"Multilingual Education" at the affiliated schools

The biggest reason I named it "GC English" is that when I considered what the students of Keio Yokohama Elementary School would most need to do for Japan and the world in 10, 20, or 30 years, I realized it was "global communication." In other words, I wanted to emphasize acquiring "the foundational ability to communicate with people around the world." I proposed this because, during their elementary school years, I wanted to aim for them to build a foundation to become people who can effectively cooperate with individuals from other countries and cultures, rather than simply being proficient in English as a school subject.

"Skills" are important, but "values" are even more so. The motto we repeat in every "GC" class for the lower grades is "Make friends around the world." For the upper grades, we add others like "make a peaceful world," and the elementary school students learn not only to say the mottos but also to write them. At the elementary school stage, I want them to develop a desire to make friends with people from other countries. Moreover, a crucial foundation of GC is for students to experience communicating with people from various cultures at the elementary school, try using a foreign language, and gain the confidence and further motivation that comes from realizing, "I was understood!" and "I was able to convey my feelings!"

To allow students to experience, even just a little, the reality of our "multilingual" and "multicultural" world, we have incorporated time to learn languages other than English into the GC curriculum for second graders and above.

Second graders learn about the Portuguese language and Brazilian culture. They practice greetings and very simple conversations in Portuguese and learn to say the numbers from 1 to 10. A guest teacher creates a video for simple conversation practice. After using it to practice repeating words like "Obrigado" and "Tchau," the guest teacher visits the class, where the second graders greet them in Portuguese and interact using English and Japanese as well.

Following a similar format, third graders learn Chinese, fourth graders learn German, and fifth graders learn Arabic. In almost every class, they spend about a minute listening to and repeating a video of basic expressions. Afterward, a guest teacher visits the class, giving them an opportunity to try using the language.

For the third graders' Chinese class, international students from Keio University visit around the Lunar New Year in January to practice simple Chinese conversations. We offer a language and cultural experience program where our students interact with them by asking questions such as, "What is life like in China?"

We also include Arabic because it is spoken in many countries and is an official language of the United Nations. In the past, an instructor from the Keio Foreign Language School's Arabic course, who is from Libya, visited our school in traditional clothing to speak about the Arabic language and Arab culture. He is skilled at Arabic calligraphy and would write each student's name on a card for them. Through these introductory workshops, we help students become familiar with Islam and Arabic. This year, an international student from Morocco is scheduled to visit for an exchange.

Additionally, all sixth graders choose a country and engage in an activity where they research its primary language and some sample greetings—for instance, Swahili for Kenya—and then share what they've learned with their classmates.

Every April and October, we recruit international students for after-school activities through the International Center and the Office of Student Services' International Exchange Services Group. We typically form a team of about eight students from eight different countries each semester, mainly consisting of short-term exchange students. After school, they come to the elementary school to play card games with our students or assist with a vocabulary test called the "GC Challenge."

Nowadays, AI is quite capable of handling English, and we are moving closer to a world with real-time AI-powered automatic translation. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that English will be the only necessary foreign language when our elementary students grow up. So, what should they be learning? For these students who will enter the world in a decade, the most crucial skill will undoubtedly be the ability to communicate skillfully and compassionately with people from any culture. English is currently a convenient lingua franca, so in GC classes, students learn it as a foreign language and experience using it for communication. However, English is not the only thing that matters. I want them to experience and build confidence in how to succeed, using various IT tools to connect with people around the world.

To that end, we are developing study abroad programs in partnership with schools in the UK and Australia, and I want to focus on fostering an awareness of what kinds of exchanges and collaborations are possible and, indeed, necessary.

When students move on to junior high school, they will study more English, and opportunities to study abroad will increase. While preserving the experience of learning a foreign language from its foundations and understanding the importance of English as a tool, I want to shift the focus toward how to communicate effectively in international projects.

For example, we are currently exploring new partnerships with elementary schools in South Korea for pen pal programs and other exchanges. Additionally, during the first semester of this academic year, nearly all of our fifth graders participated in a pilot project where they were paired one-on-one with fifth graders from a Taiwanese elementary school to communicate individually using an asynchronous video exchange platform called FLIP. We are entering an era where classmates are not just from Japan but are children from all over the world learning together. Our elementary school is steadily acquiring the devices and IT infrastructure to make this a reality, and I want to explore these possibilities further.

English is ultimately just one tool; I want the main focus to be "GC." That is the reason for changing the subject name from "English for Global Communication" to "Global Communication"—by dropping the "English."

That's right. I came to Japan because my parents were missionaries, but they were not very fluent in Japanese. As a result, from a young age, I often had to interpret and translate for them, acting as a bridge between two cultures, so to speak. On the other hand, whenever I returned to the United States, I needed time to readjust because I had lived in Japan for so long. This experience of living between two cultures has made me think, from a very young age, about how to get along with people from completely different backgrounds, and I've had many related experiences.

Also, as an adult, I taught English at a university in China for two years. Life there involved communication mishaps and a fair amount of culture shock. There, too, I experienced making mistakes related to language and culture but gradually building confidence through interaction.