I need your help
From this April, I’m teaching a research class. There are sixteen high school students and all of them want to study things related to English.
One girl wants to correspond with someone in another country. Can you find somebody? And three of the sixteen students want to improve their English speaking skills. During this year, could you come to my school and join my class as a volunteer? Your first language doesn’t have to be English.
Comments
As for the correspondence, I’ve already recommended her to use a computer, so it is ok now. Thanks.
Yes, Ruedi. It is a new class. There are about 240 3-year-students and only 10 teachers have to assist them. However, it is not hard work because we don’t have to teach most of them. They decide their own themes and reasearch by themselves. But some of my students want to improve their English speaking skills, so I need to help them during the class. The assistant language teacher at my school is very busy and has to teach other classes during my class. That’s why I ask you to introduce somebody.
I can teach English conversation, but I think students need to talk with many people who speak English, not only with teachers.
I don’t know when I need the volunteers. I just want to know whether there is somebody who is interested in this class and who may be able to contribute to it.
Since your students do have Internet access, you might be able to find online penpals here. Hayase-sensei signed up a group of students with one of those services not too long ago; maybe you want to talk to him and ask what his experiences were.
If you can get your students interested, you might be able to send them to an English-language message board. Dave’s ESL Cafe’s Student Discussion Forums is intended specifically for language learners, The Protagonist boards is a welcoming place run by an international group of high school and university students. The e-gakusei boards were run by a British teacher in Tokyo for a while, but it seems he abandoned the project when he left for India a short while ago. I could give you a hand with the technical nitty-gritty if you wanted to build and run something similar. =)
Getting a volunteer for your classes may be more difficult. But Jun-san, one of my students, is from Nabari — I’ll ask next time I see him.
Thanks, Ruedi. When I talked about e-mail, not snail mail, the student didn’t have an e-mail address, so I told her to get one and I showed how to find mail-friends on the Internet.
So, the problem is, as you say, getting a volunteer …
I mentioned your project to Jun-san this afternoon but I didn’t want to put him on the spot for an immediate reply. I just asked him to get in touch if he’s interested. He may not be.
Maybe you could shift your focus from speaking to listening. Despite the foreign Assistant Language Teachers at many high schools, it seems to me that most Japanese students of English have difficulties understanding native accents of the language.
A bit of exposure to the media may help here, and foreign programming is available in this country.
Voice of America is interesting in that it provides newscasts that you can simultaneously read and listen to (you may need to download and install Real Player). The drawback, of course, is that VoA is a government agency, so the news coverage tends to be, shall we say, slightly biased.
For more detached and independent coverage, you may prefer the BBC, which has many audio files as well, although they are not accompanied by transcripts.
And then, of course, there’s the radio and television, some of it even re-broadcast by NHK. If somebody could do some research and post a list to Tawawa of English-language programming available to the average Japanese household, that could be really helpful.
We have a new Language Lab. It is called Global Communication Room and there students can listen to English using a computer. So, other than that, I want them to have real communication with someone else in body. I know it is not easy to find the “someone.”
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What is a “research class”? Is it one of those new units introduced by the educational reform where you no longer teach the subjects prescribed by the Ministery of Eduction but instead develop your own classes by way of fostering individuality and diversity?
If so, are you asking your students what they’re interested in and then taylor your class to fit their wishes? If sixteen students come up with sixteen different ideas, you’ll try to fit all of these ideas into the same class? Do you have an Assistant Language Teacher who would help you with this?
Are you looking for an ink-and-paper penpal or have your students access to computers?
Those are all questions rather than answers, but if your students have access to networked computers and if you’d be willing to work with these machines, I’d have a couple of suggestions …