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.