Even a Native Speaker Stops Sometimes:helping Japaneselearners of Engl
by Kevin Stein
Dec 13, 2011 English Language Teaching (ELT) 3107 Views
While any of the four skills pose challenges for a learner of a second language, I would argue that Japanese learners of English face particular difficulties when it comes to listening. Over the course of 13 years working with students from the age of 7 to 70 in Japan, one common refrain I have heard is that native English speakers, "never stop between words." At first, having myself struggled through the initial stages of having to learn Spanish, Hebrew and Japanese myself, I would simply encourage the student to spend more time listening until their ear could acclimate somewhat to the sounds of the new phonemes. But the longer I worked in Japan, the more I felt like something else was going on than simply the inability to recognize new sounds. In fact, Japanese students' problems with listening cannot be seen as a simple bottom-up listening issue. It is in fact a combination of bottom-up and top-down issues that have their roots in both the structural differences between Japanese and English as well as cultural ideas of appropriate communication styles.
Each language has its own strategies for aural decoding, which are readily acquired by the L1 child, but often only partially acquired by the L2 learner (Rost). The differences between the bounded, or syllable-timed Japanese language and the un-bounded or stress-timed English language present a number of challenges to the Japanese learner. The reason a Japanese learner of English feels as if the words are slurring into each other is because that is in fact what they hear. Japanese English students use the rules they have learned to parse Japanese and attempt to apply them to English (Cutler). And this problem is made even more acute by the fact that Japanese is an agglutinative language with a subject verb object structure leading to a relatively bottom-up focused listening orientation.
The problem is one of how to shift a Japanese learner of English away from the skills which are so effective when it comes to hearing individual Japanese sounds, but can be a stumbling block for understanding English. As a first step, it is important to simply help Japanese students recognize that there is a difference between the structure of spoken English and Japanese. Once students become aware of the difference they can begin to orient themselves to the new stress system. I currently work in a high school for students who have predominantly suffered from school refusal syndrome during their junior high school years and hence have had minimum exposure to English classes. Many of the students cannot read or write. So as a first step, I simply provide students with a blank sheet of paper. I ask them to listen to a sentence and mark a "・” when they think I have said a word and to write a "／" when they think I have paused. I try to say sentences at normal spoken speed, but include a recognizable pause between each sense group in order to further aid comprehension (Rost). For example, when I say the sentence, "My brother goes to school in Osaka," the students end up writing the following written on their sheet of paper:
"・ ・ ／ ・ ・ ・ ／ ・ ・".
Even more advanced Japanese learners of English can benefit from this type of listening practice. Simply by drawing slashes between sense groups during either dictation exercises or by adding slashes to transcripts of listening exercises, students can shift their focus away from listening at the phoneme-level and begin to recognize sense groups as a more useful unit of meaning.
Once Japanese learners of English have become familiar with some of the structural differences between English and Japanese, it also then becomes important for them to take the next step and recognize that listening is a process of not only hearing what is being said, but actively inserting what could not be heard. In short, students have to start to begin practicing English with a more top-down approach. And here Japanese learners are faced not only with the issue of bottom-up orientation in their listening habits, but also a foreign language education system which has stressed accuracy over fluency, 100% understanding of texts through translation over a sense of global understanding, and non-contextualized word acquisition through one-to-one English word/Japanese meaning vocabulary tests throughout junior high school. In short, by the time a Japanese student finishes junior high school, they will most likely have developed a strong sense that if any word in a sentence is not heard or the meaning is not understood, than the meaning of the sentence is likewise lost.
To help students begin to grasp how little of a sentence they might need to actually hear, I regularly do a simple exercise with students in which there are five columns with the words "Who" "Do" "What" "Where" "When" written one by one at the top of each column . I then have the students engage in a dictation exercise, but instead of complete sentences, I say only one key word for each sense group and all verbs are left uninflected. For example, I say, "brother…read…book…bedroom…night." The students are encouraged to fill in missing words to make a grammatically correct sentence. The key word activity is done as a class warm up for a maximum of ten minutes at the beginning of each class. The following are actual sentences produced by students after 4 months of first year high school English classes which met for two hours per week.:
Key words provided by teacher:
1. brother / read / book / bedroom / night
2. teacher / teach / English / classroom / after school
3. sister / play / video game / Sunday
Student produced sentences:
|
Who
|
Do
|
What
|
Where
|
When
|
|
1. My brother
|
Reads
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a book
|
in his bedroom
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every night
|
|
2. The teacher
|
Teaches
|
English
|
in the classroom
|
after school on Tuesday and Friday
|
|
3. Your younger sister
|
Plays
|
video games
|
|
on Sunday in the morning
|
Once Japanese students of English become used to the idea that part of listening is in fact generating missed words, they realize that they can draw on the schema of English structures to infer meaning during the listening process. This can help Japanese students break free from their "mental translation approach to listening." (Vandergrift) and give students the sense of confidence required to continue to attempt to extract meaning from a verbal text even when the occasional word is not heard or the meaning recognized.
