Post by Otaku on Oct 2, 2008 12:00:05 GMT 8
After witnessing another class where the students practice writing down incomplete sentences like,
Math.
Me, too.
I started thinking about how could teachers teach that 'spoken English' has different rules than 'written English'?
Currently, most Japanese classrooms that I've experienced in my 5 years in Japan is WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get). If students start seeing and practice writing incomplete sentences, they start thinking incomplete sentences are okay. Rarely do teachers distinguish to their students the difference. And, if they do explain it, it's usually in passing, so students disregard and continue making the error.
So today, I was sitting in class and I started thinking,
"HOW CAN STUDENTS PRACTICE WRITING GRAMMATICALLY CORRECT ENGLISH AND INCREASE THEIR MOTIVATION TO SPEAK ENGLISH?"
How about simply taking spoken grammar out of the textbook? If Japan's English classrooms are WYSIWYG, then removing the text would be, "Out of sight, out of mind." This in turn would create the incentive to speak because the teacher wouldn't change their teaching style. They would still teach according to the textbook, but they would add that just like in Japanese, where spoken Japanese commonly leaves out subjects/particles, it is acceptable in spoken English to speak in fragmented sentences, like in the example sentences above. I think this could create an incentive for students to speak English because they don't have to speak entire sentences, rather simple fragments.
What do you think?
Math.
Me, too.
I started thinking about how could teachers teach that 'spoken English' has different rules than 'written English'?
Currently, most Japanese classrooms that I've experienced in my 5 years in Japan is WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get). If students start seeing and practice writing incomplete sentences, they start thinking incomplete sentences are okay. Rarely do teachers distinguish to their students the difference. And, if they do explain it, it's usually in passing, so students disregard and continue making the error.
So today, I was sitting in class and I started thinking,
"HOW CAN STUDENTS PRACTICE WRITING GRAMMATICALLY CORRECT ENGLISH AND INCREASE THEIR MOTIVATION TO SPEAK ENGLISH?"
How about simply taking spoken grammar out of the textbook? If Japan's English classrooms are WYSIWYG, then removing the text would be, "Out of sight, out of mind." This in turn would create the incentive to speak because the teacher wouldn't change their teaching style. They would still teach according to the textbook, but they would add that just like in Japanese, where spoken Japanese commonly leaves out subjects/particles, it is acceptable in spoken English to speak in fragmented sentences, like in the example sentences above. I think this could create an incentive for students to speak English because they don't have to speak entire sentences, rather simple fragments.
What do you think?