タグ: 日本語を教える

Online Teaching for Class 1837 (Conversation) on June 12, 2020

Date: June 12th on Friday, 2020 from 13:40 to 15:10 (14:40 – 16:10 in JST)

Course: Japanese Conversation 4

Used app: Streaming on DingTalk, Presentation by Powerpoint with 68 slides

Numbers of Students: 24 of 28, 4 were recorded as completely absent by the system. Of the four, one student sent me a message for sick leave before the class.

Fully attendant for 90min : 19

Shorter signing-in: 86, 79, 73, 65 minutes and 1 minute.

Responses onto the BBS:

– Attendance check by a student his/herself : 25 students input “Shusseki” onto BBS. However one student was recorded by the system as completely absent and did not leave any activities for quiz. Therefore the student was judged as absent.

– 1st Quiz: 20 students responded. The quiz was to choose right combinations of particles and causative forms of verbs.

– 2nd Quiz: 20 students responded. Before the quiz, procedures of cooking curry was explained in Japanese. The quiz was to choose the order of three major steps in cooking curry. This quiz was not just for fun, but to measure how the students understand the abstract idea and to make this a kind of introduction of a construction “V1-ta To’orini, V2-te kudasai”

– Attendance check at the end: 20 students responded. Students were asked to choose the right sentence from the five that were to be the construction “V1-ta To’orini, V2-te kudasai”.

Teaching: 

– Pronunciation of the small “-tsu”: Small “-tsu” should be silent of length of 1 mora when it is before a explosive sound. 1 mora length of silence was shown using Figure1 below. When a small “-tsu” is before friction sound, it becomes 1 mora length of friction sound. 

– Review of causative sentences with comparisons between causative sentences of intransitive verbs and of transitive verbs.

– Exercises of conversations using causative sentences whose actions were expressed by intransitive verbs.

 – Introduction and exercise of a construction  “V1-ta To’orini, V2-te kudasai”.

Homework Assignment:

– Five students were asked to send a mp3 or m4a sound data by speaking the script of conversation of two part time job workers; Park-san and Chin-san that was in Dekiru Nihongo (yellow).

Issues and Problems:

<I don’t have time to write them>

Figure 1. 1 mora Silence of Small “-tsu” before Explosive Sound

Online Teaching for Class 1837 (Composition) on June 12, 2020

Date: June 12th on Friday, 2020 from 8:00 to 9:30 (9:00 – 10:30 in JST)

Course: Japanese Basic Composition 2

Used app: Streaming on DingTalk, Presentation by Powerpoint with 57 slides

Numbers of Students: 22 out of 28; 5 students were thought to be absent based on the system and responses.

– 90 minutes attendance: 21 students

– One student was recorded for shorter attendances of 62 minutes.

Responses to my requests like Quiz answers onto BBS:

 -1: Attendance check at the beginning: 25 students responded. Of the 25, it seemed that three students were not participating because of no responses to the class activities.

 -2: Connection check in the middle of the class: the internet connections were checked by making the students input Alphabet onto BBS. 20 students responded. Actually one student input it 8 minutes late, this was judged that the student was not with me at the time of question. This was a question to ask the stroke order of one Kanji that meant “certainly” and/or “surely” as shown in the figure 1 below. 19 student answered C. There was only one exception of F that meant her stroke order was not covered by A through E. Japanese use either of A, B, or C that are commonly accepted. But A is being taught in school recent years. On Tuesday class, many students answered that their stroke orders were none of A, B, or C. So I added D and E for the class 1837. But this time almost of 1837 students answered with C. I don’t know the reason why many 1836 students answered differently.       

  -3: Attendance check at the end: the answers of 5-question quiz were sent to me right after the class. 21 students sent. Only one student got the perfect scores of 5.

Teaching:

Teachings were almost identical to the class for 1836 on Tuesday.

Homework:

Homework assignment was also almost identical to what was assigned for class 1836.

