EFL in Japan

Lazy Girl

2008-04-17T15:20:00.002+09:00

Light

2008-04-17T15:19:00.002+09:00

Poetry on my door

2008-04-17T15:15:00.006+09:00

When I was in the States last March, I bought a set of magnets that have words written on them. The words can then be arranged on a piece of metal to make phrases. I have left them on my door, and have invited students to make some of their own poetry. I'll share a few of them with you.

Consumers shun frozen food amid 'gyoza' poisonings | The Japan Times Online

2008-02-08T14:46:00.000+09:00

Don't know how much y'all are paying attention to this circus, but it appears that some poison somehow found its way into some frozen gyoza. No one died from it, and it is certainly not a widespread problem, by that I mean to other frozen foods, but it has gotten so much press that it has become rediculous. No one is on the TV telling us that bad diet and inactivity kill tens of thousands every year.

Come on, frozen prepared stuff in supermarkets isn't healthy to begin with. The poison just makes it a little more unhealthy.

Eat healthy! Exercise! Live longer! Find out about "Exercise is Medicine"
Consumers shun frozen food amid 'gyoza' poisonings | The Japan Times Online

"I want to get better at English"

2008-02-08T13:54:00.000+09:00

This research is from "goo Research", an online research firm. They teamed up with Yomiuri Newspaper to do an investigation , and published it at the site below with the title, "I want to get better at English" 86% Women are more serious (my translation)

This research was conducted by the NTT Resonant Internet Questionnaire Service (goo Research) from December 21 to the 25th. 549 10 to 30 year old men and women responded. There was a 1:1 ratio of men to women. 40% were school students, 28% were permanently employed people, 12% were homemakers.

When asked to respond to the question, "Do you think you would like to be able to use more English," 86% answered yes, while 14% answered that they do not think that.

When asked when they think they would like to be able to use more English, 44% said that they think that while watching movies; 44% answered that it was when they were traveling; 31% said it was when they use the Internet; 36% said it was when they were studying for tests; 34% said when they were reading English newspapers, magazines and books, 32% said it was when a "foreigner" asked them directions, 27% said it was when they use English at work; 7% said it was when they study abroad, and 3% was other.

When asked, "What English language skill do you feel is difficult to acquire," 78% said speaking skills, 61% listening skills, 40% writing skills, 29% reading skills; 2% said other; and 1% said that there was no special difficulty.

To the question, " Were you satisfied or dissatisfied in general with the your junior and senior high school English language education," 3% were satisfied, 23% were somewhat satisfied, 49% were somewhat dissatisfied, and 25% were dissatisfied.

The respondents were asked, "If you were to study English outside of a school classroom, what would you choose to do." Their responses included:
Language school or English conversation school (Women 51%, Men 42%)
Radio or TV courses at home (Women 26%, Men 21%)
Study abroad with language as the goal ( Women 21%, Men 13%)
Home tutor (Women 5%, Men 4%)
Commonly available texts and study materials ( Women 28%, Men 31%)
Internet study (Women 16%, Men 31%)
I have no intention to study outside of school (Women 16%, Men 14%)
Other (Women 2%, Men 3%)

First, I don't think this is terribly reliable data because of the small sample and the bias in types of respondents that they got, but it is interesting to look at.

I was most interested in the data on whether people were satisfied with their education in junior and senior high school. Regardless of the sample population, there was an overwhelming dissatisfaction among the respondents.

第13回［トピＱ・ネット調査］＜英語について＞｜gooリサーチポータル

Ferris Wheels

2008-01-29T09:35:00.001+09:00

Sometimes this country is just so cute I want to pinch its cheeks and talk in baby talk. This morning on the radio one of the regular programs, called "Number One in Japan," broadcast a show on the biggest Ferris wheel in the country. That happens to be in Fukuoka and is called Sky Dream Fukuoka. They said that it's a 20-minute ride and offers a great view of the city. They said that it had been the largest in Asia, but now there are larger ones, the largest being in China. It appears by looking at the Wikipedia that the largest one is in construction in Peking in anticipation of the Olympics there this year. The Fukuoka wheel is now eighth in the world, but Japan has eight of the world's top 20 largest Ferris wheels.

