Sometimes in higher grades kids will have taken on board influences from teachers, parents and TV and sometimes in class will gladly boast “Eigo wakaranai!” – “I don’t understand any English”. Obviously you need to stamp this thinking out before it spreads.

I’ve just written up an idea I use that works really well, and involves showing kids ( or teachers!) that they can understand half of an English newspaper without evening studying ( well sort of !).

It’s a similar approach to that taken by Michel Thomas, where in the first few minutes of his course you realise you can actually understand hundreds of words of French, Spanish or German, all without doing any “work”. Now that’s a real motivation booster!