English as an international language

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My belief: 

  - Appreciating students' own languages and cultures

  - Aiming at understandable Japanese, not native-like Japanese

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My beliefs of the meaning of learning a second language and aiming at understandable Japanese were inspired by the idea of “English as an international language” as well as my own experience. Smith (1976) claimed that speakers of English as a second language should aim at communicating their own ideas and cultures to others rather than learning cultures of “English-speaking countries” because English as an international language was denationalized, and no countries had ownership of English (as cited in McKay, 2012). Unlike English, it is obvious that Japanese is not an international language. However, I believe that Smith’s idea is applicable to other language education. When I was teaching Japanese, I sometimes heard what some students said, “I want to speak Japanese just as native speakers of Japanese.” I really respected and appreciated their thought, at the same time, however, it was always questionable for me whether speakers of Japanese as a second language had to aim at native-like Japanese. Even within Japan, depending on the areas in which people live and their identities, a great number of varieties of Japanese are spoken, so I would like students to appreciate their speaking Japanese as one of varieties of Japanese as well as other varieties of Japanese. The same goes for cultures in Japan. Extracting one standardized culture from Japan is not possible. Of course, I think that learning some specific cultural aspects that underlie in Japanese expressions is interesting and meaningful for students, but I would like students to go beyond learning Japanese cultural aspects and use Japanese as a tool of communicating their ideas to others. In this way, the idea of English as an international language gave me insight into teaching and learning Japanese.

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​References

McKay, S.L. (2012). English as an international language. In A. Burns & J.C

      Richards(Eds.), The Cambridge guide to pedagogy and practice in second language

      teaching (pp. 15-22). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Smith. L. (1976). English as an international auxiliary language. RELC Journal 7(2),

      38-43.