Alex Quinn's Japan Journal

11/8/2004, Some fun English lessons

Just some notes on some particularly fun classes.

In the public speaking (aka conversation) class, the students are memorizing a speech.  It's rather tedious and we are very picky about their pronunciation for this exercise.  They have to be able to pronounce each word perfectly.  So, we go through the whole speech word by word as a class.  They are memorizing Cal Ripken Jr's farewell to baseball speech.  I say "Cal".  They repeat "Garu" or something vaguely close.  We practice for a while until they can say "Cal" clearly.  Next, we practice "Ripken".  They initially say "Lipagen".  Next, "farewell".  They initially say "fellway".  After half an hour of practice, they can clearly say, "Cal Ripken Jr. Farewell To Baseball Address." For some unknown reason, they find this practice quite fun.  Once they start to get it, they start chanting loudly, "Cal Rip-ken! Cal Rip-ken! Cal Rip-ken!".  With the word "baseball", they initially made the B sound too soft.  It sounded like "vasebaru".  So, we did some exercises to make the B sound harder.  In the end, they were all exagerating it, and practically spitting across the room with a hard and forceful B sound.

I also do an elective English class, in which just about anything goes.  We have a 2 hour block of time on Tuesdays.  Today's lesson was typical of the last few lessons where I've been able to do what I want.  We focused on the jazz standard "Night And Day" by Cole Porter.  I typed out the lyrics and printed them double-spaced.  I also made a glossary that translates all of the difficult words and phrases into either easy English or Japanese.  For example, "raindrop", "torment", "under the hide of me", and "make love".  Then, I made a CD of all the recordings I could find of the song.  In class, I passed out the handouts.  I played a recording of Tony Bennett singing "Night And Day" with a piano-bass-drum trio.  They read along in the handout.  Then, we talked about the difficult words.  The language is very difficult.  Even English teachers (who are Japanese) have a hard time with it.  So, I assigned a group of 4 lines of the song to groups of 4 students.  They worked together to understand the meaning.  The English teacher and I walked around and helped them understand.  After that, each group picked a representative who came to the front of the class and explained their part of the song, first in easy English and then in more detailed Japanese.  The idea is to make sure all of the students understand all of the song.  Next, they worked individually to write a short fictional story based on the new words they learned from the song.  The requirements were that the story must be at least 100 words, it must use at least 3 of the new words, and it must be either fun or funny.  In other words, they may not write about breakfast or their summer vacation.  It must be fiction.  This is useful because it uses another part of their brain, as opposed to writing about their weekend.  Writing fiction requires that they come up with their own ideas and associate them with their knowledge of English.  I think it's a good experience for them.  This was the third time.  I always get some really good stories.  Last time, I got a story about a trip to Acapulco.  On the plane, there was a boy llama flirting with some girl llamas who were in an exotic mood.  It goes on.  Another story was about dreaming of flying through big clouds.  Another time, I got a story about the neighbor's pet hippopotamus.  According to the other English teachers, they never get asked to write fiction.  It's pretty neat, I think.

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