Let's Diabetic!

2008-01-28T11:51:00.000+09:00

Today was the last Japan/US Comparative Culture class of the 2007-08 school year. We ended with individual presentations on topics that the students chose. They were to choose a point for comparison based on our discussions in class, or after consultation with me. They did a pretty good job, talking about manners, a general overview of the class, tipping, food culture, and language varieties respectively. The manners topic was a little thin and focussed mostly on table manners with the presenter finally decrying the state of Japanese manners.

The food culture topic was lots of fun, with the presenter discussing sugar consumption in the US and Japan. He said that sugar provided about 8.4% of the total calories consumed in Japan, and 16 to 20% in the American diet. One of the students exclaimed, "Let's Diabetic!" I had to laugh. It was the perfect combination of bad English grammar and timing. Had a great time with this class this year.

Japans top school uses English to lure Asians from US

2008-01-24T09:02:00.000+09:00

The programme will each year admit 15 students for master's degrees and eight for PhDs, aimed at students from other Asian countries who plan to work in public policy, diplomacy and journalism.

Students from other Asian countries? What, given up on their own students?
Japans top school uses English to lure Asians from US

Center Exams, 2008

2008-01-22T13:39:00.000+09:00

It was the season, and another rite of passage for 543,385 would be college students was conducted on this last weekend. This was the weekend of the Heisei Year 20 Center Exam. This exam is offered all over the country at exactly the same time. There are exams in History, Geography, Civics, Math, Science, Japanese and English. There are other foreign language exams offered, but very few people take them. Depending on a student's college entrance requirements, they choose which tests they must take.

The English test has two parts, a written test and a listening test. The written test is an eighty-minute exam and the listening is thirty minutes. Both are multiple choice. As a test, I am still baffled by many things. First are the aims of the exam. If it is supposed to be a test of language learned in junior or senior high school, the current exam doesn't make sense. This year there were no clearly ambiguous questions as there have been in years past, but it certainly isn't communicative. The Ministry of Education states that their aims for junior and senior high English are to get students to a communicate level in the language. This exam tests nothing of the kind. It would have no direct connection to the English programs at any college, either. It is a self-referential instrument for the purpose of discriminating between students. Since there is no transparency in the system, there is no evidence that the test is reliable, that it accurately measures language ability, or that it measures or predicts academic success.

That said, the logistics of the exam are a marvel, a tribute to planning and lots of money. Take for example the English listening test alone. According to the Japanese press, 498,800 took the test simultaneously. Test takers come to the test site at the appointed time. Tardiness means you forfeit the opportunity to take the exam and must wait until the next year. Each student gets a test booklet, a mark sheet, a personal audio player, and an IC chip memory card. At the exact time all students begin the listening test, a magical experience from a proctor's-eye-view. They don their earphones and silently obey the recorded instructions. Pages are turned in unison, answers marked, and pauses taken. Then in a synchronous movement, all of the test takers remover their earphones, place them and their pencils on the desk close their test booklets, and face front. All is silence. In a technological miracle, of the individual audio players distributed for the test, only 288 malfunctioned. Last year 1,254 machines were faulty. Four times fewer glitches in one year.

The exams were a logistical and technological miracle, but a pedagogical nightmare.

Perfume-- a movie review

2008-01-21T11:07:00.000+09:00

Last Friday was movie night, and the selection was Perfume:The story of a murderer. The cinematography, costumes and narration were good. The story line as average, but the acting was below average. In general, a nice looking film, but not so well acted.

The story is set in mid-18th century France, mostly Paris, where a child, Jean, is born to a fish-monger mother, and begins his wretched life being discarded into the fish guts and filth that was a Paris street. He is raised in an orphanage and sold to a tanner. His only joy is odor, as he is born with an extraordinary sense of smell.

