The Future of Education

The present study proposes a rather simple but unique method for developing speaking skills of L2. This is to imprint the structures of L2 in the learners’ brain by repeating grammatically correct and basic L2 sentences aloud, so that they can come up with what they want to say in L2 spontaneously without translating L1 into L2.

In Japan, the Grammar-Translation method was dominant in language-teaching during the 20^th century; however, this method was considered as undesirable due to the lack of direct contribution to the growth of communicative skills. Considering this situation, the Ministry of Education has been proposing schools to put more emphasis on communicative skills in teaching, and quite a lot of time has been spent on English conversation lessons in English classes from junior high school through the university level.

However, in spite of the efforts and time spent on speaking lessons, learners are still weak in speaking and writing in English compared to their listening and reading abilities. This trend can also be seen in learners whose English manipulating skills are quite high. This tendency can be attributed to a learning style where learners just memorize English expressions without making the words into sound. That is, the learners in Japan are lacking verbal output, and what we need is a way of learning to increase their output in English.

To break down the status quo, we would like to introduce a new style of acquiring speaking ability in L2. The materials needed are grammatically correct basic L2 sentences and their L1 translation. The learners first check the structure, meaning, pronunciation and intonation of L2 sentences. Then, they repeat each sentence aloud until they can say it in L2 spontaneously, within 10 seconds at most, just by looking at its corresponding L1 words. This 10 second-time-limit will not give the learners time to translate the sentence, but will encourage the learners to say the L2 sentence in correct intonation linking the words wherever needed. This way of learning is similar to driving. Just after learning how to drive, you need time to remember how to change gears, how to control a steering wheel to pull in a car, and so on. However, by repeating these actual experiences, you will be able to drive without thinking about those steps. The same thing can be expected to happen when speaking L2 with this method.

Our method is different from “recitation” which focuses on memorizing sentences or paragraphs irrespective of their difficulty in words and structures, which puts burden on the learners. It is also different from “shadowing”, which is to repeat speech immediately after hearing it, because the words repeated will not necessarily stay in the learner’s mind when shadowing.

 We will show that this way of output practice can be useful in developing not only speaking ability, but also reading, writing and listening skills.