’ its talk. At a time when genres of research
are becoming more blurred, we are seeing welcomed shifts in empirical approaches
to the world of data. This book breathes new life into this endeavor.” (Peter
McLaren, Professor, Graduate School of Education and Information Studies,
University of California, Los Angeles)

Obviously, these three academics were very excited about this development. So
was I. I decided to give it a try. In 2020 and 2021, I gave several presentations on the
premise of Dancing the Data. While trying to come up with a sample set of research data
to “dance,” I remembered my recordings of student and teacher’s thoughts about student
showcasing. I transcribed the audio recordings and wrote it in the form of a readers theatre
script. At the Zoom-based conferences I uploaded the script so that all participants could
download it. I assigned parts to the attendees of the presentation, and we all performed
the short 2-page script titled “What is the Value of Showcasing Students? A Research
Report as a Readers Theatre Performance.” (See the Appendix for the script.) At the end
of the performance, I conducted a reflection session where teachers commented about the
positive differences of actively performing the data over just listening to a researcher
narrate the research results from a table on a presentation slide.
In 2020, the three occurrences came together in my mind, and I thought, why not
do the something similar to Dancing the Data for a Performance in Education SIG
Conference? So, we did so . . . kind of. On February 20, 2021, my colleague, Ashley Ford,
and I produced an online conference with 14 teacher presenters and student works from
over 130 students, with some of the students attending the conference through Zoom. It
was a small conference of about 80 people. I decided that instead of the typical online
conference that followed the schema of a face-to-face conference translated to the Zoom

111
world with an opening ceremony, plenary speeches, presentations using PowerPoint,
workshops, panel discussions, a banquet, and a closing ceremony. Other groups could do
such a conference, but certainly not a Performing in Education group! So instead of
choosing this model, I opted to use the metaphor of our conference as an opera. Here is
what was written in the program about the structure of the conference:

Welcome to our OPERA. Since online conferences are a relatively new experience,
I thought there is no reason for us, the Performance in Education SIG, to follow
the typical conference format – the newness grants us the freedom to improvise.
SO, I decided to choose the opera format! Why? Because this SIG is like an opera
which is a creative multi-modal performance activity comprised of literature,
drama, visual arts, dance, music, technical theatre (sound, lighting, etc.), that
communicates to the mind and the heart, that touches lives. The PIE SIG is exactly
the same. [The lights dim, the overture begins, and the curtain rises. Enjoy our
production.

Here is a copy of the schedule and explanation from that conference’s handbook. (See
Figure 1.)

Figure 1
2021 Conference Schedule from the Conference Handbook.

112
The description of the schedule states:

After registration and opening remarks in the “Overture,” participants will be

invited to join the “stage” (breakout room) of their choice. There will be seven
"scenes" (or sessions) in total through the day.
Between each "scene," we invite all participants to move to the "film festival" room
and enjoy some entertainment while the next session is being prepared.
"Arias" are special talks featuring our plenary and invited speakers and will be held
in the "aria" room at the designated time.
After the closing panel, we invite you to stay and unwind with us at our social event
featuring live entertainment by some of our members!

Conclusion
(Now we come to the part of the murder mystery when you learn who did it and what the
importance of the “It” is.) Remember when I stated regarding the idea of creating a
conference where we would dance the data, “So, we did so . . . kind of”? The “kind of”
means we all did not all don leotards and leap about doing an interpretative dance of our
data. In fact, I was the only person who used a readers theatre format to communicate my
research data, sans leotard. However, we made small progress towards this goal of
dancing the dance: we threw away the old conference metaphor and talked about our
conference in terms of overture, arias, acts, scenes, entr’actes, interludes, stages,
spotlights, finale, epilogue, and a reception instead of a banquet, and in our reception we
showcased our teachers/researchers at an open mic where we literally wowed the young
students and children of teachers with the talents of our performers (remember, this is on
Zoom!). But, acting the role of the Knight of the Mirrors from Man of La Mancha, my
sister on a family Zoom gathering, after I had explained my vision of dancing the dance
through the metaphor of the conference as opera, said, “Surely, not everyone will be
singing and dancing their presentations!” The smile dropped from my excited face as I
looked into the mirror of reality. But . . . but . . .but, perhaps in the future? Yes, in the
future! Perhaps in the future there will be a conference that IS an opera, with music, dance,

113
acting out our research results, and yes, even a curtain call. I dream the impossible dream.
What is this impossible dream about? It is about “form matching content.” Again,
repeating Ocvirk et al. (1997),
In general, subject may be thought of as the “what” (the topic, focus, or image); form,
as the “how” (the development of the work, composition, or the substantiation);
and content, as the “why” (the artist's intention, communication, or meaning behind
the work). pp. 10-13

Applying this definition to our goal of dancing the dance, subject (the “what”) is
educational research; form (the “how”) could be with music (e.g., putting the research
results words to music), dance (e.g., interpretive dance), drama (e.g., role-play, readers
theatre) content, (the “why”) is educational research results, specifically qualitative
research results, or the qualitative part of a mixed-method approach to research, which
have been most often used as being most amenable for performing the research results,
as is the case in the book Dancing the Data. Teachers who report in presentation on
making their students perform should not do so in the “cut and dried” style of a scientist
reporting the results of their experiments, but should perform, too.
Why does one attempt to accomplish this matching? Performance in English
practitioners would be saying that we are proud of the stance we take and are willing to
stand on a stage and not just tell what we teach, but also show what we teach. This way,
the form of the communication—a performance—matches the content of the message –
“having students perform is a good thing.”
What does this matching mean in terms of Performance in Education (PIE)? It
means we apply this relationship when we present at academic conferences, when we
perform at academic conferences that are about performance, and when we plan
performance in education conferences so that they reflect what we are doing in our classes.
So . . . in the first part of the title of this article, “Dance the Data!,” the
exclamation mark indicates both excitement at the idea of dancing or performing and that
this is an imperative. “Matching Form with Content” means that we will not just talk
about performing—we will PERFORM about performing. And finally, “in Presenting
Performance in Education Research” means that we will not “perform” only in

114
performances at conference banquets, but also when we are doing the quintessential
“conferency” activity of reporting our qualitative research. Why? Because we believe in
the power of performance that goes beyond words.
At the beginning of this article Ritz stated: “The very basic fundamentals of
science are made from the multiplication of the two, “Form multiplied by Content.” This
is even more powerful when applied to art. Can we accomplish this matching of form and
content in our performance in education research presentations and in our performance in
education conferences, or is it an impossible dream? I don’t think it is impossible, and
neither does Don Quixote: “Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see
life as it is, and not as it should be!” Crazy idea? It is a good goal worth working toward.

