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It’s great to be back at Oppama Junior High School again this year and we’ve got a number of new things happening.
After a year off for maternity leave, Ueki-sensei is back in action and working with the new group of first-year students.
We also have a new English teacher, Okawa-sensei. He’s got the third-year students, who have now had three different English teachers in their three years of junior high school!
And, we’ve got an English Conversation Club (ECC) up and running! ECC meets Wednesday afternoons after school, and we began in June, so we’ve only had two club meetings so far.
In our first ECC, we practiced self-introductions (“Hi, I’m Masashi, nice to meet you!”) and a few greetings which I think are more natural than the usual, “Hi, how are you?” and the perfunctory reply, “I’m fine thank you, and you?” (We practiced “Hey, how’s it going?” and “Hey, what’s up?” and appropriate responses.)
In our second ECC, we practiced “Can you ________?” Questioners could choose from one of three categories: “play” (e.g. ‘play baseball’ or ‘play the piano’); “do” (e.g. ‘do kendo’ or ‘do yoga’) and “other” (e.g. ‘swim’ or ‘ski’). Students could choose one of four replies: “Yes, I can”; “Yes, a little”; “No, not really”; and “No, I can’t.” We used this question/answer pattern with “How about you?” and also practiced “me too” and “neither can I”.
ECC is open to all students and thus far we’ve had 1 or 2 third-year students, a handful of first-year students, and a number of second-year students show up. I look forward to our future ECC meetings!
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