Archive for September, 2007

Here’s another nice one for Business English classes, study abroad classes and others. You can also turn it into a board game. I could too, of course, but quite frankly I think I’ve done enough for one week… 

Politeness competition- Negotiations/ Requests/ Complaints/ Problems
With your partner(s), take turns trying to say the following things as politely as possible. You can repeat what your partner says as long as you add something to make it more polite. You can try as many times as you like. The person with the most polite final version gets 1 point. (Hint: Longer sentences are often politer)

Give me that pen

I want a cup of tea

Sit down

etc…

Full version here:

http://www.tefl.net/alexcase/worksheet-politeness-competition-game-requests-indirect-language/

Sorry that it’s all worksheets worksheets worksheets recently, but what can I say- that’s exactly how I’m starting to feel writing them all…

http://www.tefl.net/alexcase/worksheets-ielts-speaking-sports-verbs-play-do-go-go-to/

http://www.tefl.net/alexcase/worksheets-ielts-speaking-subject-questions/

http://www.tefl.net/alexcase/worksheets-ielts-speaking-tense-review/

http://www.tefl.net/alexcase/worksheets-ielts-speaking-work-prepostions-nounprep-collocations/

As well as practising the exam, the worksheets are all designed to fit in with the syllabus of Face2Face Pre-Intermediate, which is a textbook I hate much less than any other I’ve used recently!

Why do the Japanese get into a big flap about every “typhoon” that just blows the roof off a couple of sheds?

First of all, don’t make the mistake of confusing the Japanese people and the Japanese media. Just because the news programmes try to outdo each other with details of the disaster doesn’t mean ordinary people are obsessing on it just as much, it is mainly a sign of the news crews’ gambarimasu (I will do my best) mentality and yet another quiet news day in Japan (if you ignore the news from the rest of the world, that is…). Due to not wanting to step on anyone’s toes covering something controvertial, they do tend to swarm all over trivial stories like this.

There are reasons for Japanese people to worry about every storm and not do the English stiff upper lip “oh, it’s just a puff of wind” thing. For one thing, when nature strikes in Japan, be in volcanoes, earthquakes, storms or tsunamis, it really does strike. For another, they are quite risk adverse. And my latest theory is that it is one of the few socially acceptable times in Japan when you can go home early.

Any more iof these fun and games, and you’re all going to wish you taught IELTS…

http://www.tefl.net/alexcase/worksheets-ielts-speaking-parts-one-two-tenses-game-exam-practice/

Links to my other IELTS stuff here

 http://www.tefl.net/alexcase/archives/266

and here

http://www.onestopenglish.com/section.asp?catid=58082&docid=154413

Also got plenty of stuff for TOEFL, TOEIC, CAE and FCE. If anyone is interested, requests below and I will put that at the top of my to do list…

“Democracy” works in strange ways here in East Asia:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/japan/story/0,,2162843,00.html

So, Takeshi Kitano wins another film award at an arty festival, along no doubt with a whole load of other unwatchable crap. There are a few specifically Beat Takeshi points worth making here, such as: if the judges just watched some Japanese TV before watching his films they would realise that meandering plots, lack of action, bizarre switches from drama to comedy and characters who don’t express their feelings are not fabulously avant garde film making tricks but available for you to watch, should you be M*, on any Japanese TV drama.

There is also a more important and generalised point to make about film critics. If you really want to read through their reviews and awards and find something you are going to like, you need to learn to predict what they are likely to enjoy.

Let’s analyse them together for a bit, shall we? The average movie critic spends most of their time watching hundreds and hundreds of movies in a cinema round the corner from their house, when quite often they would quite frankly rather be sitting on a hillside thinking about their own life or putting their backpack on and going somewhere new. So, when you read their review, as well as the possibility it is actually a masterpiece you will appreciate too you also have to take account of the possibility that they only like it because:

• So little happens that they do indeed get time to think about their own lives as if they were sitting on top of that hill (e.g. Hanabi)
• There are lots of references to other films that they like because it makes them seem so intelligent and makes all that time watching movies seem worthwhile, but us ordinary mortals will miss (any Tarantino film)
• There is a plot so fiendishly difficult and bizarre that even they can’t work out what is going to happen, but leaves the rest of us just confused (Memento)
• They get to see something else, maybe exotic, that they’ve never seen before (e.g. the Forbidden City in Last Emperor) but that the rest of us who are not trapped in a dark room would do much better just going and seeing in real life
• Because they don’t get time to read books they use subtitled films as a substitute

As I’ve said, the really difficult bit is not dismissing a review just because it does fit into one of those categories (I like one of the ones in brackets above), but I still find it helps me totally dismiss a good 70% of glowing reviews as something I am unlikely to enjoy.

Although I started this post mainly as an excuse to heap scorn upon “the man with two names involving Takeshi”, the same technique actually works as a rough and ready analysis of theories on how to teach a language. For example, if we look at the kinds of people who come up with wacky new ideas on how to teach English and those who then going around spreading the “good word”, we find that many of them have already been teaching for far too many years to be healthy. Of course they need something new to revitalise their classroom routines after 20 years, but it doesn’t mean the rest of us need it too… There are many examples of this, of which Scott Thornbury’s Dogme is probably the most obvious example of something only for people in the 40s or above.

We can then narrow the focus down to proponents of specific theories. For example, if you look into the dark past of many of the teachers who now preach TBA (the Task-based Approach), you will find they were once converts to a hard-core version of the Communicative Approach which involved no actual teaching of grammar at all. If you like that, might be worth a look. If not, you have to ask yourself why such people are so keen on it.