Issues and Problems:

I forgot to make quiz #3 when I was making PPT slides for Tuesday composition class 1836. So I gave the 1836 students a quiz only by my voice on Tuesday. I again forgot to make quiz #3 today. One student pointed that out by typing on BBS saying “Teacher, is there quiz #3?. Then again I gave the 1837 students the quiz #3 only by my speaking. For that particular question #3, 4 of 21 students just gave up answering. It meant that several students are not good at listening. This course is not listening but composition. So I don’t think it is my duty in this course to enhance the students’ listening. However, it seems that such students listening abilities are not in a good level at the time of the end of second years, because I said my question very simply and also used English. Can I, or, how can I incorporate listening activities into composition class, if I try to improve their listening?    

Figure 1. Stroke Orders of a Kanji “必”

Online Teaching for Class 1939 (Listening) on June 10, 2020

Date: June 10th 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 57 slides

Numbers of Students: 26

One students told me his absence beforehand. 23 student stayed with me from the start to the end. Thee students were recorded for their shorter signing-in; 84, 84, and 69 minutes.

Students’ Responses:

– Attendance Check : 25 students typed his/her attendance on BBS. One came late.

– Connection check at the half way point: 26 students responded. This was just a questionnaire to ask which Häagen-Dazs icecream a student wants to eat, from six selections. Two students chose two.

Teaching:

1: Rote exercise to read numbers

– 1st quiz was asked. Question was to choose a series that could fit in six sentences that were to be filled with number and counting word. Everyone got the right answer.

2: Review of the section 22 of the textbook.

– Review of four constructions; “V-te mo iidesuka”, “V-te wa ikemasen”, “V-nakereba narimasen”, and “V-nakutemo iidesu”. 2nd quiz was asked in order to check if a student could apply “V-nakereba narimasen” and “V-nakutemo iidesu” correctly to two sentences.

– Redo of the exercise #3 and #4 of the section 22 of the textbook. 3rd quiz was asked after Exercise #4 that was using a word “Hashi (chop sticks)”. The quiz was asking low-high ascent  of Japanese words.

3: The section 23 of the textbook.

– Introduction of an auxiliary verb “-tai” that is used for expressing wish.

– Exercise #1 of S.23: Quiz #4 was asked focusing on uses of particles “-o” and “-ga” in the sentence that was using “wishing” auxiliary verb “-tai”.

– Exercise #2 of S.23: Also this exercise focuses on “wishing” auxiliary verb “-tai”. However some conversation in the exercise uses an abstract noun “tsumori” for one’s will. Therefore the quiz #5 asked to choose a sentence of a will that had similarity with “Tsumori”.

Homework Assignment:

– No homework was assigned.

Issues and Problems:

– As the class gets near to the end, it becomes more difficult to adjust teaching to the time schedule. I am almost always running out of time, but today I got three minutes or so just before the ending. Fortunately I had put a practice on the slide that was usually the “today’s summary”. I used the practice to adjust the time, or in other words, to spend extra minutes. So I thought today that it is good to have a PPT slide near the end, which has flexibility to use in order to adjust the remaining minutes.

– Many students got full scores for 5-question quiz. If it is showing that the students are studying hard, it would be okay. But it makes me anxious because their high scores look somehow artificial, actually. I should not say anything uncertain, but I would say the online teaching has a lot of problems and defects.

Online Teaching for Class 1837 (Conversation) on June 8, 2020

Date: June 8th 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 65 slides

Numbers of Students: 24 out of 28. At least 4 students were absent from the entire minutes of the class.

Fully attendant for 90min : 20

Shorter signing-in: 78, 6, and 12 seconds.

One student was recorded as completely absent by the system, however he?she? was probably listening to the class because of sending answers of 5-question quiz. Duration of participation was not clear.

Responses onto the BBS:

– Attendance check by a student his/herself: 26. However, three of the 26 were recorded as completely absent by the system.

– 1st Quiz: 21 students responded. This was to ask changes of particles when a causative sentence was made from an intransitive verb sentence.

– 2nd Quiz: 23 students responded.This was to ask particles to be used in casative sentences of intransitive verb and transitive verb, respectively.

– 3rd Quiz: 23 students responded. This was to find out one causative sentence of intransitive verb from 5 causative sentences with other 4 being of transitive verbs.

– Attendance check at the end: 20 students responded. This was one-sentence composition for a student to type onto BBS. The students were asked to compose a causative sentence using not an intransitive verb but a transite verb.

