It is important for students of English to think about what the steps are deeply themselves in the very beginning before they set out to acquire good English skills. We as teachers, or as we prefer to call ourselves “coaches of communicative confidence”, can list up the steps and tell the students that these are [...]
Hi! This is Al from the Okamoto School (スミス英会話岡本校） Do you know the legend of the Jack-O-Lantern? I ran across this story on the Internet. I thought it was fun so I made it into a lesson. It seemed opportune for use this week. There seem to be many versions of the story as it [...]
There are many skills students musts learn to be able to really communicate in English. They have to be able to explain about themselves in English and describe their homes, family and their environment in English. Surprisingly this requires
This week’s TOEIC video (TOEIC+ Lesson 35) and related lesson have been fun for my students. It is about a young woman from Kyoto who recently moved to Tokyo. She is a Japanese language teacher but what has really caught the attention of many people are her two YouTube channels “thatjapanesegirl” and “thisjapanesegirl” on which [...]
At Smith’s School English in Okamoto スミス英会話岡本校, in two weeks we will be exploring the question of which Beatle was the most prolific and best songwriter, McCartney or Lennon. There was a great post on Yahoo about it. ‘Was it John or Paul?’ As you may remember
This morning while distributing flyers to promote my English school in Kobe (スミス英会話岡本校） I talked to one woman on the street near the station who spoke English quite well. She said in English that I was ‘exaggerating’ when I commented that she spoke English well. Again, as has happened many times recently, I realized that [...]
This is an interim report on the Smith’s Okamoto school. I took over the Smith’s School of English in Okamoto in July 2006. It had been in operation since September 2004 (6 years total so far) and it had only a tiny 15 active students at the time I took over. This month (August [...]
Last week I had three students and decided to use the vocabulary lessons. These are an interesting part of the Smith’s curriculum. They consist of many units each comprising 12 words. The words are random and unrelated for the most part. Some are nouns. Some are verbs and some are adjectives. Some can be used [...]
This week one of my students showed up and showed me her new homework folder. Since she started in April she has been diligently doing the homework, watching the videos and preparing for the lesson. She has saved all the homework sheets in this new folder. She has filled up this folder and will start [...]
This week, which was quite busy with a few trials, walk-in inquiries and the usual full load of lessons, I got a special surprise. When I called in to ask about a student’s lesson, I was informed that a student who had taken a trial at Smith’s School of English -Fukushima (スミス英会話福島校）had decided to join [...]
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