Online Teaching for Class 1837 (Conversation) on Apr.20, 2020

Date: April 20th on Monday, 2020 from 8:00 to 9:30 (9:00 – 10:30 in JST)

Course: Japanese Conversation 4

Used app: Streaming on DingTalk, Presentation by Powerpoint with 81 slides

Numbers of Students: 28

Fully attendant for 90min : 20,    Completely Absent : 3,

Shorter signing-in: 71, 41, 31, 19, 7 minutes.

Responses onto the BBS:

– Attendance check by a student his/herself: 25. One out of 25 was recorded as completely absent. One student did not report the attendance by him?herself but was recorded with 41 minutes attendance. Probably the student came late and left early.

– 1st Questionnaire: 19 students responded. This was not a question but a questionnaire. The students were asked to answer which of the four summer festivals in Japan they want to come and see. The festivals were Nebuta in Aomori, Tanabara in Sendai, Bon-Odori in anywhere, and Fireworks in everywhere. Most of the students prefer fireworks.

– 2nd Quiz: 17 students responded. The quiz was to find a different type of conjunctive particle out of five sentences. Four sentences used “If” type conjunctive particles and only one sentence used “Even-if” type conjunctive particle. The students were asked to find “Even-if” type. All the 17 answers were correct.

– 3rd Quiz: 20 students responded. The quiz was to ask right connections between negative “-nai” and conditional conjunctive particle “-ba”. All the answers were correct.

Attendance check at the end: 20 students responded. This is a quiz to ask the right conjugation of verb ‘iku/ikimasu” for conditional form.

Teaching: 

– Listening to conversation between part time job workers.

– Review on hearsay expressions using “-souda”, “-rashii”. “He/she says”, and “It is said that”

– Feedback about a Test result; A small test was given to students on April 13. The result was explained to the students for further understanding about differences between hearsay and guessing

– Introduction of the conditional conjunctive particle “-ba” and verb conjugations for conditional form

Homework Assignment:  Students were asked to type verb conjugations to conditional forms.There were 30 verbs but 60 answers were required. 30 were conditional forms directly obtained from dictionary forms. 30 were also conditional forms but obtained from potential forms.

Issues and Problems:

I am not sure whether it is standardized teaching or not as to conditional forms that are obtained from potential forms. It might bring a severe confusion to students because it makes students think as if 5-dan conjugation verb were also conjugated to have -reba. Reba ending is only for 1-dan conjugation verbs, Kuru, and Suru (actually Ra-row 5-dan verbs, too). What I thought was simple. It is useful to know conditional forms coming from potential forms because Japanese use very often that kind of conditional forms in conversation.