Half My Students Can't and Won't Speak English

The Japanese pre-college English education system is not about learning how to speak or understand English, it's merely about memorizing grammar rules and vocabulary and doing translation work. Consequently, the students at this school who are not in the English department have had almost no experience speaking or listening to English, and can only read and write it. Yet they are required to take a year of English Conversation classes. Many of them communicate with me in Japanese in class (if at all), or if they realize I don't actually speak Japanese that well, they use their dictionaries to create questions or sentences, write them down, raise their hands, then point to the sentence when I get over there. I always have to tell them, "Use your mouth." The whole thing is pretty dumb. I bet most of them have no idea why they have to take English courses. As a consequence of this bullshit, it becomes extremely difficult for me to teach them any actual English, because they are so unused to using it. Most of what I teach in these classes should be review and pretty easy for them, since they've been studying English for six years or so. But they can barely master "This is a ball" or "What color do you like?" They basically have the same apparent skill level as the seven-year-olds I teach on Saturdays, even though they have a wealth of knowledge in their brains.

For my non-English majors English Conversation course, I asked them to do a show and tell about one of the projects they made this semester. I told them to use simple English, and I expect sentences like "This is my art project. I made a picture of a zebra. I used pencils and paper," etc. But doing that requires thinking in English, which they can't do. So most of them just write sentences in Japanese and plug it into Google Translate or something similar. This is an example of what they come up with:

The project which I undertook is a picture-book. The unicorn made a hero's story. It became on group by three persons, division of roles was carried out, respectively, and it made. I bacame the charge describing an illustration. When drawing an illustration, the crayon and the colored pencil were used. Colorful and lovely use of color was used using many colors. The expression of the unicorn also took care so that it might draw lovelily (not sure where they got that adverb...). It took care also about fine places. such as a bodily color and accessories attached to a tail. It was able to cooperate in three persons and was able to make the very lovely picture-book. A result is also very satisfactory. Thank you for listening!

Japanese is a very formal language, so few things get translated as informally as they would be in English. So like, whatever the Japanese expression is for "I had fun" gets translated into "I experienced a pleasant time" or something unwieldy like that. It's terrible.