Online Teaching for Class 1836 (Composition) on Mar.31, 2020

Date: March 31th on Tuesday, 2020 from 15:30 to 17:00 (16:30 – 18:00 in JST)

Course: Japanese Basic Composition 2

Used app: Streaming on DingTalk, Presentation by Powerpoint with 55 slides

Numbers of Students: 28

24 students participated for whole 90 minutes.

3 students exhibited short attendances: 81, 52, 25 minutes

1 students was totally absent.

Responses to my requests like Quiz answers onto BBS:

Attendance check by reporting his/her-selves: 27.

Five quiz were assigned during class. Students sent the answers to me right after the class. Only 18 of 27 students did so.

Teaching:

1st half: Feedback of proofreading and corrections of the second draft of “My Winter Break”

2nd half: Feedback of quiz that was done in the last class. The quiz was mainly focused on Tense/Aspect issue of Japanese sentences. One of ways for draft correction was also taught in the class. That focused on inconsistency between start and ending of a sentence.

Homework:

300 letters advertisement for a new product of electric appliance for family use. A sample as below was shown to the students.

Issues and Problems:

I found a huge issue about “Wa-ga construction”. Students always over-generalize “Wa-ga construction” for the sentences which are actually not suitable for using this particular construction. This is because Japanese textbooks in this country always impress learners as if “Wa-ga construction” were an important basic of Japanese.

There is a simple reason why “Wa-ga construction” is thought to be important. “Wa-ga construction” is, as indicated by the name, structural. It has the structure of word order with the theme, a subject, and predicate. It is simple and easy to understand because there is no need to analyze words functions that are specified by several kinds of particles. There are only two particles in “Wa-ga construction”; “-wa” and “-ga”. Since these two are used for theme and subject, it is not necessary for a learner to think about what function each word has in a sentence. For other sentences that are not “Wa-ga construction”, students need to analyze words’ functions through several particles in conjunction with verb.

It is easy to understand, so students stick to “Wa-ga construction” and then come to think it is important. But I think it is more important for Japanese learner to learn particles and their functions. I think I need to stop students’ over-generalization of “Wa-ga construction” and to teach use of other particles and their functions.