Earlier this month (July 4), Roger Pulvers wrote in The Japan Times a brief article called “Japanese betray some blinkered views of their foreign coworkers“. While some of his observations may not be surprising or new, I thought it was nevertheless a good little read. To quote from the article, “Nihon Keizai Shimbun newspaper ran a feature on Japanese people’s attitudes to non-Japanese colleagues at their places of work. The article included the results of a survey that explored those attitudes”.

Now, the word “betray” is what caught my eye, but readers shouldn’t hold an initial negative feeling when reading the article. Pulvers’ story seems to cover a fairly balanced side of things.

Some facts:

• from whomever they surveyed, it seems that one-third (34%) of companies have foreign co-workers Read the rest of this entry »
  Tags: company, foreign coworkers, ishindenshin

The Japan Times has just come out with an article “Ex-students don’t want JET grounded“. JET has been around since 1987, and its stable of ALTs has been on the decline since an peak in the early 2000’s. The article briefly lists some pros and cons of JET, and pretty much says the Government Revitalization unit has added the JET program to its list of possible budget cuts.

I don’t know. The article states that since JET began “over 50,000 young foreigners with few, if any, teaching credentials have come to Japan and partied for a year at taxpayer expense. They have usually enjoyed their stay, but their effectiveness in improving the English language ability of their students was never quantitatively measured and, given Japanese students’ performances on international English tests, is questionable at best”. Gee, if the original and long-standing goal has been internationalization, not English improvement, what’s the major beef? Read the rest of this entry »

The following link is to a news report in the Mainichi Daily News (22 July). The headline reads “English teacher used ‘hangman’-like game at school where student hung himself“.

I find the use of such a game after that sort of incident to be in very poor professional taste. However, there is another point that I find equally, if not more so, poorly professional: the reporting.

Most of the article is about the English teacher in Chiba who plays hangman (very poorly described, in my opinion by the writer) in classes, presumably to test spelling or vocabulary. The problem is that the student who committed suicide in 2008 actually sent a report to the school declaring “I had great conversations with people on a suicide website”, yet the school did nothing about that! So why does the reporter spend so much time on a teacher (who has been at the school since before the incident and thereafter) and not on the culpability of the school in failing to report this to the parents or a counselor or to take any other action? This wasn’t even mentioned in the article until more than halfway through. Read the rest of this entry »

The Japan Times’ columnist Donald Eubank has just written “Immigration procedures face huge shakeup“. Personally, I think it was fairly premature. Eubank writes about 3 major changes, two of which are deemed acceptable by foreigners, and one that is listed as dubious and uncertain even by immigration itself.

He cites the increase in visa period to 5 years, but as far as I recall this was something targeted only at people who showed sufficient Japanese language skills. Eubank didn’t mention that, so we don’t know the whole story here.

He cites the imminent demise of the reentry permit program, which I agree is a welcome relief. Read the rest of this entry »

My students are university science majors, and I’m trying to teach them how to read graphs, tables, and figures. They already know the vocabulary in Japanese, so the first step is in giving them corresponding vocabulary in English.  That sometimes includes the names of various graphs: line graph, bar graph (vertical and horizontal), scatter plot graph, pie chart, and the good old pictograph.

Pictographs seem a bit juvenile, or at least less scientific than the others. You can see them in newspapers and magazines more than in scientific journals probably because they are easier for the layman to interpret.

Finding examples of all of these figures and tables is pretty simple nowadays. Just go to Google Images and type in a keyword. Copy and paste at your own copyright risk. But what if you wanted to make your own? Most of them are easy enough with Excel, but what about a pictograph?  I just found a way. Read the rest of this entry »

If you teach students from China, you might want to be careful about using some fairly standard English acronyms with them.  The El Gazette has reported this month that “China’s broadcasters are now required to use Chinese translations of English acronyms in news reports”. On the blacklist are such things as “NBA (National Basketball Association), GDP (Gross Domestic Product) and WTO (World Trade Organization). TV journalists must provide the Chinese translations after naming the short forms, with translations also appearing in subtitles”.

A spokesman for the change ( State Administration of Radio, Film and Television) gave this for an explanation Read the rest of this entry »

Zotero.  Sounds like a magician’s name or perhaps the son of Zorro, doesn’t it?  Actually, Zotero is an open-source software extension to Firefox, and I have found it quite useful this week, so I thought I’d explain it to the blog readers.

I try to keep abreast of the literature in EFL as much as anyone, but I’m from the old school of thinking where one needs to stuff a metal filing cabinet with paper copies of each article that I find useful. In this day and age of electronic files, I also tend to keep copies of any online papers on a disk as well.  You know, just for safekeeping and the odd chance that I’ll want to read off the screen even though I prefer to read on paper and use a yellow highlighter.

Well, electronic file management is tough even though I’m pretty organized. Paper is not all that eco-friendly, either. Enter Zotero. In a way it’s like EndNote, a software package that lets you store the reference bibliography on your computer and later drop it into your paper as you write and cite. I don’t know if Zotero lets you do any of those things, but it does allow you to put a link online accessible to any computer you have, as long as that computer has downloaded the Zotero extension to Firefox. The homepage says Zotero allows you to “collect, manage, cite, and share your research sources”, so perhaps citing is possible after all. I’ve only just begun to explore it. Give it a whirl and tell readers what you think.  Or add a comment and describe what you use instead!

Trying to get Japanese students to read English books is not always easy. They are used to reading comics and little else, even when they are well into university life. One way to coax them into reading English is to give them something in English that they already know in Japanese. There are some graded readers that do this.

IBC (Yohan) has 5 levels of books, including a large bilingual glossary at the end of each. Fiction stories include some traditional Japanese stories.

Sanyusha published a few books (like The Story of Barefoot Gen) with bilingual footnotes to explain vocabulary, and with exercises at the end.

Kodansha International has put out the cartoon series Sazae-san in comic form.

Dark Horse has published some of the Astro Boy series. Read the rest of this entry »

Withholding tax.  In the U.S., that means how much tax is kept by the government from your salary until you file a tax return and try to get some of it back.  In Japan, it’s another story.

In Japan, there is an additional meaning:

“Certain remuneration/fees paid to a resident or domestic corporation, such as payments for manuscripts, lecture fees, fees for education/guidance in the arts, sports, or knowledge, remuneration paid to tax accountants, salespersons’ fees, performance fees, and hostess remuneration, is subject to withholding income tax…”

See the Withholding Tax Guide (English translation, 2008) and pay particular attention to p.28, item 4 under Fees Paid to Residents. If you charge a company with a fee for the above, or even for proofreading/editing/copyediting, the client can withhold a certain percentage. That can be 10% for proofreading fees, and you have to wait until you file Japanese taxes to see if you can get it back.  Kind of tough for freelancers if they don’t put such money on their taxes in the first place.

Using superstitions can be a fun way to practice conditionals (using “if”). Most of us know many of our own countries’ superstitions (breaking mirrors, walking under ladders, knocking wood), but how many Japanese superstitions have you learned?

I think it’s important to use students’ current knowledge in this circumstance. We can throw our own superstitions at them, but they may be too culturally deep to get across the grammar point we seek. I wouldn’t exclude them, but it might be more effective to rely on superstitions from the learners’ own countries. (I write that in plural for those who work in international schools, or who have students from China or Korea.)

With that in mind, here is a link to some Japanese superstitions (in English). Be sure to read all 4 pages. I like the one about hiding your thumbs when a funeral car passes. Read the rest of this entry »