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Teach English in Xuanwo Zhen - Ankang Shi

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High school students and teachers in Japan face a number of challenges when it comes to English learning. The most obvious is the discrepancy between generations of English learners. While older teachers were often taught from a textbook, leading to excellent grammar but poor pronunciation, younger teachers have studied abroad and have more insight into cultural contexts and communication strategies. The Japanese workplace is a warm culture, where order is balanced with thoughtfulness towards others. There is in Japan, as in other Asian cultures, the duty to “save face” in front of coworkers. The core of this mentality is the spirit or “wa” (和). A Western native could compare this idea to “synergy,” but factors of seniority and age also apply. By maintaining “wa,” everyone in the workplace functions harmoniously. Should a senior English teacher lose face in front of any younger, more fluent peer, discord looms. The cultural exchange efforts of CLAIR, the national Council for Language And International Relations, provide a patch to the junior-senior divide by providing foreign teachers who speak better than anyone, but as their focus is cultural exchange, not education, this can at times leave proficient junior teachers feeling slighted by redundancies. Likewise, the teacher-centered classroom of Japan places pressure on more fluent students to learn two “species” of American English under their book-learned instructors. The dated excuse still prevails, “Japanese people cannot pronounce ‘r,’ and ‘l,’ differently,” a little white lie that harms motivation in low level learners. Other factors of appearance compound these difficulties: Cultural taboos against baring the teeth or showing the tongue create widespread mispronunciation. Also, students are constantly studying for national and college entrance examinations from junior high upwards, and English examinations are rarely administered by foreigners. Additional pronunciation hiccups are found in teaching spelling, rhythm, tone, and stress. Spelling is a prevailing hurdle even for advanced students, and a major factor in the other three missteps. A national mandate to teach latin letters, “romaji,” in elementary school only recently took effect in 2017; and the IPA is still optional, perhaps because Japanese language itself already employs three separate “alphabets:” Chinese letters, “kanji” carry multiple readings, and there are two syllabaries of “kana,” each containing only five simple vowels. Native words use “hiragana.” Foreign or emphasized words use “katakana.” Thus, “bed” becomes “beddo” and “cleaning” becomes “ku-ri-ni-n-gu.” Rhythm is staggered, vowels reduced, and natural syllable breaks and visual clues in text are erased. Classroom words, for example, like “correct” and “collect,” become indistinguishable. Compounded with this, Japanese is a toneless language, and punctuation, outside the full stop, serves style rather than function. The best solution on both fronts is early English education. Before 2017, elementary teachers had no requirement to teach (or learn) English, so this is only slowly catching on. However, it is a step in the right direction, as very young children are encouraged to learn through play, and the self-conscious atmosphere of “wa” is virtually nonexistent in grade school. Not to mention, a teacher making “silly faces” is all in a day’s work. For older students, however, cultural taboos and class size still feed poor pronunciation. Ensuring each teenager participates in traditional 3x3 drilling while also checking for stress, rhythm, and tone is practically impossible for a single instructor, and the drills meanwhile can be inoculating to students. This, however, is where the speech act method of teaching can be helpful. Drilling can become engaging if it feels like natural learning play. Here is one procedure: Students tap a pencil along to the teacher’s natural iambic recitation of a boarded sentence. It helps to have a worksheet to match the board. Next, students identify the stresses (or “strong”) syllables. The teacher and student mark these with a circle or dot over each. Once all syllables are marked, the teacher demonstrates clapping on each stress. Then students read together, clapping along. This recitation is repeated until the whole class can clap in sync. (This condition leads to students coaching students.) The “tap-clap” method can be used with individual words as well, especially as an English noun and verb will often share spelling but not stress. Coaching pronunciation can also be made into a game. One way to drill consonants is to emulate “voice progression,” also known as “beatboxing”. Students engage in a show of skillful “karaoke.” The challenge of up to twenty or thirty letters becomes exciting, not just an academic chore. Demarcation on a board (and worksheet) for a voiceless progression of consonants might go something like this: /p’p’p’ - k’k’k’ - t’t’t - p’k’t’ - p’k’t’ - p’k’t’ - p’k’t’.../ Voice progression works as an enjoyable warmer or wrap-up. It helps if the letters drilled are directly related to words and phrases covered in the lesson or assigned as homework. Another method to eliminate pesky “ending vowels” is a sentence race, but this requires at least two competent instructors. After demonstrating and emulating how words link together with curved lines, the teacher organizes students into teams. Each member must pronounce the target sentence perfectly. The team to finish first wins the game. Examples of these blends are “a bit of a…,” “go and try to…,” and “I’ll have to…” All these methods can be employed not only by foreign teachers of English, but native Japanese instructors as well. For certain, Japan has made great progress in its national endeavor for English fluency, especially in recent decades. Keeping in mind these stumbling blocks will help instructors coach students more confidently into success.


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