He survived working in the tanner long enough to be given delivery tasks, and one day he had the good fortune to make a visit to a perfumer owned by an Italian had-been creator of scents. He demonstrates his knack of identifying and creating perfumes so well that he is bought from the tanner and begins to learn the perfume trade.

Jean, while being gifted with a sense of smell, is bereft of any other human qualities aside from the ability to survive and the desire to preserve scent. He is an idiot savant with no social skills, no emotions other than a passion for smell, and no real concern for others. He accidentally kills a young plum seller in the dark streets of Paris, and after his ecstatic sampling of the odors from her recently killed body, he becomes obsessed with being able to capture those smells. No romantic attraction to the girl, no remorse in having killed such an exquisite being, just a desire to be able to possess the scent. He killed more young women, filled only with the obsession of collecting their scents.

Any joy or happiness in the film was short lived. Even the joy that inadvertently he brought to people through his creations was brief. His unintentional git of happiness also came at the expense of great sorrow and loss.

It should have been a better movie, really, although the story line expects us to accept a fantasy tale on top of the fiction. The acting, aside from a few bright spots from Dustin Hoffman, Alan Rickman, and the narrator John Hurt, was vacant and wooden, and in the case of the main character, almost non-existent.

A visually rich film with an interesting premise, poorly acted in general.

How Japanese ESL learners process English mathematical equations

2008-01-17T10:22:00.000+09:00

This morning, in our last English class of this school year, we were doing a mathematical warm up where I would say a long series of equations and the students would keep a running tally of the total and would say the answer at the end. (Like 3+5-4x2... I know that on paper it would be done differently, but they were just hearing the running equation.) They did a fine job of keeping up with an ever-increasing pace, but what was interesting to me was how the answer always kept coming out in Japanese. I was saying the numbers in English, and they were producing a Japanese answer. So I asked them how they were processing it in their heads.

The reply surprised me. They said that they were doing the calculations in their head with an abacus, a skill that they learned in Japanese, and so the numbers were becoming just numbers, not words. They would visualize the beads on an abacus, and the totals were coming out in Japanese as they would in their abacus classes. Great stuff!

Kagami Biraki- mirror opening

2008-01-11T10:27:00.000+09:00

Today is the eleventh day after the new year in Japan, and today marks "kagami biraki," or "mirror opening" in direct translation. What it means is that families around the country who have decorated their houses with kagami mochi, or round mochi similar to mirrors that are used in Shinto shrines to symbolize the god Amaterasu, break them apart on this day.

There was an interesting discussion of the event on the radio this morning. It seems that the event was originally celebrated on the eighth day after the new year, but after the son of a Shogun died on the eighth, it was moved to the eleventh. Of course, at that time they used the old solar/lunar calendar rather than the Gregorian calendar that is in popular use today, so it is even different from that day, really.

The word biraki, which actually means open or spread, is used because breaking or dividing carry negative connotations. When the tradition first started, knives were not used, and instead the mochi was broken with a wooden hammer, like the top of a sake cask, an act which is also called "kagami biraki. "

People bake or fry the mochi and eat it with salt or soy sauce. I like it with cheese!

"Sell the house"

2008-01-10T12:23:00.000+09:00

I'm back with a post, finally, and a book review.

I recently got a book by Celeste Heiter, Ganbatte Means Go For It!: or... How to Become an English Teacher in Japan, published by Things Asian Press, 2002.

Ms. Heiter was teaching in Japan for two years, and in that time she was thoughtful enough to put together sufficient information to complete this book, a real help for newcomers to the country. Some of the topics that would be most helpful would be her list of ten "must do's." They are all spot on, especially her encouragement to learn some of the language before coming. My father remarked once when he visited that a working knowledge of the language would be a must to live here. Her "survival tips" are really helpful, too.

The one problem I had with the book came at the very end, where she writes, "Every foreigner who has ever lived in Japan realizes at some point that it is time to go." Go where? I think she means "home." Which for me and lots of other expats doesn't mean where we were before we came to Japan. That is a problem for non-Japanese living here, the "When you going home," mentality.

