This essay is concerned with a very particular situation where a group of foreigners are working together to teach English as a second language to mono-lingual classes in a Japanese school environment; that is, not in a specialized language academy but in a school where native Japanese staff lead the rest of the curriculum. By considering this situation, my intention is to work towards the truth that ‘professionalism’ in ESL is something important that needs to be spelled out to employees before they turn up for their first day of work. The obsession in East Asia with the image projected by westerners working here has done more than enough damage to fairly honest attempts by waves of people to teach English in such a way that will lead to meaningful exchanges between our cultures. Unfortunately, the ‘image problem’ still persists and it is the marketing departments of the schools themselves that seem to be doing most to perpetuate this. The teaching of English in Japan is almost a confidence trick when you look at the whole system from a business perspective – there are very few students that do not feel they have been taken in and their confidences broken by the contrast between casual promises made by Japanese management about the predicted results of the work that can/will be done by the foreigners in their employment. Fools they are for believing such talk in the first place, no doubt, but is this an ethical way to conduct business matters, especially ones that have clear and present effects on the relations between countries as well as on domestic events within them.
|
||||||
|
For many teachers it is common practice to have students predict their own scores on tests (at the time they take them) – insofar as the students make a considered response the teacher responsible for them can achieve, by comparing it with their actual result, some awareness of, for example, how much studying the students did to prepare for the test, how seriously they take the testing process, how confident they are about their own ability in the subject, how confident they are in the teacher’s ability to assess them, and from this kind of knowledge can get a very accurate picture of how much they are investing in their own education. Of course, that is not the number that we, as teachers, will be recording in our spreadsheets, or writing into Student Reports, or filing in school records. What we record is the proportion of test questions that the students were able to answer in the correct way. While language learning motivation usually finds expression in the desire to travel/live/study/work abroad, the true push-pull factors come down to the individual’s perception of the international situation. For example, perceived injustice in international relations/politics including the effects of warfare in all its forms – military, economic and cultural – can lead to a chain of events that finds individuals involved in the affairs of other countries. Previous posts have highlighted the multi-faceted knowledge that is required to become competent as a communicator in a foreign language; this knowledge cannot of course be taught, but is sensed by the individual themselves through the experience of learning. The burden on language teaching institutions to create an environment where such learning is possible – since there is an economic demand for linguists in all aspects of international work (and therefore a socio-cultural need for properly-aware linguists) – indicates the need for a masterful synergy between the business management and education management aspects of such a school, since that ‘burden’ or pressure is considerable and in an educational economy that works through competition schools that fail to educate or explain properly to their customers about the nature of the process and the true challenges involved risk incurring legal and financial retribution. The word ‘committed’ is often used to distinguish between people whose political beliefs motivate them to action, and those whose political beliefs do not – that is, ‘committed’ means that you cannot idly ponder an issue from every angle, but that you feel or sense yourself as actually involved in a struggle on one side or the other. Teachers often talk about students as being ‘lazy’ or ‘lacking in motivation’ or ‘excellent’ or ‘absent a lot’, etc., but none of these comments wold necessarily mean that the students in question are not committed to learning. As the political definition suggests, ‘commitment’ is not always a wilfull, conscious thing – though, it is a question of recognizing your circumstances or understanding your situation. To get straight to the point, the question is : is there any point teachers talking about students (in any context) using words like ‘lazy’ or ‘excellent’ or ‘lacking in motivation’ – surely it would be more purposeful to concentrate on making them aware of their situation and to see that as the key to ‘motivating’ them? Then, a situation is created where the student finds his or her motivation through understanding, not through being coerced or persuaded or cajoled by a teacher. Apart from for bilinguals by birth, second language learning is a tricky process – a new grammatical system (often taught/learned as a system?), endless vocabulary to be memorized, a whole culture and history to grapple with. But perhaps the biggest single obstacle to confidence is pronunciation – surprisingly, for all that we so generously tell our foreign friends it matters not, there is often no bigger hindrance to mutual communication and respect than pronunciation. This is because it affects people’s confidence and there is no more devastating way to affect someone than to affect their confidence. Unfortunately, this problem is compounded in individuals whose confidence is or has also been attacked on other fronts – but that would lead us away from language and deeper into emotional psychology. Even nowadays the dominant dogma in the world of second language teaching (which effectively means ‘English language teaching’) is that a native speaker of the language will be the best, most effective teacher of it. Unfortunately, brief consideration shows this to be untrue in more cases than not – to jump the gun on the argument slightly, I want to show that this idea is usually wheeled out by people who have artificially disassociated language from its natural environment (culture, society, history), or, are simply not conscious of the ways in which natural environment shapes their own (and indeed all) language use. The concept of language as a means of control is a given when dealing with computers. In seeking the cooperation of a computer in one’s endeavours it is necessary to observe proper syntax (to an almost completely unforgiving degree) and to respect above all else that which the machine has been made to believe is logical. |
||||||
|
Copyright © 2010 language learner - All Rights Reserved |
||||||