I thought we would finally meet face to face, but alas, the mystery continues. The organizers were as cool as I expected, and it was a great chance to spend time with a few close friends. The sessions were excellent, good, OK and not good enough. However, that’s a purely personal opinion vis a vis what I chose to watch and what I was looking for.

When shall the planets align and bring us together?

Steve

I tried to send you an email but the message bounced back, saying that the email address was wrong. Please check it and send me a message at steven.herder@gmail.com

Thanks,

Steven

Hello. Long time no see. I really hope you remember me. I am Tomoe Wakui, your student of TEP seminar at IUJ. I often remember you. I don’t know how many times I tried to contact to you. I just would like to talk with you about English Education. Whenever you have time, please send me an e-mail. I will really appriceate it. Thank you very much.
Sincerely Tomoe Wakui

I too have been trying to improve my teaching, and do more professional development. I found some valuable information when I began looking outside the usual ESL/EFL sources to more general education materials.

My main concern was how to deal with and relate to large classes of teenage students. I bought a book by Fred Jones called Tools for Teaching and found it very helpful. It also helped me to better understand what students are thinking and feeling in class.

The main reason I am commenting here is the way you describe your correction of students’ mistakes. I teach in Korea, and I think that Japanese culture (especially related to shyness/losing face/etc.) is fairly similar. I agree with you (when you mentioned elsewhere) that getting students to present/speak in pairs or groups helps avoid the reluctance they show because of their issues with shyness/embarrassment, but have you ever had problems as a result making corrections the way you mentioned above?

Highlighting a mistake by one student and asking the rest of the class to correct it is sure to cause embarrassment in any culture. I wouldn’t presume to know your students’ feelings/sensitivities or the atmosphere in your classes but I would advise care when correcting mistakes. (I have specific suggestions if you’re interested.) I’d like to know how you get this kind of correction to work – how do you build students’ confidence? And how do you develop a teaching environment that helps the students to feel comfortable with it? Have you ever asked them how they feel about it? That would be a good place to start.

It’s very reasonable in today’s wordpresstwitterblogspotfacebookdelicioustechnocrati world we live in to never exactly know how we get anywhere these days.

Cheers and I’ll check out your blog as well.

Steven

Cheers,

Steven

Greetings from Finland! I have been reading your blog since last summer, when I learned about it on Twitter through @barbsaka.

I find this post, and a lot of the others you’ve written very interesting, since there are certain similarities between Finnish and Japanese learners of English. Naturally, I don’t really know the situation in Japan, but I have a few Japanese English teacher friends (even visited one high school in Hokkaido some years back) and we often discuss language teaching.

It seems to me that in both cultures there is a lot of emphasis on teaching grammar. I wonder if it is because both Finnish and Japanese are considered very difficult languages for foreigners to learn, so mother tongue grammar is also prominent in schools. Anyway, what you wrote about the university exams with testing obsolete English to create a normal distribution is exactly what happens in Finland with our national final exams in high school. Finns, on the whole, have a marvellous passive knowledge of English, so if students were really tested on how much they understand, a vast majority would score well above average. However, this is not possible from the normal distribution point of view, so the exams get more and more ridiculous every year, with the sole goal of making excellent students make mistakes! How mean!

At the same time, Finns are very shy to speak English, or at least have a hard time shedding their strange Finnish communicative patterns, I would say they are chronically socially challenged when using a foreign language. Why aren’t these skills tested in the final exams, so that we teachers could focus on skills that really matter in real life? The excuse is that such testing would be too difficult and expensive to organise. So the same old written only testing of passive skills continues…

Another problem here in Finland, of course, is that we don’t have native speakers helping Finnish teachers in class. Although, in theory, all Finnish language teachers are very well educated, I feel many of them don’t possess natural and fluent enough communicative skills themselves. It’s a different ballgame to engage in a lively English conversation from explaining the ins and outs of English grammar in Finnish! No wonder, the Finnish communicative patterns get perpetuated from generation to generation. I wish we had native teachers to work with, as in Japan!