Films as Part of the English Curriculum at Colleges : a Proposal

I criticize our way of teaching English at Japanese colleges in terms of (1) its obsession with Japanese translation; (2) its excessive stress on the study of English grammar; and (3) its ignorance of the necessity of encouraging students to express themselves. Speeches are acts of involvement in situations; they produce and expand developing networks of relationships in situations. Some sense of being in the situation is indispensable even for the student learning foreign languages. Our failure to give a Japanese student trying to figure out an English text the sense of being in the situation of the text leads to what I call excessive "metaphysicality" in language learning. The cause of the Japanese student's obsession with Japanese translation is the failure of the English teacher to sufficiently provide the student with the sense of being in the situation of the text. Unable to get the sense, the student feels remote from the text, asks for help, and resorts to Japanese. The student begins to approach the text metaphysically, in terms of grammar, becomes detached academically, and loses a sense of "illocutionary force" of the text. My proposal is that we use close-captioned British and American films as a revolutionary teaching material to complement situational knowledge, the lack of which has been leading students, away from English into Japanese and into grammatical metaphysicality. Films can overcome the three defects arising from our English curriculum. My hope is that the everydayness of films will provide students with sufficient situational knowledge to grasp the dialogues. It saves them from reverting to Japanese and to grammar, and by inviting them into situations lets them connect situations and speeches. There is another reason for my recommendation of films as a revolutionary teaching material. If we can afford to collect 1000 close-captioned films, we will have a database of colloquial English expressions: a hard disc of 80 megabytes can contain the entire scripts of more than 1200 films; for 2000 films we need 130 megabytes. With the help of the MICRO-OCP of the Oxford University Computer Center, we can analyze the frequency of colloquial words and phrases in the database. of such film-scripts. I propose to edit those film materials so that students can learn the most-frequently used English expressions with efficiency. The effect should be to encourage them to express themselves in English more persuasively.4KJ00004276440論文Articledepartmental bulletin pape