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課題集 ザクロ2 の山

○自由な題名 / 池新
○家、自己主張の大切さ / 池新

★過去のわが国の外国語教育は(感) / 池新
 【1】過去のわが国の外国語教育は、たしかに読解力と文法のみに重点を置きすぎたといえる。そのため、哲人カーライルのような文章が書けても、話す方は赤ん坊に等しい「教養人」が生産されてしまった。しかし、だからといって、発音の方は立派でも、内容空疎な会話しかできないというのでは、決して国外で尊敬されることにはなるまい。【2】そう考えると、小学校レベルで外国語に親しませるというのは本当に必要だろうか。低学年では、むしろ国語を正確に読み書き話す力をつけるのが先決であり、その基盤なしに外国語を教えても、中途半端な根無し草的「国際人」を養成することになりかねない。(中略)
 【3】文法や語彙を重視してきた反動として、近年それらを軽視し、発音や流暢さだけを追い求める向きがあるが、これは間違っている。格調ある言葉を使う必要は、日本語でも外国語でも同じである。発音については、あまりひどい片仮名発音は禁物であるが、発音が全く英米人のようである必要はなく、ある程度の訛りはかまわない。
 【4】多少の訛りは、話している人の文化的アイデンティティーを示しており、世界が多様であることを物語っている。長い国連生活で、私は各国の外交官や国連職員がお国訛りの英語やフランス語で、堂々と自分の考えを述べるのを聞いてきた。【5】流暢さより、話す内容の方が、はるかに重要なのである。現行の語学教科書には、学ぶ人の知的水準を無視したものが多く、読者の文学性や哲学的関心をそそるような教材の使用に努めるべきだろう。
 【6】とはいっても、いまの日本の英語教育にもっとも欠けているのはやはり聞き取りと会話の能力であろう。会話に先天的な能力などはなく、中学生の頃から自分をそうした環境において、話す能力をつけていくしかあるまい。【7】また日本人の英語教師のすべてに是非とも海外留学の機会を与え、本場の英語に触れさせるべきである。
 JETプログラム(地方公共団体による外国人教師招致事業)で英語使用国の数多くの若者が来日しているが、この人たちをもっと本格的に活用し日本人学生の外国人恐怖心をなくしていくべきだ。∵【8】「ものいわぬは腹ふくるるわざ」だと兼好法師がいっている。幼少から外国人の中で暮らした少数の人を除いた、多数の日本人にとって、語学習得の近道はない。恥をかき、反復をいとわずに勉強しながらも、過度に完全主義にならないことだ。【9】なかでも、よい教師や友人にめぐりあい、刺激をうけることが、学ぶ者にとって大事である。
 グローバル化とアングロ・サクソン化は違うのだが、英語を話す人口は約八億人と推定され、その数は増加する一方だ。【0】国際的取引や知的職業に属す人々の圧倒的多数が英語を話しており、インターネットの導入がそれを加速している。
 グローバル化にとり残されないために、我々はより効果的な英語教育に真剣に取り組まなければならない。日本人だけの心地よい以心伝心の世界に安住することは、もはや許されない。完璧でなくても外国語をあやつり、国境を超える骨太の論理を駆使して、他流試合に挑んでいくたくましさを身につけたいものだ。
 そのためには、東洋の島国の腹芸と自己満足を脱却するのが必要である。とはいっても立て板に水を流すように、外国語に雄弁である必要はない。自分なりの論理とレトリックとユーモアを使って、訥々とでもよいから相手を説得する努力をすることが大事だ。
 第二次大戦後、次々と優れた工業製品を作り出すことで世界の賞賛の的になったわが国は、いま政治、社会、文化、科学など幅広いソフトウエアの分野において、国際的な対話と共同作業に活発に参加することを求められている。外国語、とりわけ英語は、それを行うため避けて通れない手段なのである。手段にすぎないとはいえ、それが不如意なため、わが国の潜在的能力が過小に評価され、世界の知的潮流に充分に貢献できないという結果をもたらしている。思いつきでない大胆な解決策が、言語教育において焦眉の急であることは明らかである。

(明石康「地球を読む一日本人の英語力」『読売新聞』)