References
Bagley, C., & Cancienne, M. (Eds.). (2002). Dancing the Data. In Elijah Mirochnik (Gen.
Ed.). Lesley University Series in Arts and Education (vol. 5). Peter Lang.
Cervantes, M. (1605). The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha.
Emme, M. (2002). Review of Dancing the Data. In C. Bagley & M. Cancienne (Eds.)
(2002). Elijah Mirochnik (Gen. Ed.). Lesley University Series in Arts and
Education (vol. 5). Peter Lang.
Ludecke, M. (2015). Dancing the Data: Performed Research. YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7naeB3KKmkw
Ludecke, M. (2015). Lessons learnt from dancing the data: Performed research of
beginning teachers’ experiences. AARE Conference, Western Australia 2015.
Mienczakowski, J., Smith, L., & Morgan, S. (2002). Seeing words – Hearing feelings:
Ethnodrama and the performance of data. In C. Bagley & M. Cancienne (Eds.),
Dancing the data (pp. 34–52). Peter Lang.
Ocvirk, O., Stinson, R., Wigg, P., Bone, R., Cayton, D. (1997). Art fundamentals: Theory
and practice, 12th Edition. McGraw Hill Education.
Peter Lang International Academic Publishers. (2019). Reviews of Dancing the Data.
https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/57641?tab=reviews
Ritz, G. (n.d.). Quora: What is the relationship between form and content?
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-relationship-between-form-and-content

115
Saldana. J. (2003). Dramatizing data: A primer. Qualitative Inquiry, Volume 9 Number 2,
2003 218-236 DOI: 10.1177/1077800402250932

David Kluge (Nanzan University) has been teaching

English for 40 years. His research interests include oral
interpretation, speech, drama, debate, composition, and
materials development. He has co-authored with Matthew
Taylor three books on composition (National Geographic
Learning) and one book on oral communication. He is
working on a reading and communication book based on
PIE activities, Life Lessons. He was the founder and first
coordinator of the Performance in Education SIG
(formerly the Speech, Drama, & Debate SIG) of JALT.

116
 Appendix
Sample Readers Theatre Script of Research Results
CAST: Researcher
Teacher 1 Teacher 2 Teacher 3
Teacher 4 Teacher 5 Teacher 6
Student 1 Student 2 Student 3
Student 4 Student 5 Student 6
[On the Researcher’s count of 3] ALL: What is the Value of Showcasing Students? A
Research Report as a Readers Theatre Performance
RESEARCHER: I have been showcasing students, that is, having them perform in
front of an audience, for forty years because . . . well, because I thought it was a good
thing to do. But was it really? To answer this research question, on December 15, 2019,
I went to a showcase event, The 11th Intercollegiate Event of English Oral
Presentation & Performance (2019) sponsored by the OPP SIG and Hiroshima Chapter
of JACET at Yasuda Women’s University, Hiroshima. I interviewed six teachers and
six students about what they thought the value of showcasing events like this was.
Listen to the results of my research.
TEACHER 1: [Showcasing students] focuses on enjoying English any way you like.
Being perfect is not part of it. Student autonomy is important. I am an English teacher,
but much of what we do is life education.
TEACHER 2: Students desperately need opportunities to show their ability. They have
enough knowledge of the English language itself, but they have no chance to use
English with their own voice or their own bodies.
TEACHER 3: So, the value of showcasing students is to help students move to the next
stage.
TEACHER 4: Also, according to Vygotskian theory, we need society to share our
language, feelings, habits, and ideologies. That’s why it is important to have this kind
of event to get together and share.
TEACHER 5: We need some kind of mental state that will penetrate the hard rock of
inactivity. That kind of tenacity or strong will will come from nowhere else but matsuri
events—students show their stuff. Without events, they have no reason to show what

117
they’ve got.
TEACHER 6: I see students grow in self-confidence, cooperate and collaborate more
and better with their colleagues, value people who they never really thought about,
and enjoy themselves. In effect, they have grown.
RESEARCHER: I see. Then I asked students how they felt before, during, and after
doing the performance:
STUDENT 1: Before, I felt nervous. During, I felt I had fun. After, I felt satisfied.
STUDENT 2: Before, I felt nervous; I didn’t want to do it. During, I felt I could enjoy
it. After, I felt I appreciated the opportunity.
STUDENT 3: Before, I felt not so nervous—more now! Looking forward to it. During, I
felt it was fun. After, I felt I enjoyed other students’ performance, especially the
speech of girl from [bleep]university.
STUDENT 4: Before, I felt I didn’t want to do it, I didn’t want to join, I didn’t want to
come. During, I felt it was so nice and I enjoyed it very much. After, I felt very happy
to listen to other people’s speeches. I could get a lot of value and things from other
universities so I’m happy to join this class.
STUDENT 5: Before, I felt that I was not looking forward to it. During, I felt fine
since I played the flute while others sang. After, I felt I was glad to listen to other
groups. Every presentation inspired me. I think I have to study English hard.
STUDENT 6: Before, I felt A little nervous because practice time was so little. During,
I felt Did not think as I was busy. Everyone enjoyed the performance. After, I felt the
other performances were very good.
RESEARCHER: I found that the value of showcasing students was these things:
STUDENTS 1,3,5: Giving us the opportunity to show and share our ideas.
ALL TEACHERS: Encouraging risk-taking
STUDENTS 2,4,6: Learning from others (and impacting others!)
ALL: Transformation and growth [Count 3 seconds and bow]

