I tried to do a lesson with my vocational high school Grade 3 today that involved them coming up with 3-5 simple sentences to describe an interesting item / food / place in their prefecture.
I discovered that close to half the students could not even spell basic words such as “can” or “at” and needed close coaching to even form a basic sentence like “it is sweet”.
I am a new JET with zero teaching or English background and I have a couple questions:
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why are the teachers insistent on teaching from a textbook that is clearly too advanced for the average student? It’s obvious the students comprehend about 2% of what they are reading / speaking out of the textbook. Why not meet the students where they’re at and bring it back down a few levels as needed.
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what are some good ways (at a very basic level) to get the students to understand basic sentence structure? I feel like they know some verbs, adjectives and other vocab but have no idea how to put them together. Are there certain games / drills that are good for this? I would love to get the students to speak a complete sentence using their own brain, even if the conjugation and word ordering is incorrect.
by ego_check