We've been thinking of ways how to encourage more students to use English outside the classroom. Since Japanese people love their point cards, I thought maybe applying the same concept at school would be a hit. I brainstormed this with the JTEs at school and they helped me with Japanese on both the cards and the poster.
As suggested by another ALT in my city, we are designating particular month(s) for every grade level. We have a total of 4 English teachers at school (2 ALTs and 2 JTEs) and with more than 1 thousand students, we figured this will be easier for everybody. Please feel free to change any of the rules to fit the needs of your schools.
Steps:
1. Print the stamp cards and make sure they are printed on both sides of the paper. It's 両面印刷 in Japanese.
2. Discuss with your partner teacher(s) and make adjustments as needed. Submit for approval (Principal & Vice Principal, and everyone else who needs to approve it)
3. Explain to HRTs before handing out the cards and posting the posters. Although you will be explaining the campain or rally in class, it's best to let the HRTs know so they can guide their students and feel included as well.
4. Once the campaign starts, try to log which classes the students who are participating are from. You can use the students' logs to let HRTs know how their students are doing. You can also ask them to encourage their students to reach their goals.
5. Decide with your JTEs or HRTs what the reward will be when students reach their goals. For us, we will be giving a special sticker to those students but we'll make sure that students know that the real reward is the opportunity to use a lot of English outside of the English class.
Rules (translated from the Japanese instruction):
1. Ask the English teachers questions in English and answer your teacher's questions in English.
2. Ask one English teacher a question per day, such as How are you? What color do you like? Do you like cats?
3. When you achieve your goal, you can get another card and do it again. Let's use English a lot!
If you decide to do this at your schools, plan and get the necessary approvals ahead of your planned start date. We want to make sure that this will not disrupt any of the activities planned out for the students by the school and other teachers. Good luck and enjoy!