The news is out about the bankruptcy of yet another large eikaiwa chain in Japan: GEOS.  As with the NOVA situation, G.communication has picked up the pieces and retained many of the schools, but has closed about 99 of them according to latest reports.

In the spirit of “teachers helping teachers”, I would like to link to a list of schools that have been closed. The GaijinPot site seems to have a few articles related to the topic, so perhaps there will be useful information there in other veins.

Best of luck to all.

Lately I have been facing the indirect effect of the “kyoiku mama” syndrome. My son has just started elementary school, and my wife is rapidly learning how many other families are trying to get their kids ahead of the game (or prepared for it) by sending them to juku or eikaiwa or by exposing them to English at home. Of course, they tell my wife that we will have no problems because Daddy is an American and teaches (or will teach) our son.  Sadly, though, that is not true. I have a full-time job, and when I get home it’s very difficult to take on another (teaching my son).

He’s ahead of the game already in some ways with his spoken English, but (more…)

Thursday April 22 is Earth Day this year.  Heck, I often forget regular common holidays, so it’s no wonder that this one always gets by me.

The kind people at Teacher Planet have some activities for this holiday. Here they are.

Earth Day resource page (plenty of links)

Earth Day workbook

Stop soil pollution lesson plan (with diorama, or you can modify to a poster)

Just a quick summary of the April 6 seminar held in Obihiro by the Obihiro Board of Education. More than 20 Tokachi educators attended the day-long conference at Obihiro City Hall. Emily Carrigan introduced the basics of linguistics, and Myron Wright followed up with a demonstration of how he introduces Japanese/English phonological differences to his elementary school teachers. After lunch and a book swap, Tran Thuy Hang and Micki Haller Yamada presented a team-teaching lesson in Vietnamese, using the old stand-bys of Dokkan and Card Switch, then discussed the roles of the home room teacher and the assistant language teacher in the class. Finally, Adam Cook presented useful ideas for improving relations between the one-shot ALT and the schools. This year’s meeting was primarily organized by Glen Shimbo.

Here is a report from Science Daily, which talks about a University of Pennsylvania and University of Memphis study on over 2,000 languages. One result: “English, for all its confusing spelling and exceptions…has a relatively simple grammar.”  That may be hard to explain to your Japanese students, but it still makes for interesting reading.

On the flip side, the report tackles complex languages: (more…)

I recently joined TESOL. I’m not a member of many teachers’ organizations, and I should have been in this one a long time ago.

My co-worker just returned from the annual TESOL conference in Boston last month, and I wish I had made the time to go, despite the bad timing with new academic years beginning in Japan. Boston sounded like a very good opportunity to learn about EFL and ESL. Sometimes even we teachers in Japan become isolated and think only “inside the box” about issues that we think can only be solved by maintaining contact with other teachers in Japan. After signing up with TESOL, my eyes are opened to different perspectives. Even though I didn’t attend the annual conference, I got email from presenters and conference planners which provided links or documents or chats about topics that interest me!

One of these emails started a thread about an ESP topic which directly affects my courses. Another allowed me to provide a reference from someone who had published in Japan (and had not been read outside this country). Yet another pointed out a Yahoo site for medical English, which I’ve just joined. (more…)

Hello JALT Hokkaido and other interested people. Last Sunday I attended a great double presentation at Little Tree English School on using computers in the classroom.The first presentation was by Glen Rowell, the ETJ (English Teachers in Japan) coordinator for Hokkaido. He presented on useful software for making materials and also for actually using programs in class interactively with students. He also demonstrated some Flash games that he had made himself that reviewed vocabulary from the textbooks he uses. Glen showed and explained the differences between Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator and then also introduced free, open source versions of (more…)