improving either! At that point, I realized something was wrong –
something is wrong with standard methods for teaching English. The worst
part for me was that everyone accepted this situation as “normal.” The other
teachers didn’t seem to be concerned about their students’ lack of progress.
All the teachers were using the same methods and getting the same poor
results.
In most parts of the world, students study English in school for years. Yet,
the vast majority of them never learn to speak English well. After years of
study, they still have trouble with real English conversations. They still feel
nervous and shy about speaking.
A few years after my experience with Gladys, I got a job as an English
teaching assistant in Japan. I was excited and eager to help these young
students learn my language. I still remember my first day. I was sitting at the
front of the class next to the main teacher, who was Japanese. As the students
came into the room, they saw me and giggled nervously. They sat down and
continued to shyly glance up at me. They were sweet and curious.
Then the class started. The main teacher wrote an English sentence on the
board. I don’t remember the exact sentence, but it was something like, “The
little girl goes to school.” The teacher pointed to the sentence and began to
talk in Japanese. The students all grabbed their notebooks and began writing.
Everyone was very serious.
Next, the teacher circled the word “goes.” She pointed at the word and
continued speaking in Japanese. She talked and talked and talked, in
Japanese. The students wrote quickly, filling their notebooks with
information. Finally, the teacher drew a line from the word “goes” to the
word “girl.” And then she talked more, on and on and on, in Japanese.
This continued for the entire class. The teacher drew lines, circles, and
squares. She used different colored chalk. And she continued speaking
Japanese.
I was totally confused. I am a native speaker of English, and I was sitting
in a beginning English class. Yet I could not understand anything in the class
(except for that one sentence). I was thinking to myself, “What could this
