Over the Wall of Silence

Getting the Class Moving 31

Chapter 2

so that the queues of waiting passengers align with the doors. Hun dreds of people board it. Four minutes later, the train leaves the sta tion as the second hand of the driver’s watch hits twelve. During all these preparations, somebody has been giving instruc tions over the loudspeaker - usually live, and at quite a volume. Eve rything to do with the train’s departure, journey and destination has been explained in great detail and repeated twice. The longer you live in Japan and the better your comprehension of Japanese becomes, the more you realize how the entire society works this way. Detailed guidelines govern all group activities, from a neighborhood association meeting to a company meeting to even a casual gathering of university students whose sole purpose is to get drunk together and meet potential romantic partners. These guidelines are usually spoken but even also distributed in written form. Detailed guidelines mean that everyone knows what will happen, when it will happen, and their role in the process. W HY LANGUAGE CLASSES DON ’ T Now, as a foreign language teacher you have probably had the reverse of this situation happen to you. You asked your students to do something as simple as “pass these handouts around” and you were shocked when you realized that a number of students did not receive it. Meanwhile, a stack of handouts has ended up on a table somewhere in the class. Or maybe you instructed them to “practice a short conversation with their neighbor” and nothing happened. What? “How hard can that be?” you think, shaking your head in disbelief.