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 (more…)
  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? (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

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 (more…)