the lives of teachers

Wife and children abed, the teacher was scratching his way through a stack of conversation transcriptions that his students had handed in earlier that day. “Hi, how are you” began one. “So-so” was the reply. The teacher lifted his pen to strike through the unnatural phrase in blood red ink – after all, don’t we native speakers usually say “not bad” or “okay” – but then paused. The pen hovered above the page, as the steady tick of the kitchen clock marked time.

“so-so”

He understood the meaning.

It made sense.

It wasn’t technically wrong, was it?

“so-so”

It’s a very Japanese response, but one I have rarely used / heard in the UK. The temptation is, then, to strike it out as incorrect. There are many more such examples, and I’m sure you have your own from the contexts in which you work. Aleks Kase has a great list of ‘Konglish’ expressions over on his site which is worth looking at.

There are two debates which draw particularly impassioned discussion across the ELT blogosphere. The first is the use of technology in education, and the second is the ELF / International English / ’standard’ English bunfight. But I wonder if the question of whether the teacher accepts an expression, a usage or a pronunciation feature as ‘natural’ is of any importance whatsoever.

I suggest that there are two people who have an interest in the learner’s English, and neither is the teacher.

1. The first person is the learner themselves. Many learners are not aiming at a ‘native-like’ English. Perhaps they accept that such a goal is often unrealistic. Maybe they want to retain certain linguistic features as a part of their own cultural identity (they wish to use English, but not be changed or defined by it). For many, a certain functional level of attainment is sufficient for their purposes – for tourism, for reading documents or for online interaction.
2. The second is whoever the learner will be using their English with outside the classroom, in authentic communication. The non-native speaker should be concerned with two aspects of their English, in this regard. To start with, they must be intelligible – certain features of non-native Englishes may be more or less intelligible to those they interact with. The other issue is the image that the speaker creates with his or her language. If the non-native speaker is percieved negatively due to their English, they may have a problem. Of course, people can (do) have pre-concieved notions of others before they even open their mouths, based on racial or cultural prejudices. This is something over which the speaker has little influence. But learners need to be aware, perhaps, which turns of phrase or phonological features are likely present a negative professional or social impression.

In all likelyhood, your learners will either be learning English to interact in fairly narrow and specific contexts, or they will be learning general English because they have to. In the first case, the teacher and the learner will be able to negotiate, at the learner’s lead, based on the learner’s potential audience. If a learner is planning to attend a British university, then native-speaker academic norms are obviously worth focusing on. If the learner is doing business with her collegues in the Bangkok office, perhaps not.

Realistically, the vast majority of learners in state education are learning without a particular audience in mind. However, most of them are likely to be at the beginner to pre-intermediate level and the variety of English they learn is somewhat moot – the struggle with basic grammar and vocabulary is enough to contend with.

The student needs to know what kind of English world they are stepping into, what they can expect to achieve from their starting point, and how they are likely to be recieved by their potential audience. What the teacher thinks about English norms means nothing.

Or “cultural diversity is a wonderful thing (within the framework of western liberal democracy)”

Sara Hannam has just contributed yet another excellent post to the blogosphere, prompted by a horrific bit of teaching in the movie ‘Donnie Darko’. In this case, the teacher stifles the expression of a bright young man by sticking to her lesson plan… which also supports a hidden  dubious agenda.

But what do we do when the teacher is ‘right’ and the student is ‘wrong’?

This morning, the listening in our regular textbook was a discussion between a school principal and a concerned mother, about a teacher who was scaring the children with his enthusiastic lectures on environmental catastrophe. Rather than pursuing the ‘green’ angle that the textbook then took, I thought we might get some value out of educational policy issues. I played about with intelligent design, Darwinism and creationism, but then decided to have a look a something else.

Take a look at this clip (don’t feel obliged to watch all of it, I think you’ll get the point soon enough)

This is a typical representation of homosexuality in the Japanese media. Probably not so different from when I was growing up in England in the seventies and eighties – gay people were objects of derision and ridicule, or dangerous perverts to be feared (perhaps they still are). A prime topic, then, for a challenging Tuesday morning class about ‘What teachers should teach’. And this is the worksheet I put together.

So here is the problem. What do you do when the students express ideas or beliefs that could be considered homophobic… that is, when students are ‘wrong’? Or, more broadly speaking, what do you say to students who say something sexist or racist? How do you respond to students who put forward opinions you feel uncomfortable with? At a party, you might challenge the speaker, or avoid them? Doesn’t really work in a lesson though, does it?

The teacher has a distinct power advantage which makes a direct challenge extremely unfair. The first advantage is linguistic – the teacher is more skilled in the use of the target language than the student. The teacher is also in a position of (perceived) authority, and although they may not intend to abuse their power the students may fear for their grades. In some contexts, the learners are considerably younger than the teacher. This may also put them at a disadvantage in a disagreement, either culturally (with respect shown to elders), intellectually or experientially. Students will often back down if challenged, for these reasons. But they will resent being put in that position and grasp their beliefs yet more firmly.

