Creating TEFL Lesson Plans

If you are a TEFL/ESL teacher, chances are that at some point you will have to plan a lesson. Sure, some people like to turn up and wing it. If you run conversation classes, you might not have to do any more than talk. Some schools will give you a step-by-step lesson plan to follow. However, sometimes an English teacher will be called upon to produce a lesson plan.

If you teach at elementary school, this is more likely as the homeroom teachers' English level varies greatly and some don't feel at all confident teaching it. At Junior High school, teachers have specialised subjects, so the English teachers might feel confident in creating the lesson plans themselves - in fact, they might feel so confident that they see the presence of an ALT as a hindrance and will have you doing little more than reading out the occasional sentence. If you teach at an eikaiwa (conversation school) or run private lessons, chances are that you will have to produce your own lesson plans.

New pages!

Hey guys - I'm not sure if you will notice, but I have added some new pages to this blog!

We have the old "Help Japan" page, full of information about volunteering and donating to help the earthquake/tsunami victims. I added an "About Me" page for a lovely bit of self-indulgence, although it's more about my journey and how I came to be teaching English in Japan. The latest addition is "Live, Work and Teach in Japan" - a comprehensive FAQ in which I try to answer questions from imaginary people. The questions are based on things I've seen often asked in forums, as well as things that various people have asked me in the past. I hope that it's helpful!

Just look up and click the buttons on the bar... click "Home" to return to the main blog. I'm sure you could have worked that out for yourselves, but hey.

Goodbye, 三年生 (third grade)...

At the end of February, my third graders took their high school entrance examinations and finished their Junior High School lessons. I never taught KJHS's third grade, but in TJHS we were quite close. I ate lunch with the students on a rotated schedule, and would chat to them in the corridor. Some of them had amazing English, and even if it wasn't perfect, they weren't afraid to try having a conversation. I would teach at one in three of their weekly English classes, so while I wasn't there, their main teacher got them to write goodbye letters to me.

I have photographed some of my favourite ones. While the English isn't perfect, it's impressive. But it's the little pictures that really do it. They're so cute. So, have a look, enjoy, and understand why I love teaching.

Make Your Own Monster!

So, Halloween was last week, and I decided to get my first year JHS stud
ents (aged 12-13) to exercise some English grammar by creating, and writing about, their own monsters. Admittedly I was inspired by my friend Jenny's Pokémon battles, the results of which were being put on Facebook, and the "make your own monster" idea was borrowed from various ESL websites. Still, I thought that it would be fun to see what my students had to offer in the way of creativity. I was not disappointed!

Here are some of their creations:


"This is Dream Eater. He is white. He eats bad dreams. He doesn't eat good dreams. He speaks English. He likes children. His favorite children are small children. He lives in a box."

Pulling Lesson Plans Out Of Your.... Mind

Hey there, campers.

So I was thinking today about what you can do, as an ALT, when a lesson is sprung on you last-minute. On Tuesday mornings, I meet with one of the JTEs at the school I don't like so much to "make an arrangement for lessons", as he likes to call it. While sometimes I have a week, even two, to plan lesson activities and games, sometimes he says to me "well, we need to do this topic in the next lesson (IN TEN MINUTES), can you come up with something?"

I know that other ALTs have been thrown into a room of students, like a terrified Christian into the lion's den, and asked to do something. While planning activities is all well and good when you have time (and the internet) at your disposal, what do you do when a last-minute lesson is sprung upon you? Flounder around like a fish out of water... or whip out something from your bag of tricks?

Teaching in Dreamland

"You can't be 45 and still working as an ALT, that's just sad..."

"I don't want to still be doing this job at 30. I need to go back home and get a real job."

"I feel like being in Japan is just delaying the real world for as long as possible."

These are a small selection of paraphrased things that I have heard from fellow ALTs over the past few months. It seems to be the general consensus that being an ALT is in many ways akin to being a student - it's fun, and it's fine for now, but to do nothing else for the rest of your life would be rather sad, if not a sign of refusal to grow up.

Now, this is an attitude that I can understand. I've done my degree, I've conducted quantitative research, analysed and written up the results, passed countless exams and written in-depth essays on a variety of topics. And here I am, with my Bachelor of Science from the University of Manchester, reading out "Do you like sushi? Yes, I do!" to a group of slightly bored twelve year olds. I can't help but feel, sometimes, that the massive tuition fee debts - which I will be paying off for most of my life - were unnecessary expenses. Years of knowledge and intelligence - the mind that I have spent over two decades carefully cultivating - seems doomed to disintegrate and regress to the level of a four-year-old who is just learning her ABC.