Teaching: 

– Review of passive sentences. The concept of causative sentences, making causative form of verbs, and conversions from a non-causative sentence to causative sentence that was using an intransitive verb.

– Introduction and exercises of causative sentences of transitive verbs.

– Exercise of a construction “V1-shinaiyouni, V2-shimasu.”

Homework Assignment:

– No homework was assigned. But the students were encouraged to do self-grading of a short test that was about the section 14 of the textbook.

– Three students were asked to send a MP3 or M4A by Wednesday night. Those students were asked to record their own speaking of conversation between two part time job workers.

Issues and Problems:

<No time to write about it, right now>

Online Teaching for Class 1939 (Listening) on Jun. 8, 2020

Date: June 8 on Monday, 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 60 slides

Numbers of Students: 25: Two students told me their leaves beforehand.

24 students stayed with me from the start to the end. One student was recorded for his?her? shorter watching that was 65 minutes.

Students’ Responses:

– Attendance Check : 25 students typed his/her attendance by themselves on BBS.

– Connection Check: 23 students responded. Questionnaire was to ask which flowers seeds a student wanted to plant; morning glory, sunflower, or salvia.

Teaching:

1: Basics of Japanese grammar

– Numbers and counting words corresponding to types and shapes of what a nouns indicates. Although kanji is used for counting, most of them are different from Chinese.

– Another caution was made; a combination of number and counting word usually does not bring a particle. It is like an adverbial. Quiz #1 was a question to check if a student understand this or not.

2: Review of the last class

– Most of the minutes were spent for the review on the constructions that were taught in the last class.”V-te mo iidesuka”, “V-te wa ikemasen”, “V-nakereba narimasen”, and “V-nakutemo iidesu”. Quiz #2 was a question to check if a student could apply those “V-te mo iidesuka” and “V-te wa ikemasen”, to sentences in a conversation. Likewise Quiz#3 was a question to check if a student could apply “V-nakereba narimasen” and “V-nakutemo iidesu”.

3: Redo of Exercises I and II of the section 22 of the textbook. Quiz#4 was asked to check if a student could use “V-nakereba narimasen”.

4: Exercise III of the section 22 of the textbook. Quiz#5 was asked to check if a student did understand the outline of what he/she listened.

Homework Assignment:

– No homework, but the students were told to listen to Exercise IV and study themselves.

Issues and Problems:

– I used many exercises from a famous Japanese language textbook in order to introduce several constructions and to facilitate understanding for them. However, even though that book is also famous in this country, most students don’t have the book. We used them in the online class, but after the class, the students cannot review what and/or how they learned the constructions by the book they don’t have. Maybe I should have stuck to the textbook that we have, although it is not the best material to learn.

Online Teaching for Class 1837 (Conversation) on June 5, 2020

Date: June 5th on Friday, 2020 from 13:40 to 15:10 (14:40 – 16:10 in JST)

Course: Japanese Conversation 4

Used app: Streaming on DingTalk, Presentation by Powerpoint with 63 slides

Numbers of Students: 25 of 28, 3 were recorded as completely absent by the system.

Fully attendant for 90min : 19

Shorter signing-in: 84, 78, 61, and 9 minutes. Two students were recorded as absent by the system, but they sent me the answers of 5-question quiz. It is impossible to know how many minutes they watched the class.

Responses onto the BBS:

– Attendance check by a student his/herself : 25 students input “Shusseki” onto BBS. Two of the 25 was actually recorded as completely absent by the system. However they sent me the answers of 5-question quiz. They are identical to the two mentioned above.

– 1st Quiz: 22 students responded. The quiz was to make the students realize that there are two types of causative sentences in Japanese; one is to allow someone to do something, the other is to force someone to do something.

– 2nd Quiz: 24 students responded. The question was to know what particle should be used in the causative sentence when the causative action was expressed by an intransitive verb.

– 3rd Quiz : 20 students responded. The question was to find one exception from four causative sentences. In three sentences, a higher person makes a lower person do something. In the sentence of exception, a lower person makes a higher person have some kinds of emotion.

– Attendance check at the end: 24 students responded. Students were asked to choose the correct combination of particles that were used in three different types sentences; give-take, passive, and causative. Interestingly enough, two particles are applied to these three types in the same manner.

