Corrections

I am currently corroding my sanity by correcting some 180 or so English writing compositions from my students. Some are good, some are alright, many are lazily bad, and a painful few make you wonder what the hell these students have been doing in their English classes for the past seven years. They start learning English as a foreign language from the first year of secondary school, so by now, when they are finishing up their first year in university, you would think that they might have got the hang of the basics - word order, personal pronouns, plurals, capitalization, elementary spelling, etc. But no, such linguistic details are right up there with string theory, differential calculus and an enlightened attitude to foreigners in the category labelled "things it is impossible for mere rice eating Japanese mortals to ever comprehend".

A sample:

"I comes to college foot. It is 15 minetes lost".

"And when becoming the second grader, I want to put power in table tennis to say nothing of study more".

"I belong to Kyudo club. Kyudo makes me hot".

I would like to be fire work man after graduating from college. It is my dream in child food".

And

"In addition, the day of the snow falls down and it embarrasses it. Do the side back only once and it fell down. The hand didn't apply it because it had a clear case in the left hand and it had the shopping bag in the right hand. The waist and the the arm were thrown and it was painful. Fortunately that the head had not been thrown during unhappiness".

Some of this is just sloppiness, an impatient scribble just to fill up the page, hand into the teacher and get the hell out of the class. But most of it directly results from a fundamental flaw in how English is taught at the secondary level.

There the emphasis is on discrete item translation, be it the word or sentence. Discourse analysis (how the language is used in a natural fashion for communication, spoken or written) and the social contexts in which various forms of language are used, is completely ignored. Why? Because the Japanese teachers have very, very limited experience of using English as a living language; rather what they have learned, and what they in turn teach, is what I term 'textbook' English - a passive collection of discreet grammatical rules and decontextualized reading passages that has little relation to 'real' English.

The result is sentences like the above, and headaches for me.