teacher possibly be talking about so much? It’s just one sentence.” Yet the
teacher spent an entire hour analyzing, explaining, and dissecting that one
simple sentence. Finally, at the end of the class, the teacher asked me to read
the sentence aloud “for pronunciation.” I read the sentence a couple of times,
and that was the only real English input the students got that day.
Sadly, this same pattern repeated every day. Day by day, I watched the
students’ enthusiasm and curiosity disappear. They became bored. They
became stressed and confused. Every day they wrote pages of notes, mostly
in Japanese. Every day the teacher talked and talked and talked, mostly in
Japanese. I couldn’t understand why an English class was being taught
mostly in Japanese. During the average class, the students were listening to
Japanese 90% of the time or more. They heard very little English. No
wonder they never learned to speak! No wonder they were frustrated and
confused.
Honestly, it broke my heart to watch as the school crushed these students’
natural love of learning. It was terrible to watch them grow bored, frustrated,
and stressed. And six months later, none of the students could speak to me at
all, not even the simplest conversation. This kind of situation is repeated in
English classes all over the world.
My experiences with Gladys and in Japan convinced me that traditional
English language education is broken. I knew there had to be a better way to
help my students speak English than what we were doing. So I began the
search for a better way. I devoured books about English teaching. I
constantly tried out new methods in my classes. I read research studies. I
traveled and taught English in other parts of the world.
What surprised me was how little the actual research supported traditional
teaching methods. As eminent University of Southern California linguist
Stephen Krashen noted: “We acquire language when we understand what
people tell us and what we read….there is no need for deliberate
memorization.” If most of us knew, intuitively, that the best way to learn
English was naturally, I wondered, why were so many teachers and students
still choosing to use unnatural, ineffective and old methods of teaching?
