What better way to help students familiarize themselves with set English phrases than with some well organized phrase cards? These Smith’s
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Phrase Cards
Phrase cards are organized sets of flash cards with set English phrases.
What better way to help students familiarize themselves with set English phrases than with some well organized phrase cards? These Smith’sSchool of English
What better way to help students familiarize themselves with set English phrases than with some well organized phrase cards? These Smith’s
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ET: I’ve never heard of it
This next student has plenty of notes on him and has apparently been reviewing his [One Points] from as far back as three weeks ago. He goes on with examples for about four random One Points before he gets to the most recent one. I tell him a story about a new Chinese restaurant that has opened up in Umeda – the one with flying acrobats and free-roaming tigers. He looks at me incredulously and says, “I’ve never heard of it!”
Routine: Routine 12 – Shopping
This student has done the routines several times so I decide to review this one by making up a story of my own that is relevant to the questions. I have him write down the questions and then ask me them while I make up a story on the spot. He seems to enjoy the story and laughs at the appropriate pauses but he fails to pay close attention to the details. At the end of the story, he is caught off guard when I rephrase the questions to quiz him on how much information he retained. He struggles through the answers, forcing himself to remember. By the end, he feels that his memory has been adequately stimulated.
Item: Phrase Cards #116-120
I have already prepared for this lesson by writing up a fictional story on the board, leaving underlines in the places of the omitted phrases. The student makes an attempt to fill in the blanks but is unable to match up his choices with the sentence format. After the student has exhausted most of his examples, I allow him to look at the Japanese translations of the phrase cards. He comes a bit closer to the examples now but still isn’t able to come up with the precise words. I then give him the English phrases and he flies through the story, completing the sentences by choosing the correct phrases and changing the tenses accordingly. After he has done this and thoroughly reviewed the meaning of the phrases, he tries to make up his own sentences using them. Some of the content of his examples are absolutely hilarious so we have a good laugh over them before moving on.
One Point: For me, (A) is scary because (B)
I don’t even need to give this student an example for this new one point because he has already grasped the idea of it before I even finished writing it on the board. He says, “For me, the Japanese Yakuza are scary because they held me up twice.” I find that particularly hard to believe and ask him to confirm whether it is true or not. He bursts into uncontrollable laughter and says, “No, I’m pulling your leg.”
It's genius how SJ delivers the phrase lessons. I've always found it a bit hard doing phrase lessons because most students freeze when asked to make up a story with the 5 phrases. By preparing a fictional story beforehand and offering them the context where the target phrases are used, you'll make your students much more comfortable and confident using the phrases, and you'll definitely be able to improve student talking time!
Today’s first lesson went by very smoothly; especially the portion that was spent on the item. We first reviewed the phrase cards from the previous class to make sure that he still had them fresh in his mind.
Then I drew his attention to the board where I had written:
Last night, my roommate decided to ________ _____ his nails on my sofa. I _____ ___ his actions and tried to ____ him ____ about my feelings. As he continued to ignore me, I began to feel my energy slowly _____ _____. Eventually, he got bored of listening to me complain and _____ _____ _____ my cat.
The missing phrases were:
Sharpen up
Disapprove of
Tip off
Ebb away
Walk away with
After showing him the Japanese cards, I tried to elicit the proper phrases – or ones that might have been close. He got two of the phrases nearly perfect but needed some hints in order to fill up the rest of the board. We checked his answers and filled in the blanks with the English phrases so that the board looked like this:
Last night, my roommate decided to sharpen up his nails on my sofa. I disapproved of his actions and tried to tip him off about my feelings. As he continued to ignore me, I began to feel my energy slowly ebb away. Eventually, he got bored of listening to me complain and walked away with my cat.
In the end, the student made up sentences of his own using the phrase cards and told me several interesting stories along the way. He was particularly interested in the phrase ‘ebb away’ since this was the first time had heard it.. One of his examples reflected his keen interest in studying English. “I sharpen up my English skills by studying every day.” His next example caught me off guard, “I tipped off my neighbor who had a gun about the police.” I first asked him to verify the meaning of his sentence and then went to work fixing it up so that it would accurately explain his feelings. He tried once more with, “I tipped off the police about my neighbor who had a gun.”
I gave him a few sentences of my own to use as examples when he wasn’t too sure about the proper usage of ‘walk away with’ and wrapped up the lesson after this with a one point
Item: Phrase cards
This is an Item I did as part of one of my lessons today.
Before the next lesson, I pulled out the 5 phrase cards that I would be using and quickly made a story revolving around them. I wrote the story up on the board, being careful to omit the necessary phrases so that the students would need to use their imaginations.
The story went as follows:
Last night, as I was ( ) ( ) the local convenience store I ( ) ( ) my neighbor. He always ( ) ( ) ( ) justice in our community so he told me to ( ) ( ) ( ) trouble. After he had left, I decided not to ( ) ( ) his warning and go ahead with my original plan.
The missing phrases were as follows:
Stake out
Run into
Stand up for
Stay out of
Dwell on
So the students had a fun time completing the story with words that they tried to squeeze into the blank spaces. After a few hints, they got closer to the actual answers. When I showed them the Japanese translations of the phrase cards, they got 2 of the phrases dead on – ‘run into’ and ‘stay out of’.
By the end of the duration of this item, they were able to complete the story so that it looked like this:
Last night, as I was staking out the local convenience store I ran into my neighbor. He always stands up for the justice in our community so he told me to stay out of trouble. After he had left, I decided not to dwell on his warning and go ahead with my original plan.
