Thursday, February 7, 2008
News Events
Smith's School of English has a selection of revised news articles covering various topics ranging from crop circles to drug smuggling. It is a lesson planned for high level students, offering new vocabulary, new sentence patterns, as well as some interesting questions out of context which often spark heated discussions in class.
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Item - Hotdog Eating Contest
When I saw only one of my 7pm students in the lobby right before the class, I suspected that the other student was not going to turn up again because in the past few weeks, she had missed several lessons in a row. As usual, I had included an item and a routine in my lesson plan, but I decided to move the routine to the start in case the other student showed up shortly after we began our lesson. From her lesson reports, I knew that she had gone through Routine 9 once before, so I figured she would feel more comfortable if she walked into something familiar instead of missing a part of a totally new item.
I was glad I made the right decision. At 7:20pm, the other student rushed into my classroom apologizing just as we were starting on today's item- Hotdog Eating Contest. After some quick exchange of greetings, I handed her a copy of the item and asked both of them to list all the new vocabulary in their notebooks while skimming through the article, which was done within 3 minutes. One by one I explained all the new words and phrases in their lists: "phenomenon", "chomp", "controversy", "disqualify", "alleged infraction", "lead the pack", "reclaim", "coveted", "gush", and "throngs of media". I checked their comprehension by asking them to either use the word in a sentence or translate it into Japanese. Once I was sure that they understood the new vocabulary, I asked the students to read out the paragraphs in turn, and then corrected the pronunciation of some words at the end of their reading. Since these two students were both quite capable, I decided to let them finish the questions about the story from memory, and they flew through the 10 questions!
We had less than 5 minutes left before I introduced today's one-point, so I suggested that we should have a hotdog eating contest here at Smith's School of English Kyobashi. Well, let's just say that neither of my students were too fond of the idea, and they were too polite to call me crazy!
The News Events curriculum is a great way to enhance upper level student's comprehension and fluency. You can initially focus on their pronunciation by asking the students to read the paragraphs out loud. Depending on how many students are in the lesson I usually ask them to take turns so they can get equal amounts of speaking time. They are then able to answer the questions reasonably well which confirms their comprehension.
I find that the greatest benefit of these lessons is the new vocabulary the students learn. Some of the news article's vocabulary and phrases used are pretty advanced for this level. So I try to take extra time and care to make sure the students understand what they are reading. This does wonders for their confidence which allows them to easily proceed.
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