Treating English as a Tool
The power of changing the mindset of potential English speakers
Imagine what you were doing in the summer of 1995. When I do, images come flooding back of preparations being made to make the move from Sherwood Park, Alberta to Shizuoka, Japan. At that precise moment, with Bachelor of Education degree in hand, I was planning to make a career out of teaching English in a foreign land. At that time, 26 years ago, I fully believed that my job was to make “English speakers” out of any willing students that I was charged with educating. I had many ideas of what that career involved, and I was eagerly awaiting getting it underway.
Now, flash forward to 2005. After 10 years of amassing teaching experiences in the field of English conversation teaching that started at a local cram school, and had progressed to two private high schools and a handful of private students, I was sitting at a barstool in a French restaurant in Fujinomiya, Shizuoka. I was teaching a private student (the owner of the restaurant) and I was struggling to make him get over his fear of making mistakes when speaking English. It was at that moment that I had an epiphany. It seemed to be a quick moment of insight but in retrospect, it was a teaching philosophy that had been slowly molded and shaped by my professional experiences. What I told my student was that he should stop trying to be an “English speaker” and instead just be a “Japanese business man who can use English to communicate, if he needs to”. I told him to treat English as a “tool” that he can use whenever he needed it. Being an avid golfer, he immediately latched onto the metaphor of pulling a certain club out of his golf bag to make a difficult shot. He started to think of English as the 58 degree lob wedge that he could pull out when faced with a tricky lie. In effect, he stopped thinking of his English study as the process of transforming himself into an English speaker, and started to think of it as the process of developing a useful skill that would be added to his own personal set of abilities as a Japanese business owner. English would be the tool to help him communicate during his frequent trips overseas, and he could still be himself.
From that moment on, I realized that if I was to have a greater efficacy as an English teacher and educator, I needed to adopt this idea as one of my core beliefs. Teachers need to do as much as possible to reduce the intellectual load that can put a strain on students. The lesson I learned with that student in Fujinomiya was that there is nothing wrong with inspiring students to acquire basic English skill and keep it with them like a tool in a toolbox. Language learning can seem like an enormous uphill battle to some students who might not have the aptitude or be as motivated as others. When planning any curriculum, therefore, it is a key part of my vision to make sure that students know that their job is to add English to their intellectual toolkit and not to try and become a fluent English speaker. This realization can take a lot of the stress out of studying English. Once a student changes their mindset and adopts English as their own personal tool, they will inevitably take their first steps down a path that may very well end in fluency at some time in the future. This article will provide more details of this idea and further examine how this belief became part of my teaching philosophy.
Once a student changes their mindset and adopts English as their own personal tool, they will inevitably take their first steps down a path that may very well end in fluency at some time in the future.
I believe that there are three main reasons why students in Japan must think of English as a tool for their future communication needs. The first reason is that because culture and language are so tightly connected, Japanese students start at a greater disadvantage than people from other countries. There is no need to document the cultural divide between Japan and the average English-speaking Western country, and despite the fact that this divide is growing smaller by the day due to information technologies and the spread of global culture, Japanese students will never get past the particular cultural lens that they see through. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and the idea of linguistic determinism suggests that the language we use shapes our reality. This hypothesis essentially proposes that our native language is the window we look through to define our world around us. While the debate surrounding the validity of such a view of language has never been settled, it is my opinion that there is truth in the idea that when students are learning a second language, part of the intellectual load they feel involves changing the way they see the world around them. Students feel that they need to look through a new or different window, and that can be debilitating, especially if you are a member of a society where language and culture are connected to such a high degree. This brings us to the second reason why a change in mindset is necessary.
The second reason why students need to view language as a tool is to help them overcome the problem of high-context cultural thinking. It is commonly known that when it comes to high-context cultures, of which language is an integral part, Japan ranks as one of the highest(Everdingen & Warts, 2003). Therefore, most students in Japan think about language as being subordinate in some way to culture. In other words, what you say comes directly from the cultural foundation and situation you find yourself in at any given time. It is no wonder then that students struggle to find the correct words to use in certain situations where they need to speak English. They find it difficult to formulate a plan because they cannot understand the cultural context that is surrounding the communicative episode. There is a never-ending list of examples in Japanese where a speaker will comment on a topic by addressing only the smallest portion of it, and assume that the listener will fill in the blanks. The simplest example can be found in the way Japanese language usually omits modifiers in every day speech such as the pronouns “my”, “your”, and “our”. These are all assumed to be understood, and while this example can seem insignificant at first, we need to remember that it is just the tip of the grammatical iceberg of differences caused by high-context communication.