Now that the students were comfortable with the phrases, I got them to make up their own stories or sentences. They enjoyed this part of the item most of all because they were able to include actual facts from their lives and twist the truth a little. One student came up with the example “I stand up for my children at school whenever they get into trouble.” I was shocked by this example because this student had just told me that he still goes to school! When I asked him if he really has children, he laughed and said that he was just joking. The other student gave the example “Yesterday, I ran into my old girlfriend.” Again, this turned out to be entirely untrue since he admitted to having stayed home reading all last night.
All in all, this was a very enjoyable portion of today’s lesson for all involved
ET: I’ve never heard of it
This next student has plenty of notes on him and has apparently been reviewing his [One Points] from as far back as three weeks ago. He goes on with examples for about four random One Points before he gets to the most recent one. I tell him a story about a new Chinese restaurant that has opened up in Umeda – the one with flying acrobats and free-roaming tigers. He looks at me incredulously and says, “I’ve never heard of it!”
Routine: Routine 12 – Shopping
This student has done the routines several times so I decide to review this one by making up a story of my own that is relevant to the questions. I have him write down the questions and then ask me them while I make up a story on the spot. He seems to enjoy the story and laughs at the appropriate pauses but he fails to pay close attention to the details. At the end of the story, he is caught off guard when I rephrase the questions to quiz him on how much information he retained. He struggles through the answers, forcing himself to remember. By the end, he feels that his memory has been adequately stimulated.
Item: Phrase Cards #116-120
I have already prepared for this lesson by writing up a fictional story on the board, leaving underlines in the places of the omitted phrases. The student makes an attempt to fill in the blanks but is unable to match up his choices with the sentence format. After the student has exhausted most of his examples, I allow him to look at the Japanese translations of the phrase cards. He comes a bit closer to the examples now but still isn’t able to come up with the precise words. I then give him the English phrases and he flies through the story, completing the sentences by choosing the correct phrases and changing the tenses accordingly. After he has done this and thoroughly reviewed the meaning of the phrases, he tries to make up his own sentences using them. Some of the content of his examples are absolutely hilarious so we have a good laugh over them before moving on.
One Point: For me, (A) is scary because (B)
I don’t even need to give this student an example for this new one point because he has already grasped the idea of it before I even finished writing it on the board. He says, “For me, the Japanese Yakuza are scary because they held me up twice.” I find that particularly hard to believe and ask him to confirm whether it is true or not. He bursts into uncontrollable laughter and says, “No, I’m pulling your leg.”
Item: Phrase cards.
I had my last hour free and I was all geared up to do some blogging when, the secretaries told me that someone had booked in for that time slot at the last minute. I thought this was great but I panicked just a little because I hadn’t prepared a lesson and I only had about two minutes to do so, but have no fear...
I saw that he was a higher level student so I decided to do some phrase cards with him as I had just done the same ones with my previous students, so it didn't take me long to think of some sentences to put on the board for him to fill in the blanks using the phrase cards I had put in front of him. Since he was a higher level student I decided to throw some extra sentences on the board, I even used two of the phrases in one sentence, just to get him thinking a bit harder.
Some of the phrase cards he had seen before, but a majority of them were new to him. There were some he wanted to be clarified, so I gave him more examples along with the Japanese translations, as he was looking at his electronic dictionary, and he got the meanings and context of the phrases just right.
I found putting the sentences on the board and getting the student(s) to fill in the blanks was a great way to introduce new phrases, as doing this gets the student to think about what context it would be used in and gives them an example of it at the same time, and of course it gets their mind thinking in English.
At the end of the lesson we had some spare time so I picked out some phrase cards that he had already done a little while ago. I asked him to explain the meaning of the phrase and put them into sentences. He couldn’t have done any better, he put them all into sentences that made perfect sense and explained the meaning of them as if he was the teacher.
I had a high level student the other evening here at Smith's School of English Kyobashi. Since this student had been with us for quite a few years, he had gone through most of the curriculum more than once, but as he told us a while ago, English is one of his hobbies and he is just happy to be able to chat.
ET:
I noticed his previous one-point jotted down in his lesson report. When he walked into my classroom, I told him that I ran into Watanabe Ken at Keihan Mall before coming to work. He didn't disappoint me after a few seconds’ hesitation, and said “you are pulling my leg!” with a big grin on his face.
Routine:
Since this student had done all the routines many times, I decided to just go through routine 9 (Finnegan’s Bar) questions and do some bridging practice. This went well as he knew the drill and was very familiar with the 10 questions, plus he goes to a bar almost every week!
Item:
While it was always nice and easy to have an open conversation with this student, I thought it would be good for him to learn the usages of some common phrases. I had 5 verb phrases from the phrase lesson, and lay them out on the table for my student. I expected him to know most of them, but I knew that he’d have a hard time trying to use them in conversations. Sure enough, he was able to tell me the Japanese translation of them straight away, but barely managed to give me an example sentence. “fall on hard times” was an extremely difficult one for him, but when I brought up NOVA as a hint, he quickly organized the sentence.
“Pick up” was another phrase that we focused on in the lesson. The student knew 2 usages, but had heard about some of the other usages during his listening practice in his own time. During the lesson, he asked if I could give him a list of the usages of this phrase, which I was happy to do, and we came up with about 10 of them: pick oneself up, be picked up by the police, pick up a skill, pick up an illness, pick up a signal, pick up a topic, pick up trends, business will pick up, pick up the pieces…
One-point:
Once you get the hang of it, it is easy! I asked my student if he could play Kendama, a traditional Japanese toy. I told him that I found it rather difficult but once I got the hang of it, it was easy! Our conversation went on for another 5 minutes on childhood entertainment, although it was a bit over time but I was happy to chat.
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