And for my final trick, I will narrow it down to one man. If you want to understand why the Lexical Approach has resulted in page after page of theoretically useful but painfully dull teaching material (e.g. the most unteachable parts, amongst many, of Cutting Edge), try looking at Michael Lewis’s earlier theories on how to teach grammar. Enthusing to a teacher (I was a believer too!), especially a logically-minded one, but totally unmotivating to the learners.

I rest my case**

* A fabulous “Japanese English” expression, meaning the “M” from “S&M”

** Yes, I see the pun on my name. So not funny!

It’s all getting a bit “TEFLtastic with no irony intended” round here with all these fun and games I’m putting up. Maybe I’m too tired to even be sarcastic…

 Anyway, here is my latest attempt to make none of us fall asleep during Business English classes. I’ve slipped in lots of emailing vocab and have tackled some common Japanese mistakes such as confusing “memo” and “note”. It also includes the most important factor for any classroom speaking exercise, which is to give the other people a reason to listen- in this case to decide if they were successful in solving the problem. The board with rules is below. A link to a full version with rolecards is also given, but please note that this is for quite a high level class that have covered most of this language before so you might need to make a different version of the cards for your class.

Business Problems Mini Roleplays

Rules of the game
Shuffle the pack of cards and put them face down on the top left box. The first person takes the top card and chooses how they are going to communicate and who they are going to communicate with to solve the problem. The options are to:

·          Write an email

·          Send a text (= a text message= an SMS)

·          Phone someone

·          Pick a time when you know someone is not available and leave a phone message

·          Go and see the person and speak face to face

·          Leave someone a note (e.g. put a post it on their computer screen)

·          Write a memo for your whole team/ section/ department/ company to read

They should then tell their partners what they are going to say or write, or roleplay the conversation with someone. After that the other members of the group decide whether they managed to find a successful solution. If so, they can keep the card and score one point. If not, their card goes to the bottom of the pile. Play passes to the person on their right. The person with most cards when the teacher stops the game is the winner.

Useful language to play the game
“Who’s next?”= “Whose turn is it?” “It’s your turn”= “Take a card”

“Who are you going to contact (to solve the problem)?”

“How are you going to contact them?”

“What are you going to say/ write?”

“Who is going to play the other role?”

“I think that would work because…”

“I don’t think that would work/ I’m not sure that would work because…”

 “Let’s ask, shall we?”= “Shall we check with the teacher?”

“Who has the most cards?”/ “Congratulations, you are the winner”

Mondays are not a day for pontificating, and anyway Im a bit ponficated out at the moment, so here are some fun and games instead-

This is one that fits into my ultimate TEFL desert island survival game kit. It is personalised, it produces lots of language, it is controlled practice of the focus point but free in other ways, it is loads of fun, it practices a range of skills and it is adaptable for a whole lot of other grammar and vocab points. And here it is-

 Guess me!

Before the lesson, write a whole bunch of sentence stems or sentences with gaps including the target language (see below for examples). After a warmer that links in with the grammar, topic or exercise type (e.g. tell each other things about your weekend but with gaps and give hints until they guess the missing information- I ate _____ for breakfast on Sunday etc.), give out one photocopy per student and get them to fill in at least half of the sentences to make true sentences about themselves. When the first one or two students have finished all the sentences, stop everyone and get them to take turns reading out only the parts they have written and guessing which sentences it has been written in.

Example- Verb Pattern Guess Me!

—————————————————————————–

First of all, just because it’s funny, here’s a native speaker who wouldn’t pass the IELTS Speaking Part Three:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj3iNxZ8Dww

To make sure your students aren’t reduced to such levels of incoherence, here is a whole stack of IELTS speaking materials:

http://www.tefl.net/alexcase/worksheets/efl-exam-worksheets-ielts/

I’ve also got a whole stack of Part Two and Part Three exam questions on various topics if that is of interest to anyone. Just put a request in the comments box and I’ll put them up:

The sumo wrestling grand champion Asashoryu is finally being allowed by his sporting federation to return to his home country of Mongolia. Reminds me of the ultimate bad TEFL employer stories, something it might be worth tackling in the TEFL World Records soon. Indonesian employers in particular have a reputation for taking almost the entire length of your contract to get round to photocopying your passport and returning it too you…

Which just goes to show that you should never listen to the ruling classes when they tell you that you should get all Confucian and listen to your elders and betters. They may be right, but that certainly isn’t why they keep on saying it!

In case you think reading Marxist Japanese history comics (really!) has made me over use the expression “ruling classes”, here comes the latest Abe cabinet to illustrate it perfectly. I’m going entirely on the account of one paper here, so the real figures are probably much higher, but here are some numbers that stood out for me. In the 20 member cabinet there are:

• 20 examples of switching allegiance of party to make sure they stayed in power
• 8 relatives who have also had high level cabinet posts
• two major corruption scandals
• only two women, one in a joke post
• zero discernable principles

Not that it is just Japan, of course. In Turkey, the Western press are finally publishing articles on to what I’ve been saying since I lived there- the “protection of secularism” in Turkey is nothing more than the “protection of the secular classes”:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/28/europe/turkey.php

Getting back to Japan, they have also found that nationalism can sell shampoo:

www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/08/28/business/AS-FEA-FIN-Japan-Shampoo-Wars.php

- while 5400 people have no choice but to live in Internet cafes:

www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/08/28/business/AS-FEA-FIN-Japan-Shampoo-Wars.php

Tips on how to bring class war into the classroom coming soon…

Meanwhile, on a slightly more teaching related note there’s a touching story that also works as a great metaphor for how people hang on to old ideas:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/28/opinion/edely.php