Adapting English Picture Books to an EFL Context: A Study of Collaboration between Elementary School Teachers and TEFL Practitioners in Rural Japan

English activities in Japanese elementary schools will be made compulsory for 5th and 6th graders starting in 2011, and at the time of writing, elementary schools are in what is termed a “transition period” in which they have two years to prepare. The looming English activities have caused much uneasiness among primary school teachers to the extent that some have considered early retirement (AERA, 2008). This chapter is a descriptive study of how elementary school teachers and EFL educators collaborated to integrate English picture books into a school’s existing English activity curriculum. The project we will analyze, the Working with Picture Books project (WPB), was conducted by the Faculty of Education at Iwate University (IU) and its affiliated elementary school, (Fuzoku ES). First, we will give a background on English activities in Japanese elementary schools, arguing that the current method of enhancing them in a top-down fashion alone is inadequate. Second, we will introduce the WPB project as an example of a bottom-up plan to make positive changes to local English activities. We will then show how the collaboration between educators at both IU and Fuzoku ES led to English Picture Book lessons where teachers themselves were able to read the book in English and most students were able to understand and enjoy the reading.