Friday February 2, 1990
As a result of some thinking over winter vacation and buying an English conversation textbook in Kyoto, I decided to design my own curriculum for teaching communicative English. I've had to place the emphasis on communication because, although it seems obvious to us, in Japanese schools foreign languages are not taught as tools of communication. Languages are taught as a set of formulas and lists of vocabulary to be memorized, though not to be understood, and certainly never to be put together and used to communicate ideas.
The purpose of studying English is not to learn to communicate, but to weed out "good" students from the "bad". Studying English in Japan is an intellectual exercise with no practical application. No wonder my students hate English. And no wonder the Japanese are the world's worst speakers (so I've read) of foreign languages.
No matter how I try to convince the other teachers that language is a skill that must be practiced, like playing tennis or the piano, they are too entrenched in the system to be able to change it. They are content with rote memorization of material that the students do not understand. They are satisfied with parroting and mimicry. They don't expect students to produce new sentences, to communicate new ideas.
The students are data banks. But they have no program to process the data. They are not learning a language; they are only memorizing words and idioms that they don't know how to use.
I read the other day that a one-year-old child has a vocabulary of about 50 words and enough internalized grammar to differentiate between subject and verb in simple sentences like "baby go". The Japanese claim to focus on grammar here, but my students don't know what words perform the action, what words describe the action, or what words receive the action.
Posted by M Sinclair Stevens
February 10, 2002
Share Your Thoughts
Q: Why were errors in English textbooks not discovered for four years?
A: "I guess it is because the students were concentrating on learning aspects of English...and weren't concentrating on comprehending the content of the text."