Sanggang and Solar Terms in Korea

[samedi]

Once students reach a high enough level at our academy we have them start keeping an English journal/diary. Students are allowed to write about any topic they want. Some focus on what they did over the weekend while others pick a random subject to discuss in their notebook. I have twins in one of my classes - a brother and sister - who are

Comments

Re: Amanda here...

[samedi]

The French program at my high school only had a single class for the first two levels and there was no French III course during my freshman and sophomore years. I do wonder if the decision to read outside literature came from our teacher trying to create a syllabus for a 'new' class of just four students. Since we studied on our own without the teacher I guess it makes sense to stress reading and writing to make up for the lack of speaking practice. For what it's worth, our teacher was not a native speaker, but she had spent several years living in Paris.

I know what you mean about language courses requiring substantially more work than pretty much any other (high school) class. I still read the occasional French news articles from time to time and can make out a fair amount - though participating in forums is another matter entirely. (Internet slang ... 아이고!)

I took a year of Mandarin at university (my school didn't offer Korean or I would have taken that instead), signing up for both a standard language course and a special conversation class; between the conversation class and living with a girl from Beijing that year my spoken Chinese is probably better than my reading and writing abilities. Still, when I get back to Korea from a trip to Taiwan I tend to speak in a strange mish-mash of Korean, Chinese, and French! I think my brain realizes that it should use something other than English and pulls from all available resources?

In a comment below I mentioned that one of my coworkers takes journals more seriously -- she has students write out their corrected journal entries so that they'll get practice using correct grammar. Any idea if the extra repetition helps?

Based on what I hear about the education system here I'm not sure that kids have much time to read for fun outside of class! Without developing that habit as kids I can understand why it's not common to see adults reading for pleasure. I brought back a few kids books two summers ago and they seem to go over well with my younger students; here's to hoping that gets a few of them more interested in reading for fun.