The third reason for thinking of language like a tool is to help students avoid the wall they can encounter when defining themselves and the things around them. In Richard Nesbitt’s 2003 book, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently…and Why, the author points out that people from different cultures have vastly different world views and in fact define things differently based on these views. For example, people from one culture will define something by its relation to its surroundings while people from another culture will define something by how it fits into different categories, regardless of surroundings. To give a more specific example, in Japan, people usually give their names to others family name first, and given name second, while in Canada we give our names to others in the reverse order. In a culture like Japan’s, who you are surrounded by (family group) does more to define you than what separates you from others (given name). To a student who is struggling to become a competent English speaker, having to change their thinking in order to classify things by category rather than by connection can seem impossible. If English is merely a tool they use, they can relax and apply the tool to their own innate way of thinking and reduce the cognitive load. To give a clear, although somewhat simple example, a student who is using English as a tool will not feel an obligation to say “Hello, my name is Kenji Tanaka. I work for Sony, Japan. Nice to meet you.” Instead, he will feel more comfortable saying, “I work for Sony. My name is Tanaka. Nice to meet you.” While both of the short introductions serve the same communicative purpose, the second example may be much easier for learners to produce in high-pressure situations. The pressure to communicate as a native speaker falls away, and the student is free to express him or herself in English in a way that feels more natural.
Moving Forward
There have been a multitude of studies done on the nature of the connection between culture and language. These studies generally conclude that language and culture are inseparable and therefore, efforts should be made to ensure that they are taught together. Elmes(2013) concluded that “integrated studies of language and culture are needed if language learners are to become competent language users.” While there is no debate about the interconnected nature of culture and language, it is my opinion that communication competence is more readily available to students who are not bogged down in learning an entire culture at the same time as they learn a language. Indeed, once a certain level of communication competence is attained, a second language learner can then explore new cultures and broaden their horizons by using English as the tool in a cultural exchange where they share their own personal culture and beliefs without having to mimic those of the target country and language. I would even suggest that learning English in the confines of one’s own culture can allow for greater retention of vocabulary by tying the new words to personal concepts that already exist in a student’s own mind. By studying language in the framework of one’s own culture, we can re-codify the new language in a type of meaning focused input that is then linked to concepts that are already known.
By studying language in the framework of one’s own culture, we can re-codify the new language in a type of meaning focused input that is then linked to concepts that are already known.
In a world where the lingua franca is English, the greatest proportion of those speaking the language are non-native speakers. In fact, native speakers generally lack the ability to empathize with other speakers and can become impediments to smooth communication in their own right(Morrison, 2016). The concept of ‘World Englishes”(Kachru,1985) illustrates the point that native speakers of English represent the smallest portion of people using English today, and if students have any plans to use English in their future, they will undoubtedly be using it with other non-native speakers who do not share the culture of English-speaking countries or the Japanese culture. In a way, the future of English in our world is that of a large number of stakeholders using the tool of English to share their thoughts and opinions for the greater good. If the concept of this reality is understood, maybe we can give our students a head start that will pay off down the road.
References
Elmes, D. (2013) The Relationship Between language and Culture. National Institute of Fitness and Sports in Kanoya International Exchange and Language Education Center. #46.
Everdingen, Yvonne & Waarts, Eric. (2003). A multi-country study of the adoption of ERP systems.
Kachru, B.B. (1985) Standards, codification and sociolinguistic realism: The English language in the Outer Circle. In R. Quirk and H. Widdowson (Eds.), English in the world: Teaching and learning the language and literatures, pp.11-36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Morrison, L. (2016)In a room full of non-native speakers, ‘there isn’t any chance of understanding’. It might be their language, but the message is often lost. Worklife. BBC.com.
Nesbitt, Richard. (2003) The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently…and Why. The Free Press. New York.