118
 The Relationship Between University Students’

Global Self-Esteem and Foreign Language Self-

Esteem

Takanori Omura
Soka University
[email protected]

Abstract
Students’ performance or improvement is always one of the crucial topics in second
language education and has been linked to the notion of self-esteem. The purpose of this
study is to investigate whether students’ global self-esteem (GSE) is related to the
foreign language self-esteem (FLSE). Since this study is a mixed methods approach,
online surveys and semi-structured interviews were used as the main instruments. The
participants are university students and 149 students participated in the online surveys
and 19 students at the same faculty participated in the interviews. The prime findings of
this study are as follows. First, overall, the level of GSE and FLSE for students in each
year of study is significantly different from each other. Second, there is a positive
correlation between the two variables, GSE and FLSE. Further research is suggested to
research the same group over an extended period of time.

Keywords: Self-esteem, university student, performance in education

T
o respect or admire others around oneself is a very natural behavior of people
and they can also respect or admire themselves. The technical terminology for
this phenomenon is called self-esteem, which literally means to respect or
admire oneself.

119
 The definition of self-esteem differs depending on the field or the researcher.
For instance, Brown and Marshall (2002) defined self-esteem as “a capacity to construe
events in ways that promote, maintain, and protect feelings of self-worth.” Though a
variety of findings have been demonstrated, the further development and understanding
of self-esteem are still necessary as it is considered to be associated with several
important outcomes in life such as academic performance, mental disorder, or physical
health. Especially, the relationship between self-esteem and students’ performance in
academics has been focused on by various researchers (e.g., Baumeister, Campbell,
Krueger & Vohs, 2003; A. Takahashi & H. Takahashi, 2013). Relevant to Performance
in Education (PIE), a correlation between oral performances ability (specifically role
play and public speaking) and self-esteem were shown to be reciprocal; that is,
participation in the performance activities improved both performance ability and
increased self-esteem (Morreale et al., 1995; Satriani, 2019). Hence, illustrating an in-
depth investigation of self-esteem among some groups and the correlation between
several types of self-esteem can contribute many aspects to the pedagogical field. The
degree of performance in academics reflects the degree of performance in front of the
audience that students can demonstrate. Since this linkage between these two degrees is
easily recognized, both GSE and FLSE are considered as highly valued variables and
the overall results of them can provide an opportunity to improve the teaching skills
concerning performance in front of audience.
This paper investigates the degree of university students’ global self-esteem
(GSE) and their foreign language self-esteem (FLSE) in each year of study in a single
faculty of a private university in Japan. It also examines whether the degree of students’
GSE is related to the degree of their FLSE. The finding of this study that there is a
correlation between two types of self-esteem, may provide great hope to educators as it
indicates that students possess an enormous potential to transform their life by
improving both GSE and FLSE.

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Literature Review

Self-Esteem
Widespread attention to self-esteem started during the 1970s as the relationship between
self-esteem and social issues such as drug abuse, unstable working conditions, academic
difficulty, and social disorder appeared (Zeigler-Hill, 2013; J. D. Brown & Marshall,
2006). As the concept of self-esteem is studied in many fields and has been dealt for a
long time, the definition is not universally agreed upon and definitions are highly
diverse. For instance, James (1890/1983) attempted to calculate self-esteem from a ratio
of an individual’s successes and the frequency of failures in the domain which the
individual considers as important in terms of personal identity. In short, self-esteem is
determined by the ratio of success and failure, which is indicated by the formula Self-
esteem = Success/Pretensions. Therefore, the numerical value of self-esteem is
increased by lessening the denominator or increasing the numerator (p. 296).

Global Self-Esteem
There are notable ways of distinguishing self-esteem by two researchers, Mruk and H.
D. Brown. They classified self-esteem into three levels, and one of them being global
self-esteem. Mruk (1999) suggests three levels of specificity in self-esteem that are
global, intermediate, and situational. For the level of global, general self-worth and a
general view of self as a person are included. However, H. D. Brown (1994) shows that
global self-esteem, situational or specific self-esteem, and task self-esteem are slightly
different from each other. For the level of global self-esteem, people’s positive or
negative perception of themselves based on their self-evaluation of themselves in the
environment is included.

Foreign Language Self-Esteem

Another level of specificity in self-esteem is called situational or specific self-
esteem. While Mruk argues that everyday demonstrations of self-esteem and self-
assessment of one’s attitude in specific circumstances are included in situational self-

121
esteem, H. D. Brown states that one’s self-assessment in specific life domains such as
job, education, life in society, or individuals’ nature is included in situational self-
esteem. Foreign language self-esteem (FLSE) is the term used by Hassan (1992; 2001)
in his studies, and it is considered as a type of domain-specific self-esteem and the
individual’s feeling about himself or herself in a foreign language learning situation.
Also, FLSE is strongly related to foreign language learning. As this self-esteem is
highly specific to the language learning context and has the potential to contribute a
greater understanding of the psyche of the language learner, more studies are expected
to be conducted in the future to deepen our understanding of this concept of self-esteem.

Statement of Problem
Students’ academic performance in second language education is affected by the degree
of self-esteem (Zeigler-Hill, 2013; Navarro, 2018). Therefore, success in academics and
better performance significantly rely on how positively or negatively the students
evaluate themselves. As success in academics is crucial for most individuals’ lives and
the relationship between self-esteem and students’ academic performance is investigated
by several researchers, further development of and deepening the knowledge about self-
esteem is necessary.

