Academy curriculum EFL eikaiwa JHS junior high school language courses materials publishing textbooks
by sendaiben
leave a comment
The Fluency Course 2022
Is finally available on Amazon
I can’t believe this day is finally here. After six(?) years of writing, testing, re-writing, and figuring out how to publish and sell it without driving ourselves and our staff crazy, the B versions of all our textbooks are now available on Amazon in their final form.
Incredibly, we’ve made a lot of improvements to this latest (final?) version. We added a dictation activity to the first year books, made a simple change to the second year writing practice that should make a big difference to student results, and transformed the third year textbook.
I think our current users are going to be very pleasantly surprised, and new ones will just think the books were this good from the beginning 😉
We use the B books from October with our students, so we’ll have all the free supplementary stuff up on the Fluency Course website before then.
We’re also hoping to have the final versions of the A books up on Amazon/our site by the end of the summer, at which point I’m going to take my writing partner for a nice meal and we’re going to take a week or so off.
Would be really grateful for any help you could give us with promoting the course, telling people about it, leaving Amazon reviews, etc.
Please let me know if you have any questions! For people buying the course for their students, I would be happy to jump on a Zoom call to answer your questions or run you through how we use the books.
Academy curriculum JHS junior high school language courses materials publishing textbooks
by sendaiben
leave a comment
Fluency Course Evolution
Kaizen, kaizen, kaizen
Another month, another evolution in the Fluency Course. We’ve been playing with professional printing and design, and in the course of that have figured out that we probably need to change some of the components of the Fluency Course.
We started out with monthly texts for the students, which worked well but were time-consuming to print and somewhat fiddly.
Then we moved to 4-month texts, which worked well as the content for years 1 and 2 levels up every four months.
However, once we take printing costs and possible end uses into account, it seems to make sense to split each year of the course into two 24-unit volumes.
Not only will this reduce the cost of printing considerably, it will also allow some schools to use a single volume with their students, working at a slower pace or maybe splitting each unit over two weeks.
They could also use 1A with first years and 1B with second years, for instance, or any other combination they like.
After this change, the components of the Fluency Course are as follows:
Fluency Course Level 1
Printed materials:
Text 1A -24 units, approximately 220 pages
Text 1B -24 units, approximately 220 pages
Workbook 1 -48 units, approximately 110 pages
Free downloads/printables:
Teacher manual
Quizlet files (48 units)
Audio files* (120 texts)
Student record sheets (12 monthly)
Student reference sheets (12 monthly)
Conversation cards (240 index cards -one set needed per 2 students)
*audio files not yet available
We should have some prototypes of the professionally printed materials by the end of this month. Exciting stuff!
Academy curriculum JHS junior high school language courses materials
by sendaiben
4 comments
The Junior High School Fluency Course
Need test partners from April 2020
After five years of writing, testing, and editing, we finally finished writing the final volume of the Fluency Course last November. You can read more about the course in the previous post.
It’s been a wonderful experience working with my writing partner Dan E. and testing the materials with students at Cambridge English.
Now we are ready to take the next step.
The next step is to test the materials. We need to find out if they will work as well for other people as they do for us. We also need to find all the mistakes that inevitably lurk within the 100,000 words of content in the course 🙂
Another question is whether the materials work if students are not doing extensive reading alongside them. I suspect they will, but would feel better having actual data.
So we are looking for a few schools that would be willing to test the materials with their students from next April. It might be a bit difficult to jump into the later stages of the course, so we are only hoping to test the year one content (matches JHS first year textbooks and school curricula).
The materials
The Fluency Course consists of a number of components. It is designed to be modular, so schools/teachers can choose which elements to use with their students. The various elements are somewhat independent from each other.
- the Fluency Coursebook contains vocabulary quizzes, reading/listening/speed reading texts, verb drills, verb quizzes, and dialogues (there may be audio files for each text, but these are not ready at time of writing)
- the Speaking Cards contain questions and model answers for speaking practice
- the Fluency Workbook contains question and answer writing practice
- the Record Sheets allow students to write their scores and times and keep track of their progress
- the monthly Reference Sheets show all vocabulary and questions for that month along with Japanese translations
- the Quizlet data sets contain vocabulary and questions that match each week of the course so that students can preview before class
The Fluency Course has 48 units, organized four to a month. The first volume of the first-year course (1a) is the easiest. The second volume (1b) is slightly harder and the third (1c) harder still. At Cambridge English we only have 44 classes a year, so we just skip the units that fall on days the school is shut.
Test partners
We would expect test partners to:
- have a number of (first year) junior high school students
- have weekly 60m+ classes
- test the materials and give us feedback
- pay a nominal fee per student to cover the cost of materials
- understand that materials are in development and thus not ‘pretty’
The course could also work with second and third-year junior high school students as supplementary material, but is designed to go with the first-year JHS curriculum.
If you successfully test the first year and wish to continue using the materials you will also have access to the second and third year courses.
If you are interested in helping us test the Fluency Course, please get in touch (Gmail, Facebook, Twitter or comment below -my handle on all is the same as the name of this blog) and we can discuss whether the materials might be a good fit for you. We are only looking for a few schools, and are hoping to have different types of school in terms of size and curriculum.
