It Could Be Used For Teaching English

~Saturday is by far my busiest work day. This is because my students don't have school on Saturdays, and are thus free to come to English classes (yay!). Although I've often mentioned the crazy things my students have said or done, I've never really described what exactly it is that I do at my workplace. So today I'm going to describe one of the lessons I taught.

The class consisted of four Junior High School students, all of them girls (normally there's one boy, but he was absent today). They're a fun and genki (energetic) lot, but it's worth noting that I have a major advantage in teaching this class. This advantage is the fact that, by this point in the week, I'd already taught the exact same lesson to two previous classes (on Tuesday and Wednesday). This means that Saturday's students receive a "refined" lesson from me, because I've gotten a chance to analyze what worked and what didn't work in my previous lessons.

The lesson itself is loosely constrained by the company I work for, which issues flexible guidelines on how to run each class. The class textbook is company-produced (and staggeringly low in quality), but I rarely use the teacher's manual. In my opinion, the manual presents a lesson that is often too difficult to fit into a 50-minute class. Here's my lesson:

The class begins with a warmup, which is a fun activity to get the students speaking English that they already know without having to use questions. This break-them-in-gently approach is essential, because in all probability my students haven't spoken any English in the 167 hours since last week's class, aside from dull textbook reading in school.

• Today's warmup was "balloon bop", where they hit a balloon around saying a word for each letter of the alphabet (apple, ball, cat, dog, etc.). Students invariably lose track or can't think of an English word fast enough, which results in much amusement. As a "penalty", if a student lets the balloon touch the ground, they have to do a silly punishmen: to turn their bodies into the letter they missed, ala "Y.M.C.A.", which they all knew. Must be the karaoke.

The warmup lasted for about four minutes. Then it was on to "Opening Questions", which are simple questions to get the students' brains to think in English. I usually try to make the opening questions easy, fun, and unrelated to the textbook lesson. Today I used a very easy question, "What ____ do you like?/I like___.", coupled with a more difficult question: "Why?/Because it's ___".

• I wrote the questions on the board and give a few examples of adjectives they could use after "Because it's ___" (interesting, exciting, cute, funny, etc). I then gave the students paper cups and ping-pong balls and had them ask each other the questions, bouncing the balls to each others' cups across a table. For more chaos, I had them pass the balls diagonally across the table, in each others' paths. Hilarity ensued as the ping-pong balls flew all over the place and students scrambled to recover them.

The warmups and opening questions, all together, took no longer than 10-12 minutes. Then, it was on to a review of last weeks' lesson. Last week, they studied how to differentiate people in a picture by their actions and appearances; for example, "What's that man doing?"/"Which man?"/"The one wearing a blue hat./He's riding a bicycle." Quite difficult.

• Review: The students opened their homework books. Surprise, surprise--none of them had finished the previous assignment. Junior High students rarely do, but it's hard to blame them: they have so much school work, and the company workbook is god-awful boring. I always make sure to quiz them on the previous lesson, to see if they understand even if they didn't do the homework. We spent a few minutes going over the exercises, then put the books away.

With the review complete, it's time for the real lesson. Today's topic was hypotheticals: what an object might or could be used for, or what situation a person might be in based on limited information. It's hard to describe, but I'll show you how I explained it to my students. First, I drew a bizarre machine on the whiteboard (my "artwork" always gets a few laughs). It looked something like this:

^ On the board, I wrote this sentence: "It could be used for _____." I then placed on the table a pile of cards with gerunds (-ing verbs) written on them. I had the students look through the cards and find anything that even remotely worked for my picture, then share it with the class. Some answers in included listening to music, singing karaoke, laughing, and drinking juice.

• With that done, I passed pictures cut out from magazines. I was fortunate to have several issues of BAR, an archaeology magazine. Each issue has a section called, "What is is?" with a picture of an ancient artifact, and choices for what it might be (and the answer in the back). I also cut out pictures of machines from some science magazines that I also have. For the lesson, I passed out some of the pictures to students and had them guess what they were, using the sentence, "It could be a(n) _____.", and "It could be used for ____."
  

• Next, the students opened their textbooks to the lesson page, which had bits of out-of-context dialog in speech bubbles. For example, the words, "She's shaking." and "He said he'd be here at six, and it's already after eight." The challenge for the students was to give me a hypothetical situation for why the person might be shaking, late, or whatever, using the structures "He could be ___." or "He could have ____".

I had them work with a partner and gave them two minutes to come up with two sentences. For example, my students came up with "She could be cold." and "She could be scared." for the dialog "She's shaking."

• Next, I presented today's final structure, "He must be ____./He must have ____.", explaining that this was used if you were sure of something. I gave them more information for the dialog. For "She's shaking.", I said, "There's a big dog nearby barking at her.", prompting the students to confirm that, "She must be scared."
  

• There were about ten minutes left in the lesson by this point, so I hustled them along to the group work page, which had a picture of a bag with ten common items (a telephone, an iron, a roll of tape, a set of chopsticks, etc). The students pretended they were archaeologists from the year 2828, speculating about the purpose of these items, using "It could be used for ____."
  

I encouraged them to come up with bizarre and silly answers, provided that the answers were at least vaguely logical. They worked with a different partner for this project, asking the question, "What could it be used for?"For each sentence they came up with, I acted it out using a real object. When one student said that the tape could be used for making music, I took out a roll of tape and began sticking and unsticking it, pretending to enjoy the sound. My antics usually get this class laughing, which is fun. With only a few minutes left, I had them share their "findings" with the rest of the class.

• The only thing left to do was to briefly go over today's homework assignment, to encourage them to complete it. Then I give out stickers, which are like currency to Japanese students. Normally, they only get a sticker if they do their homework, but they worked so hard in class that I relented and gave out stickers anyway. Besides, I was damn happy that my working week was almost over.
  

It's difficult cramming all of this information into a 50-minute lesson. I feel that the assigned textbook often supplies too many new points in each lesson, and I'm often forced to break it into digestible chunks that my students can learn well, rather than glossing over a large number of questions and answers. Theoretically, students should fanatically study on their own and learn everything...but for most students, that's just not going to happen, and I don't have the heart to inflict that on them.

In the end, I'd rather they learn some English and learn it well, rather than hear a lot of English and not understand most of it. ~Oyasumi!