Welcome to a whole class of new students! As none of you have ever been in any of my classes before I'm afraid that I spent rather a long time talking to you before you all introduced yourselves to me.
I was delighted to discover that, although you are all Japanese Majors the standard of English each one of you displayed was high. Because of this there's no excuse for any of you to give for not speaking up in class! Remember...while you might be thinking your English is bad, everyone else thinks exactly the same thing about themselves - and it's simply not true.
As we said, the purpose of language is for us all to be able to communicate with each other - making a "mistake" is not important - communicating is. Although I hope that this class will improve your English vocabularies we are neither going to concentrate on vocabulary nor on grammar. What we are going to do is to try to improve your listening and comprehension skills and, above all, improve your confidence. Lack of confidence is the biggest barrier to many students. It is this that stops them from speaking. Only by speaking English can you improve your English.
I shared with you the fact that I had spent the past month backpacking in Malaysia and Thailand. During this time, as on all other occasions I have packpacked around different countries, I met other Travellers from countries such as Germany, Sweden, Norway, Iraq, Iran, India Pakistan, Italy, France, Denmark and many more. Naturally I met a lot of Thai and Malaysian people as well. For all of these people English was at least a Second language. For many it was a Third or Fourth language - yet we all made friends, shared adventures, exchanged information and laughed a lot.
I met very few people - and that includes those for whom English is their First language - who spoke perfect English. People would use a wrong tense here, forget a word there, or use the wrong word order in a sentence. It didn't matter - we all understood each other and were able to communicate our feelings, questions or funny stories. That is the purpose of a language.
While I do not forget the importance of passing exams for each of you, I also teach my classes with the conviction that being able to speak another language - especially one that is spoken by more different language groups than any other - is a skill that is for life. Long after you may have forgotten some of the difficult mathematics you have had to learn, or found that some of the information in Science classes was not needed in your careers, the knowledge of another language - in your cases of two other languages - will continue to be of benefit and to enrich your lives.
Next week I am going to introduce some contemporary English-language novels to you all. These books, while each having received some kind of Fiction award, are not Classics. They are stories about young people, mainly Australian young people, and the lives and problems they encounter in a contemporary world. You will learn what life is like for young adults in another country...and you will learn how their feelings, problems and concerns are not much different to yours.
In these books you will come across a lot of unfamiliar word and phrases. A lot of them will not be in your Dictionaries. The people in these books will not speak the formal, often old-fashioned English of your text-books, but the living changing English language which is the oral form. This is what oral English sounds like.
We already made a start by learning that, although English has the largest vocabulary of any other language, oral English does not make much use of all the descriptive, beautiful and definite forms of the written language.
Although we can describe a person in the written form as attractive, willowy [tall and slim], empathetic [easy to talk to; sympathetic], eccentric [ a somewhat crazy,individualist] or magnanimous [generous and kind] in oral English we would more likely say that person was Great or Awesome.
Similarly, while people might write that a meal was delicious, tasty, sublime [out of this world; perfect], ambrosial [fit for The Gods], or superlative [the best of all, unable to be bettered], what would actually say would probably be Not Bad or Yummy.
The antonym [word with the opposite meaning] of Yummy is Yucky and can be used not only in place of inedible [impossible to eat], or diabolical [which literally means made ''by the Devil" ] in talking about food or dreadful, unbearable or unlikable in the case of a person.
The reason for this is because in written language the word itself must stand alone to convey meaning, while in oral language our face, posture and bodies are used to give the meaning to a word.
So, while it may sound not very polite when we read that someone has said a wonderful and well-prepared meal was "Not bad", it can be a really nice compliment when we say it using many tones, rolling our eyes, nodding our heads, giving a satisfied sigh etc.
Unlike both Chinese and Japanese, oral English is a very animated [lively} language and relies heavily on visual cues and tones of voice. This may sound strange when Chinese is described as a "tonal" language. But the difference is that, in Chinese the same tone is always given to certain words to change it's meaning (Think how saying the word "ma" in the four different tones changes its meaning completely). In the same way saying "Not Bad" in different ways can mean simply that a thing is quite ordinary, or absolutely wonderful.
I hope that we are all going to learn a lot together this semester - the things I learn from my students are as valuable to me as (I hope) the things they learn from me are. And I hope that we will have fun doing it.
