The Practical Linguist / English has arrived. What now?
I heard the ｅxpression "school counselor" in the middle of a Japanese sentence on NHK last week. Then, on another channel, the phrase "national Christmas tree" popped up in a TV report from the United States. "Well," I said to myself, "English is here. Should we declare victory and go home?" By "we," I meant the army of expatriate native English speakers who have striven mightily to achieve this result in Japan.
"No," I told myself. "We can't cut and run quite yet. There are still things we must do. We must stay the course."
This flight of fancy serves to convey my impression that English is now solidly entrenched in Japan, not only on TV but also in stores, restaurants, magazines and so on. So, after two decades of living here and seven years of writing this column, I want to discuss the status of English in Japan, and ask what we teachers are trying to do and what effects we are having.
English is not entrenched in the way we imagined, as a separate second language to be used according to its own conventions. Instead, it is entrenched as a significant vocabulary that adds to the richness of Japanese. I should not have been surprised. Japan's reaction to foreign contributions has always been to assimilate them selectively rather than to swallow them whole.
The same thing happened more than a millennium ago when the Japanese language encountered Chinese. The rich vocabulary and writing system of Chinese were adopted; pronunciation and syntax were not.
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What are we doing here?
In a class on English language teaching last week, we were discussing learners' lack of motivation. The most experienced teachers were saying they can't ask learners to do as much homework as they used to, and that many learners are simply not interested in English. We sat in a gloomy mood. Then, a student who is preparing to become a teacher asked: "Why do you do it? Why do you continue in this job?"
There was a quiet moment while everybody considered the question. The ensuing discussion produced three answers. First, not all learners are demotivated. Every teacher fondly remembers some students who were "turned on" by English, took responsibility for their own learning, and asked for advice about means of improving their command of the language.
Second, even for demotivated students, we are having an effect. Sitting in the presence of English, all students absorb some language through their pores. They do not absorb syntax but they catch the writing system and some words that are useful to their lives.
Third, we are teachers in the broad sense of the word. Our instinct is to work with human beings and try to help them make sense of their lives. The class is named "English," but what happens in a larger sense is building character and knowledge of the world, and an image of what an English teacher is like. Yes, and some knowledge of a way of communicating.
Are we bringing bilingualism to the masses? No; that is as unlikely in Japan as it would be in the United States. But we are bringing something. English exists in Japan to the extent that it is useful--rather a large extent, when you consider what is going on.
One of my friends went to an izakaya restaurant with a group of exuberant university students--all Japanese--after an English speech contest. He was surprised when the students spoke English to the staff, giving their orders and even complaining about the prices. He was even more surprised when the staff (not all of them young) responded in English. Not good English, my friend said. They would have been faulted on a grammar test. But they were communicating and enjoying it.
A foreign student told the story of her visits to a Japanese doctor. on her first visit, she got a Japanese friend to go along to translate, and the communication was fairly efficient. But on her second visit, she went alone. The doctor looked behind her for the translator, but it was evident she had come alone.
Then a surprising thing happened. Hesitantly at first, but with increasing confidence, she and the doctor began to communicate in a sort of English they invented for the occasion. It did the job, and at the end she and the doctor shared a sense of both medical and linguistic accomplishment.
It appears that many Japanese people can speak English. They are conditioned not to do so both by habits of mind that keep them solidly within a Japanese-language mood and by generations of English teachers who have intimidated them by pouncing on every error.
But if placed in a situation in which it is more important to speak English than to avoid mistakes, many Japanese people can do it.
Our teaching practices are not well-tuned to the needs of practical communication such as talking with izakaya staff or doctors. We teach as though communicative competence consisted of the ability to produce complete sentences correctly. Our focus is on that rare minority of students who strive to speak proper English, trying to stay within its conventions of sound and syntax.
Remember, that was the first reason offered in the class discussion of reasons for teaching English.
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Practical communication
What would it be like to tune our teaching to the needs of practical communication? If we did so, we might catch the interest of the demotivated majority, and we might contribute a degree of self-confidence to their efforts to speak English as long as no points are deducted for mistakes.
Practical communication requires an attitude of muddling through. The objective is not to speak like a textbook but to achieve a meeting of minds. It requires a lot of backing-and-forthing, finding approximate words, and stopping to check if understanding has happened. Teaching students to do this is a matter of developing new habits and attitudes and erasing the fear of error.
Vivian Cook, professor of applied linguistics at the University of Newcastle in England, says we should not try to teach people to be two separate monolinguals, one Japanese and one English. Instead, he says, we must recognize that we are teaching students to be more than the simple sum of their language abilities; we are teaching "multi-competence," a power not found among monolinguals.
Multi-competence is a skill of putting things together. It does not require excellent knowledge of both languages, but instead the ability to wield bits of two languages in practical communication.
It was multi-competence that inspired the talk of the izakaya employees and the doctor who found he could speak English. Multi-competence can be achieved even by demotivated students, sometimes in spite of our teaching.
I am reminded of the quintessential samurai, Miyamoto Musashi (ca 1584-1645) who perfected the art of fighting with two swords, one long and one short. He did not fight one man with one sword and then turn and fight another man with the other sword; he used both swords together. This is a good metaphor for multi-competence.
Musashi's second sword was short but it made a lot of difference. Multi-competence does not depend on equal ability in two languages, or even on what native speakers would regard as correctness in either language taken alone. It is, instead, making multi-dimensional use of what you have.
If multi-competence were the goal of our teaching, we might have a strong effect on empowering our average students as well as the very good ones. We might even go some way toward reversing their dislike of classroom English. We would certainly contribute to the general level of English ability that is now latent in the population of Japan.
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Send e-mail to childs@tuj.ac.jp. The column will return on Jan. 19.
Childs, Ed.D., teaches TESOL (teaching English to speakers of other languages) and other subjects at Temple University, Japan Campus.
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