Homework + Japanese Topics

I am trying to get the students responsible for their own learning, so decided to firstly get them, for homework, to write down a diary of what they do during the day. Hopefully, the students will be able to reflect on whether or not what they are doing is valuable to their study on the programme. I'm not going to judge what is good or bad, but rather, try to elicit some discussion around time management and how students could perhaps orient themselves towards achieving goals before they return to Japan next year. It would be awful if the students regret that they didn't do something near the end of the programme (as I have often heard before).

In class today, we talked about some Japanese topics - for example, teruterubouzu, seijin no hi, etc. These are common names that label particular cultural aspects in Japan and so are known to the students. The trick for the students is to maneuver the conversation around to explain this topic - no mean feat, I can tell you now.

We also looked at more expressions that I use in the class to "manage." For example, "ok, let's move to the back of the class," etc.