Job Discussion Forums

[markle]

[go2guy]

Bang on Markle -- the pleasure-pain principle in action once again! I have taught in Japan, Canada and France. In that time I met only ONE person who hadn't left their native land (in the cases of Japan & France that is) and who spoke what we could really call fluent English. This was a middle-aged, single, Japanese male who may be the all-time number one anglophile! When I first went to France (after 2 years in Japan) I thought I could expect a clientele that would be much more willing to express opinions/converse openely. Boy, was I disappointed. The French are just as lazy/reticent/indifferent ... Personally I think it has a lot to do with fear of failing, of not being perfect in the new language & this is the same in all cultures. I think we can all identify with the situation in reverse, no? That's why I spent a lot of time creating learning environments where risk was encouraged and where answers were not always categorically "right or wrong". I guess the bottom line is "put the shoe on the other foot" and ask yourself "when I was a teenager did I really give a hoot about learning French/whatever other language?". What were the parental/social pressures surrounding that as well. And how would (WILL?!) we all react when Chinese takes over English as the lingua franca of the world!

[shmooj]

[johanne]

I taught in Japan, both kids and adults for 4 years and after that taught at ESL schools in Vancouver to people from all over the world and found that there were students from all countries that were difficult to motivate. While I was in Japan I met a Japanese guy who I ended up marrying and through him found several insights into how to get my Japanese students to speak and in fact when I came back to Vancouver was often assigned classes full of Japanese students as I had oftened received great evaluations from previous groups. My evaluation from the Mexicans and Brazilians, on the other hand, were not that great as they felt I spent too much time setting up the activity to make it as risk free as possible (a helpful technique with Japanese, and the few Thai students I taught). I guess my point is that if you can adapt your teaching strategies to complement the cultural perticularities of the student body, things should go well. Obviously this is easier said than done and I think most ESL teachers find it easier to teach students who share similar cultural traits, such as those cultures who like to discuss and debate. Also, as far as Japan is concerned, my favorite group to teach were the kids under 9 years old, as they were not at all reluctant to talk and we had a great time playing games and running around the classroom looking for English words and sounds.

As far as being interested and motivated to learn a second language, I think this is a challenge in many places. At the moment I teach Grade 5 in the French Immersion program in Vancouver's public schools and my students definately need tons of encouragement, bribery and motivation to speak, read and write in French. I can count on at least 5 of them asking me every day, "Est-ce qu'on peut lire en anglais, s'il te plait?", even though they have been told literally hundreds of times that since they are in the French Immersion program they need to read in French 80% of the time.

Sorry I've gotten off on a bit of a tangent, but the point is to look for what motivates your student even if it is completely different than what would motivate you as a second language learner.

[Sheep-Goats]

I've only taught two Japanese people English in my life, and that was for a short peroid of time while getting my CELTA in America, so I can't really say any of the following comparisions or pointers are transferrable to Japanese.

I'm currently teaching at a large, private university in Thailand. Most of the students didn't do well enough in high school to make it into either the top two schools in Thailand (Chulalongkorn and Thamasat), or the usual backup school (Bangkok University). Also, the idea of having native speakers in the classroom for young children is brand spanking new in Thailand (the government approved the hiring of "more" native speakers for government schools just this last semester -- I guess there was rather restrictive quota before then). So most of my students: a) have had 6 or more years of compulsory English from non-native speakers who DO NOT speak English in the classroom, ever, b) are not the cream of the crop as far as academic ability goes, and motivation varies a lot, and c) can't speak a word of English.

Thai students are quite willing to make mistakes, given, generally, two privisos:

1) They must like and trust the person they're making the mistake in front of, and that person should have a higher status than them. As a teacher at a university in Thailand, only monks and the king really outrank you status-wise (the term "ajarn," perhaps best translated as professor, can also be used to address a monk, particularly if the monk has just explained a moral quandrie to you), so the second isn't a problem, even if you're younger than your students. The first part, about them liking and trusting you, can be. Fortunatly, you don't need to bribe them to get them to like you, you just need to seem fair and appoachable.

2) There is no immediate or implicit comparison as to their performance. This means that games that involve splitting the class in half for competitons don't go over nearly as well as they should, as whoever is trying to participate in the game is being implicily judged by the other group. Any co-operative game though, no matter how stupid and pointless, goes over so well that it's hard to stop.

