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| Namie Amuro (middle) performs at MTV Asia Aid, Bangkok, Thailand File from the Wikimedia Commons |
Last week, after reading and responding to some comments on real-time journaling in the class, I decided to revisit this particular tool in my classroom. Rereading my entries from the week, I noticed that this time around, my real-time journal had a very different focus. Most of what I wrote was about student interactions. For example, while waiting for students to settle down at the beginning of class, here are some of the things I wrote in my journal:
- A-Kun asks K-Kun for something. K-kun takes a set of textbooks out of his bag and hands them to A-Kun.
- S-Chan and T-Chan are looking at a cell-phone together. They seem to be looking at pictures.
- M-Chan, R-Chan and N-Chan are singing a song in Japanese. These are singing loudly. Some of the boys are laughing. One boy is clapping along.
I used this information to modify how I broke the class into groups during activities. And I found that group work went more smoothly. As an added bonus, while I was writing students settled down on their own. Maybe I lost two or three minutes of class time. But instead of starting class by cajoling my students to quiet down, I was able to get something pretty useful out of those few minutes and everyone (students and myself) started class in a better mood. It also led to a radical shift in at least one of my lesson plans. The journal entry about students singing took place during a Drama class. We were supposed to be practicing a scene from a play. But after I had written in my real-time journal, I decided to follow the students’ lead. On the white board, I wrote down a translation of the first two line of the J-pop song the students were singing:
I miss you. I miss you.
The three girls who were singing laughed and started singing the song in English. After the first two lines, they shifted back to Japanese. So as a class we worked on translating the next few lines into English. What we ended up with was:
I miss you.
I miss you.
All I want is to hear your voice.
Even though I don’t have anything to say, I decided to call you.
Because you are so kind.
You are always there for me.
That’s enough to make my heart beat.
That’s enough to warm my heart.
Then I took the first two lines of the song, and changed them into a dialogue. Like this:
A: Hello?
B: I miss you.
A: I miss you, too.
B: All I want, is to hear your voice.
A:
I left A’s next line blank and students came up with, “OK, but I don’t know what to say.” And in a surprisingly short amount of time, students had constructed the following dialogue with a fair amount of useful chunks of language:
A: Hello?
B: I miss you.
A: I miss you, too.
B: All I want, is to hear your voice.
A: OK, but I don’t know what to say.
B: Even though I don’t have anything to say, I called you.
A: Thank you. But why did you call me?
B: Because you are so kind.
A: Yes, I am. And so are you!
B: You are always there for me.
A: Because I love you.
B: That’s enough to make my heart beat.
A: That’s enough to warm my heart.
Once the dialogue was on the board, students practiced it in pairs for a few minutes. We did some work on stress, playing around with how shifting stress radically changed the meaning of the dialogue. This was especially fruitful with the line, "Even though I don't have anything to say, I called you." Then I erased the board and had the students form small groups and reconstruct the dialogue. They seemed to have a pretty good handle on the language. I gave them fifteen minutes to put together skits in which they used the dialogue. One pair of students turned it into a conversation between a couple which had broken up some time before and the girl was calling the boy to get back together. Another pair of students set up a scene in which the couple was coming back from Universal Studio Japan, had just gotten in a fight, and the song was their way of making up. The song is incredibly popular in Japan
Real time journaling not only let me get a better handle on which students would work well together, it also led to a new classroom activity. Probably other teachers have done variations on using L1 songs as a base for a dialogue, but this is the first time I’ve given it a try in class. The students enjoyed it enough to suggest we do it again next week. They even agreed to each pick a song before class and translate it into English. If they’re up for it, I’m going to have some of the braver students sing their translation and have the rest of the class try to guess which song it is based on. But before I ask any particular student to sing, I think I’ll take a bit of time at the beginning of class to write down what my students are doing when the bell rings in my real time journal. With a bit of luck, it will help me figure out just who might be ready to stand up and belt out a J-pop song in English.
