この度取材をしていただき、大変光栄に思っています。
読売新聞さんの取材では、僕の英語交じりの日本語を記者の方が熱心にメモを取ってくださって、本当に素敵な記事を作ってくださいました。
「英語を好きになってほしい」
「何歳でも学ぶことを楽しんでほしい」
2016年にライジングサン英語学校を立ち上げたときの気持ちがフレッシュに思い起こされました。
今週、ライジングサン英語学校の各クラスは今年度最後のレッスンになっています。生徒一人一人の成長を評価した修了証を渡しています。生徒にみなさんに「こんなことができるようになった」ということを伝えています。次年度もさらなる英語のステップアップを一緒に楽しみましょう。
コロナの不安がなくなったら、また皆さんとパーティがしたいです。
記事中「チャレンジングな市民」というのは「雲南市民がチャレンジをやっている、チャレンジを認めてくれる、新しいことをどんどんやろうとしている、それを感じて魅力だと思っている」ということです。（英語のChallengingの意味とは異なります）
Hello everyone. Here is the class schedule for 2021 starting from Monday April 5th.
みなさん、こんにちは。 4月5日（月曜日）からの2021年の授業スケジュールです。
グーグル翻訳を使用して翻訳
私は人生のほとんどの間、日本語をオンとオフで学んでいます。私は2年間ロシア語をオンとオフで学んでいます。言語を勉強する上で私が最も難しいと思うのは、文法でも語彙でも、練習する人を見つけることでもありません。それは自己学習です。座って勉強しています。私はそれを一気に行うことができますが、一貫して自己学習することはできませんでした。これは私だけかもしれませんが、言語学習に関して誰もがこの問題を抱えていると確信しています。 この問題を解決することを約束する本やアプリケーションはたくさんあります。彼らはあなたが自分で言語を学ぶ方法を見つけたと主張しています。しかし、ここでの仕事にはもっと大きな困難があります。人によって学習方法は異なります。あなたにとって成功していることは、私にとって必ずしも成功しているわけではありません。だからこそ、私たちは教師に勉強を任せています。私たちが誰であり、どのように学ぶかを理解することは教師の役割です。あなたが良い教師になりたいのなら、あなたはあなたの生徒が誰であるか、そして彼らが学ぶのを助けるものを学ぶ必要があります。たとえば、私はなぜ私が何かをしているのかを教えてくれる人を必要とするタイプの学生です。理由がわかり次第、問題なくやって成功します。もし私ならそれは難しいように聞こえますが、たくさんあるでしょう。それは学習の1つの方法にすぎません。あなたが30人のクラスを持っているならば、あなたはそれらの30人がどのように学ぶかを理解しなければなりません。重複していると、学生は彼らに情報を提示するさまざまな方法を試すためのあなたの努力に感謝します。私のメンターがかつて言ったように、「一人が苦労していることに気づいたら、その一人を中心にレッスンを設計し、そのレッスンをクラス全体に提供します。他にも助けが必要な人がいる可能性があるからです。」 あなたが成功した学生になりたいのなら、あなたはあなたの学習スタイルが何であるかを理解し、そのスタイルに基づいてあなた自身の学習プログラムを構築するべきです。 とは言うものの;あなたの学習スタイルは何ですか？そして、そこにいる教師にとって、あなたの生徒はどのようなスタイルを学び、彼らがそのように学ぶのを助けるためにあなたは何をしますか。
What do you think is the most difficult thing about learning a language is?
I’ve been learning Japanese on and off for most of my life. I have been learning Russian on and off for two years. The thing I find hardest about studying a language is not the grammar, not the vocabulary, not finding someone to practice with, it is self studying. It is sitting down and studying. I can do it in bursts but I have never been able to consistently self study. This could just be me but I am certain that everyone has this problem with language learning.
There are plenty of books and applications that promise to solve this problem. They claim to have found the way for you to learn a language by yourself. There is a bigger difficulty at work here though. Every person has a different way of learning. What is successful for you is not necassarily successful for me. That is why we entrust teachers to help us to study. It is the teacher’s role to figure out who we are and how we learn. If you want to be a good teacher you have to learn who your students are and what helps them learn. For example, I am the type of student who needs someone to tell me why I am doing something. As soon as I know why, I will do it without question and succeed. If I do not know the answer to that question I will never get anywhere. That is just one way of learning. If you have a class of thirty people you have to figure out how those thirty people learn. That sounds challenging but there will be a lot of overlap and the students will appreciate your efforts to try different ways of presenting information to them. As my mentor once said, “when you realise one person is stuggling, design a lesson around that one person and then give that lesson to the whole class because chances are there are others that need that help too.”
