Today some students came to film my English Club students giving a send off to the graduating class of 2012. Of course, they had no idea regarding what to say beyond, 'Congratulations'.
Also, most students at the pre-graduation party, to be held in Feb in the school gym, will switch off as soon as they hear the English, so it doesn't really matter what my students say because nobody really gives a toss.
Anyway, short story short, I came up with a short script.
It went like this.
Cos 99% of the Japanese have 'Kore Wa Nippon' syndrome, which means, 'This is Japan so we don't need to speak English'.Blah blah blahBlah blah blahOccupy EnglishYou are the 1%.
The above video was my version - hence turning the whiteboard into a platform for Conspiracy Theorists.
The students asked me what it meant. I replied, 'It's because we are filming this inside.'
They are so damn cute, aren't they. The two kids on the left are junior high students, and the two on the right are high school first year. The jun. high kids have excellent comprehension of English, far better than their high school peers, which just goes to show that the sooner you get Japanese kids 'speaking and listening' to English, the better.
I really admire these kids for being the only 4 students (plus the two who are graduating) to join English Club, out of a total of 1000 pupils. Indeed, they were such good sports to let me film them again, that I think I'll make them a Christmas Cake - store-bought sponge, of course, and then jazzed up somehow.
4 comments:
I seem to recall a pilot took off without permission somewhere in the far east due to lack of English last week
So the Japanese are like the English as far as not seeing the need to learn another language? I just got back from Switzerland and its amazing to hear them switch between their own French, German, Italian, Romansh but still have a good handle on English.
Absolutely like the English, which I am not ashamed to share with them - citing that it must be our shared 'island nature' that keeps us stubbornly mono-lingual. And just today I was talking about the Swiss and how good they were at languages.
I am always amazed when some news organization goes to some isolated farm at the icy end of Norway, or to the middle of a Russia crowd of Putin-naysayers, or even in places like Iran or Saudi, and they have no trouble finding someone not only with decent English, but decent, idiomatic, barely accented English to speak with.
My Portuguese sailor buddy's 14 year old son speaks like a Californian in English, but his comprehensive is not quite as good as his remarkably Portuguese-accent-free English. Which is odd, really. He's nailed the form prior to the content.
"Engrisha kan helapu yu".
You sound like a teacher at Hogwart's there, all strict diction and so on.
Those poor little girls. They have no idea of their role in the Perkins Propaganda Machine.
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