"This… is…. a… pen!!! THIS IS A PEN!"

He plucked his blue pen from his bedazzled Winnie-the-Pooh tin pencil case. (I have the same one... do you think he'll bedazzle mine, too? Kawaii!!) So, there he was clutching his blue pen and hunched over his worksheet like a model student. He suddenly burst out into laughter, hollering “This… is… a… pen!!! THIS IS A PEN!!!” He waved his own pen around, sarcastically demonstrating that he was having an amazing experience discovering a blue pen. That day, the language target in the optional English was: "This is..."

This simple sentence is pretty standard stuff when it comes to teaching English in my classrooms. We feed the students these simple sentences, which will not really help them develop stellar conversational skills in the real world. We are mostly focused on honing the students’ ability to translate written English into Japanese. Reading and writing definitely trump oral communication.

It’s a tragic thing, because my kids can’t even hold down small talk. A couple weeks ago, I spent some time coaching some of the san-nensei students for their EIKEN test. It’s a test that measures their proficiency in English; a decent score on such a test can only enhance their applications to area high schools.

Anyways, they were able to answer all of the questions for which they’d already written and rehearsed their answers. But if I added follow-up questions, I was met with many blank stares. “Awesome, you play basketball! How long have you been playing?” (Blank stare). “Ah, you like going shopping. What do you like buying?” (Blank stare).

Obviously, some things need to change. It’s not one person’s fault. I’d attribute many failings of EFL/ESL to the shaping of the education system here. Like everyone else has said before me, the teachers and students are driven to plow through the curriculum because they want to excel on the tests. They don’t have time to hone their listening and speaking skills. It’s all about translating and such.

I should mention that the Japanese education system is set up differently than the one back home. Kids attend elementary school from grades one through six. They move onto junior high school for grades 7-9, which explains why most of my students are between the ages of 12 and 15. As a san-nensei (third-grader, particularly in junior high school), they spend a lot of time writing entrance examinations to get into their preferred high school. Intense, no? To think, the only reason I was able to transfer into Colonel By can be attributed to the fact thats I simply expressed an interest in its unique International Baccalaureate Programme and the Spanish classes. Oh, and all of my childhood friends were going there. Lame?! Yes. But I loved it there. End tangent.

And to end this post, I'd like to say that the student excited by the pen is hilarious in general. He does the whole Japanese "ehhhhhh" sound to perfection. "Ehhhhhh! Check, please. Ehhhhhh! Good morning! Ehhhhhh! Gemma-sensei."