This lesson was with one of my favourite pink students, who is going to Cairns on holidays over Obon. Her husband`s nickname is Billy, and he has been both training her physically (bikini-body) and mentally (English conversation, of course!) After both of us complaining how hot it is…
ET
Last week`s One Point was `I`ve never heard of it…`, so I tell my student about the bunyip, a mythical Australian bush creature similar to a yeti. She looks at me in awe as I embellish my description – and voila! out comes the One Point. Thank goodness I didn`t tell her about drop bears!
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I decided to adapt the Transportation lesson for her, because unless they rent a car in Cairns, chances are they`ll be taking a few taxis/buses/trains along the way.
We started off with a very dodgy map of the Osaka subway system that I tried to draw from memory. I wrote some key questions and phrases on the board, and then I pretended to be a tourist. Where do I change trains for Kyoto? We then swapped so that she was the tourist – she didn`t take long to get comfortable with this.
So then we pulled out the 10 or so pages of tourist information I had printed out for her from the web – Cairns, Port Douglas, the Daintree, and a bunch of attractions I thought she and Billy would be interested in. I asked her to imagine she was now in Cairns, and she wanted to get to a particular zoo. In this case, she needed to take a bus, so we spent a few minutes talking about public transport in Australia (you board the bus at the front!!!), introduced some new vocab, and we were off!
She handled the roleplays really well and was able to adapt the language without any problems. Next lesson = taxis…
One point
By the way…
I always ask my student about Billy, and she always asks me about my boyfriend. We both have a habit of saying `Ne, ne, ne!` when we have some interesting news, so today when she started to `Ne, ne, ne`, I stopped her, and wrote `Oh! By the way…` on the board. Her first try was `Oh? By the way…`, so we had some fun practising different intonation for the `Oh!`… and I told her I saw Billy at the train station the other day, he had been to the physiotherapist. Her example was that she had lost 3kg, which she was very proud of, so she had bought a new bikini…
Remind me to buy her some extra-extra-extra heavy duty sunscreen!
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