The Fluency Course 1 Video

Component Introduction

I promised to make a video introducing the Fluency Course materials for people considering helping us trial it.

So, er, here it is. Please forgive the shakiness, I was holding the camera in one hand and manipulating the materials with the other 🙂

Here is the full list of materials:

  • Question Cards: 20 per month, you need one set for each two students in the class
  • Reference Sheet: one per student per month
  • Workbook: one per student
  • Textbook: one per student
  • Record Sheet: one per student per four months
  • Verb answer sheets: one for every one or two students
The Fluency Course Year One introduction

I hope you found that useful. Please let me know if you have any questions or comments!

I love the materials. It teaches grammar in an experiential way rather than drills, which they get plenty of at school. The Japanese translations are very helpful – especially to teachers who want to keep their classes in English. All the patterns are learned intuitively through looking at the translations. Nice. I love the reading for fluency and comprehension with time recorded, though I am not sure how you get them to time themselves. Do you provide everyone with timers? The final task of writing your own dialogue is so important, and something that students really need structured, graduated, regular experiences doing. The one thing I don’t understand is Quizlet. I have never used that. Is it set up already, or do teachers have to load in the vocabulary for each month? Anyway, great system. I might consider adding audio for reading and sentences so that students can practice proper intonation. Just a thought…

Ha, ha, Akio Furukawa suggested the same thing. We’re going to record audio for the texts, so that teachers (or students) have the option of doing it as a listening exercise, or reading along with the audio, or any number of variations. You’re right though, it would be good to do the same for the dialogues.

We made Quizlet sets for each unit, so all teachers need to do is make a teacher account, add their students, and add our sets to their class. The students can then use the premade sets to preview before class (with audio).

I like the way you’ve considered varying levels in the class as this is what I am experiencing now. With only a few students going on to the JH course from our ES course we have had to take JH1beginners to fill the class. As much as I would love to trial this I don’t expect to have more than a handful of JH1 students from April this year.

That was one of the goals of this course: we’ve had classes with beginners studying alongside kids with eiken 2, and having extra stuff for the more advanced students to do was invaluable.

Generally speaking this can accommodate beginners, but we have found the occasional student that can’t keep up (but those students were basically not able to deal with junior high school classes as a whole, not just English).

 

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