Transportation 1

What's one of the first things you do once you get through the immigration upon arriving at a new place? To get a ride away from the airport! While there might be someone picking you up for the lucky few, most of us have to make our own way around. Transportation 1 in the Smith's School of English curriculum is a great lesson to get you started!

Q & A Routines

The Question and Answer routines involve asking questions in order to get a specific answer. There are ten questions in particular that are useful for eliciting most of the answers in this routine, and they can, and should, be learnt independently of the routines. Since the subject material is set, students may find themselves trying to express ideas they normally would not, or are not yet comfortable with. The benefit in having set answers for these questions is that students can gain confidence responding in a test environment, and then later expand or combine these simple answers into longer, more natural phrases. This process is at the core of English Coaching philosphy at Smith's School of English.

immigration

Since many students study English for traveling I always enjoy doing this lesson. Immigration questions at airports were scarce and rarely asked a few years ago. But now airport security at international airports has been enhanced to its highest level ever. So has the importance and benefit of this Smith's School of English lesson.

Passive Voice

"Wagahai wa neko de aru is a famous book written by Souseki Natsume", "This new video game was developed by Nintendo." Passive voice is used frequently in our daily conversations and it comes in handy when you are trying to introduce new things to non-locals. This lesson plan not only teaches students when and how passive voice is used, but also focuses on the application of this particular grammar point by offering picture-based dialogues, sentence-completing practices and real life conversation topics.

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.

Predicting the Future

This Smith's School of English lesson isn't so much about asking whether you will get married and have eight children, but involves predicting what you will do next summer, next Sunday, or tomorrow. One of the main focuses of this lesson is the certainty of the prediction. This lesson lets students use a variety of vocabulary in expressing future activities, such as "I know that I will ____", "I guess that I will___". The practice dialogue gives the student a direction in which to practice this vocabulary with the picture cards. Developing the main ideas allows the student to ask more open-ended questions with the possibility of WH questions related to that topic.

Ability 2

This Smith's School of English lesson focuses on invitations. The student learns how to ask invitations as well as accepting or declining them. Then if they accept an invitation they learn how to ask follow up questions to find out more about the activity. Even though this is an intermediate lesson I find it very useful for beginner students because the format is easy to follow and understand. Many Japanese students study English to communicate with foreigners. So this lesson provides a valuable resource for them.