Category: Methods and Musings

After twenty years of writing feature articles or blogposts on English teaching for the Daily Yomiuri/Japan News (Indirectly Speaking/Be My Guest), ELT News, ETJ Japan Journal, the old ELT website (The Uni-Files), and finally here on the Language Teaching Professionals, I’ve decided that it’s finally time to hang up my keyboard, to close down shop, … Read more

So there I am baking in my car in the intense July sun about to leave my parking space in the half-empty Aeon lot. However, I don’t do anything more than nudge the very tip of my nose out because someone is about to drive past me. They have the right of way – but … Read more

Many people who claim to ‘know a lot’ about grammar actually misunderstand how grammar works. And it is the resulting misapplication in teaching that is partially responsible for creating students who may hold considerable passive (albeit often very confused) grammatical ‘knowledge’ but have difficulty actually communicating.   Analyzes paralyzes   Have you ever heard the … Read more

Japan is a country in which people hold meetings about holding meetings, rehearse for rehearsals, and conduct tests to help prepare test-takers for other tests — such is the degree of fastidiousness and meticulous preparation that makes so much of this country both hyper-efficient and exasperating. Indeed, if you have children who’ve gone through the … Read more

Those of you who’ve been living in Japan for a while know how convoluted all this can get   The textbooks would have it that Mr. Brown asks “What’s your name?” and Ms. Smith duly answers with, “Karen Smith” (before calling for the manager, naturally). Simple as that. But real life is a little more … Read more

  “An unhealthy dose of social awkwardness”   I’ve written previously about how the propensity to teach and practice fully grammatical sentences can lead to increased difficulties in producing speech for non-native English speakers, as well imbuing that speech with an unhealthy dose of social awkwardness. Moreover, when we reward fully grammatical speech forms with … Read more

What they do care about is that I submit a REPORT about it   For the most part, everyone in Japan is an office worker. Office work is real work. Teachers are office workers. Police officers are office workers. Shopkeepers are office workers. You are only really working when you are sitting at your desktop … Read more

  “The rising sense of desperation that English teachers feel when a deafening silence envelopes the classroom”   People might tell you it’s because the students are shy. Or that they are afraid of making mistakes. Some will venture that they lack opinions and yet others will argue that it is actually an integral, acceptable … Read more

No, this post has nothing to do with the current socio-political situation in the U.S. Yes, it does contain ideas about how to improve your students’ English speaking skills. Read on.   “For the Japanese … associations with the English language invariably involve the U.S.”   Having spent most of last year in Thailand (on a … Read more

‘MEXT’, or ‘Monkasho’, is the standard abbreviation for the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, Technology, and International Hot Air Ballooning. More importantly, MEXT is the scapegoat for everything that happens in any given education institution in Japan. Teachers at your school will now have to undergo eye-scans to gain entry? Sorry, MEXT says … Read more

Do they even need me to be here? Does it make any difference how well I teach, what I teach? Will I have any impact upon my students’ English skills at all?       Sometimes I wonder. How many of you have had certain students enter your classroom with a certain level of English … Read more

Reputations are made in small groups. This is true from the pre-school playground to the nursing home. One’s ability to engage and interact with one’s peers defines our role and position, the wider perceptions of our value to the group, to the community, even to society at large. For Japanese who are members of professional … Read more