Intensive Summer English Course with Japanese Students

Last Monday, I returned back to the classroom for an intensive English course that I was to teach for four days with Japanese high school students from Okinawa. Their aim was to improve their English academic skills but what did they want to do? Well, it was pretty clear immediately – they only wanted to have fun. This is essentially a personal reflection of what went well and what I would do differently next time with a closed group of Japanese high school students.

In this post, I will share my initial experiences and my reflections about how best to improve future closed groups of Japanese learners for intensive language courses. However, if you have any recommendations for what to include for next time, or how best to get high school students more engaged or chatty then please share in the comments.

Day One

The first day, I obviously received little to no information regarding the closed group of students from Okinawa that were arriving to our Business School in Korea. Number of students were an unknown. Their English ability were an unknown. The expectations were also an unknown quantity.

I arrived to the classroom, printed 30 copies of material for the first lesson, in case there were more than the expected 20 odd students that I had anticipated, and was told to introduce myself to a rather quiet group of Japanese young adults.

I was as shocked as they were and had to take a few moments to compose myself before I started the lesson. While I was there, a person was wandering around with a camera taking photos and video of the initial moments of the lesson which also added to the stress of the moment. It is one thing to teach independently to students, but another thing to have four or five other individuals watching every move as you negotiate the classroom and whatever variables that emerge.

Nonetheless, I returned to the tried and tested ‘get to know you’ activity where I shared a range of information about myself, and got students to guess the questions to the specific answers. Obviously, from experience, I modelled the task with my students by sharing the answer ‘Martin’ and eliciting the question. For those unsure of the question, it would be ‘What is your name?’. Once students got the hang of it with three demonstated answers, I shared five answers about myself and got students to think of the questions in small groups.

This task worked quite well and I thought the students responded quite well to this. They were very curious to learn about my experiences of YouTube and it prompted more questions during the day. I then decided to get students to create their own personal sentences or answers for them to practice the task in predicting potential questions. This worked well and the whole task lasted nearer towards 60 minutes in total.

If you are faced with a group of students whom you have no idea of their ability, this ‘get to know you’ activity gives you a chance to develop rapport, share information about yourself which could evoke more queries or interest from learners, as well as, more importantly, learn more about their English ability based upon how well they are able to construct question forms.

Once I got to know the students, their level, as well as some personal information, I decided to have a break for ten minutes and prepare more lesson material in that short time before returning to the classroom. I also had an afternoon session to prepare and in the syllabus that had been provided, I was required to prepare the students on essay writing skills.

Returning back to the class after break, I decided to play a speaking game which is Pass the Paper – something that I had been introduced to many years ago. I had a range of questions prepared for students for their first speaking task and the students were quite receptive to this task. I moved them away from their desks towards the centre of the classroom in a circle and tried to get all to answer a question from the PowerPoint game.

In the afternoon, I decided to focus on a lesson that was to introduce British culture to the students – it seemed rather out of place for students to learn a little about British culture from a classroom based in South Korea, but it focused on the importance of tea which included a video about the history of tea.

The lesson about tea was received positively but I soon realised that I had stretched my learners a little too much as they looked a little perplexed with some of the idiomatic expressions. However, by the end of the day, I had already trained my learners to respond to ‘easy peasy’ by replying with ‘lemon squeezy’. It is always a good idea to get learners ready to learn English, and if this means getting them conditioned to saying some funny expressions – so be it.

Day Two

The second day, I wanted students to be able to develop some writing skills, despite them really wishing to focus on communication skills. So, I pulled off my trusty Reading Extra from the bookshelf and got students to complete one of the intial tasks from the resource book, which offers a really good model for self-introductions for students.

The students needed a lot of assistance but they were able to scan for specific information and complete the related table with the six introductions from the reading. Information included name, age, nationality, hometown or city, job, as well as hobbies. Once students completed this, I got them to think about themselves and started to brainstorm what they could include in a self-introduction. By the end of the lesson, students had written a respectable self-introduction after using the models to aid them.

