Hi!
I teach once every 2weeks at a high-level highschool. The JTE want me to have activities around talking and conversations. Also for the students to hear me talk and answer them.
Tbh I don’t have any idea what to do.
My other schools are very low level, and I can play basic games with the students every time I have a lesson. Basically just naming nouns or completing sentences. They can not form sentences unless they are guided word by word. I honestly don’t talk much with them in English beyond explaining it. I prefer them to generate the words themselves in the games. I help them spell or translate but I’m not holding english conversations. I talk to the students in Japanese outside of class, of course with some English but its mostly like “how are you?”.
When I see idea’s online that might suit them, they seem to be focused on adult learners or people with more experiences(?). At the end of the day they are only 15years old so they haven’t had many experiences. Or they don’t want to share them.
I want the student’s to have fun in English but also it’s difficult because I honestly have no idea how to make harder conversation lessons that aren’t boring.
Can anyone give me idea or any advice? Thank you in advance.
9 comments
Pick a theme every week. Ask questions around that theme (one week is “family”, another is “friends”, another is “school life”, another is “dreams”). Have them come up with their own questions to ask each other based on that theme and then have them report what they learned to the class. Have them ask you questions about the theme. This requires a bit of trust to be built up – if the students don’t trust you or each other, they probably won’t respond. The alternative then is for you to give them situations or prompts to build a conversation from or roleplay. Students who don’t want to speak honestly may feel safer communicating when everything is made up.
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Create conversations or short lectures that include a lot of metaphors, idiomatic expressions, phrasal verbs, etc, which don’t typically occur in written english.
Ask questions that cannot be understood directly, but those which can only be understood only though understanding inferences and reading the air.
Review what they just finished in the textbook. This means that vocabulary related to the task is still fresh in their minds. Have you taught these kids? There can be a huge difference between the JTE saying they’re high level and them actually being high level.
How high is high-level? Eiken 1? Two? etc.
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That could help with giving some advice.
Google
‘English learning activities’
There’s like a million things
1. Do the kinds of things you did in English class growing up: reading stories and then discussing them then writing a book report, learning about different kinds of writing (narrative, poem, letters, resumes, academic exposition, persuasive essay, etc.). Learn about different ways to organize information such as pros and cons lists. Read a play and then act it out.
2. Sometimes I simply try and think of the kinds of things we do with language. We use it to deceive, persuade, insult, compliment, flirt, inquire. So I make a lesson with an activity that involves that skill. I doubt your students are ready for a rhetoric lesson, but I am sure they would enjoy learning different ways to insult their teacher. (If you are a good enough sport. 🙂
3. Any game that we would call a “drinking game” tends to be excellent for icebreaking/warmup. Little games like “categories”, “bust a rhyme”, “two truths and a lie” etc.
4. Pick vocabulary you want them to know and use and design a lesson around that. I did a simple lesson today on “positive and negative”. In English, we use these words to describe something being good or bad, and we use them in mathematics, and we use them to describe different poles of a magnet. There are often all kinds of double meanings, metaphor, and cultural assumptions built into language that are non-obvious for non-native speakers. I had a class of basically fluent students in Korea that certainly read better than my brothers do but they were blown away when it came up in class that “teenager” is called that because they are “fourTEEN” or “fifTEEN”. It had never occurred to them to connect those dots for whatever reason.
These are just quick light activities off the top of my head if I didn’t have much control as the support teacher:
Starting with a pair of students saying different words out loud, they can eventually try to say the same word using each other’s previous words as clues. If it’s too abstract or difficult, tether it to a topic so it moves smoother.
Pictionary but they have to answer with a full on sentence. Three or four words.
So instead of the picture being a dog, the sentence you could draw out for them (or them for each other) “she is studying math.” In this case, the picture is just that: a woman studying with some algebra symbols.
Drawing comparisons to how the alphabet functions vs kanji and how we have to extensively study special patterns for general rules (igh is usually but not always IE. Might. Fight. Light. Tight.) and exceptions (Freight. Eight. Weight.)
Pronunciation! Get them talking with good dialect if they’re so smart. Go over solid R’s proper short vowel O’s. When to use your jaw and how to clench to really make those sounds clear.
Read a short article or opinion piece and then discuss it.
Debate a different topic every week. Examples: gardening is a good pastime for seniors. Cats make better companions than dogs. We should ban plastic bags. Cruises are more fun than going on holiday by airplane. Introduce the topic and then have each student explain their point of view. You can teach them how to introduce their opinion and rebuttals to other students. Probably a good idea to do an example with the jte first and start with an easy topic
Jeopardy! Or other quiz show formats.