English education

I have read some articles about English education in elementary schools in Japan on the Japan Times. Those were relatively old, but I have found an interesting survey result on this article, and I quote,  "A survey published by the ministry in 2005 found 71 percent of parents and guardians favored making English compulsory in elementary schools, while 54 percent of teachers were opposed." This survey was done in 2005, and can be too old, however, I believe this result depicts the reality well.
    It is now a common knowledge that learning English is important to have some kind of advantages in Japan's society. If someone has high TOEIC score, he or she might have more chance to get a well-paying job, which is considered as a good job.
    It seems that many Japanese people, especially parents of young children, may be obsessed by English education. The survey shows that 71 percent of parents or guardians want their children to learn English, in elementary schools. This might be because they had some difficulties with not being able to use the language. 
    Looking at the real situation, the one who has to teach English language at elementary school is mainly the homeroom teachers, who have not trained to teach it. Therefore  they are not confident, and also it can be too much of a work for them  because they teaches many subjects and also have to deal with pupils' parents and even with some 'monster parents'. They might have some help from ALT, but as the words indicate, Assistant Language Teachers are just to assist, so mainly the homeroom teacher have to make the lesson plans. For this reason, I assume that, as the survey result showed, teachers do not want to make English language compulsory.
    I do not know how teachers at elementary schools are coping with English lessons right now, but I hope the lessons are interesting for pupils. Otherwise it is nothing but a disaster, possibly making children to hate English language at an earlier age.


Thankfully, I did not receive proper English education at secondary schools so I did not hate it, but I must admit that since I have entered the university and been having to study English, I started to have less interest in it than before. However, by enjoying using English, especially in this class, I hope I will be able not to hate it. (?)

Something about education this week?

This week we wound up talking a lot about education, especially language education, and especially English language education, and maybe especially English language education in Japan. It's a big topic. Wikipedia has a whole category of articles about English language education, including one about English language education in Japan. Of course Wikipedia is controversial, and not always accurate, but it's a good place to start researching anything. I always tell students to use Wikipedia but don't cite it. Read the footnotes and track down the information as far as you can, to find out where they're getting it from. Don't forget to go back a few weeks later to see if the article has changed. I have some favorite Wikipedia articles that I like to follow as they change. But I do use Wikipedia, especially to start research, although I don't think I would put it into a footnote. I'll let you find other sites about learning English and link to them for us. I'd like to show you a video from YouTube about English as a second language: I hope you enjoy it! (^_^)

I have no favorite food; I eat meats, fish and vegetables.
I like cooking and eating. Recently, I have tried to cook various food; chili con carne, borshch, fried chicken and so on... I always enjoy cooking.
 However, I don't like mushrooms, konnyaku, bean-starch vermicelli (harusame in Japan), jellies and chocolates.