If all goes well the Fluency Course should be available to purchase normally in a year or two 🙂
Academy business curriculum eikaiwa extensive listening extensive reading goals high school JHS junior high school language courses materials school management textbooks
by sendaiben
1 comment
Cambridge Academy: Year Four and Five
It’s all coming together. Or is it?
You can read previous Academy posts here:
- Extensive Reading for Secondary Students (April 2015)
- Six Months In (September 2015)
- Year One (February 2016)
- Looking at Year Two (March 2016)
- Stocktake (March 2016)
- Shadoku explained (April 2016)
- Some improvements to the curriculum (April 2016)
- December 2016 update (December 2016)
- Cambridge Academy: Year Two and Three (March 2017)
- Cambridge Academy: Stocktake 2017 (March 2017)
- Cambridge Academy: Another Quantum Leap (April 2017)
- Cambridge Academy: Year Three Mid-Year Update (August 2017)
- Cambridge Academy: Year Three Student Progress (October 2017)
- The Academy Fluency Course (March 2018)
- Cambridge Academy: Stocktake 2018 (March 2018)
This year was a solid one for the Academy but we definitely had some ups and downs.
Mistakes were made (by me)
Let’s start with the downs: we screwed up badly not just once but twice. The first mistake was getting a bit cocky about the Academy and changing the way we explained it to existing students.
In the past we’d gone into each class with 6th graders in, introduced the Academy and encouraged them to join. Almost everyone did.
Last year, we asked everyone to come to a special explanation session on a Sunday, then asked them to come in again in January and line up to sign up for the days they wanted. Only about half the students joined.
This is a mistake we’ll be paying for for the next five years, as we have a year that is quite a bit smaller than it should be. Looks like we’ll have 22 second-year students next year, spread over three classes of 4, 6, and 12 students. Doubly regrettable because the Academy classes work much better with at least ten students in.
This year we went back to the original, more humble model and right now halfway through the explanations pretty much all our 6th graders have signed up. If all goes well we should end up with 28 first-graders in three classes.
The second mistake was delegating too much. As planned I assigned a teacher to each class, but then failed to monitor them as closely as I should have (in my defence we had some pretty serious issues crop up this year that took a lot of time at first and then burned me out later).
As a direct consequence of me not paying enough attention to how the classes were going, the current first-year classes in particular are not where I want them to be, and all the reading classes have gone slightly off course.
Nothing too serious, but changes will be needed next year.
But lots of good things happened too
Despite the lack of attention from me, the classes mostly went well and students learned a lot. We did Eiken last month at the school, and 78 out of 82 students passed the paper test. Last weekend we did interview practice, and everyone was basically okay to pass. This is very encouraging, as our student body is very mixed and doesn’t just consist of elite students.
We wrote 2/3 of the A3 output course, and it turned out really well. I’m proud of all our materials, but this might be the best one yet. We also finished one year of the A5 advanced course.
Very few of our students quit. We lost a handful to graduation and three quit, but we’re hoping to have a healthy intake and we also had four students join from outside. Hopefully that is the start of a trend 🙂
Student numbers
Junior high school 1: 28? (still in the process of pitching to parents)
Junior high school 2: 22
Junior high school 3: 30
Senior high school entry class (1-2 year students): 10
Senior high school advanced class (2-3 year students): 11
Pretty encouraging. It will be interesting to see how many of the new JHS 3rd years stay on into high school, as they were our first big year.
Also, the mathematically gifted among you will notice that this would give us 101 students, finally reaching our longstanding goal of 100 students in the Academy. Eventually I am hoping we’ll have something like 200 in the program (see below for how this may be possible).
Future plans
We’re going to rent the third unit on the ground floor of our building. This will give us all the car parking spaces (an additional four) plus get rid of the grumpy guy that used to rent it so no one will be complaining about our students going forwards. This extra unit will give us about 280 new class places and allow us to have all junior high school levels of the Academy, plus one high school level, every weekday.
I’m going to be much more hands on with the reading classes next year, and with the junior high school first year output classes. This will allow me to develop them a bit more and address structural problems (as well as train our teachers).
I’m going to take another leaf out of SEG’s book and try to find supplementary reading material for our beginner levels. At the moment the students read sets of readers with CDs, but I would also like to mix in picture books and other reading material that they might find interesting. A big work in progress.
We’ll finish the A3 course and start working on our final level, A4. We’ll also write a second year of the A5 course. This will complete the Academy materials, at which point we might start working on a course for elementary school students.
Outlook
The outlook is good. I am not going to be able to be as hands-off next year as I was this year, but I think the program will get a lot stronger because of that.
