A personal narrative of an english teacher in Japan on language, tacit knowledge and language education

This paper follows the path of my research into intuitions about language and linguistic knowledge as an English language teacher based in Australia in Japan. I describe how my curiosity about these intuitions grew out of an inability to reconcile the relevance of pedagogical research, applied linguistics, and linguistics with the day-to-day language tasks involved in English language teaching. This gravitated toward an interest in judgment about natural language and the revision of anomalous sentences created naturally or with the assistance of machine translation. I note that teachers and learners generally adopt an intuitive and pragmatic approach to text judgment, commentary about text and text reformulation. I hope to engage readers from other cultures and education backgrounds, so that we share our perspectives, experiences and assumptions about tacit knowledge or intuitions about language