Higher-proficiency students were given more positive-sounding words to start recording their pronunciation videos with.

In teaching foreign languages, there are two facets that educators have to take into consideration. One is the subject matter itself, encompassing things such as introducing vocabulary, explaining grammar, and fine-tuning pronunciation. The other is the psychological aspect, helping learners feel comfortable engaging with the language, and it’s in that area that a public high school in Tochigi Prefecture recently ran into a problem.

As part of an English class lesson in September, second-year students at Sano Higashi High School in the town of Sano were tasked with filming themselves pronouncing English words, with the videos to be later shown to a native-English speaking ALT (assistant language teacher). The students were divided into four groups of approximately 20 teens each, based on their level of English proficiency, with each group given a different word to pronounce at the beginning of their video. For the students in the more talented groups, the words included “harmony” and “educate.” However, the group with the lowest proficiency level was given a less auspicious-sounding vocabulary word to say: “poison.”

Some parents were none too pleased when they found out about this and voiced their complaints to the school, saying that they felt like there children were being ridiculed. The teachers who had designed the lesson, who seem to be Japanese, say that they had no intention of insulting the students or insinuating that they were problematic pupils, and had merely picked vocabulary words from units in the class curriculum. “Poison” appeared within a lesson on how to discuss environmental issues in English, introduced in its context of pollution, and the teachers say they selected it for the lowest-proficiency group because they felt it’s an easy-to-pronounce word. Nevertheless, following the complaints from parents they have apologized for “causing awkwardness and discomfort” to the students.

It is true that “poison” is a relatively easy word for native Japanese-speakers to pronounce. It doesn’t require any consonant blends or vowel sounds that don’t also exist in the Japanese language, and it has a terminal N, the only consonant that Japanese words end in. By comparison, “pollute” contains an L sound, which Japanese famously lacks, and a silent E, something that regularly trips up Japanese learners of English. At the same time, with the other groups being assigned words such as “harmony” and “educate,” it doesn’t seem like the pool of potential vocabulary words was limited to any single topic, and so it really shouldn’t have been difficult to find one with a more complimentary meaning that the lowest-proficiency group would still be able to manage.

Of course, when studying a language it’s important to learn words for talking about unpleasant and undesirable things too, and at the high school level it’s perfectly reasonable to expect students to know and be able to pronounce “poison.” Getting back to the psychological aspect of teaching English-as-a-second language, though, having the lowest-proficiency group begin their videos by looking at the camera and saying “poison,” while their more accomplished classmates got to say words with much more positive connotations, probably didn’t do much for their self-esteem. Early discouragement can cause some young learners to avoid mentally engaging with a subject as much as possible as an emotional self-preservation mechanism, so giving the lowest-proficiency group an easy-to-say but still positive-sounding word to start off their video with would probably, in the long-run, be beneficial.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that no one lost their job or appears to have had their pay docked over the incident. As such, this looks like not so much a case of teachers being punished for not coddling overly sensitive teens, and more a realization that a little extra consideration in lesson design would have been the wiser choice.

Source: Sankei Shimbun via Hachima Kiko, Shimano Shimbun, Yomiuri Shimbun, 47 News
Top image: Pakutaso
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