Date: May 13th on Wednesday, 2020 from 8:00 to 9:30 (9:00 – 10:30 in JST)
Course: Japanese Listening 2
Used app: Streaming on DingTalk, Presentation by Powerpoint with 66 slides
Numbers of Students: 27
Every student stayed with me from the start to the end.
Students’ Responses:
– Attendance Check : All of the 27 students typed his/her attendance on BBS.
– Quiz 1 : 26 students answered.The question asked the relation between “Naze” in the question and “-karadesu” in the answer which seems to have similarity with English’s “Why?- Because”.
– Quiz 2: 26 students answered.The question was to distinguish the function of a noun “tokoro” that can mean just before, ongoing, and right after
– Quiz 3: 26 students answered. Question was about a noun “koto”. The students were asked to choose one sentence from four, in which “koto” meant a decision by the one’s will.
– Quiz at the End: 26 students typed their own sentences that meant like “A person can d osomething”(of course in Japanese) .
Teaching:
1: Basics of Japanese grammar
– Intransitive verb predicate sentences and particles used in such sentences.
– Wa-ga construction for existence focusing on relations between the topic “wa” that contains and the subject “ga ” that is contained; in other words, “wa” for the entire and “ga” for a part. The students not only over-generalize “Wa-ga construction”, but also reversely place the entire thing and a part in the wa-ga construction. Also a caution was given to the students. the subject is unclear in a “Wa-ga construction” because it has the topic and the subject. It is better to use another construction that has a clear subject in order to make a sentence to say an existence of a thing and matter.
2: Review of grammar in the last class
– The section 18 of the textbook that contains some expressions using “V-te iru”.
3: Introduction to the section 19 of the textbook
– Functional nouns like koto, tsumori, and tokoro. Especially the expressions for capabilities were explained for both two types. One was that a person has potentiality to do something and the other was that the situation allows someone to do something.
– Exercise1 and 2 of the section 19 in the textbook.
Homework Assignment:
– No homework was assigned.
Issues and Problems:
– I used many PPT slides to make the students understand that there is a relationship of “contains – contained” in Wa-ga construction. “Contains” uses “-wa” as the topic and “Contained” uses “-ga” as the subject. But some students often place those words in reverse. It seems that, rather than teaching the same thing over and over and over again with a lot of repetitive PPT slides, I wonder that there might be a decisive way to make the students learn a correct use in just one time. If I repeat the same teachings again and again, but the students didn’t understand, it would be wasting the hours and it would mean that I am just damaging students’ opportunities to learn.
Agony or Fun?! Second Language Learning 