The Other Side of the Coin (and How to Deal with it)

So far my entries have been mostly happy and positive, showing Japan as a magical wonderland and depicting teaching as non-stop fun. Well, in many ways, this is true. But I wouldn't be the objective person that I try to be without telling you about the negatives, too. After all, if you're thinking about coming here, it's only fair that you have all the available knowledge at your fingertips, not just a rose-tinted dream. The higher your expectations, the harsher you may feel the realities. Therefore, I will try to highlight some of the low points - not necessarily about Japan as a country, but about the lifestyle of living here as a foreigner and working as an ALT. If you read it and you still want to come here, then I'm guessing you're tough enough to handle it. However, if it completely changes your mind, then I'm sorry to have burst your bubble. But life is life, and nothing is truly perfect, although I believe that the majority of your experience comes down to your way of perceiving things and of dealing with situations. Anyway...

1) Culture Shock!

Even if you've never been to Japan before, or even travelled to Asia, you're probably aware that it is a very different place from what you're used to. The food is different. The people are different - in dress, manners, language and values.

A Day in my Elementary School

I realised that I have talked a lot about my Junior High Schools, but not mentioned my Elementary School, which is in fact my favourite place to go. Once every two weeks, I am summoned to the elementary school down the road from my favourite JHS. Some of my TJHS students used to go there, so we had some fun today talking about the teachers.

So, KES is a 20 minute walk from TJHS. I will arrive at TJHS in the morning, and kill time until 8.40. Then, I start my walk over to the Elementary School. I've only been there four times, but 3 out of those 4 times, it has been raining heavily, which of course makes the walk extra fun. When I arrive, I am greeted by a cute, happy sign that says "Welcome Gwyneth Jones! Please come to staff room and enjoy with us". This brightens my day, so I put my umbrella in the stand, change my shoes and make my way upstairs to the teacher's room.

10 Differences Between Japanese and British Schools

Well, many have asked me, and the rest of you may have wondered. While anime and comics have romanticised the Japanese high school (and I'm sure I don't need to say anything about the schoolgirl uniforms), many of us are aware that fiction does not always mirror reality. So, I thought that I would let you in on a few differences that you may not have been aware of. Now, considering that the secondary school that I attended in North Wales may be completely different from most British schools, this may not be a fair comparison. Also, I only teach at two Junior High Schools here in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka prefecture. At one, I was a student, at the other I am a teacher.. but this is not a scientific analysis....

Here are 10 differences between Japanese Junior Highs and British secondary schools!

1) In Japan, each class has their own home room. They have almost all their classes in that room, with the teachers coming to them. Consequently, the teachers do not have their own room. All they have is a desk in the teacher's room. They carry all their books and classroom props around in cute little plastic baskets. In the UK - or my school, at least - each teacher had their own room, and when it was time for a lesson, the students would walk to the classroom. There is no cafeteria, either. Children eat lunch in their homerooms.

Surviving your first week in a Japanese Junior High School

After meeting new trainees and already feeling like an old hand, giving advice on teaching and living in Japan as if I'd been here for... y'know, more than five months... I thought I'd prepare a little guide for surviving your first week in a Japanese Junior High School. This may come a few days too late for the latest Interac batch, but I'm sure someone will find it useful, if not amusing...

1) The Checklist...

OK, so you've got your suit ready, ironed and pressed, right? Good. That won't last long. I give it two weeks before you forget that you bought an iron. Still, first impressions are everything. Some other things that you will need: a bag, for carrying around all those lovely books and pieces of paper you will soon acquire; loads of stationary, for making notes, planning lessons and storing all those lovely pieces of paper that I just mentioned; extra, indoor shoes*; your own chopsticks - they do not come with lunch, everyone brings their own!; whatever props and pictures you intend to use for your self-introduction lesson; a book, because there is a high chance that you will spend your first few days stranded at a desk, doing nothing; oh, and money, just in case. Anything else? Remember to set two alarms - you do not want to be late on the first day!
*If you didn't know, in Japan it is PURE CRAZINESS to wear the same shoes that you had on outside, inside. In some places (on tatami mats and apparently on Leopalace linoleum floors) you only wear your socks. Every teacher will have their own shoe locker at the entrance of the school, where they change from outside into inside shoes. If you have multiple schools you will usually end up carrying a pair of shoes wherever you go.