○There are some sociologists(感) / 池新
There are some sociologists who claim that a strict division of household tasks between husband and wife is breaking down in western society. It is argued that the family structure is developing in such a way that women's and men's roles are becoming more 'symmetrical'. More women are working outside the home in addition to performing their traditional family roles, and men are increasing their involvement in the family, while maintaining their work commitments. This symmetrical family form is regarded as the most usual mode of family organization for the future. It implies a movement towards a balance between the involvement of husband and wife in the two spheres of domestic and paid work.
Such a view is now the common one in the current picture of family life as shown in the mass media. This picture is based on an interpretation of two particular socio-economic trends. Firstly, it is said that, since the number of women doing paid work has increased greatly, some sharing of household tasks is now quite common. Secondly, the growth in household technology is thought to have removed the dull labour from female domestic work, saved a great deal of time in its performance and rendered most tasks so simple that they can be undertaken by any household member. Such an account also appears to set the conditions for a symmetrical family form and the gradual breakdown of a domestic division of labour based on sex.
But although this view has been widely accepted, a vast amount of concrete evidence suggests otherwise. This evidence is of two kinds: American time-budget surveys, and sociological surveys and studies of housework and the housewife which are mainly British in origin.
In recent years a number of time-budget studies have measured time spent on housework and other activities such as paid work and leisure. Such research generally involves either asking those interviewed to record their activities for particular time intervals over a number of days, or having them keep diaries recording the number and nature of tasks performed and the amount of time spent on each. The findings are remarkably consistent.
One study, for example, completed in the late 1960's, shows that women who have no employment outside the home work an average of fifty-seven hours per week on such activities as preparing and clearing up after meals, washing, cleaning and tidying the house, taking care of children and other family members and shopping. More recent research shows women spending similar amounts of time on domestic tasks, to the extent that if it was paid employment it would certainly be regarded as full-time work.
For women employed outside the home, it appears that the more waged work they do, the fewer hours they spend on housework but the longer their overall work week. It has been reported that women who are in paid employment for more than thirty hours per week work a total of seventy-six hours in all, including an average of thirty-three hours spent on housework. Yet those husbands whose wives have the longest work weeks, have the shortest work weeks themselves. It appears that the husbands of wives in waged work do not spend any more time on housework than those with full-time housewives. This apparent lack of interest on the part of husbands in women's waged work is confirmed by other research, including a study of 3,500 couples in the United States. Wives employed outside the home worked many more hours every day than either their husbands or full-time housewives. They also spent about double their weekday time for housework doing domestic jobs on their days off, whereas husbands, and even full-time housewives, had the weekend for increased leisure.
This burden increases very much when there are very young children, or many children, in the family. In either case the wife's work week expands to meet the needs of the family. Research shows that in families with a child under one year old, the wife fully devoted to her housework spends nearly seventy hours a week in housework; nearly thirty hours of this is spent in child care. The typical husband spends five hours a week on this task, but reduces his time spent on other work around the house, such as home repairs, decorating and cleaning the outside of windows, so that his total domestic commitment does not increase. When the wife is employed outside the home for fifteen or more hours a week, the average husband spends two hours more per week on child care, increasing his total household labour to twenty hours. His wife spends over fifty hours on housework, indicating that the amount of time spent on housework by the employed woman increases greatly with the presence of young children.
In addition, researchers do not appear to regard the housework or childcare activities of husbands as particularly significant. They point out that men are more likely to be occupied ill this way after dinner. At this time child care typically consists of playing with and talking to children, which is not particularly hard. Moreover, while husbands are occupied in this way, their wives are tied up with the less-than-exciting after-dinner jobs. When men are involved with other domestic tasks it is frequently because their wives have to leave for employment after dinner and so are not themselves available to perform them.
Thus the activities of husbands are a form of back-up, or reserve labour, for a series of tasks which remain mainly the women's responsibility. Most married women still spend a considerable part of every day performing the necessary and most time-consuming work in the household. It is also noteworthy that the work week of domestic labourers is longer than that of the average person in the labour-force. Thus, it is clearly demonstrated that although waged women do less housework than unwaged women, this has little effect on the distribution of particular tasks within the home. Domestic labour is still very strictly separated along sex lines and this division appears to be constant across regions and nations. Time-budget data indicate that there has been no significant change in the sexual division of labour within the household.
One significant finding suggests that in the nineteenth century there was an alteration in the content, although not in the amount, of housework performed. Although technological changes were slower in reaching the home than the work-place, they did begin to enter the richer homes towards the end of the nineteenth century. However, major technological developments did not affect the households of most of the population until shortly after World War I. The significance of these developments cannot be neglected. As a certain sociologist says, 'Three things dramatically reduced dirty, heavy work for the housewife: gas and electricity for cooking, heating, and lighting; indoor running water; and the washing machine.' The use of household technology as seen in refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, and freezers, and also convenience foods have also made activities such as cooking and cleaning easier. This has led one researcher to suggest that technological changes in the home have been equal to, and as important as, those of the Industrial Revolution.
Thus in the 1920's a large proportion of a housewife's time would have been spent in heavy routine and boring jobs such as fetching, hand-washing and cleaning. Today, time is more likely to be spent in arranging activities, particularly child care and planning shopping expeditions. The continuing emphasis on the physical, moral and emotional stability of childhood as a significant part of mothering has obviously influenced the amount of time women spend on the bringing up of children. But despite the increased availability of household technology, the purchase of household equipment does not necessarily make woman's domestic role easier. Rather, it is suggested that the more technology present in a household, the more time spent in getting it, and its use and maintenance. For example, food mixers encourage the preparation of more ambitious meals, and washing machines, together with better levels of tidiness, mean that more washing is carried out more often. Indeed, Parkinson's Law seems to operate, keeping women's housework at a constant level despite improvements in household technology. The situation appears to have changed very little over the last eighty years or so, since the amount of time devoted by full-time housewives to housework has remained remarkably stable during this time. Moreover, household technology has been developed on an individual and family basis, thus increasing the particular nature of the domestic work which women perform. Despite the many developments made in this area, housework remains unsystematic and is performed in isolated, relatively inefficient units. For all these reasons it has been argued that instead of challenging the sexual division of labour within the home, modern technology has tended to support, and even strengthen, the traditional distribution of domestic roles.
symmetrical対称の time-budget生活時間の配分 work week週労働時間
Parkinson's Law イギリスの政治・経済学者パーキンソンが「仕事は使える時間いっぱいまでのびる」という前提から諷刺的に導いた経験則