Writing projects can be a great way to create motivation, as well as getting students used to using English in their day-to-day lives. Many students are already familiar with social media and publishing photos or writing to the internet. The benefits of a blog is that it is a real life application of the language and can be viewed by the teacher, classmates, as well … Continue reading Class Writing Project
In Japan, one of the biggest problems is that Japanese has one extra one. They have the word ‘man/万’, which represents 10,000. This can make it quite confusing for learners, as a lot of them them tend to want to use this number.
Overview: Students practise counting potatoes until the music stops. Person on top is out. This is a quick and fun activity for practicing numbers and making plural words.
Preparation: Music
Introducing phrasal verbs is a useful way of helping learners to gain a deeper understanding of how to use simple words, without having to memorise huge lists of difficult vocabulary. We use them so much in English, but it’s easy to forget the importance of these little phrases in favour of more advanced vocabulary. Below are a few examples of the flexibility of phrasal words. If you cannot think of all the ways these words on the spot, having a few examples on hand can be useful. Hope you find it handy. In the Take it Easy Teaching book there are some more examples, so do think about getting a copy that you can have you in class in case you want to quickly introduce some examples.
Overview: Students answer questions. The one that answers decides who can sit down. Really fun way to start a Japanese elementary school class and get them into the mood for English. It’s also good for reviewing things from the last lesson.
Set Up: This works if the student’s desks are in lines, like in most Japanese schools.
Overview: Students practice buying and selling items.
Set up: Students are in groups of about 4. Each group will decide what kind of shop they’ll make and write a list of 5 items they have for sale and the price.
Writing is a really important skill and it’s a great way for students to improve their meaning focused output when they do not have a chance to talk. Since I’ve been in Japan, one thing I’ve noticed is that there is less focus on writing in all subjects, not just language study. There is far less creative writing, formal writing and making speeches in Japanese. My impression is that part of the reason for the difference is assessment is that writing is harder and less accurate to mark, as there isn’t a set answer. It is also time consuming to mark. (If you really want to, you can take it back to Confucius’ influence, but we won’t go there right now…)
Here are some tips to add variation to your writing tasks that will make it more interesting for the students, improve their writing and make marking easier.
All of this then comes together for overall improvement. Here I’d like to introduce a few tips for getting the most out of writing tasks.
Continue reading “8 Ways to Improve Writing in English Class”
Everyone knows that teaching to tests can be problematic. Something I’ve been thinking about lately is the nature of those tests. Tests are of course useful in terms of having goals and setting benchmarks. However, as Japanese tests tend to focus on multi choice grammar questions, they need to have questions that are suitably difficult, but don’t have to necessarily represent how English is generally used.
One example of this is the focus on ‘much’ and ‘many’. It’s easy to spend too much time on this distinction because there are so many strange rules around whether we’re talking about countable or uncountable things, which is why it’s perfect for sticking in tests. However, the result is that after rote memorization of the various rules for the test, and the subsequent forgetting of said rules, learners are left with ‘many’ and ‘much’ as their only way to demonstrate a lot of something. This leads them to the situation where they end up trying to remember if they should say ‘He has many money’ or ‘He has much money’. After letting them run through that internal struggle for while, I then have to remind them about ‘a lot of’. The third and final quantifier that they learn as more of an afterthought than anything.
Continue reading “Testable grammar vs useable grammar: many passive sentences”
The Four Strands of Language Learning is a framework designed by Paul Nation. It involves a balanced lesson or curriculum consisting of four main areas (Nation & Newton, 2009). This kind of lesson planning is beneficial in that it compliments technical language study with practical use, treating language as a language and not just a subject.
Take it Easy Teaching 