If you want to be a successful student you should figure out what your learning style is and build your own learning program around that style.
With that said; what’s your learning style? And for the teachers out there what are your students learning styles and what do you do to help them learn that way.
以下の日本語版
Peppa Pig is a long running TV show which I also recommend to English language learners as each episode is only about five minutes and it’s easy to understand the story. The actors are also all well spoken, so if you follow their pronunciation then you will do well for yourself.
Enough about the TV show. This article is to talk about the ladybird reader series’ adaption of the peppa pig episodes. I recommend these books for a number of reasons. First, you can read the book and then watch the episode of TV. It’s a great way to help second language learners follow the spoken English. Second, The ladybird reader series always includes a picture dictionary of the words in the book to help your child or student learn how to read that word. Third, peppa pig’s design and storylines are enjoyable for children. I am yet to meet a child who isn’t taken in but the character design or the storytelling.
The Ladybird reader series is good in general. It also includes a range of fairytale adaptions and other famous stories. Since it is a reader series it means that they have leveled the language used. Starting from level one you can quickly build up your reading skills. In addition, ladybird publishing also offers a lot of teaching resources to go along with this series so if you are a teacher you can safe yourself a lot of time and effort.
グーグル翻訳で翻訳 ペッパピッグは、各エピソードが約5分で、ストーリーを理解しやすいので、英語学習者にもお勧めする長期にわたるテレビ番組です。俳優もみんなよく話されているので、彼らの発音に従えば、あなたは自分自身のためにうまくいくでしょう。 テレビ番組についてはもう十分です。この記事は、テントウムシリーダーシリーズのペッパピッグエピソードの適応について話すことです。私はいくつかの理由でこれらの本をお勧めします。第二言語学習者が話された英語に従うのを助けるための素晴らしい方法。第二に、テントウムシリーダーシリーズには、子供や生徒がその単語の読み方を学ぶのに役立つ、本の中の単語の画像辞書が常に含まれています。第三に、ペッパピッグのデザインとストーリーライン私はまだ、キャラクターデザインやストーリーテリング以外に取り入れられていない子供に会っていません。テントウムシリーダーシリーズは一般的に良いです。また、おとぎ話の適応やその他の有名な物語の範囲が含まれています。読者シリーズなので、使用する言語を平準化したことを意味します。レベル1から始めて、すぐに読解力を高めることができます。さらに、テントウムシ出版は、このシリーズに沿った多くの教育リソースも提供しているので、あなたが教師であれば、多くの時間と労力を費やすことができます。
Do your children want to know how everything works? This is the book for you.
Usborne publishing’s book See Inside How Things Work is a fantastic book for helping your child understand how daily objects work. It focuses on five simple inventions that can be found in almost every invention: the wheel, the screw, the wedge, the lever and the inclined plane. Each page is dedicated to a different group of inventions including waterworks; musical instruments; cars and trucks; and flying to name a few. The book does a fantastic job of explaining how simple machines work to make complex systems.
The book is aimed at ages six and older which means that the language is quite simple but can entertain much older children as well. I have personally used this book in my kindergarten and elementary school classes to great success. While they may have only understood half the words they simple diagrams and wording meant they could still get a feel for what was being said. Even the older children learnt things they did not know.
The book is part of a larger series called lift-the-flap books. The whole series covers a wide range of non-fiction and fictional topics. If your children wants to know how something works there is a book in this series for them. With over one hundred and fifty books ranging from space, your body, and dinosaurs to the water cycle, jobs, and the Roman empire.
The books are easy to access aimed mostly at children from the age of 5 but have enough information information to easily keep older children entertained. This also means that the book is appropriate for English language learners too.
If you want to spark your children’s curiosity. Or if your child is already curious about the world and asks a lot of why questions this book and perhaps the whole series is for you.
Presenting the Oxford Reading Tree
The oxford reading tree is a fantastic reading resource for kindergarten to the end of elementary school. The series follows Chip, Biff and Kipper’s family. Most of the stories are short everyday family events with a little joke at the end. The humour is British humour so I have often had my students puzzled by the joke but they always want to read more. The early stages of the series are very repetitive and easy to read. This helps build the students confidence as they recognise the reading pattern for the story. Parents who don’t have much English ability but still want their children to learn english can read these to their kids without much difficulty. As the levels get higher there are more sentences added progressing the students’ reading naturally.
