purple and green

The flowers are a variety of legume that some farmers have growing in their fields. It's about at the end of its flowering season, but I really like the contrasting colors.

purple and green Originally uploaded by Yokkaichi 1.

Motivation from link on "EFL Geek"

I had the good fortune to have a comment from EFL Geek on my photo of barley. Followed the link to that blog and was pleasantly surprised as the most recent blog was about one of my favorite topics, motivation. It was actually about another blogger, Karen Garcia, who was writing about motivation.

I was initially struck by the idea of class norms. Ms. Garcia defines norms as "unstated/unspoken rules in a group." I immediately started trying to catalog the norms in just one of my classes. The list would be huge, but here are some that I can think of.

1. The students,
a. when entering the classroom should find a seat to sit in.
b. should be there before the chime rings. (Yes, there are chimes in Japanese universities. That's another norm.)
c. should have thier text book.
d. should feel free to talk until the teacher calls the class to order.
e. should not sleep during class
f. should not eat or drink
g. should not yawn
h. should not wear hats

2. The teacher should,
a. be on time, but not too on time. (a little later is better up to about 10 minutes, even though some teachers are much later than that.)
b. wear appropriate attire
c. do most or all of the talking
d. know everything about the language
e. be there to tell everyone what is right and wrong
f. not eat or drink during class
g. not sit on the desks at any time
h. use Japanese/not use Japanese (varies from class to class)
i. maintain a large social distance from the students

These are just a few of the probably infinite number of norms in my classrooms. This sounds like an interesting area of research to me.

barley field

Took this on the way to work this morning. I really like the color. Barley, ready for harvest.

barley field Originally uploaded by Yokkaichi 1.

Do's and Don'ts for Japan

Last night in my late-night Community College class, the students came up with a list of Do's and Don'ts for visitors to Japan. The list was extensive and very good, so I thought I would include the points that they covered. If some of them are difficult to understand, it's because of my shorthand for what the students said.

Do's
1. take a gift when visiting someone's home
2. turn off your cell phone or use manner mode on trains and busses
3. bow alot
4. say that your gift, when you give one, isn't very good
5. give your seat to a handicapped, elderly, or otherwise needy person on busses or trains
6. make a like while waiting for public transportation
7. stand to the left or right on escalators (There are differences between geographical areas and customs for standing on escalators. Watch the crowds and follow them.)
8. change your wardrobe in June and October

Don'ts
1. kiss in public or when meeting someone for the first time
2. wear a white dress to a wedding
3. smoke or talk loudly on a bus or train
4. give potted plants to someone who is staying in the hospital
5. stand on any threshold
6. go in a host's kitchen unless invited
7. tip
8. eat in the locker room of a public bath

Extensive reading resouces

I've been intersted in incorporating an extensive reading component in my classes here at the university. I haven't been able to work out some of the logistical problems, the biggest being the distribution of reading material. If I use graded readers, which I would like to do, I would be responsible for them. The library would only be responsible if the students took them out of the library following the standard procedures. I would be tasked with controling the flow of material, and I'm not so good at that. I found some great materials, though. There are a couple of articles in the Furl window at the bottom of the page.

Check out The Extensive Reading Pages for a wealth of information on the subject.

NET's in Hong Kong and the economy of "native speakers"

The Standard, the newspaper that bills itself as "China's Business Newspaper," ran an article today, "Gratuity raise aims to halt NET exodus." The article says that NET's, Native English Teachers, are leaving the country in droves, because of the devaluation of the Hong Kong dollar, and a general reduction in wages that happened in 2004. The whole senario begs several different ethical and professional issues.

First the article says that 47% of the teachers refused to renew their contracts at the end of that last school year, and that these contracts, "...are usually for two years." If the aim of the program is to recruit loyal teachers to educate young people, why are the contracts for two years? If the employment system of Hong Kong is similar to that of Japan, and I don't know that it is, then NET's are hired for two years while their Japanese, or in this case Chinese counterparts are given employment until they retire. This issue is not addressed in the article, but it makes me wonder why the foreigners are hopping on airplanes and their Chinese colleagues are not.

Another reason they may not be able to retain qualified teachers is because they are not invested in the system.
Hui explained that since NETs could not be promoted to senior ranks, it was necessary to provide them with more incentives to continue working in Hong Kong. ``Some of the NET teachers have been working in Hong Kong since 1998. There is no incentive for them to continue working here,'' he said.

Cannot be promoted to senior ranks? Sounds like Japan's JET program. There is no promotion here either. The non-Japanese teachers exist in a personnel limbo where they are covered neither by civil servant labor laws or private entity labor laws. They cannot be promoted based on their employment records, and their necks are on the block after two years. At least it sounds like the Hong Kong system is working to build in some incentives to stay.

