Literacy shmiteracy

[flonnebonne]

"Fanfic in Chinese is better! All the English ones are so bad! And you know, there's so much...18+ stuff!"
--something a Gr. 8 student said to me the other day

Getting students to read fanfic to help them improve their language abilities sounds good in theory, but all the badfic and porn out there gets in the way. The last thing you want is parents complaining that you told their kids to read porn. I think anime fandoms are especially porny, for whatever reason. Too bad, since that's what the Gr. 8 student likes.

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On another note....when I read in Japanese (which isn't that much), I tend to read crap. I read celebrity news--about Westerners, so I can't even make the excuse that I'm gaining cultural knowledge. I read manga and rarely books. I read freaking MSN ads. I rarely ever read anything difficult or substantive. And because I don't read difficult stuff in Japanese, I don't have the language to even think about difficult stuff in Japanese. I am barred from higher thought.

It really hit home the fact for me that access to high levels of literacy = access to thinking = access to power.

(This is my way of saying, "Ugh, I should have read more essays to prepare for the stupid JLPT.")

Comments

[harumi.livejournal.com]

Depends on the program. From what I've heard, it's half and half. So sometimes every other week, other times every other day, or half day. Bilingual programs are ideally supposed to have half-English/half-other speaking students, so that both can exchange. Since America is such an English dominated country though, it mostly doesn't work that way, so more emphasis on the other language portion is given to give it a little balance in the beginning. Toward the end though, students should be fluent in all four skills for both languages, ideally.

[flonnebonne]

Cool. I'll have to look into it more on my own. Wish I could have been in a program like that! (Though as a kid I probably would have rebelled.)