Purpose of the Research and Research Questions

The purpose of this study is to investigate how much the current degree of GSE and
FLSE of students who study under content-based instruction (CBI) differ in each year of
study, and whether these two self-esteems are correlated with each other.
The focus on these two aspects is based on the hypothesis that the students’ level of GSE
and FLSE in each year of study are different and are related. Therefore, the following
three research questions are set.
1. How much does the level of students’ global self-esteem in a CBI program differ
according to students’ year of study?
2. How much does the level of students’ foreign language self-esteem in a CBI
program differ according to students’ year of study?
3. Is there significant correlation between global self-esteem and foreign language

122
 self-esteem?

Method
Participants’ Profiles and Background
The selected participants are the current non-native English-speaking undergraduate
students in the Faculty of International Liberal Arts (FILA) at Soka University in Tokyo,
Japan. There are four groups involved in the study, which are comprised of students from
each year of study at the university from the first year to the fourth year. In total, 149
students (40 first-year students, 36 second-year students, 41 third-year students, 32
fourth-year students) participated in the survey. In addition, 19 students (3 first-year
students, 5 second-year students, 5 third-year students, 6 fourth-year students)
participated in the semi-structured interview. The total number of students in the faculty
is 396 (2020, Jan), and approximately 40% of this total number participated in the survey
of this study.

Data Collection and Measurements

The mixed methods used for this study is a concurrent triangulation strategy (Creswell,
2014) because quantitative data and qualitative data were garnered concurrently and
analyzed later by the researcher.
Surveys
The survey in the study included some demographic information consisting of
the gender, the year of study, and the nationality; Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSE)
consisting of 10 items (Rosenberg, 1965) measuring global self-esteem (GSE); and the
Foreign Language Self-Esteem Scale (FLSES) consisting of 25 items (Hassan, 2001).
Both surveys employed a 5-point Likert scale. The language of the questions is shown
below.

Online Surveys: SECTION 1: DEMOGRAPHIC INFORMATION

1. What is your gender?
2. What year are you in at the university?
3. What is your nationality? Example: Japan, Thailand, etc.
Online Surveys: SECTION 2: Global Self-Esteem (GSE)

123
1. On the whole, I am satisfied with myself.
2. At times I think I am no good at all.
3. I feel that I have a number of good qualities.
4. I am able to do things as well as most other people.
5. I feel I do not have much to be proud of.
6. I certainly feel useless at times.
7. I feel that I'm a person of worth, at least on an equal plane with others.
8. I wish I could have more respect for myself.
9. All in all, I am inclined to feel that I am a failure.
10. I take a positive attitude toward myself.
Online Surveys: SECTION 3: Foreign Language Self-Esteem (FLSE)
1. My ability to learn English is high.
2. I express myself freely in English.
3. I have a problem with some grammatical rules when writing in English.
4. I participate effectively in English discussions.
5. I can speak English very well.
6. My understanding of what others say in English is limited.
7. I speak English with a heavy foreign accent.
8. I have some English reading habits.
9. I can write very well in English.
10. I feel good about myself when speaking in English.
11. I feel happy when I am with my English classmates.
12. I can read very well in English.
13. I don’t feel at ease when I talk to my English instructors.
14. I find difficulty talking in English in front of my classmates.
15. My classmates are better English learners than me.
16. My English instructors have high expectations of me.
17. My English classmates do not like me.
18. I can understand English very well.
19. I am always attentive to my English instructors.
20. I attend English class sessions on time.

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21. I volunteer myself for any English classroom activities.
22. I miss many English class sessions.
23. I avoid any discussions in English.
24. I read for pleasure in English.
25. I reluctantly participate in English classroom activities.

Semi-structured interviews
The participants were inquired about their willingness to participate in
interviews by the researcher at the end of the survey. Some questions that were used in
the interviews had been adapted from the questions developed by Corrales and Maloof
(2011) while the other questions had been designed by the researcher in order to elicit
expected answers for research questions in this study.
Semi-Structured Interview Questions
1. Are you comfortable with learning the contents of subjects in English?
2. Do you like to learn the contents of subjects in English?
3. What part of this approach to learning do you like?
4. What part of this approach to learning do you not like?
5. What differences have you found between a regular English course which mainly
focuses on language study and FILA courses that are based on content? (Corrales, &
Maloof, 2011)
6. What advantage/ disadvantage do you think you get from this content-based method?
7. Do you think you could improve your English speaking with this content-based
method?
8. Do you feel any differences /changes in yourself before taking FILA courses and
now?
9. Do you feel any differences /changes in yourself before and after taking FILA
courses?
10. Do you think you have become more confident in English because of this content-
based method as compared to normal English language course?
11. What kind of classroom activities in this content-based method make you feel more
confident in English?

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12. How have the classroom activities raised your self-confidence when you are
speaking? (Corrales, & Maloof, 2011)
13. How have the classroom activities raised your self-confidence when you are writing
academic papers? (Corrales, & Maloof, 2011)
14. How have the classroom activities raised your self-confidence when you are
listening to academic talks or lectures? (Corrales, & Maloof, 2011)
15. How have the classroom activities raised your self-confidence when you are
reading academic texts? (Corrales, & Maloof, 2011)

Procedure
Online surveys were administered to the students in each year of study in the spring
semester of 2019 except for the second-year students who were studying abroad during
that semester. The second-year students started their study abroad from the first
semester of 2019 for half a year in the nation where each of them selected. The surveys
to second-year students were administered in the fall semester of the same year. At the
end of the surveys, participants were asked whether they were willing to participate in
the interview. The language of the interview questions is shown below.

