26 Oct 2010, 3:39pm
EFL eikaiwa extensive listening JHS Language learning listening online resources self-study
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Great listening practice -improved! How to combine two websites to maximise student benefit

Last Thursday I was teaching a special class to high school students (my university loves reaching out to the community, and this program is part of their PR efforts) when I accidentally combined two websites: Popjisyo and Elllo. I encourage my students to use both websites, but had never thought to combine them before.

Accessing Elllo through Popjisyo allows students to get mouseover translations of tricky words in the transcripts, and also to save new words to a vocabulary file that they can then email to themselves to review later.

Best of all, both websites are free and don’t require registration, so they are easy to introduce and get students using. This also opens up Elllo to lower level students that would have found it too challenging without the mouseover translation support.

I successfully introduced the combination to junior high school students on Saturday, and they seemed to like it!

1 Sep 2010, 2:03am
conference Language learning teaching
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Conference season

I just received the following list of conferences from a JALT newsletter:

PAC 2010 / Korea Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (KOTESOL)   
October 16-17, 2010   
Seoul, South Korea
http://www.kotesol.org/
English Teaching Association of the Republic of China (ETA-ROC)   
November 12-14, 2010   
Taipei, Taiwan
http://www.eta.org.tw/en/index.html
Thailand TESOL (ThaiTESOL)
January 21-22, 2011
Chiang Mai, Thailand
http://www.thaitesol.org/
CamTESOL Conference (Cambodia)  
February 26-27, 2011  
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
http://www.camtesol.org/
Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL)  
March 16-19, 2011  
New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
http://www.tesol.org/s_tesol/convention2011/
International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language
(IATEFL)  
April 15-19, 2011
Brighton, UK
http://www.iatefl.org/
I have never been to a conference outside of Japan, so I’m really interested in heading to KoTESOL or Thai TESOL (I can’t make the others as I have other plans). IATEFL or TESOL would also be nice, but might be outside of my budget for this year 😉
Does anyone have any advice as to which of these would be most interesting?

17 Feb 2010, 4:59pm
eikaiwa Language learning teaching culture
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2010

How do you say this year? Is it two thousand and ten or twenty ten?

I was asked by a student, and given that I had been thinking about this topic, gave them more of an answer than they were probably looking for.

Personally I prefer twenty ten, because:

1. It’s shorter and easier to say.
2. It is more consistent (like nineteen seventy).

Both are currently valid, and there are still some lingering two thousand and somes out there, but I am confident that twenty some will win out in the end. What do you think? Do you have a preference?

11 Aug 2009, 9:28am
iTunes store Japanese Language learning LingQ online resources renshuu rikai self-study smart.fm
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Top Five Free Ways to Learn Japanese Online

I know a lot of people who despite living in Japan, just don’t get the exposure to comprehensible input that they would need in order to really make significant progress.

This is a list of five free ways you can get started on increasing your input, and the best thing is that you don’t even have to be in Japan to use them.
1. rikai.com (or rikaichan plugin for Firefox)
Rikai is a website or app that allows you to read Japanese online by giving you a small pop-up window with the pronunciation and meaning of individual words. Assuming you have a minimal knowledge of Japanese grammar, this is much better than a translation program because it allows you to choose the most appropriate meaning for each word. A few minutes a day reading sites on topics that interest you is sure to boost your vocabulary and reading fluency.
This is not a radio station, but rather a website that allows you to learn vocabulary in context, using a spaced repetition system to help you transfer the words to your long-term memory (something that takes between 20 and 50 exposures to the word in context). Including text, pictures, audio, and a really fun practice system, this site makes it easy to study for just five or ten minutes a day.
I finally got my hands on an iPhone recently, and one of the best things I have been doing with it is listening to all sorts of podcasts in Japanese. There is a huge range of material available for free at all levels, and listening to podcasts while commuting or exercising is one of the easiest ways to improve your listening comprehension (with the added bonus that listening will also help your speaking ability).
4. LingQ (pronounced ‘link’, I think)
LingQ is another website featuring a learning system. It is mostly free (you can pay to practice speaking with a tutor online or to have your writing corrected) and offers an easy way to read texts, listen to audio, and learn vocabulary. I always think of it as the grown-up, more serious version of smart.fm (see above). It takes more time and effort to use, but you will make more progress.
This is a site made by a friend of mine, and it is one of the best I have seen for learning kanji or vocabulary sets, particularly if you are studying for the JLPT or the Kanji Kentei (which I thoroughly recommend, more on that in a future post). The site is free and well worth looking around. It is not as pretty as some of the others, but the mechanics are solid.
I am very lazy, so I haven’t used these resources as much as I should have, but for anyone with some self-discipline, they should prove very useful to increase that all-important listening and reading input.
8 Aug 2009, 3:10pm
EFL extensive listening Language learning listening self-study
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The importance of listening

I think the importance of listening input for students cannot be overemphasised, yet it is severely neglected in Japan, in both public and private teaching settings.

I myself have not really focused on teaching listening so far, for the following reasons:
1. graded listening materials are not as common as graded reading
2. it’s hard to categorize listening materials at a glance, like you would with a written text
3. technical issues get in the way: you have to make the materials available to the students, and it’s not as easy as just handing them a book or a handout
However, I have decided to have a go at really boosting my students’ listening practice. I am going to investigate online delivery, lending CDs, and lending mp3 players pre-loaded with content.
I will post on any challenges and successes with the project. Comments on the subject are also most welcome.
 
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