(This post is more of asking questions and trying to start a conversation. I hope that through this I can find out more of everyone’s experiences and thoughts on second language learning and language education in general…)
Across the ocean in Japan, there has been a whole debate over whether they should start teaching English earlier in schools. This is due to the worrying reality that Japanese people are not so great at learning English, especially in terms of speaking and listening. Many parents, hopeful for their children possibly becoming ‘bilingual’ or ‘international’, send them to expensive ‘kids’ English classes’ to make a headstart. Reflecting on the trend, the government is on the move to revise the national curriculm so that English classes start earlier than the current 7th grade. They are also considering revising the curriculum so that English classes have more ‘communicative’ components, such as speaking and listening, i.e. reducing the number of classes that used to be devoted to reading and grammar.
My former supervisor at the university I went to, Yoshifumi Saito, opposes to the idea. He believes that good English skills comes from good grammar knowledge and reading skills. He claims that although learning ‘basic conversations’ can be done at an early age, you would choke as you try to communicate more complex information if no one taught you much grammar and you didn’t get to read much.
He also argues for the importance of teaching their native language before emphasizing English language learning. He argues that unless students acquire good knowledge and command of the Japanese language, they will never acquire good command in English.
Therefore, according to him, starting English earlier and only teaching ‘communication’ while reducing the number of Japanese classes (you can only teach for so long!) would never work. (Sorry I would give a reference but as far as I looked his publications are in Japanese).
I think I agree with him overall. I have never really met anyone who received all the A’s in Japanese but D’s in English. It is the matter of enriching your ‘language sense’ so to speak, and you enrich your sense primarily by quality native language experience (e.g. reading and appreciating literary works). I also think that knowing the grammar of a language well is very important especially at an advanced level; it ultimately matters in any aspects of ESL learning. But the dilemma is that the current state in Japan definitely needs improvement. Even people who are called ‘English teachers’ do not know English so well; starting English classes earlier faces with this practical issue that we just don’t have enough elementary school teachers who know English well enough to even do this.
I would like to take this opportunity to ask the readers what they think. If English is your second language, how did you learn it? If English is your first language, how did you learn your second language? What did you think of the way you were taught or given opportunities to learn it? How important do you think knowing the grammar of a language is? Do you think knowing your native language is related to your foreign language learning?
I know that debates over exactly how to teach lanugage skills, even in one’s first language, are heated and complicated, and I’m not qualified to speak to that side of Yukiko’s post.
I would like though to share my experience with a second language. When I was a kid we had Spanish clases required from 1st grade through 8th grade. I never really thought that much about it til I got to a high shcool which was part of a different school system and where most incoming students had had no second language instruction. I suddenly felt myself surprisingly proficient as I noticed how it seemed extremely difficult for tennage minds to grasp the language in any respect — vocab, syntax, verb conjugation, even pronunciation. I think that however a second language is taught that the sooner the better. A young child’s mind is such a sponge that just exposure to a language does a lot of good. I also noticed when I took my GC language exam that while I had forgotten vast amounts of vocabulary I could still recognize with relative ease the structure of the sentences I was looking at, e.g. even when I didn’t know a word, I could see it was in future tense; I had no problem finding an antecedent to a pronoun, etc. I think the more time one spends around a language — conversing, reading, writing, just listening — the more he internalizes it, so that something looks or sounds right or wrong, whether or not “why?” can be readily explained with reference to precise rules or conventions.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Reply to Ryan
Great post, Yukiko.
Russian is my first language and the only language I spoke until I was 8. When my family immigrated to the US, we lived in an area of Southern California where there was no substantial Russian speaking community — in our town there were only 3 other Russian immigrant families. I learned English simply by being immersed in an English-language environment. I spoke Russian only with my parents. In our first few years in the States, I didn’t see them all that much as they both worked long hours and I was the classic latch-key kid who would come home from school and plop down in front of the TV until my parents came home. Since I never watched much TV before we immigrated, I was a voracious TV viewer before I actually made some friends and hung out after school. Though I had an English tutor for the first few months after we immigrated and spoke nothing but English at school, I probably learned the most then from TV — from Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, I Dream of Genie, Bewitched and ChiPs. That’s Incredible was educational too except when it was preempted by Monday Night Football which I never understood.