Results
Difference of students’ GSE and FLSE among each year of study
The data in Table 1 indicates the descriptive statistics for GSE and FLSE. The highest
possible mean score is 5.00, and the lowest possible mean score is 1.00. As Table 1 shows,
on the GSE survey, the mean score of the first-year students (M = 2.85) is lower than
mean scores of the third-year students (M = 3.19) and the fourth-year students (M = 3.20);
however, the second-year students have the lowest GSE score (M = 2.77). The total mean
score (M = 3.00) is in the middle of the 5-point Likert scale, which indicates that the GSE
of these participants as a whole is midway between low and high.
The descriptive statistics for the FLSE survey are similar to those for the GSE survey; the
mean score of the first-year students (M = 2.98) is lower than the scores of the third-year
students (M = 3.33) and the fourth-year students (M = 3.22) but higher than the FLES
mean score of the second-year students (M = 2.86). However, unlike the mean scores for
the GSE, the mean score of the third-year students (M = 3.33) is slightly higher than that

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of the fourth-year students (M = 3.22). The total mean score (M = 3.10) shows that the
foreign language self-esteem for all subjects is slightly higher than 3.00. Therefore, the
participants of this study evaluate themselves neither too positively nor too negatively in
general and in a foreign language learning situation.

Table 1

Descriptive Statistics of the GSE and FLSE Surveys

N M SD

1 40 2.85 .40
2 36 2.77 .50
GSE 3 41 3.19 .64
4 32 3.20 .62
Total 149 3.00 .57
1 40 2.98 .43
2 36 2.86 .34
FLSE 3 41 3.33 .50
4 32 3.22 .58
Total 149 3.10 .50

A one-way between groups ANOVA was conducted to compare the relationship of GSE
and the year of study, and another one-way between groups ANOVA was conducted to
compare the relationship of FLSE and the year of study. The results of ANOVA show that
the observed F-values for both the GSE survey (F = 6.292, p < .001) and the FLSE survey
(F = 8.164, p < .001) are larger than the critical F-value (2.70) at a probability level of
less than 5% which indicates that there is a significant difference among the GSE and
FLSE mean scores of the year-of-study groups. These results indicate that the level of
GSE and FLSE for students in each year of study is significantly different from each other
(See Table 2). Therefore, the participants in this faculty differently feel about themselves
in general and in a foreign language learning situation depending on their year of study.

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Table 2

ANOVA for the GSE and FLSE Surveys

ANOVA
F Sig.
GSE Between 6.292 .000
Groups
FLSE Between 8.164 .000
Groups

The Tukey HSD test was selected as the post hoc test. This test is designed to compare
each year of study to every other year of study. The GSE and FLSE score are set as the
dependent variable and the year of study is set as the independent variable. As Table 3
shows, the mean difference between the first-year students and second-year students (MD
= ±.076, p = .930) and between the third-year students and fourth-year students (MD =
±.015, p = .999) are insignificant on the GSE score. As for FLSE, the mean differences
between the first-year students and second-year students (MD = ±.114, p = .713) and the
first-year students and fourth-year students (MD = ±.246, p = .121) are insignificant.
However, the mean difference among other years of study for both surveys are significant.
These results support the fact that more first-year and second-year students negatively
evaluate themselves and are unsatisfied with themselves in general and in a language
learning situation.
As displayed above in the results of the ANOVA, overall, the level of GSE and
FLSE for students in each year of study is significantly different from each other.
Nevertheless, there is no significant difference between some year of study groups.

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Table 3

Results of the Tukey HSD Test on the GSE and FLSE Surveys
Dependent (I) (J) MD SE p-value
Variable Year Year

GSE 1 2 .076 .125 .930

3 -.340* .121 .028
4 -.355* .129 .033
2 1 -.076 .125 .930
3 -.416* .124 .006
4 -.431* .132 .007
3 1 .340* .121 .028
2 .416* .124 .006
4 -.015 .128 .999
4 1 .355* .129 .033
2 .431* .132 .007
3 .015 .128 .999
FLSE 1 2 .114 .107 .713
3 -.355* .103 .004
4 -.246 .110 .121
2 1 -.114 .107 .713
3 -.468* .106 .000
4 -.359* .113 .010
3 1 .355* .103 .004
2 .468* .106 .000
4 .109 .110 .754
4 1 .246 .110 .121
2 .359* .113 .010
3 -.109 .110 .754
Note. * The mean difference is significant at the 0.05 level.

129
Correlation between the two variables
Correlation between the scores on the GSE and the scores on the FLSE. A Pearson
product-moment correlation coefficient was computed to assess the relationship between
the scores on the GSE and the scores on the FLSE. The result demonstrates that there
is a positive correlation between the two variables (r = 0.551, n = 149, p < .01). This result
explains that usually the participants in this faculty might possess high self-esteem both
in general situations and in a foreign language learning situation, or the participants might
possess low self-esteem in both situations.

Correlation between the scores on the GSE and the scores on the FLSE in each year.
As for the relationship between the scores on the GSE and FLSE surveys, there is a
significant positive correlation between the two variables in all the years of study except
the second year (first year, r = 0.453, n = 40, p < .01; second year, r = 0.116, n = 36; third
year, r = 0.549, n = 41, p < .01; fourth year, r = 0.662, n = 32, p < .01). In short, there is
a positive correlation between the scores on the GSE and the scores on the FLSE in the
first year, third year, and fourth year. Also, this result explains that the more second-year
students who are generally high in self-esteem, might have low self-esteem in a foreign
language learning situation, whereas those who generally have low self-esteem might
show high self-esteem in a foreign language learning situation.

The results of interviews

The results of participants’ responses to the question “Do you feel any
differences/changes in yourself before and after taking FILA classes/courses?” are shown
in the table (See Table 4).
Seventeen participants gave favorable responses, which means the response the
participant answered “Yes”, and two participants gave unfavorable responses, which
means the response the participant answered “No”. Common favorable response are
"Deep understanding and different perspective" and “Enhancement of motivation,
confidence, and self-esteem” As a specific example, a participant who is in the third year
stated, “After taking this course, I could feel that I totally changed... I can't explain
specifically but I'm pretty sure that the course really changed my life, and it raised my

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self-esteem so high.” These results indicate that some participants relate their
enhancement of self-confidence and self-esteem to the CBI classes in this faculty.

