Arrested Pulse

I taught for two years in Japan as part of the JET Program. It was a marvelous experience, and I consider those two years to be among the best in my life.

In this blog, I'd like to share some of the activities I made for my classes at Amakusa Koko, the school I taught at in Hondo, an island community in southwest Kumamoto prefecture.

As a way of "internationalizing" Japan, many AETs in JET program teach at more than one school. Some go to as many as seven or eight schools. I was based three days a week at Amakusa Senior Secondary, an academic school. But two days each week I traveled to one of three other not-quite-so-very academic schools to "teach" English. These included a "commercial" school (Kuritake Secondary), and "marine studies" school (Reihoku Secondary) and an "agricultural" school. The students in these schools were not on academic tracks and studied English only because they were forced to. Many couldn't even speak basic English, though quite a few could understand when spoken to in English slowly and clearly.

I quickly gave up trying to "teach" standard English at these schools and focused instead on internationalizing. I taught them how to greet people in Western nations by handshake (rather than bows) and how to interpret conventional gestures. I also taught them some popular songs (The Beatles, the Carpenters, Elvis and other classic pop songs that are English "staples" at karaoke clubs across the country), showed them videos of American television shows and commercials, and often just conversed with them (usually in Japanese) about everyday things. This part of my job was quite easy, sometimes fun, but tedious for one who takes teaching seriously.

When I first arrived, my Japanese colleagues whom I assisted in teaching English wanted me to explain grammar to the students, in "fun" ways. I did so diligently, but I didn't know grammar as well as I should have and, at least in one case, actually taught them something wrong. English grammar is complex and teaching it within an ESL context required a kind of expertise I didn't have at that time.

So I decided to do something else. I may not have been an English grammar expert, but I was a native English speaker--so I decided to make that my crown of expertise.

Most Japanese schools do not have language labs; very little attention is given to oral communication beyond the rote "repeat-after-me" sequence; hence, many Japanese students and teachers have little awareness of the importance stress and intonation play in spoken English. (They do learn basic pronunciation, but do not pay much attention to the distinctions made between sounds like, for instance, the voiced th in "though" and the unvoiced th in "throw. Such distinctions are particularly noticeable when a Japanese person who says "I like to eat rice" is heard as saying instead "I like to eat lice.")

So I developed a project that focused on pronunciation, intonation, stress, and many other elements of spoken English that were not represented in the standard curriculum.

In the project I developed, students were introduced to the phonetic alphabet. We spent some time on vowels and how the mouth forms them, paying particular attention to distinctions between "high" vowels and "low" ones. We then moved onto consonant sounds and practiced aloud the different pronuciations of [t] and [d].

We then moved onto stress and intonation. Students were asked to read scripts in front of the class like this one:

(A) Nobody loves me! Nobody!
(B) I love you.
(A) But you love everyone!
(B) I love you.
(A) You only "like" me.
(B) I love you
(A) Really?
(B) Really.

The Japanese students read this in a perfect monotone. They understood well the context of the conversation, but not the context of the linguistic interplay of terms: they did not, for instance, realize that the word "I" in the first "I-love-you" statement should be stressed because it counters the previous statement that "nobody" loves person A. To the students, each "I-love-you" statement (there are three) was enunciated with no change in stress; the upward intonation of the interrogative "really?" and the downward intonation of affirmative "really" went unrealized; even negative-stress and exclamatory-("!") emphasis were missed. The native speaker would speak this script automatically as follows:

(A) Nobody loves me! Nobody!
(B) I love you.
(A) But you love everyone!
(B) I love you.
(A) You only "like" me.
(B) I love you.
(A) Really?[/]
(B) Really.[\]

There's quite a lot going on here that native speakers take for granted which is central to the distinctive meaning of each utterance. The project I instituted at Amakusa Senior Secondary focused students' attention on features integral to spoken communication in English. Since, like most other AETs, I was the only native English-speaker in the school, I was exceptionally qualified to cover this material.