le pays du soleil levant

good news, i found 3 japanese speakers who agreed to help me, so i've just done 50-60 questionnaires with one person, i'll do another 60-70 tomorrow with the second person, and i'll do the rest with the third person next week. and since i'm done with the korean questionnaires (thanks sue!!!), this means that we'll only need to go over a few arabic, thai, portuguese, and chinese questionnaires (about a 100 total) and then we'll be entirely done entering the data. and then we can code it all.

it's cool to talk to these speakers of different languages, because they can tell me a lot about the students who responded to the questionnaires. for example, we found out that all the japanese students in one school are from the same university in japan, so there must be some exchange program there with the american university where these students are studying. it's fun. and sometimes we're laughing so hard at students' comments. some say, "a good teacher is someone who knows everything, answers all my question, is on time, accessible, speaks english perfectly, is patient, loves me, understands me, makes class fun, is interesting, encourages me, makes me love english, knows other languages, is interested in my country's culture, has a master's degree in education, knows how to explain things very clearly, has a lot of experience, loves his/her job..." and you're lucky if they don't add "and only native speakers of english can do all that!"

from what i can tell, japanese students are not as demanding and harsh as korean students (which corroborates previous findings). they mostly want someone who's patient and encouraging. if that's all it takes to be a good teacher in japan, i think i could do it :)

other than that, nada. we just work on the inter-rater reliability and the coding stuff, and i'm meeting on tuesday with the statistics consultant. after that, i'll just have to write the second half of my third chapter (and i'll keep the third half for next semester, after i get the second batch of student questionnaires)! yesterday i wrote to several iep directors, especially those whose teachers haven't reponded to their online questionnaires yet, to remind them to do so and to tell them that they're participating in a project that just received a major grant! which says something about the importance of the project. two administrators and one teachers have responded since. which means that i have 804 students, 83 teachers, and 15 administrators so far. i want more! i'll get more!