On Acculturation, Personality and Fitting In

I didn’t begin pursuing a life of ministry in Japan because I thought I would fit in here. I fell in love with Japan because of having lived here. I also didn’t have a great sense that my personality or talents would lend themselves to ministry in Japan specifically....

Teaching Grammar in the ESL Classroom

Today’s post is another paper from the correspondence TESL course I was taking back in the Fall. This assignment was on the question of whether or not grammar should be taught explicitly in the ESL classroom. Any thoughts? Feel free to comment, especially if...

Talk Time

This week and next I’m continuing my series of writings on Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL), using more material taken from assignments I did for my TESL course. Today’s post was written back in mid-December, and is about teacher vs. student...

First Foreign Geisha

Check out this short article about a non-Japanese person who’s become a part of a very-Japanese part of society: Japan Today – News – Japans first ever foreign geisha debuts The interesting thing to me is that it says she’s spent half of her...

Teaching Methods

With my move to Japan less than 3 weeks away (eek!) I’ve got lots of little things to do, as well as some not-so-little things. The visa application is out of my hands, the plane ticket is booked for the 28th, and just yesterday I shipped two boxes of stuff to...

Language Acquisition

The following article is from a paper I wrote for my Teaching English as a Second Language course. It’s based on the interview I did a while back, which I also used for my podcast. The focus of the paper is, of course, on language learning. Haruka Kudo comes...