If the student is in alignment with his or her cultural norms, where do we draw the line and openly state “I believe your society is wrong in this case”?

Please express yourself freely in this class, as long as you are ‘right’.

In a previous post I mentioned an article I had read on ‘nativised’ reading materials – readings which are adapted to include local (and familiar) names, places and foods (for example) whilst retaining the vocabulary and grammar structures of the original. In the article, the researchers took a story based in New York and transplanted it to Canakkale, a coastal Turkish city. The authors reported that students’ reading fluency was best with a combination of pre-reading tasks and ‘nativised’ readings. I had a little correspondance with Salim Razi, one of the authors, who is kind enough to allow me to reproduce some of his insights here.

Recently I have been reading a book titled ‘Acts of reading: Exploring connections in pedagogy of Japanese’ which was edited by Hiroshi Nara and Mari Noda (2003). It might help me answer your question, I suppose. Nara gives an example of a tofu recipe in the book (I think, you are familiar with tofu soup as you are living in Japan but I am not as a Turkish resident). It is important to make an awareness of the topic by providing essential background knowledge in case of lack of relevant prior knowledge; however it is also important to provide the balance between teaching culture and reading comprehension. The teacher needs to consider his/her aims in asking students to read the text. If the aim is comprehension then is it really vital to spend much time on culture? I do not mean to imply that we should not teach culture in foreign language classes; but I try to stress that culture should be taken into consideration when it is necessary. Especially if we are teaching English which has more non-native speakers than native ones and called as franca lingua. The case might be different for Japanese language teaching as Japan is the only country in the world speaking it. We have Japanese language teaching department here at Canakkale and I know that they integrate much more cultural elements into their curriculum.

It’s a point I think we have to consider. If we learn the Japanese language, we need to study the culture too. I don’t disagree with that. Is English different from other languages in this regard? Is there even an ‘English’ culture? And how do teachers of Spanish, French, Arabic and other languages with a wide range deal with it? Is it a debate for them too?

“Did you hear about that boy on the other side of town? No? Apparently, he was walking home from school quite late, it was getting dark, when he saw this woman standing on the corner. She was wearing a mask, you know, like she had a cold. As he walked past she was staring at him.. he felt a bit uncomfortable. Well, she was saying something, in a really small voice, so he leaned in to hear her. She pushed her face up close to his and said “Am I beautiful?”. Actually, what he could see of her, she was. Anyway, it would be rude to say otherwise, wouldn’t it? So he said, “Yes, you are” and she pulls off her mask and says “Even like this?”. Her mouth was slit from ear to ear. Now he’s in hospital, she did the same to him. Don’t walk home on your own, will you?”

I came across the story of the ‘kuchi-sake onna‘ (slit-mouthed woman) when I was looking around for halloween topics for class beyond the usual jack ‘o’ lantern word search. The legend is a fairly modern one, dated to 1978 in Gifu prefecture, which reached its height in 1979. In that year, ‘kuchisake onna’ was named in the list of annual buzzwords, and it has passed into urban folklore. In 2007, it was even made into a pretty crappy looking film (although you REALLY shouldn’t watch this trailer if you scare easily – Japanese horror films don’t mess about!)

On the surface, this is a scary and slightly titillating story to provide a cooling shiver on a hot summer’s night (as is the Japanese custom). But digging a little deeper there are several readings of the basic story. The first is of course sexual – I’ll leave you to figure out what the mouth represents and why young boys should find it frightening – but sex is a general subtext to just about anything, so let’s leave that to one side. Michael Dylan Foster posits three further readings with more direct connections to time and place. The first is the rise of the kyouiku mama, the educationally driven mother pushing her children through cram school, which Foster cites in the oft-reported age of the cut-mouthed woman (in her thirties) and the fact that her usual victims are children coming home from school. Next is the symbolism of the mask itself, particularly in a Japan suffering the environmental and societal effects of rapid-post war growth. The gauze mask, (a daily sight on Japanese public transport since the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918) serves a dual purpose, protecting the wearer from pollution and disease in others, and covering up sickness from the rest of society. The mask also turned up as a sign of resistance during political action in the 1960′s and 70′s. Is the kuchi-sake onna a revolutionary? Foster’s attention focuses most deeply on our protagonist in relation to beauty and feminism, and believes that she continues to act as a subversive influence to this day.

It strikes me that the urban legend, as modern folklore, is ripe for exploitation in the classroom for critical thinking.