On the back cover of her book she has a quote by Mark Twain:

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the one you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore, Dream, Discover."

In answer to her back cover I am going to use a quote from "Apocalypse Now":

SELL THE HOUSE
 SELL THE CAR
 SELL THE KIDS
 FIND SOMEONE ELSE
 FORGET IT
 I'M NEVER COMING BACK
 FORGET IT

Happy New Year

2008-01-01T11:10:00.000+09:00

Happy 2008! I am looking forward to a great year with many things starting, mostly starting with getting my attitude back in order.

There are so many things we can do with a positive mental attitude. I saw a movie trailer that I recommend heartily, and have been really enjoying a podcast that has gotten me super motivated and moving in great directions.

The Secret has been a great kick in the pants for me.

Also, Morning Coach has a great daily podcast. Great juice to get your day started.

I'm looking forward to incorporating some of these activities in my classes, too.

Let's get this party started!

New Community College Classes

2007-11-14T15:39:00.000+09:00

Last night we started another 6-week session of classes in the Yokkaichi University Community College. I'll be teaching the entry-level course and the advanced class after that. Makes for a long night, but I sure like being with those learners. They are dedicated enough to come out in the cold and the dark of night to learn some English. The first class has organized a get-together in December at a restaurant near here.

In the advanced class we talked about friends and friendship. One fellow seems to dominate the discussions, so I may have to go back to dividing up the groups for some group discussions and then bring them all back for a review of their. We have a few more students this time, so it would be easier.

Brighten Someone's Day

2007-11-12T16:17:00.000+09:00

Recently I've been trying to be more positive. I think I was getting wrapped up in this culture of negativity that seems to be going around. More on that later, but I was attracted by this list of 70 ways to brighten someone's day. It is a great list, as if anyone needed a list. I do many of the things on this list as a matter of course, like waving to kids in the next car. They usually explode with laughter and tell their parents that the gaijin next door is waving at them. The parents probably want to have me arrested, but that is the kind of negativity that I want to get away from.

American and Japanese Comparative Culture

2007-11-12T15:45:00.000+09:00

This semester I am teaching a comparative culture course that focuses on Japan and America and their respective similarities and differences. For the past two classes we have talked about America's "gun culture" and the factors that cause gun violence at such a horrific rate in the US while other heat packin' people don't have nearly the difficulties.

There is gun ownership in Japan, both legal and illegal, but there is a good bit of hunting that goes on, especially out in the hinterland where I live. Hunters use traps as well as guns, and several of the locals that I know own them. I also know a Canadian citizen who went through the necessary procedures to own a gun, too. When you no longer want to hunt, then you take your gun to the police and they cut it into bits while you watch, according to the story that I heard from a one-time hunter.

The students were very interested in the class and there was quite a bit of discussion. One of the students asked about gun ownership as a deterrent. I did not know about the research on that topic, so I looked it up. It appears that there is no evidence that gun ownership deters crime, so I'll let them know about that next week.

This week's classes: Giving Directions

2007-11-08T12:04:00.000+09:00

In this week's classes for the nurses, we did how to give and receive street directions. This unit, although useful for the knowledge about how streets work in the US and vocabulary, is a little dull. Maybe not just a little. Pretty dull.

To liven things up we used a street map of San Diego, California for some realia, but even that was a little dull. When I worked at schools in Kumamoto, we would make our own maps of places around the university, but there is nothing around this university unless we could make a map of parking spaces, parked cars, bamboo groves, woods, and the school buildings. But my judgement says that would be worse than maps of San Diego.

Article 9 and the Japanese Constitution Debate

2007-11-07T15:25:00.000+09:00

This semester I'm teaching a seminar where all of the members of off the sections will participate in a debate about Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution. Last week we had a great lecture by one of the professors about Article 9. It's a very short article, but it generates alot of controversy.

Article 9:
Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. 2) In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.

This sounds great, but there are alot of people out there, probably arms dealers, manufacturers, oil companies, lots of folks, who would love to see Japan spend more on arms and war. Since the professor who gave the lecture last week spoke about how ten of the best arguments for changing the article were not really very good, I tried to help the students find some other, possibly better reasons for changing it.

