教員コラムBlog

  1. home
  2. 教員コラム / Blog
  3. 詳細 / Detail

Be informed: Join the Global Community

2019.11.29
  • Chris Summerville
  • Culture
  • 2019
Have you been hearing about the millions of young people around the world, led by a 16- year- old Swedish student, Greta Thunberg, who have been protesting about the need for adults to seriously address the causes of Climate Change? It has been big news all around the world for nearly a year now but I wonder how much the Japanese media have been covering it and how many young people here in Japan know about it? The main message of this movement is ‘What is the point of studying for a future that is so threatened by a Climate Emergency’? What do you think about this message? Are you worried about your future?

One of the key points I tell my language students is that their goal of mastering English is a very admirable one, but that once you enter the ‘Eigo-world’ you are entering a world where asking and giving opinions about social, political, cultural and environmental topics is common. More importantly, once you have given your opinion, you should be able to respond to the BIG question “WHY?”, as in “why do you have this opinion?” This means that as your English abilities improve, so will the expectations of non-Japanese who you meet for you to know about current issues, to have an opinion about them as well as to give reasons for your opinion.

Without you knowing it, you may have become very passive and comfortable living in the ‘Nihon-go’ world since talking about such topics is considered ‘too serious’ and only taught about sometimes in your classes. Also, the possibility of having an opposite opinion to someone else might break ‘WA’ so the topics are either avoided or when they arise, people may just follow a kind of ‘tatemae’ response instead of sharing their true ‘honne’ feelings. 

Once you enter the English world this protective blanket of not knowing or thinking about world issues will be removed and your new embarrassment and frustration will not be so much about how poor your English is, but how poor your knowledge about your own culture or contemporary global events are and that you have to answer “I don’t know” or “I have no opinion” or “I’ve never thought or heard about….”

There is a very simple solution to this and it will also act as a way to improve your English skills. Start informing yourself! To improve your reading skills, start scanning headlines, skimming key points and reading some news stories that interest you on a daily basis for 15-30 minutes. ‘The Japan Times’ is a good source for both Japanese and world news, and often has articles about topics you will never find in the Japanese news as its readership is mainly non-Japanese living here in Japan. Another great source is ‘The Guardian’ or ‘The New York Times’ or even ‘Google News’ which has a selection of that day’s key stories from many different sources. To improve your listening skills, start watching BBC news, or CNN news or listen to some TED talks. Once you start to do this, you will be ‘joining’ your peers around the world who are reading, thinking and talking about these topics and your connection to them will increase every day!

Many students who I have spoken to who did ‘Open up to the World’ tell me that in the beginning they didn’t want to, since they were worried they would find out lots of terrible news about depressing issues and with complicated reasons they were not interested in and that were not connected to their daily lives. But slowly, they started to feel a sense of empowerment in their newly found ‘global awareness’ and became more and more confident in their opinions and ideas and eager to talk about them with friends and non-Japanese students. Not only this, they began to understand the connections between the issues as well as how they affect their lives and to discover what they could do to make a change for a better future, both for themselves, their family and future generations!


(Photo credit: Markus Spiske@pexels.com)


戻る / go back

Related posts