Ryan Cecil Smith

I’m taking advantage of my freedom with the upper-level English elective, Cross-Cultural English, to plan some fun and kinda-challenging lessons. In this class the teachers can basically do whatever they want as long as it’s somehow “cultural,” so I’m trying to give students confidence finding, understanding, and using “real English” in sources like movies, songs, and blogs. I’ll be posting lesson plans on the internet because……. I put work into these things, and I hope they won’t be automatically left and forgotten??

Coming: How to watch a movie in English with English subtitles and English audio so my students don’t fall asleep?
Coming: What is a good podcast (or radio program that I can download online) which students can listen to and understand more than 1% of what’s being said?
Coming: What good blogs students can look at and read and understand?
Coming:…

I haven’t posted in this teaching section for… ages! Thanks the remaining readers for your encouragement and support. ;-)

A ALT-JTE team brought in some good lesson planning material at last year’s Team Teaching Mid-Year Conference. “Can Do Statements” are a hierarchy of successes in different fields for a student. Teachers often divide things up by what students _can do and what they can’t do. This is sometimes a negative way to think about things, and it’s sort of “non-progressive,” I mean this way of thinking doesn’t really define the potential for growth.

FYI you can get some good resources about ALTE Levels around the net. I googled some phrases from my worksheets.

Let’s make a list of the basic things that a low-level student can do. Then let’s make a list of the best case, highest accomplishments we’d like them to do by the end of the year. Then, like, define a few levels in between. This is something the student and the teacher should look at it. It gives every student a goal they can accomplish. They really have long-term and short-term goals, so they can see beyond today’s class or this month’s lessons. I like this kind of thing. I haven’t had a chance to use it since the Mid-Year Conference but you bet I’ll start using these in the spring.

Here’s a quick example of what I’m talking about. This is a mini-can-do list for a “dictogloss” (that’s when the students listen to a teacher read something) (I just pulled that word off of this paper I got at the MYC). Sorry there’s no context to this, I just want to give you an example:

We created “American style” homemade school lunches with the students.

I think it’s so funny that even though WE are the foreigners, the usual dialogue from Japanese teachers is, “Isn’t Japan so interesting? Don’t you have a hard time eating our food? Aren’t our customs so peculiar?” They want to hear us say things like that. It’s how they see themselves. Funny because it’s their country and I would think it might be the other way around.

So today we turned the tables. We surprised them with shocking, REAL American culture. Everyone made their own bag lunch and then we ate sandwiches together and talked about it. Almost everything was new to the students (including making a meal for themselves, which mom usually handles). The students were surprised by our many strange customs, but they had fun!! We ate:

• peanut butter and jelly sandwich
• raw carrot sticks
• celery and peanut butter
• original Lays potato chips
• one apple each, without cutting it into slices
• a health bar
• two Oreo cookies
• a juice box
• and we packed it all into a paper bag

Our students are pretty bad at discussions this year but some topics might include:

1. What does this meal have in common with your usual bento?
2. What do you think of the health balance of this meal?
3. How many calories are in this lunch? (advanced math and research required
4. What do you think of the bags?
5. How ould you create an American-style bento?
6. How ould you pack a Japanese-style bag lunch?

Results of polling to be posted soon

Today I helped S-sensei with her low-level, generally unmotivated 3rd year students. They were doing some pretty easy sentence translation exercises. They can see the sentence in Japanese, and then the English words in the wrong order, with Subject, Verb, and Object were clearly identified. It’s like this:

日本語。。。
repairs (O), urgently, car (S), my, needs (V)

日本語。。。。
wine(O), inexpensive, produces (V), good, Chile (S)

日本語。。。。
to, our, a, school, kids (S), bus (O), take (V)

Even though I can’t read (or write!!) the Japanese version), I can almost instantly figure the sentence. If you are able to read this blog then of course you can solve them, too. On the other hand, the students find it difficult and have their own way of figuring it out.

When they translate the 10 sentences on the worksheet, they generally work left-to-right, top-to-bottom. This is great unless they get stuck on a sentence, in which case they usually just sit and stare at it. I suggested that for some of them they might try solving the translation in a different way.

Write the “skeleton” or the main parts of the sentence first, and then fill in the blanks. It’s always S-V-O right? And you know which words are the S, V, and O, right? So just write those parts with blank spaces between them. For example:

__ car ________ needs ________ repairs _____
__ Chile ________ produces ________ wine _____
___ kids ________ take ______ bus __________

Then cross off the words you’ve already used, and fill in the blanks.　

Adjectives (my car) are usually easy to place. Articles (a bus) aren’t so bad if you have them in a word list. Adverbs (urgently needs) are a little harder to place. Prepositional phrases usually go at the end of the sentence (to school).

Some benefits of this approach might be:

1. It’s better than nothing for students who would otherwise give up early.
2. Looking at the problem in a different way should help a student who has hit a wall midway through a sentence.
3. Seeing the skeleton of a sentence might give a larger insight into how English works. It’s a wider perspective, compared to the tunnel-vision of translating word-by-word.

