I was in an upper grade in elementary school in a countryside city of southern Japan when for the first time I realized there were other names to the things that I had known in Japanese. My friend’s sister was going to an after-school private English institution, and she taught me a few words in English. I remember the insecure feeling that suddenly came over me as if there were another world with different names for all the objects I thought I knew how to call. From that time on I became conscious of the roman alphabets that surrounded me. Many Japanese products had decorative alphabetic writing on them, even though they had no significant meanings or functions. The bathroom rug at home was not an exception. Every time I went to the bathroom, I tried to make sense of the scripts. Although I cannot recall what the words were, I vividly remember staring at the white scripts on the lime green rug with flower prints. As I only knew the alphabet reading of the letters at that time, I was not able to read them as words. My mother was an English teacher at a junior college, and I would ask her for the sounds and meanings of a few scripts that were around me. She had already decided not to teach me English until I would start English lessons in junior high school, so she would just tell me not to worry yet.
With full excitement and anticipation, I started English lessons in junior high school. The school took a carefully designed bottom-up approach to teaching English, and the first class started with pronouncing and learning to write alphabets. After about three days, we moved on to consonant letters and sounds. We studied a few consonants each day for about a week until we were introduced to the rules of vowel sounds; a short vowel sound when a consonant follows a vowel (e.g. ‘mat’), a long vowel sound when there is an ‘e’ after the consonant (e.g. ‘mate’), sound changes when a letter ‘r’ follows a vowel (e.g. ‘cat’ vs ‘cart’) and when a letter ‘w’ precedes a vowel (e.g. ‘arm’ vs ‘warm’), and so on. I was so excited that I was able to read out all English words even though I had no idea what they meant. I read and read all alphabetic scripts around me, applying and over-applying the rules. I even applied the rules to the bathroom rug scripts, even though I sensed that they did not follow common spelling patterns. In fact, I later found that they were a brand name in French.
Although I soon learned that more commonly used words often had irregular sound-spelling relationship, it did not discourage me from learning English. The feeling that I had learned the ‘proper’ pronunciation of the English sounds made me proud, and the feeling that I knew the spelling rules made me confident. I became an avid learner of English vocabulary with the help of school’s ‘English vocabulary contest’. In order to pass one level and go on to the next, I studied about 20 words in a day, diligently making cards and notebooks. Upper level textbooks became comprehensible and enjoyable as my vocabulary expanded, and that boosted my motivation. I learned English songs by heart – rather old-fashioned ones like London Bridge is Falling Down, Old MacDonald Had a Farm, and Danny Boy –, and I sang to the mirror as I watched myself sticking out lips and curling my tongue. Japanese sounds did not use as big a movement of lips or tongue as English. American English pronunciation sounded so clear and beautiful to me, as if they symbolized another world, an imagined ideal world of total clarity.
My love with English lasted mostly through high school and college. As I had always wanted to be a teacher, it was natural for me to pursue the English teaching licensure program at college, and I started teaching English at a private girls’ high school. However, teaching at that school was a first challenge to my school-learned English. At the school that I got a position, there were teachers of English who were Japanese but had spent years living in English speaking countries. They spoke English fluently and joyfully, and it looked so easy for them to teach classes in English. There were also returnee students who spent a part of their elementary school years in English speaking countries. They spoke English as if it were their own. They expressed their emotions to each other, appealed to the listeners, and connected with each other in English. They listened to American contemporary pop music. They did pleasure reading and wrote notes to pass around to their friends in English. Their English was alive. My English was that for taking tests, comprehension, transaction, and argumentative essay writing. My attempt in teaching classes in English went awkward. My English was not a tool for building personal relationships. For the first time, I was overwhelmed, and felt my English was small, limited and technical.
So that's the first half.
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