Class reflection

In the class, Jodi handed out the sheets whose title is “Do you speak American?” I tried to define the words and expressions, but I could answer only one expression. After class, I asked native speaker of English, and he says that even though he is native speaker he does not know all of them. I reconfirmed that there are varieties of English in America and in order to communicate fluently, I have to study more and more.
Mai introduced interesting video in her blog. I was very suprised when I watched the video first time. I am interested in how the guy acquire English in detail. He says that he learned from films, if this is true, I would like to learn how to do it from him!!!

Week 8 reading reflection

In the reading materials, there are questions that which is the better teacher, NESTs or NNESTs. According to the apple book, both groups have advantages and disadvantages. Then, the author concluded that the balance between NESTs and NNESTs is very important in order to complement each other in their strengths and weaknesses.
Therefore, organized collaboration, team teaching have become well researched area in recent years. The author says that team teaching initiative has been developed in Japan. That is called JET program (Japan Exchange and Teaching Program).
I worked in junior high school in Japan for one month as teaching practice. There are native speaker of English as JET program. As far as I observe the class, team teaching program was dysfunction. There are some reasons.
First, the native English speaker is not professional of teaching English. Those who graduate American university can be a teacher in JET program. In other words, JET program ignore the prior majors of teachers. Everyone who has a bachelor’s degree can be a teacher.
Second, NNEST don not know how to do team teaching. It is not rare for Japanese English teacher who can not communicate foreigner in English. They can not plan the class with foreigner. This is very ridiculous.
Even though most of the JET systems in Japan are dysfunction, Japanese government continues to pay 3000 dollar per month for each teachers of JET program.

Class reflection week 7

During class, we have learned how to use library systems from one of librarian of MSU. I think that instruction was very helpful for us when we make some researches and write some articles. I would like to make the most of the library systems from now on.

In the class, we focused on language learner characteristics. I am really exited about the activity which Rachel made. Even though I read the textbooks, I sometimes forgot the contents. That is extremely sad thing for me. I have to try to internalize the every content which I read. In the activity there was a question about motivation. There are two kinds of motivation. That is integrative motivation and instrumental motivation. The first type is a desire to be socially integrated in target culture. The second type is that an individual learns second language to attain a certain goal, for instance a job promotion. I came up with a question that which motivation is more effective? I could find the one of the answer by using Schumann’s acculturation model (learners will acquire the target language to the degree that they acculturate.) Based on Schumann’s theory, the integrative motivation is more effective than the instrumental motivation because the integrative motivation is much more acculturate rather than the instrumental motivation. However, Lukmani(1972) says that if someone with extraordinary high instrumental motivation may perform well than someone with integrative motivation. I reconfirmed that there is individual differences in second language acquisition.

WEEK 7 READINGS REVIW

According to the week 7 readings, we could learn that there are many reasons on individual differences in second language acquisition. This is because that the lack of clear definitions and methods for measuring individual characteristics and characteristics are not independent of one another complexly. Then, teachers’ objectives is to take learners’ individual differences into account and create a learning environment in which more learners can be successful in learning second language acquisition. In order to this, teachers have to know the characteristics of learners.
In the personality section (L and S), the author mention about inhibition that is a negative force for at least second language pronunciation performance. Some researcher studies about the effective of Alcohol in reducing inhibition. According to them, alcohol is effective to reduce inhibition. I really try this method. However they also mention that when larger doses of alcohol were administrated, pronunciation rapidly deteriorated. In other word, too much drinking is too bad!!! I have to consider that point!

Teaching by principles

I have learned 12 principles in chapter 4. Among these principles, I would like to mention about principal 3 (the anticipation of reward). I strongly agree with the definition that human beings are universally driven to act, or behave, by the anticipation of some sort of reward- tangible or intangible or long-term- that will ensure as a result of the behavior, but it has mainly three problems. First, it makes students become dependent on short term rewards. Second, it coaxes them into a habit of looking to teachers and others for their only rewards. Third, it forestalls the development of their own internally administered, intrinsic system of rewards.
When I was a junior high school student, I often use this principle. I promised with my parents that if I got a good score on test, they gave me prize such as video game. In Japan there are a lot of parents who give some prizes if their child got good score, even though it is more effective to have intrinsic motivation. They never know that intrinsic motivation is better than extrinsic motivation.

Second language acquisition

In 1960s, Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH) was proposed. According to this hypothesis, errors were often thought to be the result of transfer from learners’ first language. It means that second language acquisition is filtered through the learner’s first language. If the native language is similar to the target language, second language acquisition will be easier. On the other hand, if the native language is dissimilar to target language, it will be harder to acquire target language. However, many aspects of learner’s language could not be explained by CAH. For example, idiomatic or metaphorical expression that learner made cannot be transferred word for word.
Since CAH was criticized, many researchers tried to take different approach. In 1970s, error analysis became popular. The difference between CAH and error analysis is that error analysis did not focus on predicting errors but discovering or describing different kinds of errors. However it did not give us clear insight because it ignored the strategy of avoidance that learner often do.
Selinker (1972) proposed the notion of interlanguage. A core of his construct is the notion that interlanguage can function independently of speaker’s native language or the target language. He also showed the existence of fossilization, which is plateau of language learning.
Today, researchers believe CAH’s weak version (that CAH can explain the cause of many, but far from all, systematic language learning errors) rather than strong version (that CAH can explain all learning problems). Even though CAH cannot explain all learning problems that learner has, I think it is very useful in EFL settings. In EFL settings, the group of students is homogeneous. In other word, they share the native language, so we can construct the specific hierarchy of difficulties that learners have by applying CAH. I think it will help a lot.

Reflection on class

During the class, we have experienced the activity that is kind of information gap (we have card on the each back). In that activity, we could enjoy the game and also reviewed what we had learned in the reading assignments. I reconfirmed that studying must be enjoyable in order to make students concentrate on the task and keep their motivation. Speaking of motivation, in our group’s multi-genre research paper, we decided to focus on motivation in second language learning. It was extremely difficult for me to find out which reference is appropriate for our research. I thought that it is needed for us to sophisticate the references.
We have also discussed that what kinds of bilingualism we go through. According to the book of L & S, we can classify bilinguals into two. First is simultaneous bilinguals, who learn more than one language from earliest childhood. Second is sequential bilinguals, who learn another language later. In my case, as ordinary Japanese, I experienced sequential bilingual process because foreign language education starts from junior high school (from13 years old) in Japan. Nowadays, the ministry of education of Japan tries to introduce English in elementary school in order to create bilinguals. This is the highly controversial new plan. In my opinion, I strongly disagree with the new plan because there is no professional teacher who can teach English in elementary school in Japan. If the ministry of education would like to introduce teaching English, it is necessary to train the teachers who are professional of teaching English in elementary school.