There are a lot of additional resources for teachers. My favourite extra is that you can get the series in big book format for a reasonable price. This makes for a good in class reading activity. You can get reading packs for a reasonable price. Or you can bulk the first six books from each level in two batches:
グーグルによる翻訳
オックスフォード読書ツリーは、幼稚園から小学校の終わりまでの素晴らしい読書リソースです。このシリーズは、チップ、ビフ、キッパーの家族に続きます。物語のほとんどは、最後に少し冗談を言っている短い毎日の家族のイベントです。ユーモアは英国のユーモアなので、私はよく生徒たちに冗談に戸惑わせましたが、彼らはいつももっと読みたいと思っています。シリーズの初期段階は非常に反復的で読みやすいです。これは、生徒が物語の読み方を認識するときに自信をつけるのに役立ちます。英語力はあまりないけれど、子供たちに英語を学んでもらいたいという親は、子供たちに難なく読むことができます。レベルが高くなるにつれて、生徒の読書を自然に進めるために追加される文が増えます。教師向けの追加リソースはたくさんあります。私のお気に入りの追加機能は、シリーズを大きな本の形式でリーズナブルな価格で入手できることです。これは、クラスでの読書活動に役立ちます。リーズナブルな価格でリーディングパックを手に入れることができます。または、各レベルの最初の6冊を2つのバッチにまとめることができます。
Coronavirus news in Japan has been quite comical in many regards. I’ll briefly go through what happened in Japan.
From the start the government’s policy has been to stay open. Lockdown was never a thing here although there was a caution put out about meeting in groups of more than ten people. That said though there were two times when the schools were all closed. The first time was just before the new school year started. In fact the desire for an opening ceremony for the new year was so strong that schools across Japan were openned again for one day so everyone could have their opening ceremony. The schools were closed again and students stayed home. The school are still closed in many parts of the country and will reopen at the end of the month. My area is so rural that they reopened the schools much earlier. And this was the closest thing to a lockdown this country had. Parents still had to go to work.
Speaking of lockdowns. When the WHO announced that all countries should be doing widespread testing, social distancing and lockdowns the Abe government said no to all three. Testing has been incredibly limited for the past seven months. Just today it was reported that two hundred more people than had been reported died in Tokyo during March. That may not seem like much considering other countries statistics but it does point to a worrying trend of lack of testing and low reporting. But I digressed, shortly after WHO made that announcement Abe Shinzo made a large donation to WHO so that he got a special mention by name in one of the WHO tweets.
Like many countries there was a lot of debate about giving a stimulus package to the people of Japan to jump the economy. Being a conservative government there has been a great resitance to the idea of giving money to people. They did however decide that they should give out coupons. The wagyuu beef industry mentioned to the government that they were losing a great deal of export earnings from the closing of borders around the world so it was settled. The government would give out wagyuu beef coupons. The fish industry also mentioned they’d be in trouble so fish coupons were also agreed upon. Critics of the government mentioned that wagyuu beef was going to become the new currency if they went through with that plan and demanded that the government just give money to the people. In response Abe Shinzo himself said “My income hasn’t been effected by the pandemic so we don’t need to give any money.” Talk about not understanding how taxes work or how the economy works.
While the wagyu beef coupons may have been put on hold the idea of coupons hasn’t. Believing the biggest victims of the crisis was the tourism sector the government declared they are be making coupons called the go to campain. There are two varieties; the first variety is called ‘go to travel’ (the coupons will have this English phrase on it, it was a design point that people were paid taxpayers money to come up with) for use in tourism business and ‘go to eat’ coupons for use at restaurants.
In other giving news, upon hearing that there was a lack of masks in the health sector Abe decided that he would send every household two cotton masks. Five companies were commisioned to make the masks, three of which are legimate multibillion dollar companies and two of which have no information about them. Just that they exist. Billions of yen were spent on making the masks and sending them around Japan. We are yet to receive them. Many critics pointed out that two masks wasn’t enough for most households to which the government responded, “You are Japanese, if you don’t need your mask you should donate it to other people.” This is despite the fact that two masks per household would be fifty thousand under the population of Japan.
Meanwhile Abe Shinzo’s wife, despite strong suggestions that she should not leave the house, left for a retreat in Gifu. The retreat was for the religious group that she is a member of. One of their messages; the coronavirus is just an expression of cosmic energy, if you believe this than you won’t get the virus. That convinced me. I’ll immediately travel to Tokyo and hug everyone.
On the money news, one of the other political parties managed to get a bill through that would give everyone person in Japan about 100,000 yen. The ruling party were highly critic and called that party a traitor. That party usually worked very closely with the ruling party. Despite this Abe is getting the credit for the money.
Back to the masks. Recently people have been getting their masks in the mail. One of the responses that went viral was from a woman who felt the love of her government and of Shinzo Abe through the mask and was full of gratitude for all the people who helped get her those two masks.
Well you gotta laugh.