The ten reasons conservatives give for changing the constitution were:
1) the present constitution was forced on us by the US
2) the country made the constitution; the country can change the constitution
3) other countries change theirs
4) this peace constitution is unpractical
5) this constitution should be made more timely
6) we have to participate internationally with a functioning military
7) we should add articles concerning privacy and the environment
8) what would we do if we were attacked by terrorists?
9) what would we do if we were attacked by North Korea?
10) under the present constitution we have become selfish and lost our patriotic attitude

Then the professor told us about each of the ten points and how they were not grounds for changing the constitution. Today we spent the class period brainstorming new reasons for changing the constitution.

Happy Halloween!

2007-11-01T10:43:00.000+09:00

Just finished with a class this morning. As par usual for this time of year, I did a unit on Halloween. It is becoming bigger every year here in Japan, an obvious way for a variety of merchants to market their wares, so I decided a long time ago that it would be an interesting look at American culture at least to talk about it and learn some of the vocabulary associated with it. I usually make a jack-o-lantern with a domestic pumpkin and some sweets for the class, and we have a good time talking about various related themes. Today we talked about how to make a jack-o-lantern and superstitions.

Today was special, though! Today for the first time in 16 years that I have been doing this unit on Halloween, students brought costumes and sweets--UNSOLICITED! I didn't say anything about it ahead of time, and three students showed up wearing witch hats, and four students brought sweets to give to the members of class. I was very surprised, and very very happy. We had a great time.

sacred stone

2007-10-31T14:04:00.001+09:00

sacred stone
Originally uploaded by touzanka

As I pedal or scoot to work I often try to take roads that I haven't before. On this particular road that I have been taking recently I found this stone that is decked out in a straw rope, a kind of decoration usually associated with shrines and the like. There are six acorns set on the stone frame surrounding the base of the stone, very cute addition. I'd like to do a rubbing of it sometime. There is often something inscribed on these, but I couldn't make out what was on this one.

japp candy

2007-10-12T09:41:00.001+09:00

japp candy
Originally uploaded by touzanka

You ever seen "Japp" candy? One of the profs here was in Northern Europe somewhere, and she brought this back with a bag of assorted goodies. It was chocolate, and I guess it's pretty popular. I Googled "Japp, candy" and got 56,000 hits. Lots of them had to do with the advertisements for the stuff.

Does the name of this candy seem unusual to anyone else?

Debate Class

2007-10-10T09:46:00.000+09:00

On Wednesday mornings I have a seminar in which this semester's theme is debate, and specifically debate on Article Nine of the Japanese Constitution. It is still early days, so we are discussing what debate is and how to go about it. The students in my group don't have any experience in debate, so it is a little difficult for them to imagine how to go about it.

Later in the semester we'll have a couple of units on the constitution and Article nine specifically, and then toward the end of the semester, we'll have a inter-seminar debate. I'm looking forward to the event.

Japan to fingerprint, photograph foreigners from Nov 20

2007-10-05T12:12:00.000+09:00

There are all kinds of possibilities with all this for foreigners in Japan and for anybody anywhere. Seems to me that this technological invasion has progressed far enough. My strategy is to give them the boringest show I can give 'em.

Japan Today - News - Japan to fingerprint, photograph foreigners from Nov 20

90,000 Korean students went abroad for language study in 2006

2007-10-05T11:02:00.000+09:00

This article says that more than 90,000 students went abroad last year to study language in 2006. Number one destination was the US, China second, and third was Japan. Interesting numbers there, too.

There is an interesting feature on this site, you can listen to a machine-read version of the article. At the top of the article there are buttons you can push to hear a male or female version of the article. It was funny that abroad was spelled aboard three times, and was read that way by the machine. Of course it was, but the error was made more obvious and distracting because a human reader would probably have said the correct word even if it were mispelled, while the machine had no such decision making power.
donga.com [english donga]