Any advice is much appreciated!

Mark

I appreciate your idea about short diaries – I’ll introduce this to my students next week.

Thank you for a bracing cuppa joe to remind me of my ALT days in rural Japan! I agree that motivating students who are basically forced to study English in order to pass tests is a huge challlenge, but not without its rewards. The point made about teaching reading and writing in an integrated fashion within a conversation course is an excellent one, too. In my language school, we ask JHS students (and up) to write short diaries, which really helps them to expand their expressions in a coherent manner. In fact, I’ve seen great improvement among my beginner-level adult students with this!

Very nice introduction to your schools and your context. Thank you for sharing it all. I’m in my 21st year in Japan and my 16th year in the same JSHS, so I hear you – about all the challenges of young learners who may or may not ever need English.

After many years of teaching like you do (PPP Method almost exclusively with speaking and listening) I started teaching writing and reading quite by chance about 3 years ago. I immediately noticed it is a whole new world: students were so much more engaged, they were more forthcoming with their thoughts, ideas and opinions about themselves, and I felt a palpable sense of “learning” in the air during almost every class.

My single, longest, nagging question has begun to disappear, “How can they do a dialog perfectly at the end of today’s class, then seem back at square one the following week – over and over again – seemingly not having learned anything??”

I look forward to following you on Twitter and hope we bump into each other some day. We ARE neighbors.

Cheers,

Steven Herder

Shelly, I understand what you mean. I ‘ended up making my own worksheets from scratch as I dislike the textbooks here and most material I came across was too high-level for my students. A few months back Jason Renshaw (@englishraven) introduced me to Englishraven.com, which I appreciate a lot as he has very good materials.

Thank you for sharing your experiences. I work with young language learners in Germany and the focus seems to be conversational here. I continuously get requests from parents for phonics and pronunciation materials. Speaking English correctly is the focus. I have taught high schools students from several Asian countries including Korea and tests are very important! Many told me that most of their English instruction included workbooks and drills. I have seen some of the workbooks and they are quite difficult to comprehend. I am glad to see that in your classrooms there is a mixture of techniques.

I appreciate the image of the strong cup of coffee after orange juice. I can taste it!

I think that middle schoolers in Korea must have a lot in common with middle schoolers in Japan. It’s always tough when students HAVE to be in class–different level of (non) motivation

Sounds like you’ve done a good job with them!