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August Podcast

My favourite cafe.

In my August podcast, I talk about the cafe in the park near to my old workplace. Luckily, I live nearby so can still visit occasionally. The podcast also has a listening comprehension quiz if you want to practise your English listening skills

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Nursery rhyme time

St Clement Danes church, Strand, London

The church in the above photograph is St Clement Danes, Strand, London. There is a nursery rhyme from the 16th/17th century which is sung to the melodies played by the bells in various London churches. The rhyme is ‘Oranges and lemons’ and the church above plays the first lines, ‘Oranges and lemons say the bells of St Clements’. I used to sing it a lot as a child (you can probably find a version on YouTube).

As I passed the church yesterday, the clock struck the hour and the bells played the melody from the rhyme. It did send a tingle down my spine being quite surreal at the same time.

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Remembrance of cakes past.

Blueberry muffin and cappuccino

Over twenty years ago when I was studying for my new career as an English language teacher at evening classes, I used to come to the bookstore Waterstones near Trafalgar Square to revise, study or plan my lessons. As I was there a couple of times a week, some of the baristas realised I was a language teacher and I often got a second cappuccino ’on the house’. As I was passing by yesterday, I popped in out of curiosity to see how it had changed. The whole top floor which was once half-cafe/half-bookstore in now a coffee bar. The staff are very friendly and the muffin and cappuccino (as pictured above) were delicious.

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Little Things

As I was walking out today, I passed a secondary school advertising Mandarin lessons. I noticed the Chinese characters on the sign first and because I’m studying the Japanese language, I could read some of the sign. Admittedly it was only the words ‘Chinese’ and ‘September’, but I was quite pleased to encounter and understand a language outside of a study period.

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My November Podcast

Hello there, my November podcast should be available later today. In it, I talk about my recollection of using songs and music in EFL classes. I refer to a cassette tape in the podcast, but now we’re in the 21st century, I’ve compiled a playlist on Spotify to accompany the podcast. If you have access to Spotify, the playlist is called, ‘Steve’s Songs for Lessons’. Hope you enjoy it. This is the link https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5MYSMgDa6iJLDTLr8MSpBz?si=p8jrKYBsR8eVyqgINDdt7A

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This week’s podcast

Hello everyone, I’ve just uploaded my final Season 3 podcast (or mini-podcast) in which I talk about kakizome. Thank you all for listening and subscribing.

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Seasons of mist…

Wow, term begins again. I have recently uploaded a podcast. Thanks to those who listen and subscribe 😁

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‘Appy Days’

This should say ‘nihongo’, which is Japanese for ‘Japanese’. The characters were designed for right-handed people. I’m left-handed, so it’s a little more difficult for me 😂

I have mentioned this form of learning in my podcast a few times and in this post I’d like to discuss learning language through an app (for those of you who are visual learners, rather than aural learners). It would not be my usual method of learning, but I thought I’d give it a try after reading about the app in a teaching journal. The language I decided to learn was Japanese. As you may recall, I know a few phrases and some Japanese characters, but not many. I started using this app about six weeks ago.

I’ve never been one for computer games, I might have played Pong or Pac-Man a long time ago, but that was about as far as it went. However, I am a big fan of general knowledge quizzes and have been since I was a child. Stay with me please, this is relevant to the topic. I consider this app similar to a mix between a computer game and a pub quiz machine. I used to love pub quiz machines and often won quite a lot of money on them.

This particular app is free to download, but if you interact with it on your device it gives you a certain number of lives and each time you make a mistake you lose a life. Once you’ve lost them all, you can’t continue until the app resets which inhibits your learning somewhat. However, if you subscribe for a reasonable monthly fee. the number of lives is unlimited. If you access the app through the internet, you don’t lose lives for making mistakes and can continue through the levels of the game. I am using this online version at the moment.

The app has a number of different levels and leagues. I’m in the ‘ruby’ league at the moment. It also has a leader board of the top scorers where I was number six for a while at the lower learning levels of the course. I’m on stage 2 at the moment and my position within the top thirty scorers varies between number twenty-three and thirteen. I’m not sure if I’d reach the top in this leader board as some people have scores which seems to mean they spend most of the day on the app.

The first stage of the course starts with very basic phrases, but at the same time introduces hiragana, katakana and a little kanji at this level. I’ve studied for about two hours a day and can recognise a lot more Japanese characters than I did a month or so ago, I think the interface is very user friendly and it presents material visually and aurally.

