Borderless Teaching: The Fun Way

What’s the best way to communicate with your students?
What’s the best way to communicate when you can’t speak the language your students are speaking?

This On and Off Snow clinic were about how to run a good lesson without speaking.

According to this data the Japanese ski industry is facing serious decrease of domestic skiers and snowboarders.
Still, it’s not the end of the world.

Number of foreign tourists, skiers and snowboarders are increasing rapidly.
However Japan is also facing an issue of communication as the most of nations that are taking lessons are from Asia and not western countries.

Japanese instructors and those Asia tourist struggle to communicate.

To attract those foreign tourists especially from asia who have never seen snow before.
They came up with this idea of using mats and dye.

Using body language to show they how to stop, control and mat helps skis to grip so they don’t fall over too much and give up skiing.

For those who can ski in wedge they use dye to draw on snow so they can visually approach to students without language communication.

They showed us a few slides of how they use it and also showed us on snow how they use it.
Apparently they haven’t used this nationally due to logistics.

It will be interesting to see what the result will be in 4 years time.

Also as everyone knows Japan is one of the snowiest country in the world so how they will get away with amount of snow as both matts and dye could be covered by snow easily.

Thinking about how to teach people with language barrier, which definitely happens in NZ, is a very interesting concept.

Yusuke Inoue