The Objectification of English and L1 Use in the Japanese Classroom

I’ve got a fair bit of training to deliver over the next few weeks and I need to get some ducks in a row, so here are some thoughts on the above (which is basically just a glorified way of describing the inevitable ‘Can we use Japanese in class?’ question). Imagine it’s addressed to an audience of new or minimally experienced ALTs, and also bear in mind that I might cut and/or tone down a fair bit of it – writing this is part of the process of whittling it back to the core message (still need to provide enough explanation to avoid training by diktat, however).

Efficiency and Redundancy in the L2 Classroom, Part II

Teacher Training Considerations

1.   Theory to Practice

It’s all very well for me to flippantly sign off with a line like ‘that requires thought,’ but what kind of thought, exactly? I’ve previously tried to express these ideas more colloquially on my other blog and that post got picked up by a JET messageboard, which was very gratifying. However, most commenters seemed to interpret what I was saying primarily as a call to speak more slowly, and that isn’t the main thrust at all. How, then, do we frame this in a way that inexperienced teachers can understand and apply? And, more to the point, why would we want to?

Efficiency and Redundancy in the L2 Classroom

1. Information Theory

This is the Shannon-Weaver Model of Communication –

Source: Shannon and Weaver 1998, p34

It was originally developed (and is still incredibly influential) for mechanical and electronic communication: telegraphy, telephony, the internet and the like. We need to be very careful about taking it too completely as a metaphor for spoken communication. That said, it can still be a useful model. We can re-label it for L2 or lingua franca exchanges like this –

Visual Grammar

Running at a bit of a lag between finishing the units and posting about them here. As difficult as it might be to believe I do try to put some thought into these things. However, to tide us over until I pull my finger out (and other ill-matched idioms) here, with particular regard to Kreuss and van Leeuwen's concepts of the demand and offer gazes, is the front cover of this year's first grade English Communication textbook -

Fill yer boots.

The Geography of Thought

Apologies for the lack of updates. I've settled on an essay from the Lexis module and am focussing on that right now. Family holiday scheduled for the end of July and it's going to be fraught enough without having to proofread stuff right before we leave. I'm almost done with the actual Sociolingusitics units. They're utterly fascinating, so it's a bit of a shame that none of the assessment questions quite hold my interest in the same way. I'll definitely be posting about them soon enough though.

In the meantime I actually read that book I mentioned in my post on Lexis Two and, as predicted, loathed it. I was going to post about it at length here but it quickly became apparent that even by the low standards I've set for myself on this blog I wasn't going to be able to maintain even the slightest hint of authorial impartiality. So I've put it up over at my other blog. Here it is, in all its sweary glory -

The Geography of Thought

Lazy Re-run

Here are some thoughts on the philosophical differences between the physical and social sciences, because they may be of interest and they should at least help to clarify where I’m coming from.

I have a BSc in (Physical) Geography. It’s not exactly particle physics, but I spent my own fair share of time in the lab with the safety goggles on and it did give me a reasonable grounding in ‘the scientific method’. The essay below I submitted as part of my subsequent MA (in Environmental Politics, if you care), so there are probably a few copyright issues with pasting it up here. However, when I was digging it out I was slightly disappointed to find that it’s been almost a decade since I wrote it, so we should be fine. I’ve also long since lost the references file so anyone looking to rip if off for an essay mill will have to do at least some sort of work to get it up to standard. I also can’t remember the exact question it was meant to answer.

Anyway, here you go:

  

Evolution of a Language

I gave that academic a conceptual diagram. Academics love conceptual diagrams.

  

Clear as mud

  

‘Evolution’ is a tricky metaphor for language development. I’m still trying to work out if it’s suitable or not, though I suspect it’ll be superficially attractive but ultimately not really workable. Comparing methods of evolutionary speciation to language development might be pretty instructive, but one of the main underpinnings of biological taxonomy is that cross-breeding between species is impossible; that’s a pretty good description of what a species is. That obviously doesn’t hold true for languages (and it’s worth noting there are dissenting voices on the biological front as well).