Sunday, November 20, 2005

Reading Silently vs. Reading Along

Ayu, Cube, Eri-chan, Gami, and I are conducting an investigation about Reading. Would you like to help us out? If you would like to help us out and you speak English as a second language , please click here and do our reading exercise.

Monday, November 14, 2005

The Roles of HRTs and ALTs

Bonsai has listed the roles of HRTs (Homeroom teachers) and ALTs (Assistant Language Teachers) according to the research literature she has read. If anyone is interested in team teaching or would like to comment on what Bonsai wrote, please check it out.

Friday, November 11, 2005

What's New? (11/11)

Our Seminar
The semester is progressing and students' theses are due in two and a-half-months. Bonsai, Hope, and YuS have now started to put more time into their papers. You can go to their blogs and see how they are progressing. Bonsai is writing about the roles that ALTs and JTEs should take in elementary schools. Hope is investigating how elementary schools and junior high schools can work together to coordinate their English programs. YuS is investigating why so many jr. and senior high school students lose interest in English and how to remedy this problem.
The juniors (Ayu, Cube, Eri, and Gami) and I are working on our own investigation. We will be conducting our own survey and will post it on the blog hopefully next week.
Speaking of the juniors, Eri and Ayu wrote about their experience doing teaching practice at a nursery school. Both their posts were very interesting. At their nursery schools children learn through play and children arguing with each other is seen as a good thing because they learn how to deal with conflict.
Other Blogs
I have been a little too busy to read many other blogs, but I did read an interesting post on in class discussion topics by AJ Hoge. Read the entry and tell me how you would like to participate in such a class.

Wednesday, November 02, 2005

Why can my son say the sound "A-va, va?"

The other day, my son 14-month old son was running around the house saying "A-va, va". You can listen here. (Although you can hear me saying "A-va,va" is the recording, it was M-chan who initially said the phrase and it is me who is imitating him.) I was surprised because the sound "va" does not exist in Japanese. The only English my son, M-chan, is exposed to is the gibberish I speak. I was wondering whether his "A-va-va" vocal experimentation was perhaps the result of him listening to my English. Or, could one expect other Japanese babies to make such sounds at 14 months even if they had not been exposed to any English. Can anyone give me some guidance?