rice or lice?

it's well known that japanese speakers of english have a hard time with the pronunciation of "l" and "r". this is because these sounds don't exist in the japanese language. this is one of the reasons why it's so important to start teaching esl to children at a young age. when they are very young, they are still learning how to pronounce words in their own language and so it's easy for them to learn how to pronounce words in another language as well. experts say that after age 6 the language acquisition part of our brain tends to shut off and learning a foreign language becomes much harder.
so even if my kids forget all of the english that i teach them when they move on to japanese elementary school, when they start to study english again in jr. high and high school, their pronunciation will be much better than students who didn't study english at an early age. because even if they forget the english words, their brain will still remember how to form the sounds correctly.
well, i've got this one student in my after school class who drives me crazy with this "joke" of his. every time i say the word "rice", he says "lice?" and makes a motion of picking at his hair.
now, it's pretty obvious to me that some teacher before me did this. probably the kids would incorrectly pronounce the word "rice" as "lice" and so the teacher would emphasize this (and make fun of the kids) by saying "lice?" and picking at his head. the boy's only 7 and has learned that this is a "funny" thing.
so what's so annoying about this is:
a. by doing this, he's making fun of japanese people. he is japanese.
b. as a native speaker, i'm correctly pronouncing the word "rice" and there should be no mistaking it for the word lice, thus making the "joke" incomprehensible.
it's hard to know what to do in this situation. i was hoping that by simply saying "that's not funny." and otherwise ignoring it, it would go away. but so far, it hasn't. i'd like to explain what is wrong about it, but he just doesn't have the english level to understand. i'm at a complete loss and i get really offended every time he says it.
Tags: esl, japanese, pronunciation

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