Table 4

The Participants’ Responses to the Interview Question Related to the Level of Self-
esteem
1st 2nd 3rd 4th
Overall
year year year year
(19)
(3) (5) (5) (6)
Improvement of English 1 1 1 3
Deep understanding and different
1 2 3 4 10
perspective
Deeper awareness of oneself 1 4 1 6
Enhancement of motivation,
1 2 3 1 7
confidence, and self-esteem
None in particular 1 1 2
Note. The number in the parentheses indicates the number of participants. The number in
each category indicates the number of times mentioned.

Discussion
The current level of GSE
Results of descriptive statistics on the GSE survey shows the total mean score (M = 3.00)
is in the middle of the 5-point Likert scale. This result indicates that the GSE of these
participants as a whole is midway between low and high. Therefore, the participants of
this study evaluate themselves neither too positively nor too negatively in general.
Furthermore, ANOVA indicates that there is a significant difference between the GSE
mean score for each year of study (F = 6.292, p < .001) and that the participants in this
faculty differently feel about themselves depending on their year of study.
Furthermore, the Tukey HSD test indicates which year shows a significant difference with
other years of study. This test shows that the level of self-esteem in each year is different.
Specifically, the mean differences between the first-year students and third-year students

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(MD = ±.340, p = .028) and the first-year students and fourth-year students (MD = ±.355,
p = .033) are significant. Additionally, the mean differences between the second-year
students and third-year students (MD = ±.416, p = .006) and the second-year students and
fourth-year students (MD = ±.431, p = .007) are also significant. These results also
support the fact that more first-year and second-year students negatively evaluate
themselves in general and are unsatisfied with themselves while more third-year and
fourth-year students positively evaluate themselves and are satisfied with themselves in
general.

The current level of FLSE

Results of descriptive statistics on the FLSE survey shows the total mean score (M = 3.10)
is nearly in the middle of the 5-point Likert scale. This result indicates that the FLSE of
these participants as a whole is almost midway between low and high, and the participants
may possess moderate or average feelings about themselves. Moreover, the result of the
mean scores in each year of study indicates that more first-year and second-year students
might be unsatisfied with themselves while more third-year and fourth-year students
might be satisfied with themselves in a foreign language learning situation. Educators
would be able to reduce the unnecessary anxiety towards their way of teaching and
students’ attitude in the class if they knew which year of study students’ foreign language
self-esteem are lower, which could provide the positive effect on students’ language
learning. For instance, if the educators teach the second-year students, they might feel the
students are relatively low in their confidence. However, the educators should not blame
but convince themselves by considering that the low confidence among students may
naturally occur in this year of study.
The results of ANOVA for the FLSE survey further indicate that there is a significant
difference (F = 8.164, p < .001) between mean scores for each year in the same way as it
is for the GSE survey. In short, how students feel about themselves in a foreign language
learning situation differs in each year of study.
Furthermore, the results of the Tukey HSD test show almost the same tendency of the
results for the GSE survey. Specifically, the mean difference between the first-year
students and third-year students (MD = ±.355, p = .004) is significant. Additionally, the

132
mean differences between the second-year students and third-year students (MD = ±.468,
p = .000) and the second-year students and fourth-year students (MD = ±.359, p = .010)
are also significant. The results also support the fact that more first-year and second-year
students negatively evaluate themselves in a foreign language learning situation and are
unsatisfied with themselves while more third-year and fourth-year students positively
evaluate themselves and are satisfied with themselves in the same situation.

The relationship between GSE and FLSE

The result of the Pearson product-moment correlation indicates, overall, there is a positive
correlation between the level of GSE and the level of FLSE. Regarding the strength of
the correlation, the correlation between the level of GSE and FLSE (r = 0.551, n = 149,
p < .01) is considered a moderate positive correlation. This result explains that usually
the participants in this faculty might possess high self-esteem both in general situations
and a foreign language learning situation, whereas the participants might possess low self-
esteem in both situations.
With regard to each year of study, a positive correlation appears in every year of student
study except the second year. This result explains that the students in this faculty show
the same tendency in terms of the level of self-esteem both in a general situation and in a
foreign language learning situation, but not the students in the second year.
In particular, the fourth-year students show the highest coefficient with regard to the
strength of correlation (r = 0.662, n = 32, p < .01). This result means that the more fourth-
year students who are usually high in self-esteem might have high self-esteem in a foreign
language learning situation as well, and those who are usually low in self-esteem might
have low self-esteem in a foreign language learning situation, too. To conclude, a positive
correlation is found between GSE and FLSE in all participants of this study, while a
positive correlation in each year is only found in the first year, the third year, and the
fourth year.

Conclusion
The primary objective of this study was to investigate how much the current degree of
students’ GSE and FLSE differ in each year of study, and whether these two self-esteems

133
are correlated with each other. A preliminary finding from this study was that there is a
significant difference among the GSE and FLSE mean scores of the year-of-study group
according to the result of ANOVA and the Tukey HSD test. Therefore, how the
participants feel about themselves in general and in a foreign language learning situation
highly relies on their year of study. This fact apparently indicates that the quality of
performance in front of the audience by students from each year of study generally differs
because their GSE and FLSE are different as per the year of study, too.
Regarding the relationship between GSE and FLSE, this study found that there is a
positive correlation between GSE and FLSE in general in this study, however focusing
on each year of study, a positive correlation is only found in the first year, the third year,
and the fourth year. In short, the same state of participants’ self-esteem both in general
situations and in a foreign language learning situation can be observed as both self-
esteems in most participants are generally correlated. The overall findings of this study
show the clear insight to those who are involved in teaching education in performance.
More specifically speaking, those educators should take these main results, which is GSE
and FLSE are different in each year of study, and there is the correlation between them,
into consideration in order to analyze their teaching methods and improve them. As the
investigation of the correlation between two variables, GSE and FLSE, was a main focus
of this study, what the result can indicate was only there was a correlation between them.
Further research focusing on the influence from individual variables that influence
students’ GSE and FLSE by using other analytical means such as multiple regression
analysis and a longitudinal study would be of benefit to the field of language learning.