As a language instructor, I consider ‘listening’ probably the most difficult skill to master. Sometimes, the app says a phrase in Japanese that you then have to translate into English. The phrase also appears in Japanese script. It does happen occasionally that no matter how often I listen to the phrase, I still can’t quite get it, so I peek at the phrase in Japanese to see if that can help me…and it often does. I actually read the Japanese characters and understand them and know the sounds and pronunciation. I’m quite amazed that I can now do that.

When you complete level 1 of a lesson, other lessons will open up to you. Sometimes, I have days when I seem to find everything quite easy and become bored with the repetition of a lot of the stuff. But, then again if it’s not repeated I probably won’t remember it. On the other hand, I do have days when I have a mental block and keep leaving a character (or more) out of the same phrase and it takes me a while to complete the lesson. I do find that quite frustrating. I think the course is divided into seven parts as far as I can see.

For a couple of weeks, I found things a little difficult. I believe the problem was that I was committing everything to memory and not writing anything down. While this works for a little while, I don’t consider it the best way to retain information.

It also didn’t help that I now had about 500 Japanese words or phrases stored in my memory. The last few lessons of stage 1 were quite a hard slog and I realised that eventually I would need to record the phrases and sentences by copying them down and storing them in a retrieval system. In my case, it was by the old fashioned way of using a well-known Japanese brand of ink pen and a notebook one of my students gave me as a present a few years ago.

On the cover of the exercise book it has a picture of a Japanese woman staring out of the window at the blossom on a tree. It does refer to Madama Butterfly on the cover, so I’m guessing the woman is Cho-cho-san. Sometimes, when people give me really nice looking notebooks as a present, I don’t want to write in them as I think that would spoil them. Luckily, I’ve overcome that now and have used most of them. I’m pleased to say that recording the language in written form has helped me improve my learning and that I progressed from gold league to sapphire league to ruby league, based on the number of points I’m awarded for my answers. I’ve studied for 48 consecutive days now and there isn’t a necessity for me to study any further, but as I have invested so much time in it, I think I will continue to the end of the course. Not sure how long that will take though…I will keep you advised of my progress.

The other thing that appeals to me is that you are notified immediately if you have given a correct or incorrect answer. If you have given an incorrect answer, the correct one will appear at the bottom of the screen. I think that’s a lot better than keep flicking back and forth in a text book.

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See me!

On a cookery programme the other night, one of the judges giving criticism to a contestant said their work wasn’t up to the usual standard. The judge added that if he was the contestant’s teacher, he would have written ‘See me!’ in their exercise book. I don’t know if it happens now, but when I was of school age to see those comments written in red by your teacher struck fear into your heart.

Especially after it may have been a difficult piece of classwork or homework to complete. It was never one of the nice teachers that wrote this. They would have called you aside in the class and asked you if you were having difficulties and may be encourage you to try again with some extra guidance. Oh no, it was always the strict shouty ones. The ones you were afraid to ask, because you would receive an ‘ear-bashing’ in front of the rest of the class. You may even been asked the killer question, ‘Weren’t you listening?’

A more courageous past me may have responded, ‘Yes, I was, but I didn’t understand your explanation’.

However, in a school environment where you would be hit on the palm of the hand with a ruler for forgetting a book, it probably wasn’t the wisest comment to make.

I admit, I did receive the dreaded ‘See me!’ comment a few times, but they were generally for subjects I didn’t really have the aptitude in, or come to that, any interest in. I would be able to choose the subjects I wanted to study soon. If I did receive, the ‘See me’ on my work and my teacher would ask why I hadn’t yet ‘visited’ them, I would always say, ‘Oh sorry, I must have turned over two pages at once’.

I’m sure I wasn’t the only child to use that excuse.

Anyway, these things that happened in the way distant past would affect my behaviour in my future career (although it would be a good thirty years or so before I realised that). Let’s digress a little. In my days of learning Danish, I had two tutors. One day, the head of languages was marking her students’ work and was highlighting their errors in red ink. My first Danish tutor noticed this and reprimanded her for correcting this way. She told her she should use any colour but red to correct work as it may have a negative psychological effect on her learners. The head of languages was now my Danish tutor and recounted the discussion to her class. I can see the point as the red ink probably awoke the dreaded ‘See me!’ in some people’s consciousness.

When I first started teaching, the use of technology in EFL was in it’s infancy (if it existed at all in some places), so all essays were handwritten. I had decided if I had to correct, it wouldn’t be using a red pen, but just a different colour from that in which the essay was written. Later I used correction codes and later on in word processed documents, I could use the ‘comments’ function on my computer (which I find quite useful).

I remember one of my students asking in class, ‘Steve, why do you teach as you do? What influences you?’

I told them I just remembered how I was taught in secondary school (and then did the complete opposite of most of my teachers). The class did find that comment quite funny.