So, I’ve come back to my eikaiwa school after managing it from abroad while doing other projects and feel like it’s getting…boring.
What I mean is, the students aren’t as engaged as they used to be and I noticed that it’s time to mix things up. I’d love to good materials on methodology or activities (not games) to make the lessons more engaging.
My main selling point has always been “It’s fun while learning without just playing around”
My students (mostly parents) have come to expect that we don’t just play games like mall eikaiwas. They specifically don’t want their kids to just run around throwing balls or playing bingo while learning a new phrase here and there.
I’ve been using let’s Go series for kids and adult lessons have been kind of a free talk with my own curriculum.
I’ve been toying with the idea of writing my own textbooks for the kids since let’s go definitely has its issues but that is a LOT of work.
Currently teachers at my school teach using their own “methods” but basically we expect them to warm up-intro/review vocab-practice the grammar- do the workbook together- do a fun activity that uses the grammar
That’s a normal lesson.
Any other other owners or curriculum designers have any leads of methodology materials would be great.
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Upload your current curriculum(s) so folks can see what your school is doing.
[https://www.learning-english-online.net/](https://www.learning-english-online.net/)
[https://www.senteacher.org/](https://www.senteacher.org/)
https://www.altopedia.net/jhs
Let’s Go is fine. I’m using Everybody Up, similar level, also from Oxford.
You could make your text, but it’s a crazy amount of work. You could more reasonably create supplemental lessons for Let’s Go, adding activities you think are lacking. I find the weakness of a lot of texts is a lack of review opportunities, so I’m trying more warm-ups that use stuff we studied six months before.
You should join the group LTProfessionals (Language Teaching Professionals). They have seminars and YouTube vids about how to teach kids effectively, and are Japan based. And their textbook site is 20% off, so I use that to procure students’ texts and make a profit on them
>Currently teachers at my school teach using their own “methods” butbasically we expect them to warm up-intro/review vocab-practice thegrammar- do the workbook together- do a fun activity that uses thegrammar
This is a typical eikaiwa lesson, but it’s not really a method. It’s more of a procedure, and it’s roughly based on an old, outdated method popular in the 60’s call the audiolingual approach. It depends on grammar as the main focus of the lesson, so it makes the students (and teachers) think that the only way to learn is to learn grammar, directly.
That’s just not at all how second language acquisition research shows that people learn.
If I gave you one piece of advice, I’d say to look at the components of communicative competence, and start to plan lessons that are based on those elements: discourse, pragmatics (sociolinguistics), strategic competence, and then add in pronunciation and listening.
Discourse – teach learners how to react to one another, how to organize their speech, take turns, and understand some of the differences between how English discourse is structured vs. how Japanese is structured.
Pragmatics – teach them how language is used in different contexts, such as how one would ask a friend for a favor, vs. asking a boss; or asking someone to lend them 1,000 yen vs. how to ask to borrow their car.
Listening: teach it. Don’t just practice it – actually TEACH strategies, and bottom up skills.
And so on, with each of those elements.
You desperately need to diversity your lesson plans, and stop just teaching grammar. And when you DO teach grammar, which IS important, teach it less directly. For example, employ more task based learning.
I think what you and your teachers might actually need is to understand approaches and methodologies much more deeply. That is, as an example, do you *really * know how to teach listening? Do you know what is involved in the listening process? Do you know what approaches to teaching listening exist, and how to employ them? Are your teachers aware of the importance of, for example, metacognitive listening skills, interactive listening, and connected speech (elision, linking, etc)?
In other words: learn how to teach and stop relying on old outdated procedures that don’t even really work.
If you have JHS students we wrote a 3-year course designed for Japanese JHS students. It was released this year and we’ve had great feedback so far: https://fluency-course.com/
People who go to an ei*kaiwa* are expecting to speak (or, in this case, their children do). That means input-based approaches are out the window, for better or worse.
A simple CELTA cert made me the most popular teacher at my previous eikaiwa. Dozens of people came to me to ask if they could switch to my class (even though they have to ask the office). A CELTA cert teaches the communicative approach which helps make the class more engaging. For adults.
For children, a CELTA still helps but you have to make a lot of adjustments. Children (pre-teens) can’t analyze language. I would recommend merging CELTA with CLIL.
CLIL has worked wonders for me with children. I still remember how worked up a little girl got when we were talking about living and non-living things and she just *had* to convince me that a robot was non-living, but I wasn’t agreeing. It might be hard to imagine a 3 year old talking about a robot’s lack of consciousness for 10 minutes (pretty long for a 3yo’s attention span).
So again, I have to recommend a combination of CELTA and CLIL.
^(Edit: I’m a little concerned you’ve been managing an eikaiwa without extensive pedagogy knowledge but… that does seem to be the standard these days… Seriously good on you for trying to get the knowledge though.)