References
Baumeister, R. F., Campbell, J. D., Krueger, J. I., & Vohs, K. D. (2003). Does high self-
esteem cause better performance, interpersonal success, happiness, or healthier
lifestyles? Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 4, 1–44.
Brown, H. D. (1994). Teaching by principles: An interactive approach to language
pedagogy. Prentice Hall Regents.
Brown, J. D., & Marshall, M. A. (2002). Self-esteem: It's not what you think.
Unpublished manuscript, University of Washington, Seattle, WA.

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Corrales, K., Maloof, C. (2011). Student perceptions on how content based instruction
supports learner development in a foreign language context. Zona Próxima, 15,
40-53.
Creswell, J. W. (2014). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods
approaches (4th ed.). Sage.
Hassan, B. A. (1992). Foreign language self-esteem and the oral communicative ability
of university students. Mansoura Faculty of Education Journal, 19(3), 1-19.
Hassan, B. A. (2001). The relationship of writing apprehension and self-esteem to the
writing quality and quantity of EFL university students. Mansoura University,
College of Education, Pamietta, Egypt.
James, W. (1890/1983). The principles of psychology. Harvard University Press.
Morreale, S.; Hackman, M.; & Neer, M. (1995). Predictors of behavioral competence
and self-esteem: A study assessing impact in a basic public speaking course,
Basic Communication Course Annual (7), Article 11.
http://ecommons.udayton.edu/bcca/vol7/iss1/11
Mruk, C. (1999). Self-esteem: Research, theory and practice (2nd ed.). Free Association
Books.
Navarro, P. M. (2018). Are CLIL students more motivated?: An analysis of affective
factors and their relation to language attainment. Porta Linguarum, 29, 71-90.
Rosenberg, M. (1965). Society and the adolescent self-image. Princeton University Press.
Satriani, M. (2019). The correlation between self-esteem and speaking performance in
Indonesia. Journal of Teaching & Learning English in Multicultural Contexts, (3)
1, E-ISSN: 2541-6383. http://jurnal.unsil.ac.id/index.php/tlemc/index
Takahashi, A. & Takahashi, H. (2013). Learners’ self-esteem and its relationships with
motivation for learning English, self-perceived and actual English proficiency.
Zeigler-Hill, V. (2013). The importance of self-esteem. In V. Zeigler-Hill (Ed.), Current
issues in social psychology: Self-esteem (pp. 1-20). Psychology Press.

Takanori Omura is an assistant lecturer at Soka University in

Japan, He received his MA in Education from Soka University.
He taught English as a Japanese full-time teacher in public
junior high schools for more than 10 years and is currently
teaching general English at Soka University in Japan. He has
also presented his research in many conferences since he was a
graduate student. His research interests lie in self-esteem,
learner autonomy, and the implementation of an e-portfolio.

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 Appendix A
Online Surveys: SECTION 1: DEMOGRAPHIC INFORMATION

Please tick (✓) and fill the blank with the appropriate information.

1. What is your gender?

Mark only one.

 Female
 Male
 Prefer not to say
 Other: _______________________________________

2. What year are you in at the university?

Mark only one.

 1st year
 2nd year
 3rd year
 4th year

3. What is your nationality? Example: Japan, Thailand, etc.

Appendix B
Online Surveys: SECTION 2: Global Self-Esteem (GSE)

No. Global self-esteem

1. On the whole, I am satisfied with myself.

2. At times I think I am no good at all.

3. I feel that I have a number of good qualities.

4. I am able to do things as well as most other people.

5. I feel I do not have much to be proud of.

6. I certainly feel useless at times.

7. I feel that I'm a person of worth, at least on an equal plane with others.

8. I wish I could have more respect for myself.

9. All in all, I am inclined to feel that I am a failure.

10. I take a positive attitude toward myself.

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 Appendix C
Online Surveys: SECTION 3: Foreign Language Self-Esteem (FLSE)

No. The Foreign Language self-esteem

1. My ability to learn English is high.
2. I express myself freely in English.
3. I have a problem with some grammatical rules when writing in English.
4. I participate effectively in English discussions.
5. I can speak English very well.
6. My understanding of what others say in English is limited.
7. I speak English with a heavy foreign accent.
8. I have some English reading habits.
9. I can write very well in English.
10. I feel good about myself when speaking in English.
11. I feel happy when I am with my English classmates.
12. I can read very well in English.
13. I don’t feel at ease when I talk to my English instructors.
14. I find difficulty talking in English in front of my classmates.
15. My classmates are better English learners than me.
16. My English instructors have high expectations of me.
17. My English classmates do not like me.
18. I can understand English very well.
19. I am always attentive to my English instructors.
20. I attend English class sessions on time.
21. I volunteer myself for any English classroom activities.
22. I miss many English class sessions.
23. I avoid any discussions in English.
24. I read for pleasure in English.
25. I reluctantly participate in English classroom activities.

