teacher's pronunciation?

Thesedays many midleschool or highschool students think their English teacher's pronunciation should be perfect and even judge their language ability just by their accent.
When it comes to my position, I am also trying to have "native-like" accent as far as I can.
But here's the thing. As English become more internationalized, we should accept the variety of it.
English is no longer English-speaking countries' own.
There are thousand of millions of people who use English as many purpose as their numbers.
Austrailian English is English. Singaporean English is also Englsih and so forth...
Can you just devaluate the quality of English teacher who has Korean accent?
Never do such a ridiculous misjudgement!

L1 reading vs. L2 reading

Many people and reasearches said there are a relationship between reading and L2 reading. I would say I agree with that suggestion.

daily reading - the very first attempt!

I have already, believe it or not, decided to read any kind of articles regulary from next month.
as I decided it, Prof. Kim asked me to do it as an assignment so I choose one news report from ABC news quickly.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Vote2008/story?id=4524005&page=1

kaleidoscope

Personality
"I like to observethe patterns and structures in language"
- You are a reflector who likes to notice and think about things for yourself before acting. You probably learn best by analysing the language, and you set yourself very high standards. This is good, but don’t worry too much about being completely perfect or you’ll never open your mouth. Relax a little and focus on communication.

Motivation
"I've never been a good language learner"
- You are not motivated to learn because of your beliefs about yourself as a learner. Where do these beliefs come from? Could it be that you have depended too much on external judgments of your skills? Or that in a different learning context you might be more successful? Try to look at your beliefs and understand where they come from. A fresh start or a new way of learning might have altogether different results.

Analytical and Communicative!

those are my learning styles!; among four different styles, I got the same result on these two items.

Analytical learning style
Focus on specific problems and proceeds by means of hypothetical-deductive reasoning; object-oriented; independent; dislikes failure; prefers logical, didactic presentation.

Communicative learning style
Fairly independent; highly adaptable and flexible, responsive to facts that do not fit; prefers social learning and a communicative approach; enjoys making decisions.

and the others are:
Concrete learning style and Authority-oriented learning style.

INFJ? or INTJ?

I already took a test of MBTI one year ago. At that time, the result was INTJ.
After a year, it is changed to INFJ.

See below addresses:
INFJ : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INFJ
INTJ : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INTJ

interaction while reading

There are many strategies and skills of reading foreign-language texts. As I've learned so far, those skills/strategies interact each other when the learner is reading any kind of texts. In that sense, I thought about my reading habits. What skills do I use?
I concluded It depends on the type of the text and the purpose of reading. For example, when I read textbook for preparing *quiz* something, I always read along the bottom-up processing and spend all the time to understand every word, sentence, and whole paragraph and try to memorize all of them. In the case of reading for killing time, on the other hand, I usually do skimming and read in perspective to catch out the main theme and whole meaning.
And the truth is that these stratigies are often used at once.

MBTI result

Your Type is INFJ

Strength of the preferences %

Introverted 11
Intuitive 50
Feeling 38
Judging 48

INFJ type description by D.Keirsey
INFJ Career Choices by Jung Career Indicator?
INFJ type description by J. Butt and M.M. Heiss

Qualitative analysis of your type formula

You are:
slightly expressed introvert
moderately expressed intuitive personality
moderately expressed feeling personality
moderately expressed judging personality

interactive processing

a theory of reading comprehension that sees reading as involving both the accurate and sequential understanding of text based on identification of the meanings of words and sentences in the text (i.e. BOTTOM-UP PROCESSING) as well as the experiences, background information, and predictions that the reader brings to the text (e.i. TOP-DOWN PROCESSING) Both kinds of processing are involved and they modify and act on each other.

Jack C. Richards, Richard Schmidt., Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching & Applied Linguistics, p.265

top-down processing

in PSYCHOLINGUISTICS, COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY, and INFORMATION PROCESSING, a contrast is made between two different ways in which humans analyze and process language as party of comprehension and learning. One way, known as top-down processing, makes use of "higher level", nonsensory information to predict or interpret "lower level" information that is present in the data. The other way, bottom-up processing, makes use of the information present in the input to achieve higher level meaning. The meanings of these terms varies depending on the unit of analysis. For example, in word recognition, the higher level information is knowledge of permissible words as well as actual words of a language, while the lower level information is the actual phonetic input (or orthographic input in the case of written word recognition). In sentence comprehension or the interpretation of an UTTERANCE, the lower level information is words, while the higher level information includes knowledge of GRAMMAR, SEMANTICS, and PRAGMATICS. As applied to the full understanding of a novel, lower level information consists of words and sentences, while higher level information includes the reader's previously existing knowledge of the world, including cultural and moral values, SCRIPTs, SCHEMAs, and literary GENREs.

Jack C. Richards, Richard Schmidt., Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching & Applied Linguistics, p.567

teacher-wannabe?

To be an English teacher is never easy for non-native speaker, especially me who is not good at English. So I still cannot sure wheter teaching is my true calling. It may or may not.
Anyway, If I should be a teacher, I would try to be a good model to my students.
I really want to show the other people that it's possible to have near-native English competence even in Korea.

English Text?

I have always thought that there are a lot of letters everywhere so I would say the polluted and overflowing characters around me may contaminate my brain. Now I got suprised as I am to find what kind of English text I usually see/read.

▶ textbook; who protects! I am junior. lol
▶ commercial sign; looks like hell.
▶ interface(menu) phrase of cell phone;
...

of course, there are much more things than them.

What matters is not whether it's written in Korean or English. However, I should think about it seriously. Can reading/seeing a text be called helpful way of learning language?

comprehension questions 3/11

Q: What makes you English reading difficult?

In my case, grammatical structure would be a problem. I become uncomfortable and cannot read much faster than usual reading speed, when I encounter some sentences which have unfamiliar and complicated structure.

and more, "vocabulary" and "social background"

Q: Explain each term of "Reading Process" - because of some reasons, I just explained these terms with short words.

Schema; (we skipped this term cause we all already knew it)

Shared assumption; b/g knowledge, attitudes, social b/g, language, etc...

Presupposition; unstated things

Prediction; assumption before reading

qualifications to be an English teacher in Korea

though professor just asked us five or more items, I added one more condition; "Korea".
I've thought that ESL or EFL condition should be considered with more concern....
What is more, among these particular conditions, Korea has unusual... education context.

1. passion
2. understanding of this particular situation(i.e., everyone in Korea seems to be mad at English lol)
3. of course, English skills
4. sense of morality
5.