2/27/2006

It’s somewhat depressing to realise that when you teach English to your Japanese students, you may also be giving them a general education.

This is not the case for ever student, of course, but I have had students of all ages who seem to be learning basic geography, or history, or world issues through their English classes. The courses aren’t designed to teach them these things - it’s just a topic that they can use to practise English. It can give them an example to practise their formal speech, or how to express an opinion, or how to give preferences…but for some reason, the content of the lessons seems to be new to them as well as the English.

This is understandable in some cases, where the lesson is about going through Immigration or ordering in a restaurant - the students may not now what the process is in an English-speaking country. But with higher level students, the lessons become more focused on describing detail, expressing opinions and so on. And there have been a few occassions where I’ve been taken aback by a student saying something like “I don’t have an opinion about global warming, I’ve never thought about it before”
“Well, can you tell me what you’ve heard about it?”
“Nothing, I don’t know”

Or worse:

“Excuse me, what is meaning ‘Holocaust’?”
“(Mental note: vocab low) During World War 2, when the Nazis were killing Jewish people. That time is called the Holocaust”
“What is that?”
“During World War II? Many Jewish people were killed in Europe. Death camps. Gas chambers, you know?”
“No, I don’t know”

Thankfully, she was the only student in my class that didn’t know.

There is a lot of talking about current issues and common subjects like music in lessons. Some students are great, they can talk about lots of different things, even if they are low level. But some students - geez. I wonder how they even knew there was such a language called ‘English’.