RON SHEEN'S "AN EGTM: WHAT IS IT?" (1993) A Cri

RON SHEEN'S "AN EGTM: WHAT IS IT?" (1993)

Yakudoku vs Communicative Methodology

Sheen (1993) challenges the current trend to communicative methodology in the teaching of English to Japanese students. Although he deplores the domination of yakudoku (Hino, 1988), viz. the excessive Japanese version of the traditional grammar translation method, he argues that an Enlightened Grammar Translation Method (EGTM) "offers a viable means for Japanese schools to reconcile the need to meet the requirements of an extremely formal examination system and the demands of Mombusho for change in the form of a more oral orientation" (p. 13).

He states that "An underlying premise of contemporary communicative methodology is based on an important degree of equivalence between first and foreign language acquisition" (p. 13). One need clarify Sheen's statement. Indeed, whatever one's methodological orientation, it would be inane to discount the first language's corpus of linguistic acquisitions and its influence on the acquisition of a second language. Learning strategies have been devised and honed in the process of L1 acquisition. These strategies are idiosyncratic: they constitute the individual's learning style. To this degree, there is a certain equivalence between L1 and L2 acquisition that even grammar-translation advocates cannot deny.

To develop one's individual learning style, one must identify (at whatever level of consciousness) one's avenues of most effective or lea

ative methodology points to the failure of the contrastive analysis approach, because, among several factors, structural similarities and dissimilarities between two linguistic systems and the processing of linguistic means in actual production and comprehension are two different processes altogether. Contrastive analysis is concerned with differences between and among languages--an academic topic of peripheral interest to advanced L2 learners; acquisition is concerned with comprehension and production. The contemporary problem facing Japanese education (as opposed to instruction) may indeed be whether the aim of schooling is the acquisition of functional comprehension and production of a foreign language (a current economic, political, scientific, and cultural necessity), or the learning of linguistic paradigms and contrastive analysis techniques (an exercise in futility for all but future philologists concerned with historical and comparative linguistics). Sheen also points to the "necessity for instruction in FFLL compared to its redundancy in the learning of an L1" (p. 13). No teacher of language will dismiss the need for instruction in L2 learning. Likewise, however, no teacher will deny that instruction is paramount to L1

Category: Psychology - R