What to say...
It's been about 4 months since I've arrived in Japan and so many things have happened that it's difficult to sum it all up. Everyday I have had new experiences and interactions with my students and coworkers. I'm so privileged to be in a new place and be well taken care of. I'm doing my best to help the students learn, but each teacher really has their own style and many times I find myself being a human tape recorder.
How is language learned? As I slowly learn Japanese and my students slowly learn English, it is interesting to find possible differences in what they must be feeling and thinking about language learning. To sum up what a classroom lesson might look like, it is basically learning a grammar point or two, seeing it used in a conversation, and then repeating the words being learned over and over again both for pronunciation and memorization. Yeah, not the most stimulating thing in the world is it? But regardless of how effective I think the textbooks or teaching methods to be, the students are most definitely used to it. I cringe every time I can sense a student thinking "gahh why do we have to do this?" and I wish we could focus on other things. No wonder some of them hate English. Grammar is important, but at the end of the day, I think communicating, no matter how you go about it, is more important than the rules of word order. Pronunciation might be taken a tad too seriously as well, but I'm not sure how explaining different versions of English based on country will go over. Language is ever changing and while the basic rules may stay the same, the connotation of the words put together is difficult to teach. How do you teach someone to feel a language? Then again, my students are only in the very beginnings of language so I'm probably jumping a bit too far ahead. I can see the frustration for some of them though. They are technically still in the little baby level of language because they have only been studying a few years. They are all at different levels as they should be because they are all individuals, but the school system does not allow for that. I definitely need to start thinking of new ways in which to shake things up lesson wise while still adhering to the system in place.
Sorry, I'm not sure why I decided to write about this, I kind of just started typing away, so here you are, my brain babble for the night. I will do my best to blog more often from here on out. I'm also considering starting a food blog of all my food encounters since I've pretty much been taking a picture of everything I've been eating XD
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