Teach English in Padmanabhapuram - TEFL Courses

In japan, english is compulsory for all public school students from Junior High to end of High School, six years in total, however the standard of speaking and pronunciation is low in general. This is due to a combination of cultural factors and the drastic differences between english and japanese in Alphabet, Phonology and Grammar. Alphabet. japan uses three scripts Kanji, Katakana and Hiragana. japanese learners are exposed to Roman script (Romaji) extensively and study it in school so have no problems reading roman text however pronunciation is very different even for english words that have been adopted into japan. Phonology / Pronunciation japanese has only five vowel sounds in long or short variations. Also, it is not really possible to have one consonant directly after another, a consonant is always followed by a vowel and “n” is the only consonant which can normally end a word. Because of this when faced with an english sound like the “str” in strength they will often pronounce it as “ste-rength”. There is also no native “/l/” or “/v/” sounds at all in japanese words and many speakers have great difficulty pronouncing and sometimes even hearing the difference between “/l/” and “/r/” and “/v/” and “/b/”. Intonation and stressing is also almost never used in japanese, each phoneme is pronounced and stressed the same way no matter what phonemes come before or after. This makes picking up a more natural fluency and pronunciation more difficult for japanese natives. Grammar Differences japanese grammar is in most ways extremely simple compared to english. Eg verbs are the same for singular and plural and questions are formed by adding a particle “ka” on the end of a sentence. Because of this common mistakes are for example “my father work” forgetting the s in present simple 3rd person and also getting word order wrong when forming questions. Also as the present simple is used for future in japanese mistakes such as “I help you after school” are common. In japanese verbs are modified with many suffixes indicating formality, possibility, imperative etc. While there are a large of these in japanese that can be applied to any verb in japanese they are almost without exception formed regularly. The word order is always subject-object-verb, unlike english's subject verb object for affirmative sentences, so mistakes in word order are very common in general. japanese does not use articles at all and has no concept of a countable or uncountable noun making correct usage of articles very difficult for japanese people. japanese also mixes verb tenses within a sentence, the final verb tense in a sentence indicates the whole sentence tense, so they may find it hard to remember that all tenses have to agree in a sentence in english. Vocabulary A large amount of english loan words are used in japanese usually spelt out in the Katakana alphabet in japanese phonemes. For example “cup” is used in japanese but written using the Katakana phonemes for “koppu”. While this means they can easily remember english words which have been loaned into japanese it is very common for them to pronounce them using the Katanana Phonemes with extra vowel sounds. Cultural Problems There is a very common japanese saying “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.” It can be very difficult to get japanese people to speak at all and its very common for their understanding to be quite good but conversational ability to be very poor. It can be very hard to get them to be competitive in games as assertiveness and competitiveness are not seen as desirable qualities in japanese society. japanese students have a lot of respect for teachers on the whole, but it's also very rare for them to ask questions directly, preferring to ask other students on check in their textbooks. Conclusion The cultural and phonological differences are the biggest barriers to japanese students learning effective and fluent english. This explains the popularity of on-one-one private conversational teaching in japan. While this may be unaffordable for many students, when teaching classes in japan, the teacher can do their best to compensate by learning about phonology and trying to design activate stage activities that can overcome the cultural reluctance to step forward.