Let's Talk - Outer Space

Yesterday really was a great day at Smith’s School of English, Kyobashi. One of the students had brought in some delicious homemade muffins – just enough for all the teachers and staff to have one or two – and was very eager to start her lesson. Her English skills have improved immensely over the last year and she’d recently been leveled up so she was very keen on challenging herself in her new level.

Since she absolutely loves to chat and is very free with her imagination, I selected a topic from the Let’s Talk folder that I figured she’d probably take an interest in. I wasn’t to be disappointed because she dove right into the conversation as soon as she realized what it was that we’d be talking about. The topic in question was outer space and one of the first guided conversation questions asks if the student believes in the existence of life out there. She was very quick to respond with, “Oh yes, I believe there are aliens living in outer space.” When nudged for a bit of insight into the type of alien she had in mind, she was quick to tell me that these aliens look nearly identical to us humans and live on a nearby undetected planet. What have these aliens been up to recently? Apparently, they’ve been studying the people of Earth in the hopes of being able to contact us in the future.

After receiving so much creative detail about her aliens, their appearance and ultimate goal, I was very pleased to see that she was proving her level-up to be well deserved. There were a few points where we took a bit of a break off of the aliens to go over a few grammar mistakes or choose a more appropriate word to fit into the context of the sentences that she had used. Other than that, her energy and fascination with the potential that contact with aliens had kept the conversation going at such a speed that neither of us noticed that we had just run out of classroom time.

I made sure to give her a new one point before she left so that we’d be able to review it next time. However, after the one point she had a special request to make. She’d been practicing her English at home by writing a diary everyday – a wonderful idea for using the English grammar and vocabulary that she had learned so far, as well as expressions. She only had 2 pages for checking so I went through them and carefully marked up the grammar, punctuation, and spelling mistakes, telling her why they were wrong and how to fix them as I went along. She left the lesson supercharged for learning more English and writing a new entry in her diary.