Practice Report on Quiz-Creation Activities in English Classes
The new curriculum guidelines promulgated by the Japan Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology indicate that teachers must develop student-centered classes. Greater attention is recently being paid to active learning (AL) as a means of carrying out this guideline. English teachers in Japan should teach students the four skills of reading, listening, writing, and speaking, equally. However, traditionally, reading skills, and learning English grammar have received the focus under the Grammar-Translation Method. Little attention has generally been paid to speaking as a skill. In particular, when students learn English grammar, they sit down quietly, listen to the teacher’s explanation of the grammar, complete the grammar exercises, and check whether their answer is right or not. They have little chance to speak English. Teachers find it difficult to create a student-centered learning environment and encourage students to speak English when they present English grammar. This paper includes my practice report on English classes for first year students at Kushiro College, National Institute of Technology. I created a student-centered environment that I took advantage of when I taught English grammar to the students. This is a quiz-creation activity, which I call “Guess-de-show!” In this activity, students learn reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills through the creation of quizzes. After the students listen to an explanation of English grammar, they use their newly acquired grammar to create quizzes and hints. Students must read English documents to obtain the necessary information for creating quizzes and hints, providing them to the respondents. The respondents listen to the questioners and respond to the quizzes in English. This is an easy exercise that can be done in one class, and it is an example of AL.