2007年5月5日土曜日

How to Learn English

I think that learning English should be more pleasant and practical. That is because many Japanese students are bored with studying English only for exams. And some of them even hate English. I emphasize, as I wrote in the article about my experience, originally the main purpose in studying English is not to pass exams but communicate with people all over the world. Then how can we learn English pleasantly? Let me give some examples just from my experiences.
First, faculty for reading can be developed by reading English books that we want to read. If we read the books we want to read, we are willing to read English and get pleasure from them. But that cannot be achieved by reading only text books.
As for writing skill, it is raised by writing things that we want to write: experiences, diaries, and …anything. In a general writing class in high school in Japan, we mainly study grammar and translate conventional Japanese sentences into English. That is important, I know, but is not interesting.
How about listening and speaking? These skills are achieved by talking with non-Japanese whose mother tongue is English. If they cannot speak Japanese at all, we must talk in English to communicate with them. In conversations, we would get pleasures of communicating with non-Japanese and also realize our lack of knowledge or skills in communicating in English. That can be motivation for learning.
Last, I add that I don't deny a general English teaching at school to be good. Of course, things which are being done at school are important to acquire the language. But as I wrote in the beginning, it is boring to study only for exams. So things mentioned above are my proposal that English classes would do better to have them partly to make study interesting.

1 件のコメント:

JH さんのコメント...

Keichan,
Wow, what a very insightful post! I have one question for you about speaking. Can Japanese also learn by speaking English to other Japanese? Since there are not very many native English speakers in Japan, I think it is important for Japanese students to speak English to each other in the classroom. What do you think?
JH