Job Discussion Forums

[Tara2117]

What do you do with junior high age kids (12-14) to keep them from being totally bored during a lesson? They are in that stage where childish games are lame, and they just want to be smartasses and say stuff like "this is a pain in the ass" in Japanese. I had a class of three 12-13 year old boys for the first time today, and I have NO IDEA what to do with them besides the textbook work. I like to spend about half of the lesson reviewing or using new material in a game of some sort. Any suggestions for games that won't bore these kids to death? They are well-behaved for the most part, just bored.

[G Cthulhu]

Don't take this the wrong way, but why are you looking for games? Shouldn't you be teaching them Engrish?

[gaijin4life]

[Tara2117]

[tanuki]

Heya Tara

I agree with gaijin4life re: getting to know the kids a little bit. The trick is how do you do this? Now, if you speak their native language really well and there's not some idiot supervisor there who thinks it's heresy for the native-speaking teacher to interact with the kids in the language that most easily facilitates a personal connection, then go right ahead and ask!

Otherwise, set up some sort of task/project on just ONE tightly focused theme per lesson (favourite singer/ favourite movie/ best place visited/ coolest thing you own and why/ etcetera) and get them to present those.

This can actually be a language learning activity where you provide the support in the form of vocab and necessary structures (without the need for explicit grammatical explanation).

In fact, the best way to do such tasks might be to think about the vocab sets you've done in class recently along with the grammar points you've covered recently and/or which are coming up on the test, and then think laterally for a moment: How can you connect these things? Is there a way to connect Topic A with language points B and C in a natural way?

Natural is the operative word here, of course; you need to ask "Would I, as a native-speaker, be likely to use this combination of language features if I were talking about Topic A?"

If the answer is yes, you've got a winner and you can structure your task accordingly.

I would also go and grab some images from the web that connect to the topic in both obvious and less obvious ways and give each group a copy of this sheet just as a "brain jump-starter".

But give them some sort of TASK. Something that they need to complete. And not too open-ended or (particularly at that age) they'll get discouraged because they won't be sure if they've "finished" or not. And therefore will probably give up too early because they'll think it's too much work.

No, don't be too ambitious. Just keep it really, really simple and focused. As I said, something like "My favourite pop group" is fine. You can feed in all sorts of support structures (which you can actually brainstorm together as a class before you begin) such as "Where are they from?", "How long have they been together?", "When did they form?", "How old are they?" etc.

I'm sure you can see the value in terms of language learning already.

And the last thing is to set up your tasks so that they have to comment on, or assess, or compare and contrast, or rank, or group, or whatever... the presentations (whether they are oral or written--if the latter, pin them up around the room in the following lesson and then together brainstorm and agree on the rating criteria... Let them know in the first lesson that you plan to do this!)... and then get them in groups to compare their notes (on the poster/report/speech/whatever [output]...)

As they get more familiar with these sorts of tasks and more proficient in doing them, you can then set it up so that the "follow-up" phase requires them to produce yet another "thing" (report, picture, recording, oral report, group poster, etc) as a response to what the classmembers originally created.

Caveat: These lessons will likely be a bit difficult the first couple of times because the kids are unlikely to know what you expect of them--because they are HIGHLY unlikely to have done stuff like this in the "sit down shut up and repeat after me now do these grammar exercises and listen to me drone on with some technical explanation that keeps me safe in my 'expert' position" classroom context they're used to. If you're lucky enough to be at a school that doesn't operate like this, though, then you should be okay, but the caveat partly remains: let them know right up front what you expect them to do, show them the steps in the process, and (very importantly for their confidence) how you are going to help them achieve the goal.

Best of luck with it!

Tanuki

[Big John Stud]

I also agree with gaijin4life, getting to know your students is very important. Knowing their likes and dislikes will help you think of activity to encourage them to use the target lesson.

[Glenski]

3 students? So, this is a private lesson or an eikaiwa lesson.

Which is it, and what is the purpose of them taking the class? Without knowing their goals, it is a little hard to give a real good answer.

How is their level of speaking, listening, reading, writing? Which do you think you should be focusing on?

[Tara2117]

Thanks everyone, especially tanuki. It's an eikawa lesson. Small class. I dunno, they just seem brain dead and bored all the time. Although I guess I can't fault them. Poor kids are up and at it from 6 am til 9 pm.

[tanuki]

Hmm...

Glenski's right, Tara. You do need to think about the objectives for the class.

(I somehow missed the fact that it was just THREE kids in the original post! Ha ha!)

I still think that what I said before... more or less... stands insofar as finding out things about THEIR personal interests and integrating those into your lessons in such a way as to both cover the language points and skills areas that you need to AND motivate them a little more.

I SO know what you mean about the poor little sods doing the 6 to 9 thing (most likely 6 days a week at that!); compounded by what is most likely something they haven't chosen to do (i.e. evening eikaiwa classes).

Not much help here in this post, I must say... hmmm... okay...

Battle plan:

* work out your objectives
These will be delineated to some degree by
(i) the textbook
(ii) their level of interest (although this MIGHT be turned around if low)
(iii) what you would like to achieve above and beyond the requirements
(iv) their current level across the areas of the syllabus and the 4-skills

* work out a way to extend or intro the topic of the mandatory material by tapping into THEIR interests. Start small at first.

* feed the information that you've gathered back into the lessons in various ways (e.g. referring to Shiro's like of Orange Range in an example sentence, or comparing something in today's lesson to something Tomoko enjoys doing--and then ask her a couple of tangential questions about it)

* keep doing this

* the more you do it, the more they will tell you (as long as you don't abuse their trust and ridicule their interests and so on--they are, after all, teenagers = hyper-selfconscious)

* once you've achieved this level of "trust" (to use the term very loosely), find out a way to "bargain" with them: we have to do X (e.g. textbook), but if you can help me find a way to cover the material and give you a chance to discuss/integrate your own interests and what YOu want to talk about into the lesson, let's DO IT! Then... once we've covered the required material, we can do something more interesting like [suggestions + ask for theirs]


I know that they're kids (and I don't know your level of Japanese) so their ability to reason like this may not be particularly well developed. They may just be stuck on the teenage me-me-me "This sucks!" track.

But that's my idea for an inroad.

Hope it helps,
Tanuki

[Hawaiibadboy]

English diary!!!!!!!

Strengthens writing skills and the things they write about (their interests and hopes opinions ) will form a natural base for your conversations.

I have kids as young as 8 doing this right now and it is working fantastic!