Thai students love helping eachother and the teacher, and they won't do an activity if they don't think it will be fun in some way. For example, Thai doesn't differenciate much between ch and sh sounds. To get them to practice this, you could do the usual lists of minimal pairs and then practice sentences. None of them will practice it, though, which means no improvement. The option that worked better was pretending that my board marker was a train, and to make the train go the class had to say "ch ch ch" and to make it stop "shhhhhhhh." As childish and idiotic as that is, they practised it on their own when I was (and reportedly wasn't) in the class. Waving their pens around like little trains and everything.

However, if you're teaching at a university in Thailand you can expect to make at least 1/4th the salary one makes in Japan, and there are cultural work idiocies involved -- such as most universities requiring their professorial staff to punch a clock and be on campus from 9 to 5, or whatever.

Finally, it's probably unfair to expect students from anywhere but America, England or Canada to be critcial and creative thinkers (and the idea of what critical and creative means varies a lot in those countries as well -- America has probably the least typical system world-wide, Canda's somewhere in the middle due to that nation's socialist leanings, and an Engilsh education is obviously closer to a European one than the other two). Most other nations still place a strong emphasis on absorbing as much as you can from the becloaked guru at the front of the room, and we need to remember that (if we were educated in one of the above countries in a decent school) we're the worldwide exception, not the norm.

It's also important to remember that when asking people to change, quite literally, the way they think you have to be gentle about it. After all, how did you react the last time some missionary sat next to you on the bus? You were probably polite, but inside you more or less immediatly rejected his way of thinking -- and you likely did so because you've spent years thinking the way you alreday do now...

[J-kun]

Of course you're going to have to work to motivate kids to study a second language. As one of the earlier posters mentioned, think of your own high school foreign language class (I mean when you were a student) and how anxious everybody was to sound like a doofus in French.
What I can't understand is why adult eikaiwa students, who pay absurd amounts of money for lessons, can't rouse themselves to participate in activities. What the heck do they bother showing up for? It's not as if they aren't busy enough with work.
I taught adults a bit in Brazil before coming to Japan and they were always very open, expressive, sometimes almost too willing to speak. Classes were a a lot of fun and easy to teach (even though I had no experience and didn't have a clue what I was doing at the time).
I was shocked when I came to Japan at how difficult it was to get people talking. I know, different culture and everything but jeez...
I've often heard and sometimes thought that Japanese students go to eikaiwa mostly for entertainment and some semblance of a social life. But that's just too pathetic to believe.

[shmooj]

[lostinparis]

sorry - cant help but butt in on the conversation since u were talking about french students...

[Wolf]

A few points.

Re: Ekaiwa students' lack of motivation in spite of the spending of $5000 or so.

I noticed that too, almost right away. The literature I got from NOVA concerning who my students would be led me to believe that my students would have personal and professional reasons for learning the langauge. That was occasionally true. Ocassionally.

Shmooj is right. They study as a mere hobby. Or for the novelty of being in close proximity to a foreinger. Or because they fell for the recriting staff's overly zelous (and doubiously accurate) sales pitch. According to the odd student web site, they sometimes go to land a foreign boyfriend/girlfreind.

Re: Chinese becoming the new world langauge.

I'm not sure if this will happen. The official langauge of hte PRC - Mandarin - is not spoken by everyone in China. There are various dialects even in the Han dominated areas. Many of the people in the region where I live cannot easily understand Mandarin. China's large popuation is one factor in favor of having Mandarin become a global langauge, but there are other factors. Economic importance, intercommunication with neighboring countries, etc. If it does happen, it'll take a good long while.

Re: At my school many Japanese English teachers don`t want to speak English and they teach English like it was a dead language like Latin.

Yes. This happens in China as well, I have noticed. Several of my students have complained that the some of the local teachers cannot (or will not) teach EFL classes in English.

Pe: When I was in Korea, the kids had a gaijin complex as bad as Japan.

The Chinese kids I met mostly had the same problem. Except for one that really impressed me. But on the whole it was an issue. If I could speak their langaue and get to know them I'm sure it would disappear (at least to an extent) but alas this was not to be. They get taught from an early age to treat us differently.

Re: As one of the earlier posters mentioned, think of your own high school foreign language class (I mean when you were a student) and how anxious everybody was to sound like a doofus in French.

I, for one, loved learning French. But I was probably the exception. Motivating young people to learn is a tricky business. I beleive that it's important to start them off young, and as they mature give them an opportunity to learn both what they want to know and what they need to know. We all know how often that happens in real life. We can try to reach students by caring about their progress, making our classes interesting, etc. But at the high school level anyway, I think it's realistic to expect that some students won't be motivated to learn no matter what you do.