All of my schools use the Sunshine series of English textbooks. It's one of a few options for English textbooks in junior high schools here, but as far as I can tell, all of the textbooks are colorful, thin, and lacking in grammar explanation. Here's a sample page from Lesson 5 in the second year (eighth grade) textbook, which I know well from a few months ago and seems to be the only one online:


The next part goes: "Do Americans always say nice things to each other?" "Yes, it's a kind of greeting." I could go on; I know that lesson by heart, thought I don't know if we Americans always say nice things to each other....
The lesson we taught recently is Lesson 8, which is about comparisons and soft tennis (a variant of tennis with a softer ball, played by junior high school students and possibly adults as well). The reading passage in the textbook has sentences like "Which is lighter, a soft tennis ball or a normal tennis ball? A soft tennis ball is." There's also the superlative: "I'm on the tennis team. It's the largest team in our school." How well I remember learning the equivalent grammar in Japanese class!
At one school, the teacher started by going over the grammar with sample sentences on the board. We practiced adding the er-ending onto adjectives, and I worked on the pronunciation of the "er" sound with them, as it's really hard for Japanese people and most of my students still say "raita" for "lighter." The teacher went over the construction " ~ is adj + -er than ~" and then the superlative "~ is the adj + -est of them all/in my class, etc. Then she told the class I would give a speech using this grammar and handed the class over to me.
I showed the students a picture of my family, the same one I showed them during my self-introduction, and made comparisons between my family members. "This is me. I am 25 years old. This is my sister. She is 28 years old. She is older than me. This is my brother. He is 32 years old (well almost, Brad!). He is older than me and older than my sister. He is the oldest of the three. I am the youngest." I also talked about our respective heights with the same sentence construction.
Then I said, "Now, I have some questions for you!" I held up a picture of Dogo Onsen, the famous hot spring in Matsuyama, and a picture of Tokyo Tower and asked, "Which is colder, Matsuyama or Tokyo?" After some prodding to get them to raise their hands for one or the other, most students guessed Tokyo, which is correct (and very easy for them, which was intended). "Tokyo is," I responded. I then traded the picture of Dogo Onsen for the Statue of Liberty and asked the same question for Tokyo and New York, and most students knew that one, too. "New York is colder than Tokyo." Lastly, I asked, "Which is taller, Tokyo Tower or the Statue of Liberty?" Most classes split pretty evenly for this one, and I admit my picture of the Statue of Liberty is a little deceiving, but it's Tokyo Tower by a rather large margin.


The teacher went over some of my sentences again and then we turned to the textbook. I read the passage on soft tennis once through and then phrase by phrase and sentence by sentence with the students repeating after me. Then the students got a few minutes to read through the whole thing on their own, which they did with varying degrees of success and enthusiasm. Next we did some practice conversations from the textbook:
A: Which is colder in December, New York or London?
B: New York is.
A: Do you know this mountain?
B: Yes, I do. It's Mt. Fuji. It's the highest mountain in Japan.
The teacher and I did an example or two, and the students did the rest in pairs using the textbook's graphs and pictures. We also did a listening exercise of a similar nature from the textbook, and that just about filled the period. Not exciting stuff, but the teacher did manage to include reading, listening and speaking in the lesson, and plenty of writing homework. My lessons with this teacher usually run along a similar vein: she's glad to have me in class and has me do a lot of reading, but she doesn't really do games or have me plan out anything other than short speeches.
In contrast, the second year teacher at this week's school really likes me to do a warm-up game with the students. It doesn't have to have anything to do with the day's lesson because its purpose is really just to perk the students up and get them in English mode. Anyone who's talked to me in recent months knows I have the most trouble teaching second year because the students are difficult to engage and not excited for class. Warm-up games help improve any class, but they really make a big difference for second years.
We played The Ladder Game in this class, which I actually remembered from Mme Richert's French class in high school. I drew a ladder on the board for each row of students, which became a team, and one student from each team came up to the board at his/her respective ladder. I said an English word from their textbook which they all had to write, and if they took too long the teacher and I started counting down from ten in unison. Then I'd go through and check the spelling, erasing misspelled words as I went. Whichever team reaches the top of the ladder first wins. I tried to pick words that are difficult but that they really should know: learn, children, difficult (most of them knew this one real well for some reason :-), thirteen, interesting, smile.
Since this was a new game for the students, I explained it to them in English, occasionally asking for Japanese translations of difficult words like ladder. After my explanation, the teacher asked if anyone could explain it to the rest of the class in Japanese, and one student was able to. Sometimes if no student is willing to do so, the teacher will break in into parts and ask, "so what do we do first?" "then?" "who comes to the board?" "and if the word is wrong?" etc. So even though this was a spelling game, the explanation became a listening exercise.
The rest of the class was devoted to reading aloud after me in parts and sentences, to the same conversation exercises as the other class, and then to answering the textbook's two lame questions about the content of the reading passage. I have serious issues with the textbooks we use, but I'll save that for another blog. The main difference with the rest of the class was that the students, though not quite genki, were more vocal and more participatory than last week's bunch. You see the difference the warm-up game can make! It's a good thing, too, since coming up with games is the vast majority of my contribution to lesson planning.
I hope this was a mildly interesting insight into my current profession: first and third year lessons to come!
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