Not Just Ninjas

Let’s imagine that you teach a class of 7th graders. They have just started studying English, and you’re only a few weeks into the school year, so they can say “My name is” and “I am from such-and-such a country” but that’s pretty much it. You’re given one hour to come up with a game to fill class time. Go.I was given these instructions and left to my own devices. What to do with a two sentence repertoire… hmm…

One of my pet peeves as a former-world-music-major-teaching-English-in-Japan is that usually only western countries are given any air time. Even though nations like Ghana or India have lots of English speaking citizens, they are rarely mentioned, not to mention the rest of the non-English speaking world. You would think from some textbooks that the globe contained only Canada, England, Australia, and America. My mission for this lesson? To add a few more countries to the classroom repertoire.

The game would be to find others from your country by using the key phrase “Are you from (country)?”. Every student was assigned one of 6 different country cards with a flag on it. The countries had to be easily pronounceable in Japanese, yet under-represented in the Japanese classroom. The flag had to be colorful and unique, to stimulate students’ curiosity about the world. And of course, the cultures represented had to be as varied as possible.

Let’s meet our finalists:

I made country cards with flags, and put in the name in English with katakana subtitles. In class, we did a quick sketch of the country locations on a world map, and then jumped into the game. The activity wasn’t a complete success; it was over a little too quickly, and didn’t give the students as much talking time as I would have liked. But nothing can describe the happiness that swelled in my heart when I heard a roomful of Japanese 12 year olds ask each other “Are you from Nepal?” and reply earnestly “No, I am from Panama.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 27th, 2007 at 4:04 pm and is filed under Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.