Speech Contest

Hi everyone!

In honor of my students who are participating in the speech contest today, I'm going to introduce them to you.

There are participants in both of my middle schools: Higashi 東中 and Toyama 戸山中. At Higashi, there is one first year (Miho), one second year (Miki), and two third years (Koushiro and Mai). At Toyama, there is one first year (Kanon) and one third year (Seina).

All of the participants are surprisingly good. They are required to memorize a short English story anywhere from a minute and a half to well over 4 minutes (depending on the year). They do have the same pronunciation problems as most Japanese people, but to a much lesser extent. They seem to learn very quickly, and whenever I correct a pronunciation or fluency mistake, I don't need to repeat myself often.

Performance skill-wise, Miho from Higashi probably has the best chance to win. She has excellent intonation and connected speech, but has slight trouble with omission of consonants and articles, as well as pronunciation of the letter 'r'. She takes compliments with lots of enthusiasm and excitement, which is very cute to watch. Kousuke from Higashi (who's kind of a brat to the other teachers) is also a very good speaker when it comes to intonation, but he has a particularly stubborn problem with pronouncing 'th' as 'z'. The other 4 students are somewhere slightly behind these 2 forerunners. Miki from Higashi is a little shy and has some problems with pronunciation of vowels and the letter 'l' when followed by a consonant or at the end of a word. She also has trouble with connected speech. However, she learns quickly and has good study skills, so she may well have caught up. Seina from Toyama, who looks strikingly like my devilishly cute cousin from my dad's side, is probably the weakest in the pronunciation section, especially regarding vowels that don't exist in Japanese. However, we've worked on her problems specifically and she has gotten a lot better. She has the longest speech, but somehow managed to be the first one to memorize it all. Mai from Higashi has very decent intonation and connected speech, but has trouble with pronunciation of the "v" and "r" sounds. There are also some issues with major grammar errors in her speech, but that is entirely out of her control because the composition was provided to her (*correction, it turns out she's participating in the "read your own composition" part of the contest, so the errors are the fault of teachers failing to correct her work properly). Finally, Kanon from Toyama is very shy and hardly talks when I work with her. She has a nice clear voice and a very decent grasp of connected speech, but she has a problem with adding stray 'r's into words, like many Japanese people believe native English speakers do. Watch anime and you'll know what I mean.

To help them get better, I've recorded their voices at different stages of their improvement. Then, I made CDs for them (since many surprisingly do not use the internet very much) and told them to listen to their voices when they're practicing at home. They should be able to notice the problems I point out better if they can hear their own voice over and over at cue. The personal tutoring certainly improved their speeches, and I'm really proud of how much they've progressed.

That being said, they are all also surprisingly bad. At English I mean. Yes, they can memorize a long English passage and read it aloud. Yes, they sound very good while they are reading it (given that they've had a week of tutoring from a native speaker with some actual credentials). But, if you even try to have a simple conversation with them in English, they fall deathly silent. Why? It's because they have no idea what I'm saying. That's right: they can read and recite English, but their listening and conversational production are poor. I had to do most of my tutoring in Japanese because they couldn't understand my English.

However, I must admit the problems vary among the students. Kousuke can probably handle conversational English the best out of all of them. Even so, I still can't have a conversation using full sentences with him. Besides Kousuke, I doubt the other students can understand more than a few words I say. Seina, as friendly and fun to talk to as she was, couldn't even understand what I meant by "a lot" or "a little". Remember, she's the one who's a third year and is reciting a story that's about 2 pages long double-spaced.

This is a frustrating problem with the English language learning system in Japan. The problem lies in the fact that classes still have a large emphasis on written translation. For homework, lots of the students have to translate some English sentences into Japanese, or the other way around. I haven't yet seen a class taught entirely in English or one that emphasized creation and use of pure English rather than translated Japanese. This is the underlying problem, and as an ALT, I am here to help fix it.

Good luck to my students who participated! ファイト！一発！