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The Language Teacher | |
The Editor invites well-written informed opinion and perspective articles from L2 professionals on any subject that is academically or pedagogically related to language teaching. We also invite well-written, informed rebuttals. As a rule, opinion / perspective articles should not exceed 1500 words. Send them to the TLT Editor's address in the Masthead. Nothing Succeeds Like FailurePerhaps nothing succeeds like failure in getting us as teachers to review our classroom practices. On the other hand, we might end up with the rather jaundiced view expressed by one teacher in a cultural context other than Japan, as seeing the art of teaching as "throwing imaginary pearls before real swine." What does seem obvious is that there is a fair degree of frustration experienced by teachers and students in the Eigo Kaiwa class at college and university level here in Japan. Some of the publishers' buy lines taken from a quick glance through a number of issues of The Language Teacher say it all: W O W! YOUR STUDENTS (17:4;14) Tired of detours, back routes and dead-ends (18:2;72) Brings English to Life! (17:5; 64) Wondering how to get your students talking? The course that really motivates! Looking for a way to "breathe some life" into those oh-so-hard to motivate high school/college/young adult classes? (18:1; 50,45,43) Culture ClashI'd like to propose that one source of this frustration is the clash of cultures that develops when a foreign teacher enters the Japanese college conversation class with ideas about teaching and classroom behavior conceived and developed in a Western cultural context. Shimazu (quoted in Samimy, 1993, p.7), suggests that foreign teachers should alter their classroom behavior to fit in more with conventional Japanese classroom practice. In contrast, Samimy argues that the students need to bear responsibility for their own learning by adjusting to the "classroom discourse patterns of the target language." She assumes that the notion of communicative competence is always the guiding principle which should be adhered to, in pursuing course objectives. Communicative competence is a much discussed term these days in applied linguistics (Murata, 1993, 121-137). For the purposes of this article I'd like simply to take it to mean, the range of knowledge and skills which confer grammatical and sociolinguistic competence on the second language learner. Along with the communicative approach it has been accepted by many in the TESOL community as a virtually unquestioned criterion for setting aims for oral language learning. I'd like to look specifically at the college teaching situation in Japan and see to what extent if any, communicative competence should inform our classroom practice. I'm talking now about the kind of compulsory conversation courses that very many students take as non-English majors at Japanese colleges and universities. Very often, such courses lack a clear rationale for their existence. The minimal class contact hours means that the majority of students may only receive between 36 and 40 hours of conversational English instruction in their whole undergraduate careers. It is really debatable whether and to what extent, communicative competence can be achieved at all, let alone the narrower goal of linguistic competence in such fleeting exposure to conversational English. Harmer (1988) proposes a more modest aim, which he labels "communicative efficiency" by which he means that students will "be able to say what it is they wish to say" (p. 24). In addition, we should recognize that the vast majority of our students are not being prepared to live in an English speaking country or even to interact on a regular basis with native speakers of English. If they are ever called upon to use oral English to communicate, it may well be "to interact with Chinese, Koreans, or other Asians, whose styles of communication may be more similar to their own" (Anderson, 1993, p.l08). So, the criterion of communicative competence while being valid in many ESL situations may not prove to be either desirable or realistic in certain EFL contexts such as we sometimes find in Japan. Motivation, or the perceived lack of it, is another factor which defines the college level Eigo Kaiwa class. Because of their previous experience of examination-focused high school English, many students do not come to college English classes with high expectations. Lacking any clear extrinsic motivation beyond getting a passing grade, students see themselves in the situation described by the acronym LENOR (Learning English for No Obvious Reason). The ball is in the teacher's court then, to teach in such a way as to develop students' intrinsic motivation for studying English. This brings us back to the question posed earlier by Shimazu and Samimy as to who should be prepared to make the cultural adjustment in classroom discourse practices: the students or the teacher? Once a foreign teacher meets his or her students for the first time in the oral English class, the encounter will be, like it or not, a cross-cultural experience for both. Whether the experience will be perceived positively or negatively depends on the amount of cultural adjustment both sides are willing to make. In my view, the onus should be on the teacher to ensure that this cultural encounter is successful, by virtue of the responsibilities invested in him or her in their role as teacher. Japanese Classroom InteractionGreene and Hunter, in describing the conflicting behaviors and beliefs of foreign instructors and their Japanese students, argue that the oral language class constitutes a culture in itself (1993, p.9). They propose that both students and teachers need to become "acculturated" to the shared culture of the oral language learning and teaching situation (OLLT). Some of the beliefs/behaviors of students which they single out as points of difficulty for foreign teachers include: students do not respond to first names, they do not make eye contact with the teacher, they believe they should not be called upon to speak by the teacher (p.15). These characteristics of student behavior are supported by Anderson's description of Japanese students' classroom behavior, where he notes that students:
