English teachers in the future

MURATA Yukine 20/09/19

I believe there will be a need for English teachers in the classroom in twenty years. I have three reasons to substantiate my opinion.

Firstly, English teachers give their students practical conversation skills, for example, better pronunciation, ungrammatical phrases in fashion, and body language like expressions. We can notice the importance of throwing in appropriate words and nodding assent to other people’s ideas. Learning gestures will bring improvement students’ speaking.

Secondly, technology provides us many methods to teach and to learn, however, devices cannot create various expressions come from their hearts as humans do. It is because machines do not have their own hearts, though they have intelligence. On the other hand, there are various ways to represent our feelings, and they depend on our personalities. It is essential for students to learn through being exposure to diverse representations such as sighs, laughs, and frowns. Students will be able to tell their characters.

Lastly, the post-IT era will come in twenty years. I presume that we will revaluate communication without virtual environment in the future. According to Albert Mehrabian’s examination, we judge vague messages from visual and auditory senses more than from verbal expressions. As evidences to guess the feelings of speakers, words account for 7%, tone of voice constitutes 38%, and body language amounts to 55%. These figures indicate the importance of seeing each other. Because IT omits some of these kinds of information, so it cannot beat real conversations.

Thus, I expect that we will have a need for English teachers in the classroom in two decades. The primary reason is the weightiness of conversation face to face. Even if technology enables us to ‘telecommunicate’ in better circumstances and to be taught by more developed machines, we will chose flesh and blood teachers in order to share the atmosphere of the classroom.