ENGLISH SPECIAL / Variety key to learning English
Kiyomi Arai Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer
English is the world's de facto international language and today's most common communication tool. As English plays a growing role in people's education, careers and lives, being able to use the language to effectively communicate takes on greater import!ance.
This special six-page section looks at the state of the Japanese people and the role of the English language in their lives today.
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The following is an interview with Prof. Masaaki Osugi of Seisen University.
By Kiyomi Arai
Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer
Good observation skills are indispensable when learning a new language, as imitation is an import!ant part of language acquisition, according to Prof. Masaaki Osugi of Seisen University.
"I wanted to speak English like actors do in films, and sing the English songs that were played on the radio," he said, explaining how he ended up becoming an NHK radio English lecturer despite starting out as a perfectly ordinary student.
The 60-year-old professor started teaching English without having lived or studied abroad. He said he started out "under the same conditions as about 95 percent of Japanese people studying English."
"Back then, the exchange rate was 360 yen to the dollar, and a round-trip plane ticket to the United States was about 20 times more than the starting salary of a company employee," Osugi explained. "It was very difficult to study abroad or even travel. But since I didn't have many options, I could focus on one thing, clinging on with my extremely limited means."
During his middle school days, he was fascinated by American music and films. He had no idea what was being said, but nonetheless tried mimicking actors and singers. "After I saw a film starring Gary Cooper, I repeated what he said in the film--the way I heard the words, and of course what I said was total nonsense--in front of my friends." Listening to American music on the radio, he wrote down what he heard using the alphabet and katakana, so that he could sing the songs later on his own.
"It gave me a sense of the rhythm and speed of the language," Osugi recalled. "When you read sentences in a textbook aloud, you try to pronounce words correctly. But in actual conversation, people don't fully pronounce each word--some of the sounds may be linked, sometimes even resulting in a different sound altogether."
He added, "Having a sense of the rhythm and speed of English proved very helpful to me later in understanding spoken English, and when speaking English."
Osugi further enhanced his English abilities while at university, taking part in debates on serious issues at an English conversation club, and reading books by J.D. Salinger, Tennessee Williams and other writers for pleasure. He even developed his own learning techniques--such as creating a daily oral diary, or giving a running commentary on whatever he saw while walking around.
From 1987, he spent 11 years as the lecturer on "NHK Radio Eikaiwa." He said his own experience taught him it was useless creating a strict schedule for the program. "Trying to teach certain things in a certain time frame is just nonsense on a radio program," he said. "Listeners can quit any time they want, so a time frame doesn't mean anything. I tried to create interesting stories so listeners would stick around."
Unlike conventional English conversations that appear in textbooks, Osugi wrote scripts that included some twists--a person meeting a mean man, having their bag stolen, getting in a fight, or involved in a relationship.
His emphasis on storytelling proved to be the right way to go, at least for playwright Shoji Kokami. When Osugi and Kokami met for an NHK TV show recently, Kokami told the professor he took a year's worth of tapes and textbooks by NHK Radio Eikaiwa when he spent a year studying in London. Kokami said, "The stories were so much fun, I just couldn't stop."
"Maybe he [Kokami] felt the stories offered a hook because he is a playwright," Osugi said. "But all the same, I was very happy to hear it."
He continued the principle of offering interesting stories to keep the audience interested when lecturing on the TV show "Imakara Denaoshi Eigojuku" (Starting Afresh in Learning English) between 2003 and 2006, including reruns, and a radio program titled "Monoshiri Eigojuku" (Tidbits in English) from 2006.
Osugi believes that to learn English in a comprehensive way, practicing certain patterns is essential.
When he was in high school, one of his English teachers distributed a handbook including 200 sentence patterns. The students were told to memorize them all, reciting them from memory in class.
"With these patterns, I later found I usually was able to say pretty much what I wanted to," he explained.
Pattern practice was the focus of English education in Japan after World War II, but it has come in for criticism since cognitive linguistics was widely introduced about 30 years ago. But Osugi believes practicing patterns is a necessary process in learning English.
"I don't agree with people who say studying English for university entrance examinations is a total waste of time. You have to know the grammar to express your opinions, and memorizing sentence patterns can be useful in that sense," he said.
Osugi does, however, think current English education at the middle and high school level often fails to fully develop students' abilities.
"The fundamental problem is the size of a class. In a 50-minute class with 30 to 40 students, a teacher can never have enough time to let each student practice their communication ability," he argued.
Although this may be a difficult problem to solve, Osugi himself offers an example of how to learn English outside school, by oneself.
"You can start learning a foreign language any time but you have to keep going. once you stop, your ability will start to decline," he said. "I always say learning English is like carrying water in a bucket with a hole in it--you have to keep pouring water in it, or the water will eventually be gone. The most import!ant thing is to keep on learning."
(Apr. 27, 2007)