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[Eleckid]

It's a new term in my eikaiwa & tonight I taught 2 middle-aged ladies for the 1st time. Both claimed that they've been studying English for the past 2 years. However, they are still beginners (who can't understand any English) & they have this old habit of trying to translate everything into Japanese first, think of the answer, then try to translate everything back into English. This goes with conversations & reading.

For example, tonight their book (Side by Side) has this page of text for reading. After they listened to the CD once, they immediately dig into their dictionaries & tried to translate the entire text! Word by word!

Of course, they ended up being completely confused cuz some words have different meanings depend on what word is next or before it. When they break up every word, the sentence made no sense to them.

Anyway, I stopped them from doing that & tried to re-tell the story in my own words with gestures. This time they understood but they were still trying to underline every other word & write a Japanese meaning. I remember that one time a teacher told me that one of the ladies tried translating the entire article using her dictionary, & came to the class all confused.

What kinds of things can I do to help them break away from this traditional habit? I'd like them to try thinking in English, & it will for sure help them with both speaking & understanding the readings.

Has anyone taught Side by Side before? My boss decided to have them start from the beginning starting next week. Any good tips on how to approach this book for low confidence beginner housewife students would be of great help.

Thanks a lot!

[Glenski]

For the lowest level students, you can still expect adults to have been taught six years of English in most cases. Rely on that for some measure of understanding written English.

Start every class for a month or two by writing on the board:

"How do you say ---- in English?"
"How do you say ---- in Japanese?"

Change it slowly to

"What does --- mean?"

and add things like

"How do you pronounce this word?"

Get them to realize that asking for help is more important than looking up a word. Get them to ask each other these questions IN ENGLISH as the class goes along. You also have to explain to them that making mistakes is acceptable, and that you cannot help them if they are silent and just use dictionaries. You can help them if you hear their mistakes.

It's a basic point, but I did this with an eikaiwa class of a dozen adults, and it was amazing how they succeeded.

[BradS]

I have a "no dictionary" policy in my class. If they don't know what a word means, I make them have at least ONE guess before I tell them the answer. This can be hard as so many Japanese people have been taught to get the answer from the teacher and not work it out for themselves. It doesn't matter if they're right or wrong, as long as they try and give you a response in English.

This is effective because they work out words and phrases by using the English language, i.e. not translating.

Also explain that it's not important to understand every word (not at their level anyway), as long as they understand what the sentence is saying (there's a difference). You could possibly try speed exercises so they don't have time to translate.