"English only!"
The more I hear myself saying that to my Japanese English major students in English Conversation I (for first year students) and II (for second year students), the more I doubt that they are obeying my command. I feel completely sure that all of the students, even the shyest and least skilled or experienced with English can do almost everything we do in 95% English, because when I am talking with any of them, we can communicate somehow if I force the students to persist in trying to do it. The problem is when I'm with one group of students, the other groups tend to either lose focus and start chattering in Japanese or fall silent. I warn them that their grades will go down if they speak fluent Japanese in class, but they don't seem to care about their grades or believe my warnings. I suppose some of them are mostly using mostly English, but the longer the semester goes, the more I lose my confidence in myself and trust in the students about it. I do enjoy spending the 90 mins each week with the kids! They are funny and cute and interesting. Last week I could learn the names of some of their grandmothers (rather old-fashioned sounding, as in Shigeko or Natsue or Shizuko) and the backgrounds of their own names (rather clever of their parents, as in taking one kanji from two different siblings to combine to make the name of a third), and I could learn what aspects of Japanese culture they would satire if they did a satire (the junior-senior relationship, the need to work too hard, etc.). I could practice a little with them using words like "darn" or expressions like "Do you believe in X?" and using gestures like showing half your teeth to express embarrassment or fear etc., or making adjectives by adding "-ed" to nouns (as in, "the sweatered boy," or "the pony-tailed girl" or "the masked ones,"), and so on. I do enjoy the students and our time together. I do wish I could do a more effective job of teaching English conversation!
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Jefferson Peters (JP)
Can you find me in the picture above? Archives
December 2023
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