He goes on to characterize Japanese communicative style by the terms:
and argues that:
The message should be clear then, that Japanese students are not guilty of lacking in motivation or imagination when they fail to engage us in lively conversation about their personal opinions on their favorite movie or whatever. The fact is, they have been trained to communicate in a very different way from the foreign teacher of English. Culture CourseI'd like to propose that the inherent conflict in the communicative styles of foreign teachers and their Japanese students could form the basis of an oral course that focuses on the very idea of culture and the students' immediate perception of cultural differences. The teacher could work from the obvious tensions between what the students are used to and what the teacher is used to. This implies that teachers would have developed an explicit understanding of the cultural underpinnings of both their own beliefs and classroom practices, as well as those of their students. As Strevens argues:
For such a course on culture to work, the teacher would need to spell out the differences between the classroom discourse practices of their own culture and that of their students'. There should be some negotiation in the working out of a third culture where "holders of one pedagogical world view strive to work productively with holders of another" (Scheers, 1993, p.9). This point was echoed recently by Sasaki at the JALT 93 conference in Omiya when she proposed that students could be invited to "voice their own expectations of classroom interaction" and to become "more aware of what teachers expect of them" (Reported by West, 1994, p.l3). The language of communication in such a course would, for the most part be English, while the content could be taken up with culture as a focus for exploring intercultural understanding and communication. Developing cultural understanding seems a singularly appropriate aim in the Japanese educational context, given the relatively homogenous nature of its people on the one hand, and the economic dominance of Japan on the world stage on the other. By employing the concept of culture as a framework for looking at other cultures, students could be led to see the value and the challenge of cultural diversity in a world both of global communications and global miscommunications. I am not arguing simply for the teaching of a specific culture such as American or British culture. Teaching about a specific culture would, of course, be very valuable in preparing students who intend studying abroad, or students who are pursuing a course of literature in English. Since this is not the perceived aim of most of the students I am referring to, I believe an exploration of a number of cultures would be more useful where "...the process involves not only perceiving the similarities and differences in other cultures but also recognizing the givens of the native culture..." (Damen, 1987, p.l41). Such a course would not aim to teach students how to behave appropriately in other cultures as the development of communicative competence might seek to do, but rather increase awareness and acceptance of other cultural norms and their validity. Language improvement would of course be a byproduct of this process. However the main focus would be on such elements of culture which might be categorized under ideas as: beliefs, values and institutions; and under behaviors: as language, gestures, customs, and food preparation (Robinson, 1985,p.7). Resources and MethodsLess attention would be given to what are sometimes categorized as cultural products such as literature, music, artifacts etc., and which have tended to form the core of traditional literature and culture courses in the past. These are less useful in examining reliable cultural comparisons and in developing cross-cultural understanding. Many techniques have been developed to enable teachers and students to reflect upon cultural differences and similarities. Among them are the use of case studies, culture capsules, critical incidents, questionnaires, role plays and simulations as well as culture assimilators. It's not possible to discuss these here, but those interested should have a look at Seelye (1993) or Damen (1987). Textbooks available in Japan which attempt to treat culture in the conversation class include Kusuya and Ozeki's Speak Up: Conversation for Cross-Cultural Communication (1994) and Fuller and Grimm's Milestones: Discovering People and Cultures Through English (1993). A word of caution however, about some of the more popular techniques that are used for exploring culture, and that is that they often contain their own "cultural baggage" of which teachers from a Western background are frequently innocently unaware. Teachers should try them out with caution and modify them as necessary in response to student reaction. Pedagogical GamesLet me reiterate what I said earlier by saying that I believe the foreign teacher must be sensitive to Japanese styles of communicative behavior and classroom interaction modes. Having said that, however, it's important to note that the already laid down educational discourse patterns of a particular culture do not of themselves constitute acceptability or successful practice (Canagarajah, 1993, p. 601-626). In the language classroom teachers need to be aware of the cultural implications of particular methods and approaches. How many teachers have asked themselves what cultural assumptions about communication are involved in the current prevailing paradigm of the communicative approach? We might all do well to ponder on Damen's observation that "many of our students simply don't know how to play our pedagogical games" (p.20).
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