Month: January 2012
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Learning languages: the importance of motivation, repetition, authenticity, proportion of time
Yesterday’s Hiroshima JALT monthly meet was a good one. Four non-native speakers of English talked about their experience and how they went about learning the language. One point was common to all four speakers: motivation. And three of the speakers had repetition and authentic material use as a commonality. Motivation is ultimately a most factor…
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Do Japanese really need compulsory English?
In today’s Daily Yomiuri there was an article about the results from a survey of 3,225 middle school students on their perception about English. The survey conducted by the National Institute for educational Policy Research found only eleven percent of students want to find work which requires English. But seventy percent also said they believed…
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Thinking about writing an etextbook
Thinking about writing a textbook? Then why not write an etextbook. Apple has released iBook Author to help people write their own books for the iBook and iPad. Haven’t tried it yet but will in the near future to give an update.
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Three things Tokyo University students have in common
I was reminded by Stephen Krashen’s post on reading, access to books, and school performance about the three things Tokyo University students have that help them get into the University – bookshelves (with books of course, and the more the better), a globe (to help them see the world differently (or is it correctly)), and…
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Occupy – the trek from a verb to a compound proper noun
One of the key words of 2011 was ‘occupy’, or to be exact Occupy X. It is said to have begun in New York in September but was inspired by the Arab Spring and camp protests in Spain in May. Words have the ability to fill a space in a language’s lexicon if one is…
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