While there is no formal pre-evaluation component for these first year beginning English classes (primarily because at the start of the year the students are not at an adequate level to measure their listening skills), I do evaluate students through weekly dictation quizzes using texts from "Stories for Young Readers" (Appendix A) (Kinney, R. & Kinny, D) After 8 months of lessons, students are typically able to accurately complete dictation of both full sentences and sentences in which the teacher only provides key words for each sense group and there is no discernable difference in accuracy between the two styles of dictation.
Most of this short paper has focused on listening activities in which the learner is focused wholly on listening. And while some listening exercises are structured in this manner, it is fair to say that in an English course in which students are engaged in communication, much of their listening will be part of the active give and take involved in conversation. Perhaps due in part to the SOV sentence structure and agglutinative nature of Japanese, Japanese speakers of English are often less than willing to interrupt a speaker to request clarification or express a lack of understanding before the speaker has finished talking. This prevents the listener from clearly articulating at which point there was a breakdown in communication and hence deprives the listener of the chance to clearly understand what aspect of the language was not understood. Without this crucial piece of information, it is difficult for a listener to gain an awareness of what forms they have trouble processing verbally, vocabulary they need to study, or even which topics might pose particular problems for them in verbal discourse. In addition, in Japan it is a communicative norm to avoid asking for clarification of the same point during a conversation more than once, especially when the speaking partner is engaged in a narrative act. While it might be considered impolite to allow a point of conversation to pass without a genuine effort to understand in certain western cultures, in Japan it would most likely be considered just as impolite to break the narrative flow and insist that a speaker repeat the same content over again just for one's own personal understanding.
Avoidance of both interrupting and repeatedly negotiating for meaning leaves the Japanese student of English at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to understanding the content of a verbal discourse and could also have a long term impact on the development of their listening abilities. For this reason, Japanese students of English, from the very first communication classes, need to be provided with models for active negotiation of meaning as well as activities which require the use of said negotiation. In my beginning communication classes I run an activity in which I have students write three sentences about their best friend on an index card. I then circle one word from the student's prepared sentences and write a higher level, low frequency vocabulary word which could be used in its place. For example, one of my students wrote the sentence, "Tomoka is good at cooking." I circled the word “good” and wrote the word "superb" above it. Students are then paired up and talk about their friends with each other. Students are instructed to negotiate for meaning by simply saying the word "what" the moment they hear a word they do not understand, even if it requires interrupting the speaker. But as this exercise is also to encourage student to repeatedly negotiate for meaning, the speaker has been instructed to repeat the low frequency word as written on the card three times, and only after the fourth request for clarification are they to substitute the more recognizable high frequency word or phrase. While I realize that the staged nature of this activity can make it seem highly artificial, I do believe that the benefits that come from practicing behaviors which are outside of communicative norms in the L1 can lead to communicative behaviors more suited for the L2 environment and that these behaviors can benefit students' listening abilities.
Learning a language is an ongoing process. The difficulties that a student faces at the beginning of their studies will necessarily change as their skills develop. In this short paper I focused primarily on beginning Japanese learners of English. Such learners can improve their listening skills through a guided progression of exercises which allows them to first recognize some of the basic structural differences between spoken Japanese and English while helping them develop a grammatical schema to begin to practice simple top-down listening. Simultaneously, teachers need to plan and implement activities which encourage students to negotiate for meaning in ways which might fall outside of the Japanese communicative norm. Along the way teachers will have to carefully monitor and evaluate student progress so that once students have acclimated to the different stress system and can identify key words in spoken English, students will then have the chance to explore other useful listening strategies such as making predictions and listening for the gist (Hinkle). Because only after a Japanese learner of English realizes that English speakers do in fact sometimes, "stop between words," will they have the chance to use their world knowledge and contextual clues to help turn a spoken text into a source of comprehensible input.
Appendix A:
The following is a short story from “Stories for Young Readers.” I have found these stories to be an invaluable tool for both beginning listening and reading English classes in Japan. The stories use limited grammar structures and vocabulary and both the vocabulary and grammar structures are repeated across stories. The stories also include simple illustrations which serve as an excellent source of redundancy for content meaning. As a source of dictation exercises, I have found the stories to be simple enough to allow students to focus primarily on meaning, as well as personalized enough to stimulate student interest.
Ann
My name is Ann Tanaka. I am from Japan. I live in Canada. I am fifteen years old. I speak English, Japanese and French. My mother and father speak English and Japanese.
I like to run. I run three kilometers every day. My mother likes to run, too. She runs five kilometers every day. My father does not like to run.
Sources:
Cutler, A (1997), "The comparative perspective on spoken-language processing." Speech Communication, 21 pp. 3-15
Hinkel, E. (2006), "Current Perspectives on Teaching the Four Skills." TESOL Quarterly, 40 (1) pp. 106-131
Kinney, D. & Kinney, R. (2003), Stories for Young Readers Book 1 (2nd Edition) Saitama: Kinney Brothers Publishing
Rost, M. (2001) "Listening." In R. Carter & D. Nunan (Eds.), The Cambridge Guide to Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press pp. 7-13
Vandergrift, L. (20040 "Listening to Learn or Learning to Listen?" Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 24 pp. 3-25
Article source: http://eslarticle.com/pub/english-language-teaching-elt/81270-even-a-native-speaker-stops-sometimes-helping-japaneselearners-of-engl.html
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