I’d love to hear more about Jennifer’s action research study on Japanese use–always a fascinating topic

Maybe some day you can post the commercial videos with a disclaimer–if you’re easily offended, don’t push “play”

I’m sure many of us would enjoy them!

This post made me miss my high school English language learners from Texas! They were from 12 different countries including Japan, but the ones from Mexico were the ones I had to watch out for! I’m so glad I was never easily offended and could laugh things off. They did the same thing, except with post it notes so it was easy to remove! Some of their journal articles, though, still had evidence. I remember doing an incredibly cool project they loved where each student chose a commercial and identified the stereotypes, hyperboles, and biases. They wrote papers identifying these then proposing how they would improve the commercial rectifying the things they identified. Then they actually redid the commercial. I have some incredible essays and video commercials that I can’t show because of one little thing here or there since they got all their dorm buddies to participate! Some weren’t even in my class but we were a tight community since there were 70 of them. Arggh they’re my favorite commercials I still treasure and get a laugh from and are pure genius but they will remain off my blog so as not to offend.

This group is also the first class to have given me a nickname. I didn’t learn about it until I discovered that we had a seating chart. Everyone had nicknames, actually. Mine was “barabara hochikisu” which was a nice play on Barbara Hoskins, I thought. Apparently, my fast English felt like staples shooting across the room (barabara meaning scattered and hochikisu meaning stapler, for readers not familiar with Japanese).

The seating chart also FINALLY solved the mystery of which of Takashi Takahashi’s names was his given name and which was his family name

One of my first experiences with Japanese boys of that age was when they were visiting my place of work for the typical 2-day package… My lesson was supposed to be ‘Homestay’ English. Their class teacher had two groups to supervise and once we got started, she disappeared to the other group.

Three of my 24 decided to make paper planes with their worksheets and started a trend. We ended up having a paper-plane throwing contest. Their teacher returned, watched for a couple of minutes and asked me why we (=I) had departed from the agreed upon (and paid-for) lesson. I explained. She just said “I see” and encouraged the use of target language, organized the boys into teams and helped explain the competition rules.

I was pretty new to teaching in Japan, and I learned a couple of things – the importance of group-work, teenage boys are the same the world over, and most importantly: experienced teachers observe, ask “why?” and then (re)act.

Funnily enough, the boys’ teacher said they’d probably spoken more English during that 90 minutes than they had during the prior year. She thought it was probably because they forgot it was supposed to be an English lesson!