Tuesday, September 13, 2005
English in the Japanese jr hi classroom
My greatest frustration teaching English to junior high schoolers as a native speaking helper has always been with the Japanese co-teachers. I'm sure it's not limited to Japanese people, but most teachers I've worked with have not, themselves, been teachable. The native speaker usually teaches only one class in every 3 or 4 in a Japanese junior high. The Japanese teacher often erases any benefit when he or she demeans the native speaker's advice as simply "his accent" and returns to incorrect patterns once the native speaker has gone.
I would never demand that my students speak with the same accent that I have. It's perfectly acceptable to speak English which bears the marks of one's origin. IF, that is, it still falls within the boundaries of accepted "correct" English. Few things make me crazier than teachers passing along to their students English that sounds like this: "I WON-toh tsu puREH BEHsu BO-ru tsu MO ro" and telling their students it means "I want to play baseball tomorrow."
Furthermore, English teachers working with native Japanese speakers should take extra care to always and only model correct rhythm and intonation in *every* English utterance, because of the wide gap between English and Japanese in this area. And yet I still hear teachers every week enunciating and accenting every word with no regard to the words' functions in the sentence. And since native speakers connect words together to form 'legato' phrasing, teachers should also be modeling and teaching this, as well.
It's easier to forgive a teacher that writes mis-spelled words on the board. At least with mis-spelled words the students can correct the teacher, and a skillful teacher can make a game of it. Unfortunately, mistakes of pronunciation, rhythm and intonation remain uncorrected in most classrooms. And Japanese teachers of English seem uninterested in mastering and then teaching these most important of English skills. Is it any wonder that so many Japanese students claim that listening comprehension is the one skill they never seem to master!? They almost never hear it!!!Unless they spend significant time abroad, they only hear natural English for the few seconds in class when the native-speaking teacher (or the CD or cassette) model a few words, phrases or sentences.
One more common error of English teachers and then I'll quit for today. Time and again I've seen teachers fail to initiate students into using proper verb tense until it's too late. I can't even count the number of students in my high school and university classes who show up without understanding how simple present tense is used in English!
A teacher I observed yesterday instructed students to answer the question, "What do you have for dinner?" with what they had eaten the previous night, never explaining that present tense in English is generally used for regularly occurring lifestyle actions, and rarely (if ever) for something that occurred in the past. A significant percentage of those students will NEVER understand how present tense is used, even if eventually taught several weeks or months down the road. I know. I see them in my university courses all the time.
Short of hiring native English speakers to take over English classes full time in the junior high schools, Japanese teachers of English must recognize that the greatest benefit from having native speakers in the classroom occasionally is to the teacher, not the students! It is the teacher's chance to improve his/her communication skills, and to get correction on language issues.
Teachers with the humility and hunger to acknowledge their insufficiency and continually strive to improve their skills are not as common as one might hope. Teachers need not have mastered English to be good language learning coaches, but they themselves MUST be lifelong learners, and that attitude must be passed along to the students.
Lastly, the native speaking English teachers must also remember that they are teaching a foreign language, as opposed to a second language, i.e., English taught to immigrants in a NY classroom. Few students will be able to accurately reproduce the teachers' accents. Nor should they be able to.
Like the Japanese teachers of English, the native speaking teachers must also demonstrate humility, acknowledging that their own English may not be perfect. (A British friend had to correct his habit of substituting /f/ for the th sound when he began teaching in Japan.) That humility should extend to broadening one's English to include words, phrases and pronunciations that are "native," but to someone of another English-speaking culture. I regularly teach "Good day" even though that is rarely used in my American homeland.
Focusing on the issues that directly affect the students' ability to understand and produce English that communicates should be key. Word order, vocabulary, tense, subject/verb agreement, rhythm, intonation and pronunciation are all vitally important. None of these, at least, should be discounted or relegated to the "well, if there's any extra time at the end of the semester" box. These, at least, are not optional. ¶ 9/13/2005 04:35:00 PM
I would never demand that my students speak with the same accent that I have. It's perfectly acceptable to speak English which bears the marks of one's origin. IF, that is, it still falls within the boundaries of accepted "correct" English. Few things make me crazier than teachers passing along to their students English that sounds like this: "I WON-toh tsu puREH BEHsu BO-ru tsu MO ro" and telling their students it means "I want to play baseball tomorrow."
Furthermore, English teachers working with native Japanese speakers should take extra care to always and only model correct rhythm and intonation in *every* English utterance, because of the wide gap between English and Japanese in this area. And yet I still hear teachers every week enunciating and accenting every word with no regard to the words' functions in the sentence. And since native speakers connect words together to form 'legato' phrasing, teachers should also be modeling and teaching this, as well.
It's easier to forgive a teacher that writes mis-spelled words on the board. At least with mis-spelled words the students can correct the teacher, and a skillful teacher can make a game of it. Unfortunately, mistakes of pronunciation, rhythm and intonation remain uncorrected in most classrooms. And Japanese teachers of English seem uninterested in mastering and then teaching these most important of English skills. Is it any wonder that so many Japanese students claim that listening comprehension is the one skill they never seem to master!? They almost never hear it!!!Unless they spend significant time abroad, they only hear natural English for the few seconds in class when the native-speaking teacher (or the CD or cassette) model a few words, phrases or sentences.
One more common error of English teachers and then I'll quit for today. Time and again I've seen teachers fail to initiate students into using proper verb tense until it's too late. I can't even count the number of students in my high school and university classes who show up without understanding how simple present tense is used in English!
A teacher I observed yesterday instructed students to answer the question, "What do you have for dinner?" with what they had eaten the previous night, never explaining that present tense in English is generally used for regularly occurring lifestyle actions, and rarely (if ever) for something that occurred in the past. A significant percentage of those students will NEVER understand how present tense is used, even if eventually taught several weeks or months down the road. I know. I see them in my university courses all the time.
Short of hiring native English speakers to take over English classes full time in the junior high schools, Japanese teachers of English must recognize that the greatest benefit from having native speakers in the classroom occasionally is to the teacher, not the students! It is the teacher's chance to improve his/her communication skills, and to get correction on language issues.
Teachers with the humility and hunger to acknowledge their insufficiency and continually strive to improve their skills are not as common as one might hope. Teachers need not have mastered English to be good language learning coaches, but they themselves MUST be lifelong learners, and that attitude must be passed along to the students.
Lastly, the native speaking English teachers must also remember that they are teaching a foreign language, as opposed to a second language, i.e., English taught to immigrants in a NY classroom. Few students will be able to accurately reproduce the teachers' accents. Nor should they be able to.
Like the Japanese teachers of English, the native speaking teachers must also demonstrate humility, acknowledging that their own English may not be perfect. (A British friend had to correct his habit of substituting /f/ for the th sound when he began teaching in Japan.) That humility should extend to broadening one's English to include words, phrases and pronunciations that are "native," but to someone of another English-speaking culture. I regularly teach "Good day" even though that is rarely used in my American homeland.
Focusing on the issues that directly affect the students' ability to understand and produce English that communicates should be key. Word order, vocabulary, tense, subject/verb agreement, rhythm, intonation and pronunciation are all vitally important. None of these, at least, should be discounted or relegated to the "well, if there's any extra time at the end of the semester" box. These, at least, are not optional. ¶ 9/13/2005 04:35:00 PM
