Good news on open access to my works on bilingualism, the research area related to my teaching, child-raising, and using Japanese for over 40 years. I was interviewed by The Japan Times on #bilingual#education for a forthcoming paywalled article. It was a long interview, and usually a newspaper article uses only short passages from one individual. However, the #Japan Association for #Language#Teaching Bilingualism Special Interest Group (#JALT#Bilingualism SIG) would like to publish the full interview in its newsletter Bilingual Japan. Everyone should be able to read that as I back it up in research repositories. The tentative title is "English Education and Bilingual Education in Japan."
My publications on bilingualism have been backed up mostly at Academia Edu, which is not so easy to access anymore [any comment?], so I've added links to the original sources of articles, which are open access, at https://japanned.hcommons.org/bilingualism
Via reading about the theremin, I reached Wikipedia's page about the Sorbs. Out of curiosity I started reading it. Then I thought I'd rather read it in #German. So I went to the German Wikipedia page about the Sorben and read for a while.
When I was finished, it occurred to me that there are some subjects I prefer reading about in German vs. English. It depends on my original context for those subjects.
The hardest part of this semester was trying to urge #students, amid the available #technologies, to really #read. Most friends worldwide are on mobile phones, preferring short posts, and not easily accessing links. I can therefore be thankful for the global readership of my #publications in these #research#repositories:
Japan's ResearchMap (和英), where I have filled in #Japanese as well as English information about publications (6,600+ downloads): https://researchmap.jp/waoe
Does anyone know of any research on bilingualism/multilingualism which discusses language acquisition that didn't happen simultaneously or sequentially, but involved switching back and forth between the languages? Also studies on people who experienced both L1 and L2 attrition?
I'm in the #Humanities Commons instance, and we have free profiles like https://hcommons.org/members/stevemccartyinjapan that include a link to the old blue bird of Twitter, and members are increasingly leaving, so our admins at @hello might want to reconsider having that item in the next version of profiles.
Too many decades in Japan, but surprised to find that "kawaii" ([Japanese-style] cute, adorable, etc.) has become a loanword in English. Many technical or other English terms that I use are not in the Scrabble Dictionary, but kawaii is. Cuteness is ubiquitous in contemporary Japan, and apparently getting exported. The attached screenshot is from our family LINE group.
I have always advised college students to use Romanized Japanese terms in sentences if there is no English equivalent. This lengthy "List of English words of Japanese origin" would have been handy when I was teaching classes of mixed international and Japanese students. You might also find it of reference or interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Japanese_origin
@mguhlin In Bilingualism classes in Japan, I can require students to show what they have learned from this class, which is based on reliable research, and to discuss their own experiences in summary, reflection, and response papers. In such ways I can discern how much of students' writing is their own thinking and analyzing. Findings from the discipline of bilingualism are dwarfed by the amount of common misconceptions about bilingualism, which would presumably be reflected in AI databases, from blogs and such sources in Japanese, where students find mostly stereotypical, anecdotal, or prejudiced information for papers, despite my warnings to use reliable sources. I am wondering how applicable this approach could be for other subject matter areas.
2/2 Among the limitations are that the English is too much and too difficult for L2 learners in most academic sources, such as journals. When students use automatic translation, they have probably thought about the content in Japanese, but they can paste auto-translated English into papers without fulfilling the language-driven mandate to balance the content-driven approach. I do not believe in content-based EFL as a pretext to mask a language-driven agenda, since the students are enriched by the transferable knowledge they gain in L1 as well as in L2.
Writing reflects thinking, so I discourage writing and speaking that relies on machine translation or AI. The result might be obvious, but we cannot accuse and police students.
In Singapore Colloquial English (aka “Singlish”) there is a linguistic construction I like to call the “is one” construction. Basically this is an “is”, followed by a statement, followed by “one”, typically used to assert the agency of the subject of the statement. E.g., one might say,
“Is he say one, (not me)!”
To mean, “It is he who said it, (not me)!”
Or “Is the cat eat one, (not the dog)!”
To mean, “It is the cat that ate it, (not the dog)!”
Racists defacing bilingual road signs in indigenous languages is annoying. But ultimately I think it serves our cause more than theirs. "Respectable" white folks may not care about decolonization, but they're passionately against vandalism of public property.