日: 2020年5月1日

Online Teaching for Class 1939 (Listening) on Apr.26, 2020

Date: April 26th on Sunday, 2020 from 9:50 to 11:20 (10:50 – 12:20 in JST)

Course: Japanese Listening 2

Used app: Streaming on DingTalk, Presentation by Powerpoint with 54 slides

Numbers of Students: 27

26 students stayed with me from the start to the end. One student is recorded his?her shorter attendance of 79 minutes.

Students’ Responses:

– Attendance Check : All the 27 students typed his/her attendance by themselves on BBS

– Quiz 1 : 23 students answered. This question was to ask if “Adj1 to Adj2” is right or not. This is not right. Two nouns can be stated in the form of ‘N1 to N2’, but two adjectives cannot be stated as ‘Adj1 to Adj2’.

– Quiz 2: 24  answered. Question was about “Wa-ga conflict”. Japanese learner is always confused by selection of particles, “-wa” or “-ga”. In this question, the sentence (1) uses “-ga” and the sentence (2) uses “-wa” as shown in Figure 1 below. 6 students got the right answer A, 18 got the wrong answer B. It seems still difficult to learn that “-ga” is exclusively picking up a word, while “-wa” is for stating a nature of the word that had already been recognized by both speaker and listener.

– Quiz at the End: 23 students typed a sentence that meant “[Noun1] is more [Adjective] than [Noun2]” (of course in Japanese).

Teaching:

1: Review of Grammatical Topics of the first half of Section 16 of the Textbook

– “-no” that makes an adjective a kind of noun

– Conjunctive particle “-kara” for stating a reason.

–  Introduction of sentences to say capability

– “-noda/nda” for explaining and/or revealing

– Auxiliary verb “-tai” to express one’s wish

– “-to” that is putting between the thoughts and a verb for thinking

2:  Sentences for comparison

3: Redo of listening activities of the last class and Today’s new ones.

Homework Assignment:

– Homework was not assigned during the class because I didn’t have time before the coming holidays. It was noticed to the students that I would give them homework in the following day, 27th (But I couldn’t).

Issues and Problems:

This is a listening course. I play the listening materials of the textbook, make the students think of answers, and then show them the answers. However, I am suspicious about the effectiveness of this teaching style for learning Japanese. It seems like the students’ understanding is not good as I expected. One way to improve the effectiveness would be to make the students make their own Japanese sentences as utterance. I am looking for a better way to do this. As part of this, I ask the students to make his/her own sentence at the end of the class. It seems like to help me find a misunderstanding of a particular student.

 

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Figure.1 The Reasons for Use of “-ga” and “-wa” (Particularly for this Case)

Online Teaching for Class 1837 (Conversation) on Apr.26, 2020

Date: April 26th on Sunday, 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 55 slides

Numbers of Students: 24 out of 28

Fully attendant for 90min : 17,    Completely Absent : 4,

Shorter signing-in: 87, 86, 69, 15, 12*2 minutes, and the shortest was 49 seconds.

Responses onto the BBS:

– Attendance check by a student his/herself: 25. One of these students was actually recorded as completely absent.

– 1st Quiz: 17 students responded. The quiz was just to measure whether or not the students understood the listening material.

– 2nd Quiz:19 students responded. The question was to find an erroneous use of conditional conjunctive particle “-nara” from four sentences. “-Nara” cannot be used in a conditional clause if the condition is 100% sure.

– 3rd Quiz: 19 students responded. The question was to select “If” type conditional conjunctive particle that is applicable in a sentence.

– Attendance check at the end: 21 students responded. It is to ask suitabilities of “-nai” or “-zu” for negations to speech or writing.

Teaching: 

– Listening to a conversation between two part time job workers.

– Review and exercise of conditional conjunctive particle “-ba,” and “-nara”. The emphasis was put on the latter, “-nara” with the following three features; (1) Suggestion can be made in the form of “Noun+nara, (clause)”. (2) In the construction of (Preceding conditional clause with “-nara”, conclusion clause), the conclusion clause has modality that expresses speaker’s feeling like intention, guess, request, and so on. (3) If the conditional clause is definitely certain, “-nara” cannot be used.

– Exercise of “-ba” and “-nara”

– Introduction of expression for negation using “-zu-ni” that is a little formal

Homework Assignment:

Any homework was assigned in this time, too. It was noticed to the students that homework during the holidays would be assigned the following day, 27th.

Issues and Problems:

This is a conversation class. So students’ utterances should be promoted. By far I have just tried teaching listening comprehension and making the students do a kind of  rote exercise. In order to prompt the students’ utterance, I decided to give the students a homework in which he/she need to fill his/her own words into many blanks put in the conversation script.