Our
approaches to teaching are shaped by our own learning style and past
experiences. I initially learned English by being thrown into a Washington
D.C. junior high school when my father, a correspondent for Asahi Shinbun,
was assigned to cover the White House. I had had little previous exposure
to English. Except for math, music and P.E. I had little understanding
of what was going on in the classes to which I had been assigned. Rather
than reading grammar books, I learned the English language by listening
for patterns, picking up vocabulary and experimenting in conversations.
Subsequent classroom study of English solidified my basic belief that
one needs both field-learning, to pick up language used in the right
context, and formal classroom learning where grammatical clarity help
anchor all the phrases picked up randomly.