1. I sometimes feel that students are so bound up in deciphering the language that they take the content for granted. By providing familiar stories, the student has a better chance to manipulate both the language and content.
2. For many students, teachers and textbooks are unquestionable. Tell a tall story with a straight face and see how many call you out on it. Encourage this attitude vigorously.
3. There are many, many readings of most legends. Seeking the origins of the story and extrapolating to the wider context which it sprang from is a great research project.
4. Legends are often either local, or adapted to fit the locality. Use the chance to have the students tell the the teacher, or each other in a multi-cultural class, and take part in an authentic communication experience.
5. Charting the progress and changes to a legend over time and space gives a thermometer reading of social concerns in context.
6. Utilise Hammersley and Atkinson’s ethnographic questions about texts – simple to ask but often a bugger to answer. These last are vital questions for anyone (student or teacher) spreading their wings above the vast hinterlands of the internet. Too many “I don’t knows” and you’d better move on to something else.

How are texts written? How are they read? Who writes them? Who reads them? For what purposes? On what occasions? With what outcome? What is recorded? What is omitted? What is taken for granted? What does the writer seem to take for granted about the reader? What do readers need to know in order to make sense of them?

In a neat coda, reports surfaced in 2007 of a coroners report of a woman who had been hit by a car whilst chasing after a small children. Her mouth was slit from ear to ear, perhaps caused by the accident but perhaps….

Now, read through this post again and tell us what may have prompted this latest twist in the tale of the kuchi-sake onna…… happy halloween!

Further Reading

Foster, M.D. (2007) “The Question of the Slit-Mouthed Woman: Contemporary Legend, the Beauty Industry, and Women’s Weekly Magazines in Japan.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 32, no. 3 (Spring 2007): 699-726.

Hammersley, M. ＆ Atkinson, P. (1983) Ethnography: Principles in Practice. London: Tavistock.

Snopes.com, the best site on the internet for debunking urban myths and folk ‘wisdom’.

Bad Science, Ben Goldacre’s blog taking down tabloid ‘twitter gives you cancer’ scaremongering.

It would be crass and unfair to claim that “We are all racists”. But I do believe that we are all capable of making decisions based on our preconceptions of other peoples ethnicity or cultural background. Isn’t that just the same thing with a few five-dollar words thrown in?

I’m not sure. Is there a difference between shoving a firework through a ‘paki’ family’s letterbox and crossing the road because there is a black man behind you? The result might be markedly different, but they both come from the same place.

I’m working on this topic at the moment with an advanced class, and I’ve been trying to avoid the big, obvious issues such as Apartheid and the U.S. civil rights movement. Of course there are some harrowing and terrible stories to be told, but once you tell them where do you go? It’s like when you watch the news and something awful has happened to some people you have never met in a place you have never been, and you say “Oh dear, that’s a shame”, and you really mean it, but you go back to cooking the dinner. This is the danger of all ‘issues’ classes – reducing complex problems to tired cliches in search of a grammar point.

But this is a guide, so let’s go to the bullet points.

• If there is one thing students value, it’s fair treatment. We should be consistent and equal in the way we respond to students. All classrooms are diverse, but racial and cultural differences may lead to certain students feeling sidelined.
• Don’t assume your classroom is racially or culturally homogenous. I teach in Japan, generally thought to be a very homogenous society, yet I frequently have learners of Chinese or Korean ancestry. They are not as immediately visible as the Turkish, Bangladeshi and Brazilian students I’ve also taught here, which means perhaps that it is all the more important to be aware of it. The hidden history of world emigration patterns is more than just Ellis island. Educate yourself about the place you are teaching in (although don’t get carried away and make each student give you a DNA profile. Some people get sensitive about that kind of thing).
• Don’t stereotype your students. Obvious perhaps, but it is so tempting to do. I’ve taught quite a few students from Arabic-speaking countries and they tend to be more talkative and to have more trouble writing than Japanese students . The danger is that you will pigeonhole a student as soon as you see their face, and get yourself a self-fulfilling prophecy.
• Don’t use those stereotypes as an excuse. It may be that my class is quiet because they are Japanese…. but maybe I just did a lousy job setting up the task, or the lesson itself is boring.
• Assess your materials. Whether you are using publishers stuff, authentic media, or something you have put together yourself, try not to be one-dimensional. the Marxist TEFL blog have an excellent post on immigrant squirrels, and the dangers of peddling perceived wisdom which is actually not so wise. Learners take away a lot more than language from a class, and that handout you used to teach the indefinite article might not stand up to critical scrutiny. Of course, the best student is the one who questions EVERYTHING, including the teacher.
• You do not represent your entire race or country, but to your students you might. Be very wary of starting statements with “Well, in England we…..”, because whatever you follow it with will be untrue.

To finish off, twenty years old and still as powerful and intelligent as ever……

And in troubled times you might want to read through Searchlight, fighting racism for many years.