To all you English teachers out there.

[Admiral-Badruck]

Teaching Eikawa to kids for less than an hour a week.

Is there anyone out there that has done this and ended up with a kid that could read write and speak well enough to have natural conversation or write a letter to a friend with out making any mistakes?

Is this even possible?

I am doing some research for an article I intend to present At next years JALT Convention. If you have any experience please feel free to contribute.

[Primarch]

Teaching Eikawa to kids for less than an hour a week.

Is there anyone out there that has done this and ended up with a kid that could read write and speak well enough to have natural conversation or write a letter to a friend with out making any mistakes?

Is this even possible?

I am doing some research for an article I intend to present At next years JALT Convention. If you have any experience please feel free to contribute.

Apart from some returnees, I never had any kids who could do much more than sing the alphabet song. I'm so glad I stopped teaching kids Eikaiwa. It was very unrewarding.

[Miggy Smallz]

I haven't got anyone who can write a letter or anything (aside from some returnees) but yeah, a couple of my private-lesson kids are pretty smart cookies who work hard and are pushed by me to achieve more than the standard curriculum aims for. The kids who don't take private classes with me, but stay in my classes for multiple years, tend to be the smartest for their ages in the school, I've noticed.

[The Other Dave]

An hour a week is not enough for anyone, adult or child, to learn to carry on a natural conversation or write a letter with no mistakes. The only adults I've seen do it are the ones who come to two or three classes a week and do a lot of study at home. The only kids I've seen do it are the ones who are raised or have lived in a more-or-less bilingual environment at home.

[Colonel Voss]

They can do decent but like everyone has said, one hour is no where near enough. I have been working with two girls for 6 years now. They know a lot, can read decently and their handwriting is great, but with only one hour, a lot of the stuff has jumbled up in their heads so their a bit slow on the uptake as they sort through everything. And there is still so much more to teach.

[Admiral-Badruck]

I haven't got anyone who can write a letter or anything (aside from some returnees) but yeah, a couple of my private-lesson kids are pretty smart cookies who work hard and are pushed by me to achieve more than the standard curriculum aims for. The kids who don't take private classes with me, but stay in my classes for multiple years, tend to be the smartest for their ages in the school, I've noticed.

I have seen some fairly good students in my ten years of teaching I have see students that study 4 hours a week get better and be able to have a broken conversation some were really smart and could write a sentence or 2 but nothing I could call a letter... I have never seen the results of a private lesson for 1 hour a day... that could be something to research.

Has anyone had a private student student achieve anything close to the level described in the original post?

[me_in_japan]

I dont teach eikawa any more, but even at the school I work at there are very few non-returnee kids who can hold a regular conversation. I can think of one or two new chu2 students who are not returnees and have had 6 hours of english classes a week for a year who can at least get their ideas across, but its not what I would call natural. Good, impressive, even, but not natural. Likewise, their writing is a bit mangled because they just havent studied the structures they need to express what the want to say, but they can generally get their point across.

this is the good students, mind you, and our school has a very, very good english program. Id say on 1 hr a week, plus national curriculum (which cant be discounted, as most all kids are exposed to it), its impossible for anyone to achieve anything like comprehensibility, much less "natural conversation"

*edit* what do you define as "natural"? you say "have natural conversation or write a letter to a friend with out making any mistakes" but how many natural conversations have you had recently where neither person made mistakes? I was making a listening CD for my class today using samples of real-life interviews between 2 native speaker adults, and they are absolutely riddled with "ums" "ahs", "no, i mean ~", repetition and contradictory statements. If youre gathering data for a talk or presentation, I'd advise you define your terms as clearly as you can, purely so the data you get from your respondents is as valid as possible. (I say this as someone who has had to do scientific presentations in uni on a number of occasions. Man, do they slam you if you havent defined what you mean properly... )

Also - how old is a "kid"? I teach between 12 and 18, but in my original post I was limiting myself to the youngest group Im familiar with at the moment i.e. the current chu2 who I taught throughout 1st year. We have loads of rokunensei who can hold a conversation, but that's cos theyve had about 6 hours a week for 5 years (poor wee souls that they are). Ask them to write a letter with no mistakes, though, and you'll be struggling. there may be one or two in a gakunen who can do so, but they are rare, rare finds indeed. To compare, I have a chu2 returnee student who lived in america her whole life up until about october last year. She's damn smart, and reads voraciously. Definitely a book geek if ever I saw one. (e.g she read "Little Women" a few months ago. I think back to when I was 12, and I wouldnt have fancied that much...) She writes me a book report about once a month, maybe 2 sides of B5. Its very, very good, but there are mistakes there, every time.

[Admiral-Badruck]

The "kid" in question has started 3rd grade this year. Most of the children I taught up until last Tuesday were able to do a very good job reading and writing... I am very happy to say they could write about as well as I could when I was in the 3rd grade. To be honest they may write as well as I do now

[ashmie]

If they wrote a letter it would probably be after years of tutoring from kindergarten to 5th or 6th grade and with a lot of help from the teacher.
I teach elementary and we only teach writing in the 6th grade and again only in a 'fun' setting nothing too heavy before JHS.
That's kids who study once a week.
Eikaiwa on the other hand, if the kid was home tutored by speakers of English and given more than one class a week it might be possible. Native speakers can write letters at primary age of course but even they have a lot of mistakes. So I would say unless the child studies everyday it wouldn't be possible.

Like my Japanese, if I actually studied to read and write the language everyday I would probably improve a lot but right now I'm happy with Mie farmers dialect to get along.