The Horrors of Japanese - English Textbooks

teaching in Japan is a fantastic experience the students are great and there's a lot of scope for creativity and having fun in the classroom making learning English fun one of the best resources we have a Japanese English textbooks and I say Japanese English because they tend to be written by non-native speakers of English aka Japanese speakers so the content is often very useful and interesting and engaging and valuable and today I want to talk about how valuable and how useful those books those textbooks are in this video so one of the things I like to do in my old communication class is practice practical dialogue and roleplay for example at a party I was very lucky when our oral communication textbook had a chapter on a party it's called a party at home and it's absolutely it's brilliant we have John here and Yuki and John is hosting the party invites Yuki over hi yukky welcome to my house hi John thank you very much for inviting me and Yuki's the first guest and then she's the only guest is it a party it was John John trying his luck and then on the second page we really get into the heart of the party dialogue Yuki pass me the salt please here you are thank you and then us that's the party dialogue one of the best things about the textbooks are the stories which are always uplifting and happy and and rather positive and I like that for example we have the story of quill the guide dog here and his beloved owner mr. Watanabe and it's the story of how mr. Watanabe hated dogs and he was blind but when he met quill the guide dog they had this fantastic relationship and it's a beautiful story I'll read it quill helped mr. Watanabe as a guide dog and learned many things to happy years past however their happy days did not last longer than this mr. Watanabe became ill and went into hospital mr. Watanabe died Oh clue lost his job after turning 12 years old quill could not move any part of his body except his head his puppy Walker slept beside him late one night his puppy Walker said to him Thank You quill you don't have to try so hard anymore just relax soon after quills breath stopped comprehensive question 1 why did their happy days not last very long I think this is quite a heartwarming story what is love it's the story of Helen Keller the famous American writer and her teacher miss Sullivan and they're really close really nice relationship one day miss Sullivan spelled in my hands I love Helen what is love I asked if Sullivan held me close and said it is here and touched my Ches her words puzzled me yeah yeah me me teeth and all right maybe miss Sullivan can clear up the definition of love for Helen love is something like the clouds in the sky you cannot touch the clouds but you feel the rain you cannot touch love but you can feel it without love you would not be happy at 1:00 to play what the does that mean Oxford Dictionary defines love as a feeling of deep affection why couldn't you just say that you stupid question to fill in the blank miss Sullivan touched Helens blank and said love was there he saw as themselves there as well as being inspiration or really quite well written so here we have soccer balls Afghanistan and it's the story of some students that made soccer balls to send to Afghanistan's really which is you know really a really nice gesture at first all of us were excited but it wasn't easy to make soccer balls it took seven hours to make one ball sounds we worked day and night and we finally made 500 balls we all shouted we made it yeah seven seven hours per ball five hundred pulls us that's a long time at first the children look nervous but when we showed them the balls they gave us big smiles it was like a magic like a magic beautiful something stories a really inspirational as well I'm really to get you here make you want to do great things and I think that resonates with the students as well for example this chapter here called our life it's about disabled people and says our life is not a tragedy it's full of challenges and adventures we can do anything we feel the same as you all do which is just brilliant I think that's great and I think a case study from the Paralympics or something would be fantastic ah I don't know not so much the Paralympics but this is good but sometimes we feel frustrated for example we hate steps they don't listen to us we are dreaming of a new world all the people there will live together then we will be full members of society what does that mean we're dreaming of a new world all the people there will live together if somebody came up to me on a wheelchair and said we're dreaming of a new world all the people there will live together not really sure however how I'd react to that is that disabled disabled people planning something starting to feel with paranoia so there you have it you come to Japan YouTube can teach using these fantastic resources of course there's many more it was just a small song really are just don't what is great

Channel: Abroad in Japan

Views: 1,071,141

Rating: 4.9558949 out of 5

Keywords: japan, teaching japan, Textbook (Literary Genre), JET, teaching in japan, japan classroom, classroom, teaching

Id: bZqUtVxDFvw

Length: 6min 51sec (411 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 05 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/TheSlimyDog]

RIP Mr. Watanabe.

[u/[deleted]]

lost it at "question 1: Why did their happy days not last very long?"

[u/yaosio]

He needs to get a new camera. It zooms in a bit and then immediately zooms back out. It's very distracting.

[u/spinac]

RIP in peace quill