I do think that my Russian literacy was a huge factor in my quickly attaining proficiency in English. I got myself in the highest reading group in 2nd grade pretty quickly by virtue of my prior Russian literacy instruction. Since elementary school in the former Soviet Union was far more rigorous than it is here, my first few years of schooling were very much conducive to picking up the habits of mind and competencies essential to language learning.
On a slightly different note, I once had a Japanese student who was very negative about his capacity to become proficient in English due to his poor proficiency in his native Japanese. “I can’t write in Japanese,” he said, “so I can’t write in English either.”
Reply to Mikhail
This post brings up such a complex issue. My very first reaction was to disagree with the idea that proficiency in any language (or mother tongue) makes second language acquisition easier. So many children of immigrants speak their native language at home and foreign language (English) at school, and they do just fine in both. In Europe, it is standard for many kids to speak many languages, many of them acquired at the same time: let’s say while living in Belgium and speaking Flemish to grandma, French to dad, German to mom, and English while playing computer games. I am envious of some people I know who grew up naturally speaking a number of languages, and now suddenly find themselves remembering enough of a language they spoke when they were little, although they did not practice it in 15 years or so… However, I did learn English late, when I was seventeen, with some difficulty, but the process was easier because I was an accomplished writer in Polish already. But I did wish I had started learning English earlier!
And didn’t Chomsky, who is a respected linguist I think, say that children are capable of learning the most before the age of 5? I suspect that there is some advantage to learning languages simultaneously at an early age. But I also think that some of Yukiko’s theory might be very true: if one lacks proficiency in one language, and then attempts to learn another, this might cause a great difficulty. But this does not suggest to me that learning two languages at the same time is somehow less advantageous than starting with one. So I say: “yay” to starting learning early, and to learing a lot:)
On another hand, and here my disciplinary training rears its ugly head, I think there might be different reasons for this particular debate in Japan. Often decisions about national education and the shape of the training given to young citizens of a nation are based on political as much as practical and pedagogical reasons. I wonder if the growing Japanese nationalism, and the emerging debate about national symbols, independence, and pride, might have something to do with the increasing stress on teaching “native” tongue, or with the opposition to introducing English, presumably at the cost of no longer prioritizing Japanese.
Reply to Agnieszka
I hope everyone enjoyed the break and thanks for really interesting comments!
>Ryan
Your experience of learning Spanish is interesting and that kind of success story is why I wish I had started learning English earlier than 12. It reminds me more of me and my learning to play tennis though…I took lessons from the 1st grade and although I stopped playing from age 10 to age 18, when I went back to tennis in college I found myself performing better than I expected. So this ‘the younger the better’ thing is not specific to language but things in general.
>Mikhail
It is encouraging to know that you feel that your (huge) success in learning English comes from the fact that you are a proficient Russian speaker and reader.
I wish people in Japan can pick up English like you did…the problem is that the amount of exposure to English for Japanese people is extremely little in their daily life. Everything on TV or radio is in Japanese (except for the language lesson programs or news shows for foreigners) and foreign movies and shows are dubbed. Although you have the option to play its original scripts in English, you really have to choose to do that.
And I just loved your episode with a Japanese student; he knows!
>Agnieszka
I realize that I might have thrown too general a statement on language learning. Chomsky’s framework would definitely say that children are capable of acquiring the grammar of any language (knowlede of the structure of the language) when exposed to certain amount of input at an early stage in life. However, it is also true that there are people who ‘know’ the basic grammar of a language, have a perfect pronunciation, but are not very good in other things such as writing, reading, etc. because they just didn’t do it in that language…Obviously the goal for Japan is to acquire English skills that are personally, academically and professionally good enough.
I am glad that you brought up the politics side of this issue and I was interested to read it. Although Prof. Saito’s opinion does not directly come from the nationalistic viewpoint, there are people who have started questioning the ‘English is THE language to learn’ atttitude, or have started encouraging people to appreciate our own language and culture more, rather than worshipping things foreign. It may be that the country is at the turning point in a lot of different ways.
Reply to Yukiko