I’m back in Ehime this weekend, for the first time since November. When I used to be a JET I could never understand why ALTs from the big cities complained about living in the countryside. What’s not to like about being surrounded by greenery, clean air and lots of fresh food? But after being in…

Yesterday, after having meetings all morning ( lots of new stuff coming up on the site!), in the afternoon I popped along to some of the ALT workshops to see what was going on. The first one was by an elementary school ALT, Stein Setvik from Nagahama City Elementary English Program in Shiga Prefecture, and…

Today the Yomiuri had the second in its series of articles about elementary school English. This time from one of the opponents, Prof. Yukio Otsu. You can read the article here ( note: the link will expire soon). He seems to be of the familiar, but not widely held outside Japan, view that English shouldn’t…

Today was this year’s Kobe Conference for recontracting members of the Japanese governments’ JET programme. This was the 4th year I’ve been asked to present here, but quite a few things have changed, so it was almost like doing it for the first time. First of all there was no AJET info fair, so I…

The Daily Yomiuri is doing a series of interviews with people on the government panel who are discussing Elementary School English in Japan. This week it’s the turn of one of the people in favour, Mineo Nakajima. Here’s the article http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/features/language/20060518TDY14001.htm (The link will expire soon. Link found courtesy of the ELTnews)

I made a couple of big changes to the site today. The first is splitting the printed/laminated picture card packs in two. Quite a few people already have the cards for CDs 1 to 4, but were getting fed up with the all the hassles of printing out lots of the new ones. After trying…