(PS, I haven’t updated this journal lately because my workload is very light this year. I’m not planning very much at all. My brain is inactive and soft and ineffective.)

Some students followed my advice and watched movies for English practice. Each student brought me one or two sentences from a different movie. I was very interested to see what caught their eye!

Now look, you two are the best I’ve got. Put aside your differences and stop this madman… whoever he is. - Wild Wild West

They’re frat boys with trigger fingers. - The A-Team

I’ve moved on. -The Italian Job

To be honest I was a little surprised that they couldn’t understand these sentences. I shouldn’t be surprised though! The trouble is in the idioms. “Moved on” isn’t easy to find in a dictionary, nor are “trigger fingers,” “frat boys,” or “put aside your differences.” “The best I’ve got” didn’t make any sense until I explained that it means, “Of all the employees I have in this company, you are the best employees which I have.”

It’s hard for me to guess what my students do or don’t know sometimes. I hope they’re getting something out of this, and they’ll continue to approach me with these questions.

Third year students live pathetic lives of drudgery, the only purpose of which is NOT to learn something, but to prove who is REALLY dedicated to throwing away as much of their life as possible in order to get into university. Students literally stare at books for 10 hours a day. It totally sucks. Be thankful you weren’t born here.

It’s funny for an ALT to check the students’ English translation exercises, because the students are always struggling to mimic more and more complex forms of grammar without ever slowing down to master anything. It’s clearly unproductive and just for show. Sadly, most students believe they really are learning a difficult language as best they can.

I say, if they really want to learn English, they should try EXPERIENCING English in some small way, such as watching TV or movies from time to time.

Hold onto your butts!

Last week I suggested that the students watch Jurassic Park with English subtitles on. The audio can be Japanese or English but the point is they will look for words or phrases they don’t know and write them down. Later they can look the words up in a dictionary. That way they can understand some context and hopefully pick words that are interesting. They should also choose a few sentences and write them down. The teachers and ALTs can review their work.

Here are some great examples of words and phrases you might learn from Jurassic Park:

• bounce
• incredible
• compatible
• vertebrae
• Cretaceous Period
• visual acuity
• spilling
• intensity
• “The feeling is mutual.”
• “We’ve been advised to deal with the situation now.”
• “I’m delighted to finally meet you in person, Dr. Grant.”
• “My 50,000 a year has been well spent.”
• Viable embryos – they’re no use to us if they don’t surive!”

Starting this summer, I’ll be dropping my visit school and only working at my base school for 5 days a week. I’m really excited about this. I used to wake up an hour early on Tuesdays and Thursdays and ride a bus and two trains into Kobe. I had a couple friends in the staffroom there… but I wasn’t “officially” a part of the staffroom, so I was basically ignored by everyone but my co-teachers in a given semester. Also, I had a lot of really interesting, funny, smart students – but I only taught Oral Communication to first year students a handful of times per class, so I didn’t get to know them so well.

I was really glad to work there, even if I didn’t do very much. My favorite JTE was at my visit school. In general, the students were hard workers, so I could communicate pretty well with more of them. Visit ALT’s get a wider perspective about schools and students in Japan than ALT’s in just one location. My two schools were very different and it was fun to learn about those differences. The visit school was more academic, the students were more studious but more quiet, the students had more freedom, and the students dressed differently than my base school. There were many small, day-to-day differences. Also the school was older, the neighborhood had an interesting history (it was destroyed and mostly rebuilt 15 years ago after the Hanshin earthquake), and it was a lot of fun to ride my bike to work in the summer. But perhaps the best part was going to Sannomiya twice a week. I’ll miss that!

This week, On The Media had a short section about grammar. It reminds me of some of the weird questions I get from teachers.

Mike Vuolo showed how Official English Grammar changes in cycles: what was once bad or lazy grammar becomes the new standard that experts defend, until something new and popular takes its place.

1. “The book is on printing” (sounds strange to modern ears) was shortened to:
2. “The book is o’printing” (sounds like a fairy-tale), which changed into:
3. “The book is a’printing” (sounds like a nursery-rhyme), which was abbreviated to
4. “The book is printing” (sounds like it could be correct in some cases) until its current form:
5. “The book is being printed” (correct and normal today) took hold.

It’s really difficult to teach English grammar if your students (or JTE’s) mistakenly believe that “if a book says it’s true, then it’s true.” I’ve seen a lot of books at my two schools that are over fifty years old, some over SEVENTY FIVE years old. They are catalogued in the same place as modern books. Unfortunately, students also have the impression that they should trust the older book, because it’s been around longer or something.

Language is fluid and there are no fixed rules. Students would be better off if they spent some of their study time watching Teen Titans on YouTube rather than drilling into a grammar book. Caveat discipulus!