As I am so bad with names, I decided to go through a small game at the end of the lesson and get each of the students to introduce themselves – again recycling what they had written previously – and then introduce their peers. For this, get the students sitting in a circle, get one student on your left to introduce themselves, then move onto the next student. This following student introduces the first student and then themselves. By the time all students have introduced themselves multiple times, you will have got a good idea of all names as well as their interests. It really does put you on the spot but it is a wonderfully engaging task for all students.

I completed the second day with minimal material and more emphasis on communication than anything else. By lunch time, we were done for the day and there were no afternoon classes. Overall, it was a really rewarding day.

Day Three

On the third day, I decided that I wanted to focus on a topic that I soon learnt while observing the students, which was based upon music – specifically Justin Bieber. I managed to source some lesson material about Justin Bieber and decided to start the lesson with a music quiz to warm students up to the topic. They were very engaged but they knew nothing about some of the music that I had shared with the quiz.

I chose a range of music from the 1970s all the way to more recent pop, so had 20 songs to play to students and they needed to write down the name of the song as well as the artist. I decided to award students a point for the correct title of the song and another point for the correct spelling of the pop group. All songs were either Canadian, American, or British and I thought that having chosen a range of music through the ages, students will have known them but I was in for a surprise as they knew less than I had expected.

I suppose in the future, I would include the names of the songs in one word cloud and another of the musicians in another word cloud, and get the students to write them correctly in the worksheet that I had created and handed out to the class.

Anyhow, students were very interested in Justin Bieber and LinguaHouse came to the rescue with a lesson based on him. We looked at his background as well as some vocabulary together in preparation for the class. The final task for students before they finished class was to listen to Ed Sheeran and Justin Bieber’s song of ‘I Don’t Care’ (video below), and complete a different comprehension tasks.

After a morning filled with music and some reading, we ended the lesson with a game and this time it was hangman. Once we got nearer to lunch time, I had created the gaps on the board which were to spell out ‘lunch time’, and after a few attempts to get the correct words on the board, the students knew immediately the word and got their things together before heading down for their well deserved lunch.

Day Four

This was the last day with the students and they had been such a joy to teach, albeit briefly during the week. I decided to focus on a project with the students, and decided to use Present Yourself 1: 2nd Edition as material to get students prepared for their final presentation project in the afternoon. I have used this coursebook in the past with presentation courses but as the syllabus included a presentation topic for their final day, I thought I would incorporate this as best as possible.

It took a while to get students ready for their presentation preparation, so we looked at the sort of things that are available in towns and cities to begin the lesson. I asked students to write down anything that they have in the hometown and to share it after a short brainstorm. We wrote down a variety of things such as train station, post office, as well as hospital.

We used one of the chapters in the coursebook as a reference and there were some nice examples of presentations in the form of a video which were from the coursebook also. After completing a variety of vocabulary and listening tasks, I explained that students would need to prepare for their individual presentations. However, prior to them preparing, I gave an example of a Pecha Kucha presentation that they would need to give when introducing their home town.

For those unaware, a Pecha Kucha presentation is originally 6 minutes and 40 seconds in length, with the presentation automatically transitioning from one slide to the next after 20 seconds and there are a total 20 slides. However, I explained to students that they will only need to do a presentation for 3 minutes and 20 seconds in total with a total of 10 slides.

Anyhow, I shared a personal Pecha Kucha of a holiday that I took in Busan (Korea’s second largest city) one time and shared my experiences. This was meant as a demonstration and I told them to plan their presentation in the afternoon, after lunch.

Once students returned from lunch, they were sitting down and planning their presentations. They had a lot of time to plan and they also brought all their laptops along which had been leased by the university for them. They used PowerPoint to plan their presentation and then I requested that they submit via Google Forms.

Students practised a few times, and then they were randomly chosen to present to the class. They did a marvellous job at presenting, but they found it strange to present without any script. However, they grew in confidence and some of the more extroverted students really did a good job without any hesitation. Students were applauded for a job well done, but we kind of finished late with presentations and there was a colleague waiting to give their final words to all Japanese learners before they left and returned back to Okinawa.

We handed out certificates to the students and said goodbye and that was the final moments with them, and it was decided that we should have a few group photos with them at the entrance to our Business School.

And then we said goodbye and they took their bus to the airport.