John Coleman, the owner and head teacher of the Kawanishi Smith’s School of English and I (Al Bartle of Smith’s School of English – Okamoto) have been working hard to make TOEIC Part 3 type listening lessons for the Smith’s main site. So far we have made 11 lessons. You can see the free online TOEIC Lessons here or at the English School Blog page written in Japanese.
But what you may not know is that there are also in-class lessons being created for almost every one of the videos. These are short reading exercises for students to prepare for at home by reading, writing the answers and filling in the blanks before going to the weekly lessons.
These in-class lessons and the related free online TOEIC lessons make for a well-rounded study experience for higher level students (not just those interested in TOEIC) who realize that they actually need to do more than just acquire the ability to speak English. We are an English School and not just a conversation school. Reading and writing are also essential abilities that together with speaking and listening practice enable students to learn much much faster. They will be presented with more difficult grammatical structures and vocabulary by also reading and writing than they will ever be able to generate on their own without such study and practice. So these TOEIC lesson related in-class lessons will be an excellent resourse for teachers and students alike.
What is really exciting about this new resource is that it is fresh. The topics are from recent topics in the news so the teachers and students can enjoy studying English while discussing fresh and interesting topics. This is great or the higher level students and the fun nature of it will make even the lower level students want to work harder to get to the level where they too can participate in these higher level lessons.
Smith’s cares! Just reading these posts, you can feel that.
To all teachers, please keep up the good work and I hope you will all take advantage of the TOEIC lessons and related in-class lessons when they become available in the near future.
For you teachers who are studying Japanese and students who want to check my poor attempt at writing in Japanese, please check out this recent post on the Japanese Soapbox–>無料オンラインTOEICレッスンに関連する教室内レッスン
By the way, two of the free online TOEIC lessons are related to women’s figure skating, so I put Mao Asada’s picture here. And as you know, she just won the world championship and the gold medal in Turin. She is quite inspirational for many young Japanese women and her rivaly with South Korea’s Yu-Na Kim makes for exciting drama. I hope to be covering her in future lessons.
Enjoy life! Enjoy Smith!
I have been using these lessons with my students, from intermediate up (we do vary the level of the content, with great success. Suddenly many of my students are doing homework. They love the fresh content.
John