I am sorry that this system exists, where certain nationalities (and not others) are considered to be professional qualifications. As for teachers leaving for higher wages, that can't really be helped. Workers often move to where more lucrative wages are available. I heard a story on the news this morning about how digital animators in India are being paid well, so workers are flocking to that field. I am not sure, however, that making language teachers into migrant laborers actually works in the best intersts of the learners who are supposed to be served. It is a shame that instead of helping qualified professionals invest themselves in a community, governments scurry around adjusting salary levels enough to be competitive, but not enough to draw the ire of tax payers. If governments worked at developing a dedicated, loyal pool of professionals who are invested in their communities, the issues of currency values would instantly be moot. These people would be home, and their wages would be worth just as much as their colleagues and their neighbors. Instead they aim at the lowest common discriminatory denominator.

Blurring the lines--Last name first?

The top news stories for the past couple of days have been about the whereabouts of a mercenary named Akihiko Saito, who was last known to be one of the armed people accompanying a group of trucks in Iraq, and two men who stole a sidearm from a police officer in Japan. Mr. Saito is a sad story, but I will ignore that for now.

The story that attracted my attention was that about the two people who are said to have stolen the service revolver from a police officer in Gifu Prefecture. The police officer whose weapon was stolen, suggested that the two who stole it were foreigners, and now the whole country is on the lookout for two Brazilian men. The fact that they were foreigners receives great attention here, but their names when the are given, are given in the order that a Japanese name would be. Look at the link for the article above. I quote from it here:

The police said they have put two Brazilian residents of Aichi Prefecture — Eguti Mauro De Souza, 22, and Eguti Jorge Edgar De Souza, 26 — on a nationwide wanted list as suspects.

Their names begin with Eguti, a family name. Why would their names be given in this order? Because they are of a Japanese ethnic background? The names were given this way on NHK radio this morning, too. In the Japanese language media, for example in the Mainichi Newspaper, they are given in the same order, but in katakana (a syllabary used for, among other things, writing foreign names).

After searching for the name De Souza at brazzil.com, I found that it is a family name, usually spelled with a lower-case d.

This name order is curious, and it makes me wonder what the conventions are for names in the media.

Supplemental materials for new text

This year we have begun using Interchange Intro, 3rd edition, published by Cambridge University Press, written by Jack Richards. It is a more practical text than the one we had been using for the past four years, but I have to start all over again in building supplemental resources for it. It has unit quizzes in the back of the teacher's book, but they aren't complete. They don't cover everything, and do not include speaking assessments at all. I'm in today working on the first unit quiz that I'll give next week. The hard part is working out the speaking assessment. The logistics of it are really the hard part.

Kims game

I played a "kims game" with the class today. A "kims game" is any kind of game where the players have to remember a set of items to be recalled at a certain time. There are various ways to play it. Today I set a collection of things that one might carry in one's pockets. I included 13 items, a cigarette pack, a small dictionary, a schedule, a five dollar bill, a USB drive, keys, sunglasses, a pen, a pencil, breath mints, gum, a cell phone, and a lighter. I don't smoke, so I scrounged an empty cigarette pack from one of my smoking colleagues. The rest of the stuff came from student comments and actual stuff that they pulled out of their pockets the other day during class.

The class was broken up into teams of five or six and each team had two minutes to look at the items before they returned to their tables to cooperate and down what they saw. Some of the groups tried different strategies to remember what they saw. One group broke the items into smaller groups and assigned each member with the job of remembering one of the smaller groups. I did not see anyone count the number of items to make sure that they had a complete catalog of items when they compiled their lists.

Most of the groups got 12 or 13 items, and nearly all of the items were spelled correctly, without use of texts or dictionaries. Actually one group used the dictionary in the group of items during their two minutes to look up the spelling of two words. Very resourceful, I thought.

Tuesday Classes

On Tuesday I teach two classes in the morning and one at night from 8:10 to 9:40. The two classes in the morning are "conversation" classes.

Today's classes were the first excursion into the textbook. I spent the first gatherings talking about individual information, like birthdays, zodiac signs and blood types. It was good to have them talk about themselves in an introductory way. Some of the students did not know their zodiac signs in either English or Japanese.

The first unit in the textbook that we are using, "J-Talk," by Yoshida and Ziolkowski, is on names. That is convenient, because I had worked up and used over the years a unit on names that is very similar to the material in the text. There is some information that it does not cover that I will supliment with my own material, but it is a nice introduction. The students get an opportunity to think about their names, what they mean and where they come from, in addition to names from around the world. One nice feature of most of the classes here is that there are international students. That makes the conversation much more global.

Bad cold

Recovering after a really nasty cold. Hadn't been ill for a whole year, and then wham... Ended up with bronchitis. Thank goodness it was Golden Week. I spent the time recuperating. I missed one class because of fever, but that was it.