What to do when you have 50, 70 or 100s of kids in a class? After last weeks disaster, I figured it would be good to go through and figure out what games do indeed work with super big groups. I wrote an article about teaching big groups in China a while back, but here…

JALT is the Japan Association for Language Learning. ( In Japanese 全国語学教育学会). Today is their huge conference, mainly attended by university teachers or private English school teachers. As it’s a pay-to-present event ( most people get their schools to pay for it), I wasn’t that interested. But as most of the workshops are in English,…

The thing about being really good at something, even speaking English, is that you don’t realise what sounds impressive to your average person on the street. And hence what will motivate them to learn. I had another DJ lesson today. Last week was a bit boring so I asked the teacher to teach me some…

Today’s plan was a full school show, then 3 demo classes. The idea being they’d be model classes that the teachers could video and I could write up a week’s worth of fantastic lesson plans for you. Ahhhh… if only things worked like they should! First off was the show. 300 kids in the gym…

Sustainability Education is a hugely important new trend and is something I’m hoping to help with in the future. Long-time Genki English contributor, Joel Bacha, is conducting research to assist the new UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development. Part of the research investigates the perceptions of the word ‘sustainability’ across languages and cultures through…

I ordered Brett Manning’s Singing Success vocal programme today. In his “Philosophy of Learning” section he writes: Have you ever seen the movie Karate Kid?  Singing Success uses the same “wax on, wax off” approach to learning.  You’ll improve steadily by doing simple exercises that retrain your muscles to automatically respond with new coordinations.  That’s…