INTERN TEACHER ALUMNI Shiho Yamamoto
Shiho Yamamoto was an Amity Intern Teacher at East Hartford/Glastonbury Elementary Magnet School during the 2005 – 2006 school year. Before Shiho came to the US she lived in Osaka, but says her hometown is Yamaguchi, which is located in the southern part of Honshu.
Below is an article about Shiho, written by Christine Stuart and published by the Journal Inquirer:
Japanese intern finds American students ‘sweet’
By Christine StuartJournal Inquirer
East Hartford-Shiho Yamamoto, an intern from Japan, arrived in Connecticut in August to teach her native language to students at the East Hartford/ Glastonbury Elementary Magnet School. She already was familiar with life in the United States, having spent a year as an exchange student at the University of Arkansas. Yamamoto, 24, said she enjoys the enthusiasm of the students at the Magnet school. “They’re so sweet,” she said, adding she enjoys hugs from the students, something she wouldn’t expect from students in Japan. She said in Japan, students stand up to greet the teacher. They stand again to at the end of class to thank the teacher. There is often no spontaneous emotional reaction from students, she said.
For her American students, she uses a furry animal puppet to evoke a response. Nobuko Tsuji, a Japanese teacher at the magnet school for kindergarten through fifth-grade, said students sometimes feel more comfortable responding through stuffed animals. Yamamoto agreed. She said while she was greeting students at the door one day a student turned to the stuffed animal near the doorway and greeted it, instead of her.
Yamamoto said she started to learn English in seventh-grade, but was taught only grammar, writing and reading. There were no opportunities to practice pronunciation. Once a native English speaker learns Japanese, “it is easier to speak any language,” she said. At the Magnet school, whose mission is to prepare students for life in the culturally diverse, technologically-oriented, interdependent world of the 21st century, students have daily Japanese language lessons. Part of the school’s philosophy is to take advantage of young children’s exceptional language learning ability. Tsuji said the younger children in kindergarten and first-grade learn Japanese songs through sight and sound. Tsuji displays a picture of the object in the song next to its Japanese character so the students begin to realize the characters, which are the equivalent of phonetic sounds in the English language.
Principal Glen Peterson said the school adopted a language acquisition model which makes it easier for students to learn different languages as they continue their studies. The magnet school was one of the first in the state to offer Japanese to elementary students. Yamamoto said she plans to make a career of teaching her native language, and hopes to continue her studies by attending graduate school. She is extremely proud of her heritage and noted that in the region where she was born, Iwakuni Yamaguchi, is the birthplace of Japan’s first prime minister after the revolution of 1860. Tsuji explained that the revolution, not unlike the American Civil War, is a popular topic of conversation in Japan. That may explain why she enjoyed reading “Gone with the Wind,” she said, adding she recently saw the movie for the first time.
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