TsukuBlog

On Sunday, April 27th, the Ibaraki Chapter of the Japan Association for Language Teaching will offer two presentations. All are welcome. There will be no charge. No pre-registration is necessary.

Date: Sunday, April 27
Place: Ibaraki Christian University, Hitachi Omika
Cost: Free
More info: http://www.kasei.ac.jp/jalt/

Morning Session (Part 1): 10:00 (Registration from 09:30)
Doing Culture Ethnographically/Study Abroad Programs
by Elaine Gilmour, Associate Professor, Miyagi Gakuin Women’s University

This presentation examines what an ethnographic approach to teaching culture is, and suggests components for a community based ethnography course. We’ll also consider the point of such a course from the students’ perspective, by looking at questionnaire response data provided by students who have participated in Study Abroad programs during their university experience.

Lunch Break: 12:00-14:00

Afternoon Session (Part 2): 14:00
Actually Teaching Listening
by Alastair Graham-Marr, ABAX
Teaching listening effectively means teaching both phonology and knowledge of discourse. A working knowledge of the phonology of natural connected speech, elisions and liaisons, weak forms and reductions helps students with their ‘bottom-up’ decoding skills. Developing student knowledge of discourse, particularly of scripts (those discourses in English that tend to follow a set pattern) helps them with their ‘top-down’ predictive skills.

JALT Ibaraki chapter meetings are open to all interested in learning and teaching languages. Abstracts for the presentations and access information for the venue, as well further information for future events are available on the chapter website.

Why not buy some furniture?

This is from the back of a truck seen in Tsukuba. There is another branch of this company in Tsukuba called Style Shop, a much better name if you ask me.

You’d think that if you were going to paint it on your vehicle, you would get someone to check it first.

This is not an April Fool’s joke. One of my friends found this coffee in a vending machine at a local research institute. I took the picture with my very own camera.

Photo taken near the JR Ushiku Station

I was waiting at stoplights last night, and saw these E-words. If “table were” the only “innocent mistake” I saw, I wouldn’t have snapped this picture!

Engrish.com has been on top of my bookmarked websites for many years, and not surprisingly, Tsukuba is also awash with its own version of Engrish. With camera in hand, one needs only a few hours in Tsukuba Center and its environs to capture some of the best and most hilarious Engrish in Japan.

This week, allow me to begin a series on Tsukuba’s own Japenglish with this photo below:

I never knew that in Matsushiro there’s a place where you can specifically buy pigs. Check out the Matsushiro Shoppig Center!

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Feel free to contribute to this series. If you’re not a contributing blogger, please send your digital photo to me (tpbnt(a)yahoo(dot)com) and I will be glad to post it for you — with your byline, of course!

If you’re in trouble with your spouse, or worse, with the law, there’s no better place to go. Here, you’ll be incognito, surrounded by the perfect ambiance for a sumptuous Japanese-style meal.

Make no mistake: it’s not your best hiding place, it’s your ONLY hiding place.

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Located at Sakura Technopark, beside BookOff.

If you were going to go all the trouble of making a product, don’t you think you’d run the name of your product past a few people before making the decision to use it?