イギリス英会話ブログ

Audio :

When I first arrived in Japan I could not speak Japanese at all, but from my third day here I had to start teaching English to Japanese students ranging in age from toddlers to retired people. During my teacher training back in England, we had it drummed into us that our job was to teach English in English. So, in the beginning that’s what I did. I soon noticed however that a lot of students were unnecessarily tense in the lesson and that most of them had great difficulty understanding my explanations. I realized that having a strict rule about not using Japanese in the classroom can be counter-productive because it limits the level of sophistication of teacher-student interaction to the (I think patronizing) level of listen, repeat, drill, practise.

Of course, with time, my Japanese skills developed and soon I was able to give quick explanations of grammatical points or tell students the meaning of new words in their own language. This helped students to relax in the classroom and made the process of studying much smoother and quicker. Funnily enough, no one has ever complained about me using Japanese in the classroom, except my boss, the owner of the school. It challenges the ‘English Only’ dogma which Conversation schools depend upon to justify the linguistic incompetence of their newly-imported teachers. I should perhaps add, that I try to keep my use of Japanese to a minimum, and with classes of intermediate students or higher I only use English.

It seems foolish to me to have a strict rule about not using Japanese in the English classroom. A moderate and thoughtful use of Japanese to explain new words or vocabulary points or the meanings of expressions and idioms can be a great help to lower-level students. It is not sufficient to stand at the front of the class and assert your linguistic superiority over the students - it is the job of a teacher to work his or her way towards the students just as much as it is the students’ job to work towards the teacher. In this way, a bridge for comfortable communication is built between students and teacher - with both sides working to get nearer to the other.

It is high time that Japanese schools started employing linguistically-capable native speakers to teach English on a full-time basis, and that English Conversation schools stopped spouting the self-serving dogma about the ‘English-Only’ classroom being the most ideal way to learn English. While it is of course a necessity in multi-lingual groups in schools in England or America, the ‘English-only’ method is counter-productive nonsense in Japan.