Teaching: 

– Review of passive sentences

– Introduction of concept of causative sentences.

– Exercises of conversations using causative sentences whose actions were expressed by intransitive verbs.

Homework Assignment:

– Self grading of the short text for the section 13 that is about passive sentences.

– Four students were asked to send a mp3 or m4a sound data by speaking the script of conversation of two part time job workers; Park-san and Chin-san that was in Dekiru Nihongo (yellow).

Issues and Problems:

The biggest issue is whether or not my explanations were good for the students to understand the concept of causative sentences in Japanese. I don’t think my explanations were good. For the introduction, I totally relied on the section 13 of Dekiru-Nihongo Yellow, CD track C29.

Online Teaching for Class 1837 (Composition) on June 5, 2020

Date: June 5th on Friday, 2020 from 8:00 to 9:30 (9:00 – 10:30 in JST)

Course: Japanese Basic Composition 2

Used app: Streaming on DingTalk, Presentation by Powerpoint with 63 slides

Numbers of Students: 22 out of 28; Six students were recorded as absent.

– 90 minutes attendance: 19 students

– Shorter attendances: 84, 60, and 54 minutes were recorded for three students.

Responses to my requests like Quiz answers onto BBS:

Attendance check at the beginning: 23 students responded. Of the 23, one student was recorded that they didn’t watch the streaming.

A question and responses on BBS in the middle of the class: 18 students responded. This was a question to ask the day’s highest temperature by the weather forecast. The students input numbers in Celsius of the city he/she lives now. Temperatures varied form 20 to 35 Celsius degree.

Submission of 5 answers of quiz right after the class: 18 students submitted. Only one student got the perfect scores of 5. Average was 3.2 point.

Teaching:

Teachings were almost identical to the class for 1836 on Tuesday.

Homework:

Homework assignment was also almost identical to what was assigned for class 1836.

Issues and Problems:

Like I wrote one week ago, I no longer have any practical ideas to continue the teaching except writing a paper about tourism in each prefecture in Japan. It is like there is no well-organized curriculum, no strategy, but only short term tactics. I mean one of the short term tactics is to make feed-backs for errors on 5-question quiz on the class one week before. It is good to improve students’ Japanese by picking up a particular issue. But each student is different. I mean one issue is not applicable to every students. For example, I explain one issue about an error that some students made. That explanation is useful to the student who made the same mistake, but not for the students who did not make that error. And it is obviously the nature of Hodge-podge things, my teaching is not streamlined at all. I think that, to the students, my PPT slides seem to be too confusing and complicated to understand. I still have four weeks in this semester, but I am worrying that I may be messing up towards the end. I think that I had done well in the first semester for this composition class for the second grade students. But somehow I have burned out. I failed to organize a good curriculum for the second semester. What I think is that, if I make one year curriculum for this composition class by averaging what I have done in the first and second semesters, it would be very streamlined curriculum. I wished that I could enhance my composition class by reviewing and reorganizing the experiences that I got in this year. But last week I was told by the chief that I would not be assigned to the composition class in the coming first semester.

Online Teaching for Class 1836 (Composition) on Jun. 2, 2020

Date: June 2nd on Tuesday, 2020 from 15:30 to 17:00 (16:30 – 18:00 in JST)

Course: Japanese Basic Composition 2

Used app: Streaming on DingTalk, Presentation by Powerpoint with 63 slides

Numbers of Students: 27. The class has 28 members. One student was absent today because of his?her? medical reason.

24 students participated for whole 90 minutes.

2 students were recorded for their short attendances: 84 and 64 minutes, respectively. One student was recorded as absent by the system but this student sent me 5-question quiz. This is why I think there were 27 participants : 24+2+1

Responses to my requests like Quiz answers onto BBS:

– Attendance check by reporting his/her-selves: 27.

– 5 Quiz were given to the students during the class. Answers to the 5-quiz were sent to me right after the class. 26 students sent the answers to me.

– I would not have any responses from the students if the 5-question quiz were only thing that I assigned to them. In order to get responses, I asked the students to input the highest temperature of the day in each students city at the half way point of the 90 minutes class.  23 students responded. And the temperature varied from 20 to 37 Celsius degree.

