日本で英語を教えていらっしゃる方々へのご参考です

This page discusses characteristics and challenges of Japanese students upon their learning of English. It is written for the purpose of assisting the teacher so that he may understand and teach Japanese students more effectively. It is categorized as general characteristics, mannerisms, pronunciation/speaking, listening, grammar, reading/writing, and vocabulary. The information provided in this page is not exhaustive, but these are the main elements I can think of as a result of my own experience, opinions of my fellow ESL teachers, and interviews with Japanese students.

Pronunciation/Speaking
The first step to helping Japanese students on pronunciation is to help them realize that English has more sounds than Japanese. Most students who have not had good training on pronunciation justify their pronunciation by substituting close-sounding Japanese sounds that they are accustomed to using for new and discrete English sounds. They must realize that there is a difference between the sounds, and that substitution of the sound could change the meaning of words. Then they need to learn how to produce the sounds easily and correctly in their conversation.

The reason why it is hard for Japanese students to hear or produce certain sounds is due to either the sound not existing in the Japanese language or two sounds being very similar and sounding the same to the Japanese. For example, [f] [v] [s] [d] [r] and [l] sounds do not exist in the Japanese language. They are usually substituted with [h] [b] [] [d] [r] (Japanese [r] and [l] both equal the Japanese [r]) which are the closest counterparts of each sound. The [s] and [z] sounds are used in Japanese, but when they are followed by [i] or [I], they are changed into [] and [d] in Japanese. Hence, it is hard for them to pronounce words such as sick and zipper; they pronounce them shick and zhipper. The flap [r] in letter and Betty is another example of sounds which do not exist in Japanese, and the Japanese student will need help with them.

[l/r], [hw/f] and [y/e] (when followed by [i] or [I] such as wheat/feat, year/ear) are the biggest challenges for the Japanese, both hearing and producing. Production can be mastered through persistent practice, but perception requires a great amount of experience in English. It is more realistic to teach the student to guess which sound he hears according to the context of the utterance.

In Japanese all the words end with vowels. When the Japanese students begin to learn English, they tend to attach some vowels after English words which end with consonants. Here are some examples:

[i] is attached    [u] is attached    [o] is attached
after     [t] -catch [kti]
[d] -judge [jji]     after     [l] -pool [pulu]
[k] -book [buku]
[g] -egg [Egu]
[p] -top [tapu]
[b] -cab[kbu]
[f] -knife [naifu]
[v] -have [hvu]
[z] -prize [praizu]
[] -mash [mu]
[m] -gum [gmu]
[] -teeth [tiu]     after     [d] -bread [brEdo]
[t] -note [nouto]

The same thing can be said for consonant clusters. They add vowels after every consonant within a consonant cluster. For example, film becomes [filumu] and swan becomes [suwan].

Another challenge is English vowels. [a] [] and [] all sound as [a] to Japanese students. Naturally, they substitute [a] for all of these sounds. [i] and [I] sound the same to them , too. Another problem is that every time they see the letter "o", they try to pronounce [o]; as a result, when they see words like hot and top they tend to pronounce them "hote" and "tope". The teacher needs to pay special attention to these sounds and assist the students by explaining their slight differences.

In speaking they often make errors which they have no problem understanding grammatically, but they still make in their speech. For example, subject-verb agreement and mixing up she and he are common errors.