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 Appendix D
Semi-Structured Interview Questions

Students in FILA learn the contents of subjects through English. I would like to ask you some questions
related to your perspective of learning the contents of subjects through English.
1. Are you comfortable with learning the contents of subjects in English?
2. Do you like to learn the contents of subjects in English?
3. What part of this approach to learning do you like?
4. What part of this approach to learning do you not like?
5. What differences have you found between a regular English course which mainly focuses on
language study and FILA courses that are based on content? (Corrales, & Maloof, 2011)
6. What advantage/ disadvantage do you think you get from this content-based method?
7. Do you think you could improve your English speaking with this content-based method?
8. Do you feel any differences /changes in yourself before taking FILA courses and now?
9. Do you feel any differences /changes in yourself before and after taking FILA courses?
10. Do you think you have become more confident in English because of this content-based method
as compared to normal English language course?
11. What kind of classroom activities in this content-based method make you feel more confident in
English?
12. How have the classroom activities raised your self-confidence when you are speaking? (Corrales,
& Maloof, 2011)
13. How have the classroom activities raised your self-confidence when you are writing academic
papers? (Corrales, & Maloof, 2011)
14. How have the classroom activities raised your self-confidence when you are listening to
academic talks or lectures? (Corrales, & Maloof, 2011)
15. How have the classroom activities raised your self-confidence when you are reading academic
texts? (Corrales, & Maloof, 2011)

138
INTRODUCING

THE JALT PERFORMANCE IN EDUCATION

SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP

The Performance in Education SIG

The mission of the Performance in Education SIG (PIE SIG) is to provide a forum for
teachers and academics to discuss, research, and implement oral interpretation, speech,
debate, drama and other forms of performance in language education. The main activities
are the publication of a newsletter and the Mask & Gavel journal, as well as sponsoring
conferences and workshops. including annual conferences in Okinawa and Sapporo.
Other activities have included supporting chapter events and running local, regional, and
national speech contests.

139
 2021 Official Officers: Advisory Officers:
Co-Coordinators: David Kluge, Website Administrator: Roy Morris
Chhayankdhar Singh Rathore Assistant Publicity Chair: Chelsea
Membership Chair: Samuel Nfor Schwartz
Program Chair: E Von Wong Member at Large: Dawn Kobayashi
Publications Chair: Philip Head Member at Large: Jason White
Publicity Chair: Ashley Ford Member at Large: Eucharia Donnery
Treasurer: James Higa Member at Large: George MacLean
Conferences Chair: David Kluge Assistant Program Chair: Vivian
Bussinguer-Khavari
Drama Chair: Gordon Rees
Debate Chair: David Kluge
Speech Chair: Morris
Oral Interpretation Chair: David Kluge
Japanese Liaison Officer: Yukari Saiki
Music Chair: Kim Rockell
Social Chair: Gordon Rees

Find out more at:

https://jaltpiesig.org/

SOCIAL MEDIA:
Google/E-mail: [email protected]
Twitter: @JALT_PIE
Facebook Page: @JALTPIESIG
Facebook Group: Performance in Education SIG (JALT)
YouTube Channel: JALTPIESIG
(https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCp56gGQkoV6aVQRwgnH4dNQ)

140
Description of the PIE SIG
David Kluge
(Published on the JALT website PIE SIG’s page:
https://jalt.org/groups/sigs/performance-education)

“INTRODUCING, for Your Enlightenment and Entertainment, The Performance

in Education SIG!”
(Drumroll and trumpet fanfare)
A little too dramatic? Yes, well, that’s who we are. Who ARE we, you ask?

We are Orators. We teach speech and presentation, and we are unusually good orators.

We are Dramatic. Yes, we do put on plays, radio dramas, and readers theatre
productions, but we also incorporate into our classes, roleplays, simulations, theatre
games, improv activities, and process drama techniques. Never heard of process drama?
Ask one of our members to explain it to you personally. Students are not bored in our
classes!

We are Argumentative. Debate is another focus of the SIG, and it is interesting how
many of the flamboyant, dramatic people are also the debate people. Formal debate
teaches important critical thinking and public speaking skills, but it is also exciting and
fun, and the way we teach it is fun, yet challenging. Students are not bored in these classes,
either.

We are Creative. It is amazing how many creative, artistic people we meet whenever we
gather together.

We are Flamboyant. Not all of us, but a great many of us dress in flamboyant colors
(guilty as charged) and talk and gesture dramatically. That is also how we teach.

141
We are Serious Professionals. We write articles, textbooks, and performance pieces,
we conduct research, we go to great lengths to mentor the younger members.

However, we are also a very active SIG. Our main activities are:
1. Publication Producer: Mask & Gavel is our official peer-reviewed journal that comes
out once a year. The Classroom Resource Journal, a collection of My Share-type articles.

2. News Station: We announce news about events relevant to our SIG to members and
interested people on our Facebook and Facebook Group pages.

3. Event Producer: We produce 2-3 events a year, usually at JALT’s two main
conferences.

4. Presentation Agent: We provide presenters at several JALT chapter events. Please

contact us if you are interested in presenting.

5. Conference Sponsor
Every year we sponsor 3-5 student/family friendly conferences in the Kansai, Tokai,
Kanto areas with annual conferences in Okinawa, Sapporo, and Nagoya.

Everyone loves PIE. Come join us for a slice of the PIE. Mmmm-mmmm GOOD!

142
PUBLICATIONS

Performance in Classroom Resources

Mask & Gavel Education Review 2020 ISSN 2435-676X

ISSN 2435-6603 The classroom resource journal

This is the new journal that
of the Performance in Education
The peer-reviewed academic features articles based on
SIG
journal of the JALT
selected presentations at the
Performance in Education
Performance in Education The PIE SIG has put together a
(PIE) SIG
conferences over the academic lesson resource publication, and it is
year. available online. This is the
The PIE SIG publishes its
publication for the sharing of
online academic journal
practical lesson resources. Published
annually. We welcome The first volume will be
by the Performance in Education
research-based, comment & published soon.
Special Interest Group, The Japan
opinion, interview, and The deadline for submissions
Association for Language Teaching,
review-based articles. to the second Performance in
JALT Central Office, Urban Edge
Practical lesson resource Education Review 2021
Bldg. 5F, 1-37-9 Taito, Taito-ku,
article should be submitted to publication is December 30,
Tokyo. For the classroom resource
the resource journal. For 2022.
journal submission style, use JALT's
submission guidelines please
My Share column guidelines.
refer to the specifications
Send submissions to: Philip
outlined in JALT's The
Head at
Language Teacher.
[email protected].
The deadline for submissions to
DEADLINE December 30,
the Classroom Resources
2022
journal is December 30, 2022.
Send submissions to: Philip
Head at
[email protected]

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