Watching An Inconvenient Truth in Japanese

Last Wednesday I joined the first-years in the gymnasium for a screening of An Inconvenient Truth. Since I'd already seen the film last year, I didn't mind that it had been dubbed into Japanese. Plus, such is Gore's dexterity with Keynote (Apple's version of PowerPoint)--not to mention that crane he uses--that his presentation would be easy to follow in any language.

I found it compelling (and polls indicate that about 70% of Japanese are concerned about global warming); but I did notice a few students seizing the opportunity of a darkened room to catch up on some shut-eye. They usually have to wait for my classes in order to do that!

P.S. On the subject of global warming, here's a YouTube that has been doing the rounds:

Cleaning up the schoolyard

For some reason, spending an afternoon with 60 third-years bearing rakes, forearms and plastic bags, converting little piles of leaves and grass and twigs into big piles of leaves and grass and twigs, put me in mind of the ancient myth of Sisyphus.

And whatever that wriggly, bug-eyed silvery-grey thing was that lurked beneath one of the disgustingly cool and moist little mounds of compost (one which I subsequently avoided), I'm sure it was perfectly safe for droids . . .

ESL idea #2: Intonation Listening Quiz

(UPDATE: The following is probably going to be of interest only to those few other JETs who stumble across our blog from time to time. I find that the readers of blogs are like domestic cats: if you don't leave a regular supply of Friskies out for them, they'll happily leave and find someone else who will. And faced with the option of blogging about what I had for breakfast or did in the toilet today, and posting an ESL idea that someone, somewhere might actually find useful, I opted for the latter. I promise we'll have more interesting stuff--photos, etc.--soon enough. -- Matt)

Recently I've been teaching intonation in my third-year English conversation classes. I found an online audio quiz which, with some modification and pre-teaching, proved quite effective. The mulitple-choice quiz involves listening to a dialogue between a husband and wife: the wife has some news to break to her husband, and students are required to interpret the emotions/thoughts of the speakers from the intonation they use.

As I mentioned, you will need to pre-teach the concept of intonation as a way of conveying emotions and personal information in English, before you even think about using this quiz in class. Furthermore, the quiz questions as they stand are probably beyond even the average third-year student, so I suggest you make up a worksheet with alternative questions that make the differences between the choices more stark.

I found that this worked most effectively when I split the class into two teams and gave them 5 questions each (there are 10 in total). I also had the benefit of a wonderful JTE who translated the questions into Japanese for me. (I know, I know--that's not strictly vegan kosher, but the point of the exercise is to test student's ability to interpret English intonation, not vocabulary.)

There is a downside: you need a projector, and a computer with a good set of speakers. But if you would like a copy of the lesson plan and worksheets that I used, feel free to email me.

ESL idea #1: Noughts and Crosses

Now that I have taught high school students in two countries, I suspect I may have discovered a universal law of secondary education*. Whether you're in Kobe or in Kallaroo (actually, there's no high school in Kallaroo), if it's the final period of the day on a Friday--especially before a long weekend--the last thing the kids want to do is work. And who can blame them? Work also happens to be last thing teachers want to do at the end of a long week. So you have to improvise if you want to hold their attention for more than ten consecutive seconds.

It doesn't help, of course, that I've decided to introduce them to the rather difficult concept of intonation. They breezed through intonation patterns in questions--i.e. where wh- questions are uttered with a falling intonation, and yes/no questions are uttered with a rising intonation (did you know that?)--but now I'm having to walk them through the use of tone to express feelings, and as I'm having to walk slowly, I end up with a lot of spare time to fill in my lessons. And I hate uncomfortable silences.

Fortunately, I have on my desk a wonderful little book called 96 Games for Beginners in ESL. It belongs to Emma, and she wants it back, but it saved my bacon today. I found a game that is a little like Noughts and Crosses meets The Einstein Factor. The object of the game is pretty straightforward: you have to get a row of three Os or Xs going either across, down, or diagonal. But each square contains a category: past tense, Australia, fruit, spelling, pronunciation, abbreviations, girls' or boys's names, special places and occupations. The class is divided into two teams, and as each team chooses a square it is asked the corresponding question (e.g. "What is the past tense of give?", "What is the capital city of Australia?", "What is the name of a fruit beginning with the letter 'O'?"). If the team cannot answer, the other team is given a chance to answer it and claim the square. As with normal Noughts and Crosses, teams take turns answering questions, until one of the teams has won, or the result is a draw. No materials are required for this task except a whiteboard marker and a whiteboard (my favourite kind of lesson activity), on which is drawn a 3x3 grid.

I discovered today that my students were actually unfamiliar with this game. (Rocks, paper, scissors they are aware of; just not noughts and crosses.) So I quickly drew another 3x3 grid and ran through the rules, before playing a game against them. To give them encouragement, I let them win. They enjoyed the actual games a lot, though one of the last-period-of-the-day teams made a costly strategic error and handed victory to the opposing team on a plate. I'm putting it down to fatigue!


*Logicians please note: this is an example of a hasty generalisation fallacy.

Suppose I gave a lesson and nobody came?

I think I just experienced my first "Don't-ask-me-I-just-work-here" moment.

Well, there I was in the Language Lab, all set for today's lesson. The exercises were written on the whiteboard. The worksheets were waiting on the students' desks. The Powerpoint was primed. All that was missing were my students, and the JTE.

Don't panic, I told myself as I collected some of the worksheets that had blown off the desks. Maybe they're just late back from phys. ed. I mean, it's not as if they switched to Monday's timetable because of some soccer thing, out of the clear blue sky, and didn't tell you. That's just crazy-talk.

End of whine.