Rice

sustenance on the root. If you use your imagination and look carefully, you can see a tadpole in the foreground, at the base of the second plant from the right.

Young Russians embrace English

This article about English language in Russia serves as a great source of contrasts which we can use to evaluate English education in Japan and elsewhere. If what is written here is true, curriculum makers and teachers in Japan could learn alot.

I'd like to copy the whole thing, but that probably wouldn't be wise. Some of the better quotes are:

"The fact that our students start learning language at an early age (6-7 years old) helps a lot, as does the possibility to teach English in small groups of 8-10 students,"

Even university admission demands fluency and understanding. "You should be able to read, understand what you have read, answer the examiner's questions, talk with the examiner, speak on a chosen topic," Ludanik says.

The abiding impression left by Russia is of a place where English is taught as a means to an end rather than as an end in itself.

Teachers reprimanded for not singing national anthem

Does this kind of thing happen in other parts of the world? What would happen if a teacher in the US decided not to stand in protest of something?

I wonder how the government justifies punishing only teachers. Is it because they occupy such significant roles in society that the powers that be in Tokyo can't let it go?
Japan Today - News - Teachers reprimanded for not singing national anthem - Japan's Leading International News Network

games in the classroom

Using games at the beginning of class seems to be having some unforseen rewards. People, even cynical college students, seem to have fun with them. It serves as a war up for the day's lesson, and a review of features, mostly vocabulary, of other classes.

I have found most of the games I use by searching for ideas on the Internet. For example, today I input ESL, games, clothes in Google. The resulting games weren't exactly what I wanted, most of them being web-based kinds of vocabulary games, so I modified one that looked useful.

The game I modified was a rhythm game, where a group makes a rhythm by slapping their thighs once, clapping once, and snapping their fingers twice. The students sit in a circle, and while keeping the rhythm going, they say the name of an item of clothing that they already knew or learned in our class. My job was to count how many people could say an item of clothing, and each group got that total as a score. There were three groups, and they could compete.

Even though the scores were quite different the first time around, they became more uniform as groups got more practice.

Toastmasters speech contest

I teach a course on English speech making at the Community College here from time to time. It is interesting to me that there are several Toastmasters groups around Japan that focus on English speech making. This is an article about a fellow who won one of the most recent events.