If you are extending the Chindogu (new product) activity, these handouts might help. One is a general reading passage about the Chindogu phenomonon. The second handout incorporates the pictures that are already available but provides a set pallette for creating a product name and description of 5 of the pictures.

Chindogu Reading Passage (adapted from Wikipedia)

Chindogu Reading Task Sheet

A treasure hunt activity to help students familiarize themselves with the book.

Treasure hunt (Word .doc)

Treasure hunt. Answer key (Word .doc)

Paper copies of the Student Notes and Instructor Notes will be available for everyone at the 2007 ELP Orientation on April 7 from 9:00 to 5:00 in Room A408 on the Machida Campus. The level structure, most of the content, and many of the assessments remain the same. However, there are a few changes. The biggest changes are a new textbook in Level 1 and new double-koma classes.

Level 1 will discontinue English Firsthand 1 in favor of English Firsthand Success. Some teachers may know the older version of English Firsthand Success, but we will be adopting the April 2007 edition. Totally True 1 will continue as the reading textbook. Levels 2 and 3 will keep the same textbooks as in 2006: Let’s Talk 1 and Totally True 3 for Level 2; and Passages 1 for Level 3.

The other big change is an administrative and scheduling change. The four koma of Eigo I will now be divided into Eigo IA (Listening and Speaking: Two back-to-back koma), and Eigo IB (Reading and Writing: Two back-to-back koma) on schedules, on e-Campus, and with kyoumuka. Most of the actual content and curriculum will continue from 2006, but teacher responsibilities and record-keeping will change somewhat. Details can be found in the Instructor notes for each level. These organizational details will also be explained in detail at the orientation, but for those of you who may want to get a headstart, here are the notes.

Download PDF files of all notes for all levels in a single .zip archive. Just double-click the downloaded archive to open it.

This is a very bare bones way of explaining the structure of an essay. There are many ways to use these materials, but a suggested plan is:

1 Hand out this worksheet and quickly go over it. (This is the corrected version!)
structure of an essay v2.pdf
2 Hand out this model ‘New Product’ essay, and get the students to identify the various ‘parts’ of the essay.

New Product Model Essay.pdf

3 Hand out these worksheets to help the students plan their own new product essay.

Planning your essay.pdf

This is a re-written and simplified version of the Structure of an Essay reading passage used for the 2004 and 2005 EAP course. I’ve simplified the language, but also made it a bit more prescriptive, focusing exclusively on how to write in the five-paragraph essay format. I’ve included a separate worksheet to supplement the reading, and a quiz to be given a week later. I plan to make a Moodle-based practice quiz to supplement it.

The Structure of an Essay - Reading

Structure of Essay Activity Worksheet (JS).doc

Structure of an Essay - Quiz

These web resources may vanish by this time next year, but in the meantime it might be fun to link to them from your Moodle course.

history of useless inventions
http://www.designboom.com/history/useless.html

Video
Chindogu Celebrating Weird Inventions
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-0Xgx7GiYs

2 Within each group, each student chooses one invention.

3 Quickly read about the invention, and remember as much as they can.

4 Mixed-groups: exchanging information about the inventions they just read about.

Early days with Moodle, but this shows how I how wrote a lesson plan above the web page link. Click on this image to see how I included this resource into my Moodle course.

This worksheet contains 9 questions about English Firsthand. To answer the questions students need to quickly scan the book.

After you have checked the answers you can get the students to work in pairs and write a few extra questions about the book. >> Followed by mixed pairs or a mingle for students to ask each other their new questions.

The worksheet:
get to know Firsthand.pdf

The answers:
get to know Firsthand Answer.pdf

In the first class you may experience problems getting the ‘umbrella holder’ text to your students, in order for them to paste it into Criterion.

To streamline this process I have put the relevant document online in a way that allows for direct copying and pasting from the document online. There is no need to download it first.

Just direct your students to this site:

http://randomhawk.com/eap/

These handouts, based on the book, Treatment of error in second language student writing (Ferris, 2004), will help orient students in the Level 3 writing class.

There is a questionnaire about grammar knowledge, a grammar pretest, a handout for eliciting a diagnostic paragraph, and an error analysis sheet for teachers to attach to the diagnostic when returning it. This material is aimed at developing students’ self-editing skills and awareness of the main kinds of errors they make in their writing. It will give new students a general idea of what to expect later in the course, when working through drafts marked by their teacher and also provide teachers with information about students’ writing ability and understanding of how to fix errors in writing.

Here is everything in MS Word format. The files are numbered according to the sequence in which they would be used in class.

grammar questionnaire

grammar pretest

diagnostic paragraph

editing exercise

The orientation session consists of a quick overview of the FLSC facilities, and an introduction to elpweb. A guide on how to conduct the orienation was handed out to everyone on the 8th, but just in case anyone mislaid it you can download a copy here.

Teacher guide to FLSC and elpweb student orientation.pdf

Do please allow a full 30 minutes for the orientation, as it is vital that students get as much exposure to elpweb as possible!

The introduction to elpweb consists of watching several informative movies (which have no sound), and then completing a worksheet. While watching the movies, students can easily switch between English and Japanese explanatory text. The worksheet consists of 10 questions: 5 are based on the informative movies, and 5 on the elpweb.com web sites themselves.

I would suggest handing out the worksheets AFTER students have watched the informative movies.

elpweb Student worksheet.pdf

* There are copies of the worksheet in the FLSC .

elpweb Student worksheet Answers.pdf

It is possible that some students will not be able to complete the worksheet withing the 30 minute FLSC visit. I would suggest asking students to complete it as homework, and then check the answers in the next class.

Location of the elpweb student orientation movies
• A link in the dock at the bottom-left of the screen of the FLSC computers.
• Online at: http://elpweb.com/about