I am a native Japanese speaker, teaching Japanese in the foreign language department in a university. Today (actually yesterday) March 4th was the first day of the second semester of school year 2023-2024.
I taught three classes today. Two was listening course for two classes of second year students, and one was conversation course for one class of first year students.
Since we Japanese teachers had been assigned a lot of documentation tasks during winter break, I couldn’t start teaching with textbook materials for listening class. I was ill-prepared for the class. I just did a feedback thing of the last semester.
For these four years, I had been teaching second- and third-year students only. But this time I have got an opportunity to teach first year students. Actually, I am not good at so-called “teacher talk” that is a speaking style for foreign language learners to understand easily. I need to practice teacher talk rather than relying on my poor English.
In order to know the level of the first-year students, I gave them a small quiz at the beginning of the conversation class. The results show that they could not learn well Japanese characters Hiragana and Katakana during the first semester. I need to think of way so that my students can write Japanese characters well.
Agony or Fun?! Second Language Learning 