We will be in a position to recruit hundreds of new students next year, including almost 100 new Academy students, so we will need to start working on advertising for April 2020 from now. It’s going to be intense but also kind of fun 🙂
Academy business curriculum extensive reading high school JHS junior high school language courses Language learning school management SHS
by sendaiben
6 comments
Cambridge Academy: December 2016 Update
Academy beginner book section (YL0.1-0.7)
You can read about the Cambridge Academy in previous posts:
- Extensive Reading for Secondary Students (April 2015)
- Six Months In (September 2015)
- Year One (February 2016)
- Looking at Year Two (March 2016)
- Stocktake (March 2016)
- Shadoku explained (April 2016)
- Some improvements to the curriculum (April 2016)
Well, a lot has happened since my last post about the Academy (July 2016). We have had several schools visit, and I have talked to lots of people, and I have realised that in order for someone to start a program like the Academy in a school, the following four conditions are necessary:
- the desire and autonomy to begin a program
- the knowledge of ER to explain it to teachers, parents, and students
- a critical number of junior and senior high school students
- a large amount of money for books
So far I haven’t talked to anyone with all four of these, so we are putting our plans to license our system on hold. After all, if there are no potential customers it doesn’t make much sense to develop a product, right?
I’m still very happy to answer questions and give what advice I can though -feel free to leave a comment on this post or drop me an email.
Progress Report
We’re approaching Year Three for the Academy, and a lot is going well, and some things are going less well. We haven’t seen the growth I was hoping for (100 students are still out of reach), but we have a solid 70-some and next year is looking somewhat hopeful to break three figures.
1. Shadoku/Students that didn’t do shadoku last year
Our new first year reading curriculum incorporating shadoku is working extremely well. This year’s first year students are possibly doing better than last years’ (who are now second years). The second years are struggling a bit and I am trying different things to help them out, including having them re-read at a much lower level, etc. Not sure if the situation can be fixed completely, but at least we’ll do better going forwards.
We’ve also bought a lot of new books, particularly at the intermediate and advanced levels. Still not enough, but much closer to being able to meet our students’ future needs.
Academy intermediate book section (YL0.8-2.9)
A few of our students are really taking off with their reading, breaking the YL2.0 barrier and becoming more independent and motivated readers. It’s wonderful to see.
Academy advanced book section (YL3.0~)
I would say that somewhere over half our students are doing really well, and most of the others are doing okay. Maybe 20% are not doing well, and I hope some of them can be salvaged. Most of the ones who are not doing well started off badly, and I wasn’t skilled enough at the time to notice or help them.
2. Student reading targets
I’ve also noticed that students that read a certain amount are doing well, and those that read less are not. Using this data, I have come up with provisional weekly targets that we’ll start using next year with our students:
JHS1 2000-5000 words a week (100,000-250,000 words a year)
JHS2 3000-7000 words a week (150,000-350,000 words a year)
JHS3 4000-10000 words a week (200,000-500,000 words a year)
SHS1Â 4000-10000 words a week (200,000-500,000 words a year)
SHS2 5000-15000 words a week (250,000-750,000 words a year)
SHS3 6000-20000 words a week (300,000-1,000,000 words a year)
Based on these a student that joined our program in JHS1 and stayed with us until the end of high school would read 1,200,000 to 3,350,000 words. I predict this would provide them with some pretty decent English skills. The targets include in-class reading as well, so students with decent reading speeds might be able to clear the target just by reading in class for 55 minutes a week.
These numbers are provisional and we’ll probably adjust them after working with the students a bit next year. Looking at our current student data though, they seem reasonable. For comparison, in my university classes I require students to read 8,000 words a week to pass the course and 25,000 words a week to get a top grade.
3. Original junior high school output (speaking and writing) curriculum
We’re currently working on making our own curriculum for junior high school students for the output (speaking and writing) classes. As I mentioned in the improvements to curriculum post, the output classes have actually proven to be extremely important, and in the future we’ll be recommending students take both classes if at all possible.
Reading classes are much more profitable, but so far the results of students that only take reading are not satisfactory so we’ll have to abandon that idea as a profit centre 🙂
We should have the original curriculum for JHS1 ready to try from April, and then develop year two in 2017 and year three in 2018. Using the new curricula, we will now place junior high school students in their equivalent year class instead of trying to stream them by ability. High school students will be streamed by ability/level.
4. Assistant teachers
We have a couple of assistant teachers this year. They were students in the program last year, and are now attending local universities. We asked them to help us out as part-time staff.
The huge advantage of recruiting assistants like this is that they are very familiar with the system. It’s a win-win: we get dependable and skilled assistants that we know and trust, and they get to continue their English studies while doing fairly well-paid and interesting part-time work.
Best of all, this model should be fairly sustainable: I would expect we’ll have at least one suitable student per year graduating and we can keep them for four years while they are at university.
5. The next steps
Right now we need to do a few things before the end of the year. I would like to write a student guide to the curriculum that explains what they need to do. I think this will help students and their parents get more out of their classes.
We also need to buy some more books, although we can probably slow down a bit now.
Another stocktake will have to happen at the end of the year and book purchases to fill in holes.
We’re going to need more shelves soon too.
We’ll also be taking over another school and inviting their students to join our program from April. Hopefully this will build up our numbers a little bit.
All good stuff. I’m really looking forward to how the Academy develops as we go into our third year.
Anyone else working on extensive reading systems? Any questions or comments?