Learn English with Teacher Joe

How do we succeed in learning another language? Is there one simple approach we can take? I don’t think so. People who succeed in learning a language do many different things, and all of those things together lead to success. I remember one of my most amazing students…

I was teaching in a high school in Japan. During my first year there, I taught over 400 students. Although I knew their faces, I only knew a few of them by name. Two years later, those 400 students were in their final year of high school and 14 of them took English as an elective class. They chose to take an extra English class with me two days a week, but I wasn’t sure why. Maybe they thought it was easier than the other choices!

Only two of the students could speak a little English. One student really surprised me, though, because she was so much weaker than the others in English! I mean, she didn’t know the days of the week in English. She couldn’t count to 20. She didn’t understand the simplest questions I asked in class. And then she surprised me even more - she said that, in the future, she wanted to become an English teacher!

Well, I wondered how she could do it, but it was her choice. All I could do was teach the best I could. We did a lot of listening exercises in class, with lots of discussions in pairs and as a whole class. We did some activities such as planning a trip and cooking “French toast”. We used English two times a week, ever week. However, I cannot say I saw a lot of progress from any of my students, including her.

So, maybe you can imagine my surprise, the final surprise, two years later, when I met this student in the train station one afternoon. She spoke to me in perfectly fluent English! She managed to get into a pretty good university where she was majoring in English. After one year of taking English classes there, she went to the United States to study for one year. All of the things she studied in my classes, and in her university, were finally put into use, and she finally did learn.

In slightly different ways, this is how we all learn languages. We start by learning the parts, we practice them, we listen, read, write and speak the language and finally there comes a time when it all “comes together” and we can use it well. We just have to keep on trying, keep on learning.