"Pardon?" - How Well Do Language Courses Equip Us For Real Conversation?

When you learn a new language, where do you begin? Some people half-jokingly tell me that you have to learn the vulgar words first. Others would begin from the bottom up with "My name is.." and "how are you?", which seems the most logical step, and the one that most language courses take. However, it seems to me that language lessons do not equip people to have an effective conversation in their chosen new language.

Take, for example, my students. While their textbooks try to build a foundation for their English-speaking abilities (starting from "this is____" and, by third grade, going up to simple stories), I see tasks being set that stretch their English beyond its natural capacities, and it is of little wonder to me that many children have no enthusiasm for learning English. At one of my schools at the moment, third graders are translating a Disney storybook (Snow White) from English to Japanese. This is a painfully slow process, as the story uses storybook language and expressions that they would never have encountered before. So, they can translate "a handsome prince came and fell in love with Snow White" into Japanese, while my other third graders are performing their speeches - "Hamamatsu is a big industrial city", "my school has an abudnace of nature" - wow, what? That's great! But you ask them "what music do you like?" and you get a blank stare, an "eeeeeee?", a lot of "nan dake??" and a general sense of confusion.

My Schools - 私の学校！

I thought it was time that I told you about my schools, without giving away any identifying details of course...


So, I have TJHS on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. From the central bus station in Hamamatsu, it takes 15 minutes to get there. As you walk down by the river and the often-flooded fields, the school comes into view. Now, I always thought that my secondary school in Wales was small, with its 450-odd students, but these schools are TINY...
One reason for this is that Junior High schools in Japan only accomodate three grades (the equivalent of year 8, 9 and 10 in the UK, ages 12-15). Another is that each class (each year is divided into 3 groups) has their own room, in which they have all their lessons. Consequently, there are only 9 necessary classrooms, with a few extra rooms for art, science and perhaps music, a gym, a dojo... and no cafeteria, as they also eat lunch in their homerooms. As I walk past the gym and tennis court into the hallway, where each member of staff has an individual locker for keeping their shoes*, I am greeted by students shouting "Hello!" and "Good morning!", which wakes me up on those slow mornings.

Teaching!

So, it's been a long time since I posted anything here.

I've been teaching for two or three weeks, now! I say "teaching"... what I mean is doing my Self Introduction Quiz for 15 minutes or so, taking questions of varying strangeness from the class and then letting the main teacher take over while I read out some passages, perhaps choose children to answer a question or set a question.

The self introduction goes something like this....

Good morning, everyone! My name is Gwyneth Jones... you can call me Gwynnie! OK, we're going to play the Gwynnie... Quiz!... So, first question, where am I from? Hmmm... am I from - America? Am I from.. Britain? Or am I from... Japan?
This is of course accompanied by a lot of smiling, acting like an idiot and holding up colourful cards with pictures of the options. I then tell them... Britain! - and get them to clap themselves if they got it right. I then tell them about Britain... including getting out a world map and getting them to guess where it is... then asking - "so - who likes soccer? Do you know... Manchester United?" - showing them a picture of Old Trafford stadium and pretending that my house is right next to it. Well, technically I lived in Old Trafford for a while, but the picture I use is of my house in Wales....

Update! - Starting Schools!

Hi!

I realise I haven't updated this for a while, I'm sorry. Sooooo..... since the last time I wrote, I actually left Hamamatsu - to visit Fukuroi, a whole 15 minutes away on the train, with Saba. We strolled around, got bored and then took a bus to a place called Hatta-san temple. We walked up a delightful path littered with restaurants and market stalls, and tried the local delicacy - dumplingy bean paste things on sticks! Yum.


Eventually, following a group of giggling Japanese schoolgirls (calm down, boys) who seemed almost as confused as we were, we reached a million stairs. There were little shrine stop-offs everywhere, where people prayed and gave donations.


At the top of the stairs was a big temple, which I failed to take a photo of because I decided it would be disrespectful. We walked around for a bit, cleansed our hands and wafted incense towards our faces (basically copied whatever the other people were doing...) and hoped that we didn't look TOO much like tourists!