Welcome to Oral English class.
I was delighted to discover that, although you are all Japanese Majors the standard of English each one of you displayed was high. Because of this there's no excuse for any of you to give for not speaking up in class! Remember...while you might be thinking your English is bad, everyone else thinks exactly the same thing about themselves - and it's simply not true.
As we said, the purpose of language is for us all to be able to communicate with each other - making a "mistake" is not important - communicating is. Although I hope that this class will improve your English vocabularies we are neither going to concentrate on vocabulary nor on grammar. What we are going to do is to try to improve your listening and comprehension skills and, above all, improve your confidence. Lack of confidence is the biggest barrier to many students. It is this that stops them from speaking. Only by speaking English can you improve your English.
I shared with you the fact that I had spent the past month backpacking in Malaysia and Thailand. During this time, as on all other occasions I have packpacked around different countries, I met other Travellers from countries such as Germany, Sweden, Norway, Iraq, Iran, India Pakistan, Italy, France, Denmark and many more. Naturally I met a lot of Thai and Malaysian people as well. For all of these people English was at least a Second language. For many it was a Third or Fourth language - yet we all made friends, shared adventures, exchanged information and laughed a lot.
I met very few people - and that includes those for whom English is their First language - who spoke perfect English. People would use a wrong tense here, forget a word there, or use the wrong word order in a sentence. It didn't matter - we all understood each other and were able to communicate our feelings, questions or funny stories. That is the purpose of a language.
While I do not forget the importance of passing exams for each of you, I also teach my classes with the conviction that being able to speak another language - especially one that is spoken by more different language groups than any other - is a skill that is for life. Long after you may have forgotten some of the difficult mathematics you have had to learn, or found that some of the information in Science classes was not needed in your careers, the knowledge of another language - in your cases of two other languages - will continue to be of benefit and to enrich your lives.
Next week I am going to introduce some contemporary English-language novels to you all. These books, while each having received some kind of Fiction award, are not Classics. They are stories about young people, mainly Australian young people, and the lives and problems they encounter in a contemporary world. You will learn what life is like for young adults in another country...and you will learn how their feelings, problems and concerns are not much different to yours.
In these books you will come across a lot of unfamiliar word and phrases. A lot of them will not be in your Dictionaries. The people in these books will not speak the formal, often old-fashioned English of your text-books, but the living changing English language which is the oral form. This is what oral English sounds like.
We already made a start by learning that, although English has the largest vocabulary of any other language, oral English does not make much use of all the descriptive, beautiful and definite forms of the written language.
Although we can describe a person in the written form as attractive, willowy [tall and slim], empathetic [easy to talk to; sympathetic], eccentric [ a somewhat crazy,individualist] or magnanimous [generous and kind] in oral English we would more likely say that person was Great or Awesome.
Similarly, while people might write that a meal was delicious, tasty, sublime [out of this world; perfect], ambrosial [fit for The Gods], or superlative [the best of all, unable to be bettered], what would actually say would probably be Not Bad or Yummy.
The antonym [word with the opposite meaning] of Yummy is Yucky and can be used not only in place of inedible [impossible to eat], or diabolical [which literally means made ''by the Devil" ] in talking about food or dreadful, unbearable or unlikable in the case of a person.
The reason for this is because in written language the word itself must stand alone to convey meaning, while in oral language our face, posture and bodies are used to give the meaning to a word.
So, while it may sound not very polite when we read that someone has said a wonderful and well-prepared meal was "Not bad", it can be a really nice compliment when we say it using many tones, rolling our eyes, nodding our heads, giving a satisfied sigh etc.
Unlike both Chinese and Japanese, oral English is a very animated [lively} language and relies heavily on visual cues and tones of voice. This may sound strange when Chinese is described as a "tonal" language. But the difference is that, in Chinese the same tone is always given to certain words to change it's meaning (Think how saying the word "ma" in the four different tones changes its meaning completely). In the same way saying "Not Bad" in different ways can mean simply that a thing is quite ordinary, or absolutely wonderful.
I hope that we are all going to learn a lot together this semester - the things I learn from my students are as valuable to me as (I hope) the things they learn from me are. And I hope that we will have fun doing it.
Welcome to Oral English class.
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