cac.ophony.org

In the previous post, I have talked about the Freshman Year Composition Task Force that I am working with. In an attempt to keep notes of my thoughts on this project, I am going to write on some of the programs that I am familiar with as a former member. I hope that this might be of interest to not only the members of the Task Force but also to anyone who is interested in this topic. I will start with a Freshman English Program in a Japanese university. Although it is basically an ESL program (hence not focusing on writing necessarily), it might be a good example of a very controlled Freshman program.

In 1993, the Freshman English workgroup at College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Tokyo launched a new freshman English program, which requires all instructors of the English courses in the liberal arts school (freshman and sophomore years) to use one single textbook (called the Universe of English), which consists of readings in popular culture, sciences, history, literature, etc., accompanied by audio-visual materials and exercises that have been prepared by the staff of the workgroup. This was a groundbreaking move, because this means that more than 7000 students of the same year take the same content course. The program turned out to be a great success and the textbook, the Universe of English , was published for purchase for general public and made a bestseller.

A large part of the success comes from the fact that it achieved a very high level of control and consistency in terms of the course content and evaluation through all sections (several dozens) of the English class. The progam started a year after my year and I know how things used to be; everyone taught a different English class, and by everyone I mean dozens of instructors. Nobody knew what everyone else was teaching, and usually the textbook was something that the professor was interested in and was usually some literary work that they publish as a textbook. If you hit a professor who is actually into teaching ESL, you might get something more practical and fun (such as watching movies), but that was rare. The grading scheme was also very obscure, somewhat consequently; you might hit a demanding professor and get a bad grade, while in other sections everyone might just get an A. So this new program achieved a new sense of fairness and clarity among students and instructors. Also, from an instructor’s standpoint (I also taught this for a year), preparation for this new class is extremely easy. Every week I was given a videotape to play in a class, plus an exercise worksheet to use in class. All I had to do is to do the reading and explain the hard part to the students. That was it.

However, there have been drawbacks. As the discussion on the school’s official website (sorry, there is no English version) admits, the class can become really monotone and boring as a result of too much control; as an instructor, I found that not spending too much time preparing, especially for the readings that weren’t so interesting, resulted in monotone teaching. Also, because there is only one textbook per course (that thousands of students are all taking), it was so easy for someone to start selling a cheatbook for the textbook, which you can purchase for cheap to use when you skip a class. So for the end of the semester exam, I got a lot of students -I mean a lot- who never showed up to a class and got over 80% on the final exam. Astonishing.

The school has recently replaced the textbook and revised the way to supplement this reading-heavy class by requiring all freshmen to take another course, which they can choose from comprehension (reading) and presenting (oral or written), to enhance other aspects of ESL. They also have a support system in managing this course by hiring English-speaking international students to hold a discussion group for students to sign up to talk about the materials.

Even though they have some issues to work on, this program is a good example of actually achieving a drastic change and a high level of control across the sections of the course.