March 4, 2000

Dear Sir or Madam:

     This letter concerns Gill Bates, who I have the pleasure of working with while he is here in Japan. Since July 28, 1997, Gill has taught here at Fujiyama Senior High School as an assistant language teacher (ALT) five days each week, teaching nine or ten classes of first-year students their Oral Communication of English, with a few classes of second-year or third-year students. His major role here is to team-teach English class and to lead the private English conversation lesson after school.

     The caliber of work he did for us was outstanding. In particular, he has made a great contribution to developing a new approach to teaching Oral Communication; before he came to this school, our approach to teaching English was traditional: that is, our English lesson was mainly based on the lecture-style and was a sort of grammar-translation method. Gill, however, went the so-called "extra mile" and took the initiative to develop a new, more communicative method of teaching English. This will have lasting value.

     I'd like to explain in detail here about what Gill has done for us. First, he actively participated in planning meetings and almost always gave us good and new ideas about teaching procedures. For example, he suggested that we should use more Japanese in the first stage of English lesson so that students can be comfortable and relax, and that we should pick up intellectually appropriate materials for students; textbooks are not so interesting. He initiated weekly meetings and prepared and wrote lesson plans each week for all team-teachers. Although those suggestions were good enough, they would not have been effective if they had been given without any consideration of the students' abilities or interests. In this respect we appreciate his attitude and ability as a teacher.

     Second, during class he encouraged students to actively participate. While Japanese students are typically quite passive in class and reluctant to speak out, Gill helped solve this problem by starting students on making speeches in English, so students could communicate with each other even if they are shy in class. He replied to all of the students' drafts, and told them important strategies to make a speech: eye-contact, passion, gestures, visual or audio aids, structures, quotations, and so forth. The results were extremely splendid. In Japan, students have rare opportunities to conduct a research and complete it in a foreign language. However, our students became more comfortable and relaxed in speaking English than before and found speaking English more interesting or more enjoyable. In this sense his encouragements were quite successful.

     Third, Gill made great efforts to help students to write essays in English. Every year we encourage students to challenge some "English essay contests." He read a lot of essays and gave students appropriate advice to improve their drafts, while giving superb suggestions about teaching English writing to the Japanese staffs. He advised us not to correct their minor grammatical mistakes too much and to encourage them to continue writing, which we now consider as basic policies.

     In addition, Gill has shared his ideas about teaching in other ways. For example, Gill made a speech at 1998 Mid-summer Conference of ALTs in Gifu Prefecture, held in Norikura, where his speech gave a lot of suggestions to the audience. He also informed us of a variety of books, articles, magazines and web pages on English or teaching English.

     Last but definitely not least, I would like to write about Gill's friendship to us. Since just after his arrival at our school, he has been friendly to all of the staff here. Every day we have a chance to talk about education, politics, languages and so on, because I am his supervisor, and so I can say that he always wants to make friendly relationships with the Japanese teachers and that actually he did it. He has been trying to understand everything in Japan: its language, culture, customs, history and education system. With this understanding, he got accustomed to be with and teach the Japanese students, which sometimes made me forget that he is not a Japanese.

     Although I have been impressed by Gill's ability as an English teacher, I think you will agree that the skills and initiative that I have described above apply not only to the teaching of English. Working with Gill was in many ways a refreshing and inspiring experience for me. I can therefore recommend him without reservation.

Yours Sincerely,

Masaru Tanaka

English Teacher,
Fujiyama Senior High School