Teaching:

1. Review for the 5-q quiz of the last class. The followings were topics; V-te miru for trying to do something, abstract nouns, especially “koto”, Ending point “-made”, and so on.

2. Writing a paper about the sightseeing of a particular prefecture of Japan.

A student needs to pay attention not to use “desu-masu style” for their writing. Font must be MS mincho, not Simsun. Introduction of a prefecture’s tourism has to focus on topic that a student wants to write a suggestion, and so on.

3. Some tips for writing a composition using the textbook.

Differences on usages between “hazu” and “beki”.

Homework:

To write the suggestion to the tourism on the Prefecture.

Issues and Problems:

I was confused verbs’ forms of potential, honorable, and passive.

I implicitly gave a caution to a student who recently have not sent me homework. The student sent a message to me after the class.

Online Teaching for Class 1939 (Listening) on June 3, 2020

Date: June 3rd 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 71 slides

Numbers of Students: 27

23 student stayed with me from the start to the end. Four students were recorded for their shorter signing-in; 77, 72, 72, and 68 minutes.

Students’ Responses:

– Attendance Check : 24 students typed his/her attendance on BBS. Three came late.

– Connection check at the half way point: 25 students responded. This was just a questionnaire to ask which Japanese food a student wants to eat, Rahmen, Yakisoba, or Takoyaki.

Teaching:

1: Rote exercise to read numbers

– 1st quiz was asked. Question was to find one erroneous combination of number and counting word. The answer was “Six sheet of postcards” that needs different counting word from Chinese.

2: Review of the section 20 of the textbook.

– Rote exercise to make Nai-form from Masu-form of verbs.

– Redo of the exercise #3 in the section 20 of the textbook. Emphasis was put on the differences between intransitive and transitive verbs. The 2nd quiz was to ask the right combination of pair of intransitive and transitive verbs.

3: Introduction of three new constructions

– V-te mo iidesuka, V-te wa ikemasen, and V-nakereba narimasen; Apparently the time was not enough to introduce those important constructions.

– Explanations about Conjunctions and Conjunctive particles. The 3rd quiz was assigned for these words.

4: Listening to exercises 1 and 2 of the section 22 in textbook

– Some of expressions used for rejections in the textbook were not appropriate for the students to say. Therefor I gave the students a caution about what was the best expression to say no in the 4th quiz. That was “Chotto….”

– The 5th quiz wast to tell the functions of conjunctions and conjunctive particles in terms of being “As expected” or “Against expectation”.

Homework Assignment:

– No homework was assigned.

Issues and Problems:

– The hours of preparation were not enough to do an online class for 90 minutes. I woke up at 3 a.m. and tried making every PPT slide by 9 a.m. when the class started. But some slides had a problem with a-or-b selections for the answer because I didn’t check them well before the class. I apologized to the students.

Online Teaching for Class 1837 (Conversation) on Jun.1, 2020

Date: June 1st 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 57 slides

Numbers of Students: 23 out of 28. 5 students were recorded as completely absent.

Fully attendant for 90min : 17

Shorter signing-in: 85, 77, 35, 7, and 1 minutes.

Responses onto the BBS:

– Attendance check by a student his/herself: 25. However, three of the 25 were recorded as completely absent by the system. One student came late and stayed shorter times.

– 1st Quiz: 17 students responded. This was simply to ask two particles to make a passive sentence.

– 2nd Quiz: 18 students responded. This was to measure how well the students understand the conversation of Min’nano Nihongo section 37.

– 3rd Quiz: 21 students responded. This was to measure if or not the students understand a conjunctive particle “-noni” that indicated surprise and/or disappointment. No student got the right answer.

– Attendance check at the end: 20 students responded. This was to distinguish a passive sentence and honorable sentence with both using “reru/rareru”.

Teaching: 

– Review of passive sentences. The four types were discussed with rote exercise ogf passive form of verbs.

-Many activities including passive sentences and conjunctive particle “-noni”.

Homework Assignment:

– No homework was assigned.

– Three students were asked to send a MP3 or M4A by Wednesday night. Those students were asked to record their own speaking of conversation between two part time job workers.

Issues and Problems:

<No time to write about it, right now>