My company trained us with a variety of activities and techniques to use in our teachings, but I've gotten ideas from other sources as well. L.A.'s Freestyle Fellowship inspired a lesson last year and another musician, Bobby McFerrin, has helped me teach pronunciation.
Though students learn to read and write English, pronunciation is another beast entirely. Repetition addresses this but simple "repeat after me"'s get played out quickly, causing students to zone out or do it unconsciously(which leads to less retention). So I was constantly trying to figure out a better way to teach it.
And then this clip of McFerrin and the pentatonic scale started circulating:
After seeing it, and noting how the audience associated his physical location with relative pitches, I thought I'd give it a shot with my students. But instead of scales and pitches, I used vocabulary words and syllables.
For example, the word "communication" would be broken into 5 syllables, "com", "mu", "ni", "ca" and "tion", and I'd demonstrate each one at a relative location. In the clip, the audience was able to follow McFerrin as he physically (and sporadically) moved between pitches. Likewise, my students could follow me as I moved (sporadically) between syllables!
It turned out to be a great way to teach pronunciation. The McFerrin technique made practicing more puzzle-like, and their desire to solve each puzzle kept them attent and focused while participating.
Not only that, but by concentrating on the syllables, they ended up doing better with similar sounding words. A word like "immunization" would be intimidating until the syllabic breakdown revealed "mu", "ni" and "tion"--3 syllables they had already learned and felt comfortable with.
I wouldn't have guessed that you could learn something about teaching English from Bobby McFerrin; I only thought of him whenever someone said "Don't Worry, be Happy"! But by keeping an open mind, I was able to once again see how unrelated things can help you solve a problem.
It's amazing how a song can resonate so deeply inside of you even when you have no idea what the lyrics mean. It just goes to show that music often speaks to us on subconscious levels.
I first heard "Sekai ga Owaru Yoru ni" (The World Ends Tonight) by Chatmonchy last year and have been haunted by it ever since.
There's a block party coming up in June and Ryohei--a b-boy I met at a hip hop show--and I are putting a routine together. Despite the language barrier, things have been coming along pretty smoothly. We put this first part together in about 10 minutes:
I find that amazing. Not the dance itself, but the fact that we were able to choreograph it so quickly without speaking each others' respective language. The routine itself isn't complex, but we literally only communicated using the music and the moves. And it was equally created so we both had to do some "talking" and "listening".
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once said that "music is the universal language of mankind". Does that make dancing its sign language?
I had a lesson this week over the SVO sentence structure. That class is in the middle of learning different ways to construct sentences so I wanted to make it easy to remember this specific type. At some point, Freestyle Fellowship's "Hot Potato" popped into my head and an idea was born: use the words of Aceyalone, Mikah 9, P.E.A.C.E. and Self Jupiter to teach it!
First, I gave some background on Hot Potato and taught them the hook from the song:
Hot potato, pass the potato (x4)
After they got the words down, I taught them tempo and tune by leading the class in chorus and metronomic claps. I couldn't get them dancing but I did get some enthusiastic claps and a few head bobs!Next came some rounds of Hot Potato. I paired them up and gave each group a "potato" to pass back and forth while singing their newly learned song. And then I snuck in the grammar.While demonstrating Hot Potato with the JTE, I visually broke down the sentences "I passed the potato", "I passed JTE-Sensei the potato" and "JTE-Sensei passed me the potato" into their SVO components. And before I could ask them to make their own sentences (relative to their groups), some already had! I checked for their understanding (e.g.,"What did you pass?") and found that many could create and understand SVO sentences. After a few more rounds with newly paired groups, most of the class could. Success!I wonder if Freestyle Fellowship ever envisioned this?
I'm a 20-something year old American seeing more of the world by teaching English in Japan. I dig breaking, web apps and services, African development and life experiences. See me around the world (wide web) at EbunOmoni.com.
I'm a 20-something year old American seeing more of the world by teaching English in Japan. I dig 
